Comment by MangoToupe
5 days ago
It's a nice victory story for the YIMBYs hoping to win over the upper-/middle class trying to retain the narrative that the market will provide "affordable" housing (not what this even demonstrates, but anyway), but this isn't going to get people off the street. We need a public housing sector to appropriately meet everyone's needs. Otherwise this is just a game of justifying "who deserves housing", a discussion over which I'll never agree with the market.
Until you reach transient shelter beds, which may not be saturated in a region (in some places in Chicagoland the work is going into outreach to get people off the street and into shelter beds as much as it is in expanding the number of beds), every additional unit of housing you build frees up some unit at or below that unit on the stack of housing. The effect percolates all the way down to long-term supportive housing rooms.
I don't really understand the intuition people have for how anything else could be the case. You make new housing available, people move into it, leaving vacancies. Pretty simple.
> every additional unit of housing you build frees up some unit at or below that unit on the stack of housing. The effect percolates all the way down to long-term supportive housing rooms.
This makes intuitive sense to me, but I've really struggled to explain it in a way that makes it click for people.
Just ask: whoever moves into the new place, where did they live before? Does their previous apartment vanish into the ether?
This is an aside to your thing here, but I don't think any of us can do better than the HN commenter on the other housing thread today who said (paraphrasing) that this concern about building market-rate housing is like expressing concern that nobody builds used cars.
I don't have the impression most of my "fellow" americans even gave a damn about homelessness to begin with, so perhaps what you read as misunderstanding the market might simply be a disagreement of values—one party cares about the homeless, the other cares about salaried employees. May we all truly rot in shit.
0.2% of Americans are homeless.
Why is housing always about the homeless? Yes, getting people off the street is important. But there's few other topics where a solution that helps 99.8% of people is dismissed because it doesn't help 0.2% of people (I don't even agree that it doesn't help them, but I'll be charitable for the sake of making my point).
> Why is housing always about the homeless?
To me, poverty is basically the only thing worth talking about when it comes to politics. Nothing else is going to get me to the voting box—to me, a platform that doesn't focus on poverty reduction doesn't even understand the point of government, the economy, or trying to work together.
I suspect other folks who think this way are going to be disproportionately loud.
People in poverty have to pay for housing. Reducing the price of housing helps them, and may even help them climb out of poverty. Building more housing reduces the price of housing.
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Right now in cities homelessness is often associated with addiction or mental illness. We spend billions every year giving these people resources to get off the street, get treatment for addiction or mental illness. Right now? Many, many, many of those people have no desire to get off the streets or get clean or get treatment for their mental illness - despite the copious amounts of safety nets and other programs designed specifically to help those people.
I agree, we already have programs designed to help those who need it - focusing on the larger percentage of the population just makes sense if you're concerned about having bigger positive outcomes.
So you're telling me if an additional, say, 100k units came on the market in Denver in the next year, housing prices wouldn't fall dramatically such that all working people could afford housing?
Working people should be able to afford housing near where they work. So let's press the gas pedal on building. The mentally ill and drug addicted should be subject to mandatory treatment or jail until such time as their underlying condition is mitigated to the extent that they can work and afford housing. Free housing doesn't work. In fact, it exacerbates individual dysfunction. It is cruelty masquerading as kindness.
> all working people could afford housing?
Hey, if that's the metric you're pushing for, good for you. I'm pushing for housing as a human right. I never caught the calvinist bug of "torture the non-productive until they conform and perform" method of population management.
Human rights don't depend on the compulsory labor of others. They are inherent. Housing doesn't qualify.
"torture the non-productive until the conform or perform" is possibly the most inflammatory framing of "you should not make other people pay for your housing" I've seen.
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Don't you see the huge contradiction here?
Housing doesn't just spring up on our streets by Jesus' will, so by making people responsible for providing housing for other people, you're literally calling for "torture until they conform and perform".
> housing as a human right
Why not just shelter?
Why should housing be a human right? Human rights came from seeing all people as made in the image of God, but since God is out of fashion, what justification is there? And even if you argue "image of God", human rights have hithertofore been about human interactions, not possessions or use of things. On the latter, Paul instructs thieves to stop stealing and work, so that they have something to give to the poor--it's not clear to me that a Christian position would necessarily consider housing or income to be a right of existence. [1]
If housing is a human right, then I think you need some human responsibilities, too. Like giving back to society in some way, e.g. Paul. Rights of interaction go both ways, but right to housing/basic income only go one way and that is not workable. Communism tried right to work / right to housing, and it never worked. You could say, well, the probably was command economy, but how would you guarantee work/housing without a command economy? As it is, society informs you how it values what your giving in the form of money, which you then use to buy housing. It isn't perfect, either, but it seems to work better.
But going back to human rights being derived from all people being made in God's image, the Christian view is that it is each individual's responsibility to care for the poor. Making no-poverty a human right turns it into society's responsibility, and I'm not convinced that is workable. Society doesn't exist; society is the interactions of individuals, and if you don't transform the individuals to each care for each other, it will be impossible for society to. Marxism makes the claim that society is the problem, but so far no workable solutions have emerged on how society can solve the problem. (To be fair, Christianity did not solve the problem, either, although the early church sure tried, especially with Basil et al after Constantine increased their resources)
[1] As a possible counterpoint, St. Basil said that everything you earn over subsistence belongs to the poor, but that seems a unworkable unless you, like him, are part of a rich monastic/ecclesiatical community that provides for you in exchange for individual poverty.
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Lowering the rent stops people from becoming homeless which is a necessary element of ending homelessness.
> Lowering the rent stops people from becoming homeless which is a necessary element of ending homelessness.
Sure but by this reasoning you could justify any effort as sufficient. At some point you have to make the personal judgement on what effort is enough. I don't really see any effort focusing on anything short of homelessness as worth the oxygen in the room it consumes.
Who said anything here about "sufficient"?
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