The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression • Hacker News Board

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#531

Post by c_crank » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 3:43 PM UTC

jklinger410 wrote: post #521

c_crank wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who forced these students to take the loans, exactly? Do you have a list of names?

Their parents and an entire propaganda machine coming from the school system, local, and federal governments. Children were told "you can be anything you want to be" and also "in order to get a good job you have to go to college" which, in effect, forced children who otherwise didn't need to go to college, to go to college. In the same way a child cannot consent to sex, a child cannot fight social pressure coming fro…

I was told such things too. I also can process numbers. I knew that taking on an extra cost I could not pay would not be worth it without a guarantee of a high paying job, which is not something offered by going to school.

The younger generations certainly seem capable of that reasoning. They aren't taking on nearly as many student loans.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#532

Post by NegativeLatency » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 3:43 PM UTC

oooyay wrote: post #100

I moved to Portland a year ago. We certainly have a lot of homeless people, many of which are people caught up in the substance abuse cycle with particular drugs. However, one day I was driving back to East Portland, I drove under an underpass that's a particularly rough place. I saw a woman that looked to be my mom's age with what appeared to be a modern suit case, she was well dressed, and sober looking. The blood…

Portland isn’t perfect but it’s doing a bit better than many places with the elimination of parking minimums and the relative ease of building ADUs.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#533

Post by c_crank » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 3:44 PM UTC

ebiester wrote: post #512

c_crank wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people I know making lower wages typically rent or live in places with not such a high expense. Their apartments are not as upscale as others are, but they are certainly livable.

I live in one of those places. This is a medium cost of living area. That's how much rent has gone up in the past decade in most places that they've raised the de facto minimum wage to 11 bucks, and I wasn't even counting those who live at the real edges. I'm talking about people who are doing reasonably but not excessively well for themselves with high school degrees.

Inflation where I live has driven entry level job wages much higher than 11 bucks. I haven't seen rent rise quickly to match it - where I've seen the most price gouging in response has generally been on car payments and electricity.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#534

Post by slt2021 » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 3:44 PM UTC

voisin wrote: post #350

c_crank wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But no one forced those people to take on those loans.

Not explicitly but the choice is “stay in your economic class or invest in the only thing reliably proven to improve your future”.

and why people invested noname colleges with degrees in psychology, english lit, gender studies?

and then act surprised when they get out with zero useful skills

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#535

Post by antisthenes » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 3:44 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #497

BytesAndGears wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t built a “$2k rental”. You can only build a rental that someone will pay for. Landlords are building luxury housing because it’s the only thing that’s profitable right now due to the immensely ridiculous laws that don’t help people. But if an apartment building popped up in downtown SF charging $800/mo, it’s not like only the low income people would live there. Many people living in $3000/mo apartments also…

> You can’t built a “$2k rental”. You can only build a rental that someone will pay for. Landlords are building luxury housing because it’s the only thing that’s profitable right now due to the immensely ridiculous laws that don’t help people. That's what I'm asking: Exactly which laws? Nobody seems to be specific.

The combination of:

1. Land costs

2. Labor costs

3. Material costs

4. Zoning laws

5. Building codes

For example some zoning laws have a height restrictions, which limits my development to 3-story buildings, when I would actually want to build a 5-story building

For building codes, some would require me to put in $100 breakers, when I could do with simpler $20 breakers, etc. etc. for a LOT of items, which also feeds into the material costs.

If you want more specifics than that - open up your county/city website and start reading. It's not up to HN to do the legwork for you.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#536

Post by dghlsakjg » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 3:44 PM UTC

IKantRead wrote: post #267

spir wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You only perceive corporate landlords as the greater problem because we're not living in the counterfactual reality where there are millions of new apartments that are inexpensive, tiny, safe, quiet, modern, clean, dignified, and well-located. In pretty much every major city in North America, it is illegal or there is too much red tape to build the affordable housing people actually want. Why is it that living in a t…

> not living in the counterfactual reality where there are millions of new apartments that are inexpensive, tiny, safe, quiet, modern, clean, dignified, and well-located. China serves as this counter factual and it's facing an even larger housing crisis. Massive building of houses lead to many people buying up property for investment reasons and now there is a pretty clear oversupply while plenty of people still stru…

China is especially interesting since it appears that much of the housing stock was built purely to be a financial instrument, and was never occupied.

There are entire towers that were never used as residences, but just used as investment vehicles based on faith rather than any sort of realized value.

This is really a story about the dangers of using housing stock as an investment vehicle.

North America has a related problem of financialization, but is complicated by rules constraining stock in the places where people would like to live.

I would argue that you need rules around financialization (punitive capital gains taxes on market based gains for non primary residence), as well as rules around allowing people to do reasonable things with their property (infill, single family zoning, etc) to increase the amount of allowable stock.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#537

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 3:45 PM UTC

pierat wrote: post #495

jpadkins wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Time to de-profit-ize housing. Can you cite an example of where this policy has worked out well? It seems counter intuitive because removing the profit incentive seems like it would remove investments + labor and therefore reduce housing construction.

"Can you do the dirty job of recreating the housing market, and cite your sources in what amounts to a blog post?" Sure. Let me get right on that, after I get elected to be a Congresscritter.

[deleted]

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#538

Post by maxwell » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 3:45 PM UTC

justin66 wrote: post #450

jeffbee wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The most intriguing thing about boomers is that they all believe exactly the same things.

Intriguing maybe, but not surprising. It seems like they all grew up watching the same TV shows/news, eating the same food, and reading/watching/listening to mostly the same books/movies/music.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#539

Post by Ajedi32 » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 3:45 PM UTC

yakubin wrote: post #524

jlangenauer wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even a "crime problem". It's much more often people expecting their class prejudices to be embodied in the built environment, so that working class/poor/immigrant folks - which has nothing to do with crime, I hasten to add - are not defiling their beautiful suburb.

I’ve never been to the US, so I don’t have a good idea of what it is like there, but over here I lived for a couple years in a poorer district of Warsaw, where I would never be able to get good sleep, because there would either be a neighbour screaming out of nowhere in the middle of the night, or a party going on with music on full blast a floor up the whole night. Every night. Police wouldn’t do anything about the…

> a real problem of public order, tidiness, peacefulness

Side note: that's part of what I meant by "crime". Usually in the states there are laws or ordinances enforcing such things even if they're not necessarily criminal statutes.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#540

Post by thatfrenchguy » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 3:45 PM UTC

IKantRead wrote: post #267

spir wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You only perceive corporate landlords as the greater problem because we're not living in the counterfactual reality where there are millions of new apartments that are inexpensive, tiny, safe, quiet, modern, clean, dignified, and well-located. In pretty much every major city in North America, it is illegal or there is too much red tape to build the affordable housing people actually want. Why is it that living in a t…

> not living in the counterfactual reality where there are millions of new apartments that are inexpensive, tiny, safe, quiet, modern, clean, dignified, and well-located. China serves as this counter factual and it's facing an even larger housing crisis. Massive building of houses lead to many people buying up property for investment reasons and now there is a pretty clear oversupply while plenty of people still stru…

> SF starts to shrink it already looks deserted

I don't think we've been to the same city, vacancy rate is around 7%.