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

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

#931

Post by epistasis »

Kretinsky wrote: post #849
epistasis wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With housing, the problem isn't so much that we can't afford to build it easily, the problem is that we have made it illegal to provide housing. We have a shortage not because it is expensive, but because we regulated a shortage into existence. We do need some subsidy programs to help those with the lowest incomes or no incomes. But those will become easier to provide once we allow enough housing to be built and less…

Housing is expensive, especially in the american, low density suburbian way. You need to build a large infrastructure around housing for it to be viable, and if the housed can't pay taxes, everyone will end up paying for it. Also, I don't understand: why not move to a place without zoning? Not all homeless have to live in SF right?

There's more than adequate infrastructure in cities to support a huge increase in population. And it's super cheap to do that. Suburban sprawl is massively expensive because of that inefficient use of infrastructure, it's unbelievably wasteful and ends up getting paid for by people who live in dense areas, which are the seas that actually generate surplus tax revenue that can cover the freeloaders in the suburbs who drive everywhere.

> why not move to a place without zoning

Because I don't want to live i n isolation, I want a city, and cities and density have been banned. Nobody bans sprawl, they ban density and its efficient use of infrastructure. I want the people. I want the culture. I want the transit, and being able to experience more amenities than anywhere else without having to drive to every goddamned place. I want to be able to walk to do interesting things and meet interesting people.

What does your comment about homeless in SF have to do anything else you or I have written so far?

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

#932

Post by mlinhares »

monknomo wrote: post #892
mlinhares wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not owning the apartment seems to be a very US thing, I owned two apartments in Brazil and had a small construction business that built small apartment buildings and it was almost all sold to owners.

eh, they are called condos or co-ops when they are owned by the occupant in the states. I think they're the same thing, though interested if there is some distinction I'm missing

TIL. I don't think we have different names for them in portuguese, it's just apartments, for some reason full apartment buildings for rental aren't really a thing in Brazil, don't think I've seen many of them there.

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

#933

Post by mlinhares »

pnutjam wrote: post #809
unethical_ban wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A place to live is a base of the hierarchy of needs, but giving away $2000 to someone else for a place to live vs. putting $2000 a month into your own assets is not a red herring. Developers want equity because it is financial security and passive income for them. Regular Joes want it so they don't pay rent in perpetuity; that they may have a place to live in old age without working, among other reasons.

As if you can live anywhere without paying in perpetuity. If there wasn't an endless drive to increase the value of homes, this would all be moot.

Hate the game, not the players.

All my friend's parents that didn't own their homes are completely fucked now that they're old, retired and their pensions didn't keep up with inflation. If you don't own the place you live you're just a rent hike away from the streets.

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

#934

Post by JuanPosadas »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #768
digging wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, you're just old enough to remember the propaganda. Social housing (in the US) has always been underfunded to make it look bad. It was a worst-of-both-worlds compromise which served to undermine confidence in government and promote racism. There is literally no reason a municipal government can't run high quality social housing. That's why it happens, outside of the US.

> has always been underfunded to make it look bad. I Yes, the "secret capitalists hiding in the woodpile" theory of why communism sucks. You, of course, are immune to the other side's propaganda, and your own brain is a perfect simulator of the real world so you've run mental experiments that prove to you irrefutably how awesome it would be. If only other people paid for it for you. > That's why it happens, outside o…

> Yes, the "secret capitalists hiding in the woodpile" theory of why communism sucks.

Are you saying the United States is secretly ran by communists, and that there is a conspiracy theory that those secret communists are secretly ran by secret capitalists?

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

#935

Post by jjav »

jorvi wrote: post #82
jongjong wrote: post #16

Part of the problem is government regulation. In some places, it's almost impossible to build new houses due to regulations. Some portion of the population wants to see house prices continue to increase and they will vote for politicians who will implement policies which will support that agenda. Of course this happens at the expense of another, also large portion of the population who do not own a house and have to…

Yup. It might be painful for homeowners in the global West to realize, but for a healthy housing market, owning a house or renting a house needs to end up having the same amount of return on a 5-10-20-30-50 year timeline. The benefit of owning a house should be that you get to customize it to your liking. The benefit of a rental should be that you can switch up relatively quickly. Houses being an investment vehicle i…

> owning a house or renting a house needs to end up having the same amount of return on a 5-10-20-30-50 year timeline

This is clearly impossible. I think everyone can agree that a house is worth something. It's a roof over your head, so that's worth something nonzero.

So if you own it, you own some value. Might be low, might be lower than what you paid initially, but it's worth something nonetheless.

If you perpetually rent you own nothing, so your equity is always $0.

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

#936

Post by araes »

mym1990 wrote: post #908
araes wrote: post #888

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thought on this, is that a lot of humans plan like they're playing a game they expect to end tomorrow. The wealth stuff feels like people don't want to spend money, because they're afraid they'll fall off the leader board. In a Game Theory sense, that means always choose "backstab", cause "cooperate" might never pan out. There's also a lot of selfish, and "I want to win" or "I want my sport team to win", and I don…

It won’t ever be so black and white. Certainly some cultures place less emphasis on the future, but western culture definitely revolves around long term goals of building a family/retiring, etc… I think a lot of people are choosing not to have kids mainly for 2 reasons: it is getting extremely expensive to raise a child, and the uncertainty of the next 20-40 years makes people hesitant to put their kids into that env…

Except personal preferences are mostly irrelevant from the momentum of society. Because of acting that way, an immediate disadvantage in America results. The Kardashians, Swift, Santos, Thomas (also every other Supreme Court Justice [1]), Kalanick, SBF, Trump, Bezos' yacht, Musk's Twitter strobe [2], Epstein [3], Harvard making more than the NSF while taking NSF money [4] (+corrupt professors and lawsuits for bonus points [5]), flat wages since 1980 [6], preferential exploitation of loyal workers [7], and 42 million on food stamps [8] say that machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopaths generally get rewarded in America.

[1] https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/03/16/lets-just-say-...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De0pH_XMUSA

[3] https://archive.org/details/jeffrey-epstein-39s-little-black...

[4] https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2021/10/harvard-endowment-su...

[5] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/9/25/pierson-sulliva...

[6] https://finfacts.ie/cmsb/uploads/thumb/us_productivity_pay_g...

[7] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221...

[8] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/07/19/what-the-...

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

#937

Post by mcntsh »

kuschku wrote: post #909
mcntsh wrote: post #891

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I also live in Germany and housing affordability is much much worse than in the USA. The ratio of the median income to the median housing cost is significantly worse: https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_count... Renting in the US also is very cheap outside of cities. You can rent in New Jersey and take the train into NYC, or rent in Vallejo and take the train into San Francisco. Over all the i…

> The ratio of the median income to the median housing cost is significantly worse You're again quoting income vs the price to buy property. You're arguing against a strawman with that. The argument is about the cost to rent, combined with the monetary and opportunity cost of commuting associated with that.

It was easier for me to find a rental in NYC than in was in Berlin so I wouldn't really say Germany is ahead there either. Maybe if you got a rental 10 years ago? German rental markets are price-controlled which means extreme shortages because... surprise surprise... Germans don't build either.

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

#938

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jrumbut wrote: post #799
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know it’s from zoning laws because a few places don’t have this problem > “We have kept our rent increases to about 1% whereas the rest of the country was looking at 31%,” Mayor Jacob Frey said on Monday, citing data from The Pew Charitable Trusts. > “That’s a drastic difference. And in part, it’s due to the policies that we’ve passed.” > It’s mostly simple supply and demand, according to Mayor Frey. An explosion…

> Still, on average, people are spending about 40% of their paychecks on renting a place to live. I think it's fair to say they've made progress in slowing the growth of the housing problem, but it is a big stretch to say they don't have a housing affordability problem.

Housing is mostly local but a little bit national. If you have better housing prices than other cities, well, some people can work from home, guess who's moving in. People compare cost of living when choosing a new job.

Get most cities to do what they did and you get less of this net migration and housing becomes more affordable everywhere.

Some of this also takes time. You let people build, they start to build, that doesn't mean they've stopped yet.

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

#939

Post by io_oi »

Check out my experience with my elderly neighbor. She is at risk of homelessness due to getting cut from benefits. It's hellish.

I posted to Ask HN about it recently [1] and it is just mind blowing how bad the USA safety net is.

I am baffled. We can barely communicate with them due to months of lag on their end.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37429228

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

#940

Post by blharr »

macNchz wrote: post #424
J_Shelby_J wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building any housing is building affordable housing. Adding one home at the top of the price range, increases the number of affordable homes for someone, somewhere, by at least one.

It’s exasperating how many people will fight this. I believe it has been supported by research as well. Anecdotal, but I experienced it firsthand: Several years ago I was living in a lovely, historic, but no-frills apartment in a desirable area (Cobble Hill, Brooklyn) when several new “luxury” apartment buildings opened nearby, all around the same time. They were only a bit more expensive but offered lots of amenitie…

>They were only a bit more expensive

Not to be a doubter, but it seems like this note completely changes the context of the problem they stated. A slightly more expensive housing is competitive with the current housing you had. A higher-end luxury building being built costing 10x as much would likely have different effects.

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