In my 20s I did a year long internship in Japan and lived in a dorm owned by the company I worked for.
Single room with bed and desk, bathroom down the hall, shared cafeteria on the first floor with breakfast and dinner served every day (lunch expected to be eaten at the office).
Not a bad set up for a young single person. Especially considering a lot of the dorm residents left early in the morning and didn’t return until the last train home.
Not a bad setup for an old single person either, or a married couple: it's much better than living under a bridge! Gets a little crowded as families grow, but people have made do in one-room houses (even with multigenerational families) for eons.
Of course, the dorm room setup is less vulnerable to exploitation if the dorm is rented or purchased separately from one's employer, otherwise you not only risk losing wages (and, in the US, access to health insurance) but also your home if you're laid off.
GP comment was obviously referring to Anatole France, who wrote sarcastically in 1894:
> Cela consiste pour les pauvres à soutenir et à conserver les riches dans leur puissance et leur oisiveté. Ils y doivent travailler devant la majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain.
> It is the duty of the poor to support and sustain the rich in their power and idleness. In doing so, they have to work before the laws' majestic equality, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.
Shared space living works as long as your roommates don’t come back horribly drunk and reek of alcohol. True story: when I moved to Lausanne I stayed at the youth hostel for a week while looking for a place to live. The police would bring in some people in sometimes who didn’t have a place to stay…and it was pretty horrible, I’m not even sure how to describe the smell even today. Suffice to say, I got out of that hostel as quickly as possible.
Youth hostels used to be able to discriminate with a lot of requirements to prevent chronic homeless from using them (you need a passport, you need to be under a certain age) but as soon as those criteria disappeared, they basically become unviable.
We need to reframe the conversation on public and low cost housing. It's not about providing homes for only the deserving or the hardworking. The tough reality is that a lot of people on the street right now are happy enough living on the street. Demanding that you only give housing to people who can make it through a treatment program or find gainful employment means most of them are still going to be on the street.
Even if you are only completely motivated by selfish desires, we want these people off the street for our benefit. It make cities nicer and America safer.
Yes, these places are going to be drug infested slums. But it's still a good idea and I want my tax dollars to go towards it.
And if we can add in some market-based options and give down-and-out humans the option of self-selecting to nicer facilities and working their way up to something better in life, all the better.
* No one wants to live next to low barrier housing (for drug addicts, that don't require drug treatment or other social programs), not just the most generous people who like you think these people should be helped, but even other homeless people! They will try their luck outside because you just put them in with a drug addict crazier than they are.
* If your city starts handing out free housing to all of its homeless, it will just attract more people in need of that housing, to the point that you started out with 50K on the street, housed 50K, and now you have 100K on the street! This is a problem with local solutions at least: the better you treat the problem, the worse the problem will get. Local resources quickly get exhausted with no visible progress made (and worse: things are worse than when you started!), even if you are technically making the country a better place.
SROs and rooming houses of the past...still had standards, they would kick out people who were causing problems. The only reason it seemed better is that enough people were afraid of losing the little housing they had to keep their problems/addictions in check enough to keep it. It was just crappy enough that no one wanted to be there who could do better, having a bunch of SROs didn't necessarily make your city a destination.
No one wants to like in the bad districts, yes. But people will happily buy apartments in such places if they are significantly cheaper than the median (I mean not like twice or thrice cheaper, but even 10-25% cheaper). Case in point - people often do check that narks don't shoot drugs in their potential new building, but still all apartments would be sold out eventually. People don't like living under airport glide path, but still all apartments and houses under it are sold like hot cakes. I had viewed a new low rise complex last year near city highway (unshielded), railway, metal recycling shop and a construction site, and only a big mall nearby as a benefit. It's almost fully sold out now. In my previous city some company had built a three building low economy complex right near the railway in the middle of the former warehouse district, with bysmal parking and connection options too, it's also sold out.
tl;dr low housing price (in a region with jobs of course) beats ANY negative factor. At least until it's not literally slums, and possibly not even then.
Housing thats just 10-25% cheaper isn’t going to attract the chronic homeless, they can’t make housing work in LCOLs which is why they are hanging out in HCOLs un the first place. Also, you might be doing better for the middle class, but even in the working poor isn’t going to be helped much by that.
Anyways, none if what you said has anything to do with the visible homeless who have many other issues to work through before they can even think about paying even a little rent.
> Yes, these places are going to be drug infested slums. But it's still a good idea and I want my tax dollars to go towards it.
From reading the article:
1: I got the impression a lot of these places weren't drug infested slums.
2: I got the impression that young, independent middle-class people could live in the nicer ones and save money. (Which they could use when they were ready to buy a home, start a family, ect.)
I was being hyperbolic. I don't think all SROs would be "slums". But if we did provide housing for all 500,000+ homeless people in the US we shouldn't be surprised when some do become slums.
SROs of yore came in all types, but one of the most notorious were flophouses, like the infamous "chicken-wire hotels".
Tent living is something like the middle class of homelessness. You have a private space, you can can acquire things, you can choose where you live and who you live around, and you don't have to jump through hoops to maintain your status.
Even for the "long-term" housing programs you have a lot of rules you have to follow and can easily fall out if you commit a minor crime.
If you realize that our human ancestors lived in hovels and tents for thousands and thousands of years, it's not too hard to believe that modern humans can adapt back to similar living conditions.
> If you realize that our human ancestors lived in hovels and tents for thousands and thousands of years, it's not too hard to believe that modern humans can adapt back to similar living conditions.
100% of the land was not owned by people with the ability to enforce it constantly then.
So your point is that some homeless (surely we agree it's not all homeless people) would rather live in a tent free from restrictions bound to housing programs than to take part in those housing programs and submit themselves to the restrictions?
I'm absolutely not arguing that people enjoy being homeless, but life is full of tradeoffs and for enough Americans homelessness beats some of the alternatives.
That is not true? Tent it a place super easy to steal from which is something homeless deal with constantly. They can not choose where they live all that much, because they get kicked from most places.
> If you realize that our human ancestors lived in hovels and tents for thousands and thousands of years, it's not too hard to believe that modern humans can adapt back to similar living conditions.
Humans build permanent houses pretty much the moment they could. The nomads were nomads because they had to.
Which makes it obviously impossible for all of them to be employed.
I mean, yes, shelters have issues and being away of them is often the reasonable choice. But, calling homeless in tents "middle class" is beyond absurd.
If you ever work with the homeless, it's a common trope. People seek out tent camping as a form of long-term security.
There's a great Conversations with Tyler where he interviews a prominent homeless person in the DC era and one of the topics he brings up is specifically stratification amongst these groups:
"Happy enough" not to be willing to give up their autonomy and jump through a whole bunch of bullshit hoops to get housing.
"Happy enough" that housing that excludes queer people, men (or people who look like men), people who need to not have their names be public information because they're hiding from abusive prior partners/parents, pets, people who are currently addicted to drugs (and thus cannot realistically never have drugs around), or any of a host of other restrictions, will not be something they consider an option.
(Note that these restrictions are a) from separate sources, not all on the same thing, and b) things I've heard about in the context of shelters, rather than low-income housing; however, it would not surprise me in the least if similar restrictions were placed on various programs to help house the homeless.)
Also if you have work that doesn't line up exactly with the shelters opening or close, or you want to not be abused or assaulted at the shelter, or...
There are cases where the street is safer or has more autonomy, like you say. Solutions need to offer similar things, so privacy, the ability to indulge in some little pleasures, to come and go at your own schedule are basic table stakes.
A housing unit that lets you stay there indefinitely, for free, in an apartment that you can have to yourself—but doesn't allow alcohol, or is sex-segregated, or where you're mandated to come out and work for a specified period every day, or even that gets regularly searched for drug paraphernalia, is not going to work for a lot of people.
Basically, housing for people like this needs to have, if anything, fewer restrictions on its use than housing for the general public. Give them the space to fuck up and to heal at their own pace, and not have to worry that those very normal kinds of problems will leave them worse off than before (eg, because if you're kicked out, your stuff gets confiscated—or even just because with these projects in place, there's less of a community of homeless people to support each other for those who still don't "fit").
I personally don't frame it as an "us vs them" situation. If anything, I feel like homeless deserve the same dignity to make choices for themselves and have their choices respected. And we owe them better choices.
My point is even if you entirely self-motivated, it's still something you should support for selfish reasons.
That said, streets and parks are public spaces meant for the enjoyment of all. Public urban camping robs civic value and turns public property into private spaces. Excessive tolerance of it is a failure of policy, not actual policy.
If you'd like to let them shit in your bathroom, or fund public bathrooms, you can be part of the solution.
> their habit from interfering with my safety and health
Needing to shit isn't a habit. If you weren't aware, its a basic life function, like eating and breathing.
Its telling that you're piggybacking that on to your complaints about drugs (and also ignoring the untreated/poorly treated mental illness and straight up poverty legs of the homeless tripod).
I agree, I think public bathrooms are really important. Feces on the sidewalk is a health issue and impacts economic value too.
But we have to acknowledge that the instant you make a bathroom "public", it becomes a place to do drugs, turn tricks, and sleep. Even if you're fine with a bathroom being occupied for hours for non-bathroom tasks, it makes the public bathroom a toxic area, with drug paraphernalia (including needles and other waste products) and used condoms as discarded litter at best, and clogged infrastructure at worst.
We need to provide these services for any human who needs a toilet, *and also* figure out ways besides incarceration to effectively deal with uncooperative drug users.
I think the sad part is I think most people would be ok funding more public bathrooms if we had confidence that they would be used only as bathrooms ... but in the places that need them the most, people have the expectation that they will be used for other purposes.
I think that's an unfair comparison insofar as a person speeding on the highway generally passes you by quickly and doesn't prevent others from using the highway.
But a person who tries to camp out in the bathroom because it's an indoor place and their tent was taken/destroyed by the police etc, does functionally prevent others from using it as just a bathroom. Similarly if someone locks themselves in to get high. The bathroom then not only doesn't give the broader public a place to pee, but also becomes a liability where whomever is responsible for it periodically has to have confrontational interactions. People and organizations seem to have a strong preference for avoiding such interactions and will go awkwardly out of their way to avoid them.
It's like once your city has a bad issue with homelessness, a bunch of public services get distorted around making them not be encampments. A couple examples:
- At one point SF was considering fare-free public transit and the mayor basically refused on the grounds that unhoused people would just use buses/trains as a place to hang out indoors rather than to go anywhere in particular. It's not that she hated the concept of public transit in particular so much as that having the ability to exclude the homeless was viewed as a way to keep transit as transit.
- The closest library to me got some press for shutting off its wifi after hours, not because anyone using the wifi was bad per se, but because a semi-permanent encampment was erected around it, so the unhoused population could access it.
> I think that's an unfair comparison insofar as a person speeding on the highway generally passes you by quickly and doesn't prevent others from using the highway.
Insane drivers doing dangerous shit are by far the biggest threat to my health and personal safety on a day-to-day basis. And next to nothing is done about them.
I welcome you to point to the part of my comment that says they don't deserve public bathrooms, public housing, or human dignity.
I'm not ignoring a thing. If you follow the thread to which I'm replying, it starts with someone discussing the "homeless by choice" and follows with someone suggesting there is not difference between the impact of a homeless person and a housed person on the community.
This analysis ignores the fact that homelessness itself is by and large the primary cause of mental health issues and drug addiction. It only takes a few missed paychecks before most people would end up on the street.
I'm not sure if I am ignoring it? There should be a housing option of last resort for people, full stop. The cause and effect between mental health and housing should be irrelevant when we solve for housing.
~60% of Americans can't handle a surprise expense of $1k.
"A few" missed paychecks is generally going to be more than a $1k disruption.
My understanding is lots of places have relatively little protections for tenants. Once you're behind on your rent, how are people in this position going to catch up?
When I talked to people in shelters before that was literally the top reason they were there. Oftentimes it starts from car trouble or a health episode causing loss of income. Without friends or family that can take them in they go to a shelter if they can (those with pets oftentimes go directly to the streets or their cars). Many are able to find employment again soon but many don’t and a downward spiral begins quickly. Somewhere around 30-40% of Americans cannot afford an emergency $1000 expense and it’s probably only going to go higher.
> Somewhere around 30-40% of Americans cannot afford an emergency $1000 expense.
This oft-reported statistic is wrong. It's based on a survey that simply concluded that they wouldn't necessarily pull that amount from savings to meet an emergency expense. That doesn't mean they can't afford it or don't have more savings than that.
You're right that the question they used is a bit vague, but there is a ton of other data in there that points to affordability as the main cause e.g.
"Nearly a quarter of Americans have no emergency savings"
and:
"Sixty percent of Americans are uncomfortable with their level of emergency savings — 31 percent are very uncomfortable, and 29 percent are somewhat uncomfortable."
Depends on the country and its support systems. But there are plenty of stories of rapid decline, even in well run countries. A bad divorce followed by some bad decisions and suddenly you realise you have nowhere else to go but the streets.
The "one missed paycheck away" is cited a lot, but it's not entirely false, if a bit of a hyperbole.
The majority of Americans (recent estimates I believe are around 60%) have no savings, and live paycheck to paycheck. So while not exactly "one missed paycheck away" it's pretty close. More accurate would be to say "Most Americans are one crisis away..."
Median weekly earnings for full-time workers in the US was $1,196 in Q2 - so, half of Americans make even less than that (~4,700/month). That's not a lot, and in a lot of areas of the country, that doesn't leave much room to save much of anything, especially if you have kids and need childcare.
Going off the BLS consumer expenditure survey from 2023 (most recent one I could find), average spent on housing was $25k/year or 2119/month, almost half the median monthly earnings. Just housing. Factor in food, transportation, healthcare, utilities and it's not hard to see how people can, and are, struggling, and are effectively one mishap from falling too far behind to catch up.
Although Median household income in the US is the more relevant figure, especially for things like housing costs, and that's at ~80k.
While most Americans don't have "emergency savings" (heck, I don't), most of the credible studies more realistically peg it as 25% of American adults or 1 in 4.
Yeah fair enough, household income paints a better picture.
Even so, $80k household isn't a pretty picture with today's housing and food costs except for the most LCoL areas, and in those the income is going to be considerably lower. To afford the US today, we need to be closer to $80k+ individually rather than for the whole household.
The median American has $5400 in savings. It varies, but people who don’t have a good support network can fall off the rails quickly, depending on there you live. Florida unemployment pays $32-275/week.
This is why you see so many homeless veterans. They often end up geographically separated from family and see relationships weaken due to time and distance.
Whenever someone says “mental health” as a causative factor in a social problem, that’s saying “don’t know, wont fix”
In similar spirit to what dang posted in reply to you a few months ago: we empathize with your experience and can understand you feeling this way, but we need you to avoid expressing your feelings like this on HN.
Rather than fulminating and attacking other community members, which is clearly against the guidelines, please think of a way you can draw on your experiences to educate others who may not share your experiences and thus may not be aware of the reality for people in this situation.
It's true that their comment broke the guidelines, but in fairness your comment lacked substance, and qualifies as a shallow dismissal, which is also against the guidelines, and is ultimately the reason why it was so upsetting to that commenter. Please try to make comments more substantive in future.
The US Federal Government spends over $3 TRILLION on social services. US states collectively spend around $1 TRILLION on social services.
This is what's available just in my state:
- temporary housing
- free drug treatment programs
- free addiction services
- free food at hundreds of food shelves that also offer other amenities.
- free public transportation
- free and low cost job training
- free and low cost pharmaceuticals and medicine
I've never been homeless, because in several instances, I've actually used social services to survive and get back on my feet because that's why they're there. People complaining there is no support system are either willfully ignorant these programs even exist, or are just too lazy to take advantage of them. And I don't remember ANYBODY in ANY of the non-profit, state funded or state run offices asking me about my race or sexuality before they offered to help me.
I honestly don't know what you're on about man, but saying there is no support system is pretty crazy to hear someone say.
Quite candidly for a lot of people whether or not there's enough "support" is just a matter of looking at outcomes. Are outcomes bad? Then (to some people) there is self-evidently not enough support.
Maybe the dissonance could be explained by being in different states? I can totally imagine social workers in some localities imposing their personal or religious beliefs on people needing help...
The issue with SROs is nobody likes being near them and the crime and drug use they attract.
My guess is as the asset bubbles pop, the marginal 70s-90s apartment complexes and second ring suburbs will be the new slums. People aren’t going to be able to afford cars as policy changes accelerate cost increases and wages continue to erode. City and near suburbs will be more attractive and expensive.
You already see this happening in larger metro areas to some extent.
If the bubbles pop that hard the state may ease up (reduce .gov imposed costs) rather than let those residents go from tax paying profit centers to assistance qualifying cost centers.
In my town there used to be a lot of single-room units (there are of course none now), and my understanding is that the primary residents were migrant men working pretty much all day. They'd just crash in the rooms, all their meals and social events would be out in town or at their work place.
I feel as though there would be a different tenant in the modern era. Some would be migrant young men trying to save every dime, but many would be those suffering mental illness, and they'd fill the unit with tons of stuff. Can you imagine how much more stuff Americans have these days than they did back in say 1900? I genuinely think that the volume of stuff/garbage would be a legitimate fire or structural hazard. No landlord would want that. Back in the old days landlords had a lot more ability to force out any tenants they didn't want.
Yep the article shows a photo of a neatly kept room, the reality would be a bare mattress on the floor, piles of dirty clothes, trash, and hoarded posessions.
Drug-addicted and mentally ill people do not know how to keep even a moderately organized living space. Our city has tried "housing first" and it's been a disaster. The units are filthy, damaged, and the buildings don't pass minimal standards when the housing department inspects them because the "tenants" and their associates have destroyed them.
I do believe most SROs had a "no visitors" policy so that might help somewhat but there would have to be strictly enforced requirements about not trashing or abusing the property.
One of the last SRO left in Chicago is about 2 blocks from my house. They have extremely strict cleaning requirements and a no visitors policy. It seems to keep the damage to a minimum. I think the biggest issue there is how many of the residents really need aged care but can’t afford it.
The average/median/typical recipient of EBT or welfare or whatever only receives it transitionally for less than a year. Yet at any one time the system is 90% lifers or at least long term users. Because anyone who isn't a lifer is in and out quick. Same problem mental institutions have.
I pulled those numbers out of my ass and you can play with the numbers to change the proportions but the problem still stands. At any one time the system is going to be somewhat saturated with the "problem people".
Now, I don't think that's a problem. If someone thinks they can develop and profitably run SRO housing with a bunch of those people then good for them. But that makes some people feel icky about it.
Those aren’t the ones who housing-first advocates are building units for. The theory is the crazy people on the street will suddenly be not-crazy when they get an apartment
The vast majority of homeless people are homeless for economic reasons, like the loss of a job or household income, and the largest growing population of unhoused people are entire families.
The ones built in my town were for the “chronically homeless” these are people who are likely addicted, mentally ill, or very antisocial. They have burned every bridge they may have had and even their family has written them off. You can’t give someone like that an apartment and expect they will take care of it without extremely close supervision.
The lack of the ability to sleep securely and the lack of a place to store your possessions are enough to drive someone crazy. Sure, some people might be homeless because they're incurably insane, but plenty of people are insane because of homelessness.
> Drug-addicted and mentally ill people do not know how to keep even a moderately organized living space.
Which is nonsense and a damaging stereotype. Drug addicts and mentally ill people exist in all areas of life and many are successful - more so than you or I.
Secondly, I'm challenging you on:
> The theory is the crazy people on the street will suddenly be not-crazy when they get an apartment
Because in fact there is now a great body of evidence that shows that housing-first, that is providing housing with no pre-conditions, is in fact extremely effectively at treating both uncontrolled addiction and untreated mental illness.
Yep, this is exactly what would happen. Anyone who has worked in industries adjacent to these types of people knows how it is.
At this price point, you're essentially only going to be renting to people who are currently homeless, which is great from a societal standpoint. However, you can't ignore the fact that substantial portions of the homeless community, and therefore your potential tenants, are either drug addicts and mentally ill people.
1 out of every 10 of those people will cause more property destruction than could ever be recouped in rent from the other 9. It just doesn't work for private landlords.
I bet those landlords could build housing that was sufficiently resistant to property destruction, which those renters would be happy to pay for at a sufficient rate - everyone would be happy. But it's the myth of consensual housing: isn't there someone you forgot to ask? The housing regulations would (and do) absolutely forbid anything that fit this niche.
Of course it’s legal to interview tenants in the States, a landlord should simply avoid violating the Fair Housing Act in a particularly flagrant manner while doing so. (E.g., they should avoid documenting in writing that they’re refusing to rent on the basis of familial status! This parenthesis possibly based on a true story.)
Give it another couple years and I’m sure the courts will dismantle the FHA. Then landlords will have to find something else to complain about.
You're right. The town has speculated it to be the case and doesn't want housing for situations like this. Real estate investors also speculate it, and they'd prefer to cater to those with more disposable income.
Single-room units would bring down the cost of housing for everyone, but those with influence and money have decided that we don't want it in our community.
Many cities for example forbid single stair multi story buildings from being built, despite the lack of danger and much of their current stock being literally this, which greatly raises the costs to build denser housing since everything has to be at least a large building which are aggressively lobbied against by local NIMBYs
Seattle allows them, it wasn't a magic bullet.
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We need to look at historically successful housing and just legalize that.
For example - SF's row houses. You can't build anything like those due to rules about stairs, environmental laws about multiple family dwellings with internal stairs, and building codes that have such strict environmentally friendly rules that people cannot afford to live indoors.
Up here in Seattle I was inquiring about extending my roof out to convert my cape code into a salt shaker style house, basically giving me two more bedrooms on the same lot. From an environmental perspective this is great, my house is over 70 years old, it is a sunk cost in terms of building material, and it was already updated with modern insulation years ago. I had an energy assessment done with I first moved in, and basically was told there isn't much I can do except fix the duct work but sadly no one does duct work anymore (I tried to find someone!)
So anyway, my roof extension? The city would want me to replace my roof with larger wood so I could put in more insulation. An expensive undertaking that would have ZERO benefit to the house's energy profile. If they wanted me to paint the roof white, sure, that'd make sense and help more than $30k extra of roof work.
Another example is how the electrical code keeps getting more and more strict, such as having outlets every few feet in kitchens. That adds a lot to costs, with little to no benefit. If you add up all the incremental safety rules since the 90s, we're paying a ton for a very very small margin of improvement in safety.
And none of these rules are making houses better! "Home inspector discovers entire subdivision has leaking walls" is an entire sub-genre of video on YouTube.
So we're paying a lot small things we don't need (kitchens with a dozen outlets, AFCI breakers everywhere, 30k of lumber to save $5 a month on cooling) while the important things (walls that don't leak) are being ignored.
I think it's because the code writing associations literally have no choice but to keep adding new code to justify writing new versions. i.e. the textbook publisher grift
Hence why we are down to moving outlets over a inch every version
All while just 3 hours away by car, beautiful houses are crumbling into dust. You literally can get them for the price of the land tax, and there are even companies that specialize in finding them.
Ah yes, a micro-apartment the same size as the average American kitchen [1], how affordable!
For comparison, Seattle WA has a minimum wage around 2.5x higher than Tokyo. Here is a larger apartment [2] that is only 1.33x more expensive than your Tokyo broom closet.
Go ahead and find something more akin to the American sized apartments (500sq+ for 1 bd) and you'll see that the prices are almost the same, with much lower wages across the board.
Build more houses per year than people who want to move to the city. Prices will decrease.
NYC did this over 100 years ago, it became one of the world's most important cities.
SF did the same thing, it became a tier 1 world city.
Same for Chicago.
Then they stopped doing it.
Then no other city in America even bothered trying.
Also housing prices don't go down immediately with new construction, there is a latency. More so, sometimes prices just stabilize, but if prices stay the same for 5 years, and inflation and wages go up, that means the effective price of housing went down. If you keep building and prices stay the same for a decade, all of a sudden houses are affordable.
> Austin LITERALLY has falling housing prices from building more units
No, they don't. They got a one-time pause in the price growth from a _falling_ overall population. Here's the price chart for housing in Austin: https://imgur.com/a/WzauEIp
The population has either not yet recovered, or it has just recovered to the peak 2019 level. I have conflicting data. But nevertheless, once it comfortably passes the 2019 peak, the prices will continue growing.
> They why dont we build as much housing as possible?
Because it's not possible. Large cities can't sustainably grow at more than single digit percentage per year speed.
And at that speed, the density/price death spiral easily consumes all the housing.
Seattle was mentioned here, and it grew its number of housing units by 25% over 12 years. Oftentimes leading the country in the number of active cranes.
Can you guess what happened with housing costs? I give you three guesses.
> Since if prices never fall or never even rise slower we clearly can make infinite wealth?
No. You get the fall of democracy, demographic collapse, and in general other nasty consequences when the bill comes due.
Because it's essentially a zero-sum game now. The population growth has mostly ended, so every new dense housing unit in NYC means a new abandoned house in rural Ohio.
Want a stat that will blow your mind? The US has 1.1 housing units per family. We literally have more houses than families in the country. Yet somehow it's a "housing crisis".
You're pointing yourself at a graph that shows an exponential spike in prices up until 2023, just as my model of density-price death spiral predicts.
And the only reason the prices stopped growing is the population _decrease_ after COVID lockdowns. The ACS data series ( https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST5Y2020.S0101?q=Austin,+TX ) gives 979,263 people in 2019, and by 2023 it recovered to 979,200 after falling to 944,658 in 2021.
So no, Austin has not managed to lower prices by building more. It managed to do that by using a worldwide pandemic that lowered the city population.
And yes, lowering the population is the only way to lower the housing cost. You don't have other options.
No one is claiming that if you increase density the price will always go below the price before you added incremental units. People correctly point out with data the as you add marginal units the rate of price increase goes down. So the future price will be lower than it would be absent those marginal units. It's super basic economics.
I just made a post saying the same thing so I feel the need to play devil's advocate - Induced demand also exists. Seattle got hit by this last decade when the Bay Area had no more construction but we still had some, people flooded here for affordable houses. Denver also got a lot of this, and so did Austin more recently.
Math has to take into account that if 30k people want to move to a city, and you build 40k houses ( to drop prices), well now maybe 50k people want to move to the city and prices will still go up!
Austin is a bad example, since prices actually went down about 17% in the last 3 years.
If you create the regulatory climate that allows the market to provide housing, you can probably absorb a few tens of thousands of people over a few years. Most of these places don’t do that at all, other than Austin.
This article commits the cardinal sin of homeless discourse -- trying to conflate two things:
1. The "homeless problem", that is, the problem of mentally deranged or violent vagrants that make public spaces less usable or unwelcoming. This is difficult to impossible to measure, both in impact and in extent.
2. The "transient homeless", that is, the down-on-their-luck or otherwise situationally homeless people. This is easy to measure because these people will attempt to secure housing and services to get back on their feet.
Fixing #2, while worthwhile in itself, does nothing to fix #1. But well-intentioned people trying to fix "homelessness" find it much easier to address #2 because there are measurable outcomes, and no messy compromises to be made about civil liberties or individual freedom vs civil order. And this relies on the fact that since the same word is used, that it carries the same connotations. People hear "reduce homelessness" and they think that this means fewer people screaming about brainwaves and starting fights on the subway, but that's a completely separate issue.
EDIT: removed discussion of SROs to another top level comment to avoid confusing discourse here
3. Transient homeless that tried to get back on their feet but was met with the notion that all the options were eventually exhausted (they lived on their friend's couch until he got married). They even had dishwasher jobs, but inevitably, because rent was $2000 more than they would ever have - they decided to do drugs and live on the street because no amount of work at the wage they would be paid would ever make their life meaningful.
I'm sorry -- I fail to see how "mental health issues" is an interesting version of this. For serious mental health issues (of the form of #1) we simply do not have reliable treatment options aside from involuntary confinement.
For drug addiction the problem is more subtle but I question whether this part of the pipeline is worth considering when looking at the problem at scale. There is no serious attempt as far as I'm aware to measure the number of people that transition from #2 to #1 style homelessness, and since it is difficult to measure this it is very likely that solutions to #2 will have no effect on this pipeline.
While the idea of restoring SROs and other dormitory-style housing is a good idea to better serve the lower-cost end of housing, it is completely incompatible with modern ideas around tenant protection. For an SRO to work, you must be able to evict or remove unruly or uncooperative tenants to a degree that is far in excess of what is necessary for a regular apartment or for standalone housing, because by necessity the quarters are much closer. If a manager cannot evict an unruly tenant the entire SRO facility becomes uninhabitable.
> For an SRO to work, you must be able to evict or remove unruly or uncooperative tenants ... If a manager cannot evict an unruly tenant the entire SRO facility becomes uninhabitable.
I remember hearing a recent US legal change that makes it easier to forcibly commit mentally ill people.
To be quite blunt: Someone who's making an SRO unlivable is mentally ill, and needs to be in a place that's appropriate to handle their needs.
Someone that makes an apartment building unlivable is probably mentally ill. The amount of disruption necessary to make an SRO unlivable is much much much lower.
Failing to clean up after yourself in the kitchen or bathroom; playing loud music or coming and going at odd hours, even things like having frequent visitors can be enough. SROs and boarding houses used to have all sorts of "unreasonable" restrictions because of the close quarters, and not having those restrictions makes this untenable.
Yes, this power will be abused arbitrarily by managers/landlords in racist and classist and ethno-cist (is that a word?) ways. Attempting to prevent that will lead to the same regulatory quagmires that got these things banned in the first place. You just have to accept the mild social injustice. If you cannot then SROs will have to be banned.
I wonder about demand. Who will these tenants be now? In my city they were day laborers and single poor people way back in the day. I don't know how much of that we have now / the homeless seem more like a mix now. Let alone issues of managing such places / social conflicts and so on.
Not saying it isn't worth a shot, all for it. I just don't know if this eats up that much demand / houses that many people these days.
I know a lot of Gen Z and even Millennial adults who are still living at home well after finishing school. I'm sure plenty of them would love to get out of their parents' homes but can't afford current rents, but might be able to afford an SRO.
In general I don't think many homeless people are going straight from the street to their own market rate unit. However some of them might be able to move into a sibling's spare bedroom after their adult nephew moves out.
Speaking as an older gen-Z-er living in with their parents, this is very true of me and many people I know around my age (most, now that I think about it). If I could live somewhere nearby that doesn't eat up 50%+ of my income I would go there in a heartbeat. On HN there's a tendency to assume people are either well-off or destitute drug addicts who have given up on life but there's a wide range in between.
I got a tour of a homeless shelter a few months ago and the folks running it mentioned that one of their jobs is to wake up specific people at 6am, 7am etc so they can make it to work in the morning.
It's amazing to me that, in the US, we're discussing deregulation and privatization of so many functional and working parts of the government apparatus (the United States Digital Service, public broadcasting, the post office, etc.), when deregulation of the housing market would probably do the most for public good. Distortion of the market, which includes outlawing SROs, jacks up housing prices and indirectly perpetuates so many societal problems:
- Homelessness, which likely worsens mental health, increases drug usage, reduces tourism, creates a massive eyesore for everyone else, etc.
- Lack of disposable income—if folks are spending more on a rent or mortgage payment, they're not spending as much on goods and services.
- Inequality—artificially constricting the supply of housing creates a game of musical chairs, where some inevitably get left out and, because of that, can't climb up the social ladder. It also favors incumbents who already own homes or received their parents' home.
- Sprawl—zoning restrictions stifle the construction of high-density housing, which makes cities inaccessible, increases car dependence, negatively affects the environment, etc.
Is it possible to develop cheap SRO-style housing without needing it all to be clustered together? It's easier to convert a single building into a bunch of SRO units, but that's just a recipe for more community backlash and economic segregation.
All the land around economic centers is taken by suburbs, the only direction is up. There’s nothing wrong with that, this is the natural progression of city growth.
This is only becoming a problem because local communities are using their legal weight to prevent enough condos & apartments from being built to satisfy demand. So now we have more homeless people and high rent problems.
I think you're just describing standard mixed income housing, although the section 8 eligible units there are often nicer than what you would get in an SRO, they are often less nice than the market-rate.
Belgium is overpaying for labor then! Open up those dormitories for workers and you can squeeze employee costs down at least 20% and harvest that value!
(cynicism)
>In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, landlords converted thousands of houses, hotels, apartment buildings, and commercial buildings into SROs, and by 1950, SRO units made up about 10% of all rental units in some major cities. But beginning in the mid-1950s, as some politicians and vocal members of the public turned against SROs and the people who lived in them, major cities across the country revised zoning and building codes to force or encourage landlords to eliminate SRO units and to prohibit the development of new ones.
So the greedy landlords are the would-be heroes of the story and the politicians are the bad guys?
> A wealth of research has examined the causes of homelessness over the past two decades. These studies consistently find that the cost of housing is by far the primary driver. For example, several studies have concluded that an area’s median rent correlates far more closely with its homelessness rate than factors such as weather, poverty rate, and rates of mental illness or substance use.
Curious to know about how homeless correlates to city / town / urban / suburban ect.
I don't encounter homelessness in expensive towns, but I do encounter it in expensive cities.
> I don't encounter homelessness in expensive towns, but I do encounter it in expensive cities.
Most likely because the cities have services available and the smaller towns don't. My wife works with the homeless where I live, and many in this small city are from the surrounding smaller, more expensive towns/suburbs - because of the lack of services in those towns, and their hostility to homelessness, they hop on a bus and come here because they receive much better care and have more opportunities.
Somewhat glad to see this getting coverage. I question the use of "decimated" here, as it feels a bit misplaced? "How States and Cities Regulated Out ..." would have worked really well?
'decimated' means 'totally destroyed' in the same way that 'literally' means 'figuratively' now. Just roll with it. Anything else will make your head hurt.
"Abundance" doesn't really address housing the lower half of the market, though. The market will never be willing to provide housing at a price that everyone can afford.
The abundance crowd aiming to lower some regulations, though, is directly in this lane. Like, specifically so. One of their complaints is that it costs so much for the public sphere to build cheap housing. No?
> a small room with a shared bathroom and sometimes a shared kitchen for a price that is unimaginable today—as little as $100 to $300 a month (in 2025 dollars).
This is exactly what I rented when I moved to
NYC two years ago. It was a month-to-month single room in a six-bedroom apartment. I’m not sure how legal it was, but I rented from a company with a web site, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That said, it was substantially more than $300/month - something like 4-5x
Prisons are very expensive. Better off buying each person a luxury appartment than building a prison. We can spend a lot of money if we scare people and the bogey man is punished. Be it "criminal" "terrorist" "illegal immigrant".
I think you are on to something though. Get rid of the bad parts of prison and they are accommodation and a car-free city within.
Arkansas is the lowest-cost state and still spends $23,000/prisoner/year. The median is $65,000/prisoner/year. 11 states spend over $100k/prisoner/year.
How much of that is surrounding infrastructure and overhead (guards, security, etc) that don't apply? Plus that includes all meals, medical care, instruction, and other resources in many cases.
We'd obviously want to model it around something like Arkansas. Remember, prison provides reasonable security, food, and clothing. Security will generally be better since regular people are not self-selected for criminality, and those savings can be moved over to improved food. Re-using the prison model for extreme low income and homelessness is not intuitive - but so be it (sometimes you have to use an anti-pattern).
Edit:
$100k/prisoner/year
That's crazy. Regular people don't live on that yearly.
> That's crazy. Regular people don't live on that yearly.
Yeah, there's either some severe inefficiencies there (or a ton of budget pork going to the wrong things), or it's a canary in the coal mine telling us that people actually should be making at least that much to live, and the fact that they aren't is a big problem, if not the main source of our societal problems.
Humor aside, there are people in the US who do get arrested for misdemeanors on purpose just to spend the night in a warm jail, and those that try to get into prison to alleviate chronic homelessness
Affordable housing is a solvable problem - the problem is that nobody at the top actually wants to solve it. Too much wealth and power tied to real estate value.
In the United States, this seems to be true for most of the "big" challenges the country faces, from medical care to immigration and employment. They are solvable, but no one at the top likes the solutions so they allow the public to suffer, rather than even trying to solve anything. (And use the problems as rallying cries come election-time.)
Don't lay this at the feet of government. Government may be sociopathic and unfeeling but the state doesn't generally meddle in petty matters of poor people who have little to no wealth to extract or redirect except to curry favor with other elements of the population.
Lay this at the feet of the individuals who thought they knew what was right for everyone and leaned on the government to act. Be that action local zoning, state laws or federal thumb on the scale money with strings attached behavior.
Ideally, you'll even see the pattern and use it to crap all over contemporary examples of the same.
No sane person wants to have to share a kitchen and bathroom with random transient strangers, as in the USA's SRO model. This is really where learning from other countries makes sense - in particular, Japan's high population density has led to the micro-apartment - that's a much better option, though probably still requires some regulatory overhaul (and isn't very compatible with car ownership as population density becomes too high):
> "Japan, particularly in dense cities like Tokyo and Osaka, allows and builds extremely small private apartments, often between 100–200 square feet. Despite their size, these units almost always include a private bathroom and kitchenette."
The lowest-cost housing is not in dense slums. It's in the rural areas and smaller cities. There you can buy a small single-family home for the cost of an SRO in NYC.
By adding more SROs the city housing will get MORE EXPENSIVE in the end. They won't solve anything, they'll just create more misery.
> The lowest-cost housing is not in dense slums. It's in the rural areas and smaller cities.
You can buy houses in rural New York for $100k-$150k. In St. Paul, it's not hard to find a house for $300k.
Yet most of the discussion revolves around fixing the situation in coastal cities, instead of working on incentives or infrastructure that would encourage people to see what's available in the hundreds of counties and smaller cities that have ample affordable stock.
Living in a rural area is not actually either cheap or easy. You need the skills to either profit off the land, which is not a trivial thing, or you to have a job that will allow you to afford to commute.
What incentives are you imagining, relative to reducing the housing cost burden in areas that already have many of those incentives (for instance, access to easy irregular work or income sources)?
The parent is talking about rural areas:
> You can buy houses in rural New York for $100k-$150k.
But for your comment, what percentage of the population do you believe qualifies for WFH? Do you think the population at risk of homelessness does? Are we going to see WFH hotel check in desks, restaurant servers, and other manual work soon?
Certainly if you have a well-paying WFH job you can work from nearly anywhere. I'm an example! I live in a rural area, precisely because I have a WFH job that enables it. But I still acknowledge that I'm that exception, not the rule.
1. These cities with ~100k population _are_ basically in rural areas. My prototypical example: Bend, OR.
2. You can live in real rural areas without doing agriculture just fine.
> But for your comment, what percentage of the population do you believe qualifies for WFH?
There are estimates that go as high as 60% of the working population in the US. During COVID, it went up to 72% but that clearly was not optimal.
> Do you think the population at risk of homelessness does? Are we going to see WFH hotel check in desks, restaurant servers, and other manual work soon?
These service jobs can also work in smaller cities. The _only_ way to solve the housing problem is by creating _more_ of these smaller cities or by increasing the size of existing cities by a bit. There's no harm if a 50k city becomes 100k by adding a couple of suburbs. And this provides plenty of population to need baristas, waiters, hair stylists, etc.
I'm very anti-urbanist and I'd like to see abominations like NYC to be demolished, just like we did with polluting factories. But there's always going to be a need for central places for services and businesses, and it's fine as long as they do not start growing uncontrollably.
You're saying that increasing supply (all else being equal) will increase prices? Seems like that turns standard econ on its head, so can you help me understand who you reached that conclusion?
> You're saying that increasing supply (all else being equal) will increase prices?
Yep. Exactly. With the caveat: the increase happens by increasing the _density_.
> Seems like that turns standard econ on its head, so can you help me understand who you reached that conclusion?
Here's another example. Suppose you give a billion dollars to everyone. Will everyone just become rich?
Housing is similar. When you build denser housing, it increases the attractiveness of the area for employers. They get access to a larger labor pool, so companies near dense housing are long-term more competitive.
This in turn increases the housing price, as workers want to live closer to employers.
Rinse, wash, repeat.
The end result: no large city managed to lower down housing costs by increasing density. It's a simple verifiable fact.
Edit: I checked data for Western Europe, Russia, US, Japan. It's possible that some citi in India or Malaysia managed to do that. But I don't have data for them.
I see what you're saying: all else will not remain equal. Your argument is that any increase in supply will always be more than offset by a corresponding increase in demand.
That is correct. An abstract spherical city in vacuum might be able to lower prices by building more. Or it's possible in a fantasy scenario where you suddenly drop a million housing units onto a city from orbit.
But cities don't exist in vacuum. And building new housing is always slow, so you can feasibly grow housing stock in a large city only by single-digit percentages YoY.
Yes, let's bring these back. In fact, why don't we just build Khrushchevkas and skip the whole proletarian revolution step? We can even start wearing the funny little hats with flaps and drink until we forget about freedom or dignity. We're beyond that anyway, aren't we?
With this level of wealth inequality and these seeming like a good idea, I'd say we're gearing up for a bloody good time, to say the least.
It's hard to imagine that abundant housing led to the truly adverse economic conditions in the USSR. Rather than offering a cheeky strawman perhaps you could give some real thought to alternative solutions you'd like to see?
In my 20s I did a year long internship in Japan and lived in a dorm owned by the company I worked for.
Single room with bed and desk, bathroom down the hall, shared cafeteria on the first floor with breakfast and dinner served every day (lunch expected to be eaten at the office).
Not a bad set up for a young single person. Especially considering a lot of the dorm residents left early in the morning and didn’t return until the last train home.
Not a bad setup for an old single person either, or a married couple: it's much better than living under a bridge! Gets a little crowded as families grow, but people have made do in one-room houses (even with multigenerational families) for eons.
Of course, the dorm room setup is less vulnerable to exploitation if the dorm is rented or purchased separately from one's employer, otherwise you not only risk losing wages (and, in the US, access to health insurance) but also your home if you're laid off.
GP comment was obviously referring to Anatole France, who wrote sarcastically in 1894:
> Cela consiste pour les pauvres à soutenir et à conserver les riches dans leur puissance et leur oisiveté. Ils y doivent travailler devant la majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain.
> It is the duty of the poor to support and sustain the rich in their power and idleness. In doing so, they have to work before the laws' majestic equality, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.
Shared space living works as long as your roommates don’t come back horribly drunk and reek of alcohol. True story: when I moved to Lausanne I stayed at the youth hostel for a week while looking for a place to live. The police would bring in some people in sometimes who didn’t have a place to stay…and it was pretty horrible, I’m not even sure how to describe the smell even today. Suffice to say, I got out of that hostel as quickly as possible.
Youth hostels used to be able to discriminate with a lot of requirements to prevent chronic homeless from using them (you need a passport, you need to be under a certain age) but as soon as those criteria disappeared, they basically become unviable.
I would love a local cafeteria serving edible food.
The elderly (or the lazy) would also benefit from this kind of living arrangements.
Dorms are fine, but America has a long really bad history with company-run housing.
We need to reframe the conversation on public and low cost housing. It's not about providing homes for only the deserving or the hardworking. The tough reality is that a lot of people on the street right now are happy enough living on the street. Demanding that you only give housing to people who can make it through a treatment program or find gainful employment means most of them are still going to be on the street.
Even if you are only completely motivated by selfish desires, we want these people off the street for our benefit. It make cities nicer and America safer.
Yes, these places are going to be drug infested slums. But it's still a good idea and I want my tax dollars to go towards it.
And if we can add in some market-based options and give down-and-out humans the option of self-selecting to nicer facilities and working their way up to something better in life, all the better.
It just isn't feasible.
* No one wants to live next to low barrier housing (for drug addicts, that don't require drug treatment or other social programs), not just the most generous people who like you think these people should be helped, but even other homeless people! They will try their luck outside because you just put them in with a drug addict crazier than they are.
* If your city starts handing out free housing to all of its homeless, it will just attract more people in need of that housing, to the point that you started out with 50K on the street, housed 50K, and now you have 100K on the street! This is a problem with local solutions at least: the better you treat the problem, the worse the problem will get. Local resources quickly get exhausted with no visible progress made (and worse: things are worse than when you started!), even if you are technically making the country a better place.
SROs and rooming houses of the past...still had standards, they would kick out people who were causing problems. The only reason it seemed better is that enough people were afraid of losing the little housing they had to keep their problems/addictions in check enough to keep it. It was just crappy enough that no one wanted to be there who could do better, having a bunch of SROs didn't necessarily make your city a destination.
No one wants to like in the bad districts, yes. But people will happily buy apartments in such places if they are significantly cheaper than the median (I mean not like twice or thrice cheaper, but even 10-25% cheaper). Case in point - people often do check that narks don't shoot drugs in their potential new building, but still all apartments would be sold out eventually. People don't like living under airport glide path, but still all apartments and houses under it are sold like hot cakes. I had viewed a new low rise complex last year near city highway (unshielded), railway, metal recycling shop and a construction site, and only a big mall nearby as a benefit. It's almost fully sold out now. In my previous city some company had built a three building low economy complex right near the railway in the middle of the former warehouse district, with bysmal parking and connection options too, it's also sold out.
tl;dr low housing price (in a region with jobs of course) beats ANY negative factor. At least until it's not literally slums, and possibly not even then.
Housing thats just 10-25% cheaper isn’t going to attract the chronic homeless, they can’t make housing work in LCOLs which is why they are hanging out in HCOLs un the first place. Also, you might be doing better for the middle class, but even in the working poor isn’t going to be helped much by that.
Anyways, none if what you said has anything to do with the visible homeless who have many other issues to work through before they can even think about paying even a little rent.
> Yes, these places are going to be drug infested slums. But it's still a good idea and I want my tax dollars to go towards it.
From reading the article:
1: I got the impression a lot of these places weren't drug infested slums.
2: I got the impression that young, independent middle-class people could live in the nicer ones and save money. (Which they could use when they were ready to buy a home, start a family, ect.)
I was being hyperbolic. I don't think all SROs would be "slums". But if we did provide housing for all 500,000+ homeless people in the US we shouldn't be surprised when some do become slums.
SROs of yore came in all types, but one of the most notorious were flophouses, like the infamous "chicken-wire hotels".
> The tough reality is that a lot of people on the street right now are happy enough living on the street.
Are they? Happy enough for what, exactly?
Tent living is something like the middle class of homelessness. You have a private space, you can can acquire things, you can choose where you live and who you live around, and you don't have to jump through hoops to maintain your status.
Even for the "long-term" housing programs you have a lot of rules you have to follow and can easily fall out if you commit a minor crime.
If you realize that our human ancestors lived in hovels and tents for thousands and thousands of years, it's not too hard to believe that modern humans can adapt back to similar living conditions.
> If you realize that our human ancestors lived in hovels and tents for thousands and thousands of years, it's not too hard to believe that modern humans can adapt back to similar living conditions.
100% of the land was not owned by people with the ability to enforce it constantly then.
The people who own the land cannot enforce it because the state will put them in a cage if they do. They have to "ask nicely".
So your point is that some homeless (surely we agree it's not all homeless people) would rather live in a tent free from restrictions bound to housing programs than to take part in those housing programs and submit themselves to the restrictions?
I'm absolutely not arguing that people enjoy being homeless, but life is full of tradeoffs and for enough Americans homelessness beats some of the alternatives.
So I'd argue we need to provide better alternatives.
That is not true? Tent it a place super easy to steal from which is something homeless deal with constantly. They can not choose where they live all that much, because they get kicked from most places.
> If you realize that our human ancestors lived in hovels and tents for thousands and thousands of years, it's not too hard to believe that modern humans can adapt back to similar living conditions.
Humans build permanent houses pretty much the moment they could. The nomads were nomads because they had to.
It's pretty common to see tents in small groups together so that one person can stay there and protect their stuff.
Obviously crime is constantly a worry in a tent, but theft is rampant in shelters.
Which makes it obviously impossible for all of them to be employed.
I mean, yes, shelters have issues and being away of them is often the reasonable choice. But, calling homeless in tents "middle class" is beyond absurd.
> For the homeless, tent living is something like middle class.
WTF are you even talking about.
If you ever work with the homeless, it's a common trope. People seek out tent camping as a form of long-term security.
There's a great Conversations with Tyler where he interviews a prominent homeless person in the DC era and one of the topics he brings up is specifically stratification amongst these groups:
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/alexander-the-gr...
They are talking a lot of bullshit
I doubt they are happy but many prefer the street to the current crappy shelter options we offer in the US.
"Happy enough" not to be willing to give up their autonomy and jump through a whole bunch of bullshit hoops to get housing.
"Happy enough" that housing that excludes queer people, men (or people who look like men), people who need to not have their names be public information because they're hiding from abusive prior partners/parents, pets, people who are currently addicted to drugs (and thus cannot realistically never have drugs around), or any of a host of other restrictions, will not be something they consider an option.
(Note that these restrictions are a) from separate sources, not all on the same thing, and b) things I've heard about in the context of shelters, rather than low-income housing; however, it would not surprise me in the least if similar restrictions were placed on various programs to help house the homeless.)
Also if you have work that doesn't line up exactly with the shelters opening or close, or you want to not be abused or assaulted at the shelter, or...
There are cases where the street is safer or has more autonomy, like you say. Solutions need to offer similar things, so privacy, the ability to indulge in some little pleasures, to come and go at your own schedule are basic table stakes.
Right.
A housing unit that lets you stay there indefinitely, for free, in an apartment that you can have to yourself—but doesn't allow alcohol, or is sex-segregated, or where you're mandated to come out and work for a specified period every day, or even that gets regularly searched for drug paraphernalia, is not going to work for a lot of people.
Basically, housing for people like this needs to have, if anything, fewer restrictions on its use than housing for the general public. Give them the space to fuck up and to heal at their own pace, and not have to worry that those very normal kinds of problems will leave them worse off than before (eg, because if you're kicked out, your stuff gets confiscated—or even just because with these projects in place, there's less of a community of homeless people to support each other for those who still don't "fit").
Why are you making this a us vs them situation? They are citizens as much as you are and they inhabit their city like you are.
I personally don't frame it as an "us vs them" situation. If anything, I feel like homeless deserve the same dignity to make choices for themselves and have their choices respected. And we owe them better choices.
My point is even if you entirely self-motivated, it's still something you should support for selfish reasons.
That said, streets and parks are public spaces meant for the enjoyment of all. Public urban camping robs civic value and turns public property into private spaces. Excessive tolerance of it is a failure of policy, not actual policy.
Except they shit on the sidewalk, piss on the shop steps, beg for food and cigarettes and get belligerent when turned away.
If a vagabond or drug user can keep their habit from interfering with my safety and health, they are more welcome to do as they please.
If you'd like to let them shit in your bathroom, or fund public bathrooms, you can be part of the solution.
> their habit from interfering with my safety and health
Needing to shit isn't a habit. If you weren't aware, its a basic life function, like eating and breathing.
Its telling that you're piggybacking that on to your complaints about drugs (and also ignoring the untreated/poorly treated mental illness and straight up poverty legs of the homeless tripod).
I agree, I think public bathrooms are really important. Feces on the sidewalk is a health issue and impacts economic value too.
But we have to acknowledge that the instant you make a bathroom "public", it becomes a place to do drugs, turn tricks, and sleep. Even if you're fine with a bathroom being occupied for hours for non-bathroom tasks, it makes the public bathroom a toxic area, with drug paraphernalia (including needles and other waste products) and used condoms as discarded litter at best, and clogged infrastructure at worst.
We need to provide these services for any human who needs a toilet, *and also* figure out ways besides incarceration to effectively deal with uncooperative drug users.
[dead]
I think the sad part is I think most people would be ok funding more public bathrooms if we had confidence that they would be used only as bathrooms ... but in the places that need them the most, people have the expectation that they will be used for other purposes.
That same standard isn't applied to most other public services.
Nobody says: "Well, I'd stand behind funding public roads, but I won't since people don't follow traffic laws on them."
I think that's an unfair comparison insofar as a person speeding on the highway generally passes you by quickly and doesn't prevent others from using the highway.
But a person who tries to camp out in the bathroom because it's an indoor place and their tent was taken/destroyed by the police etc, does functionally prevent others from using it as just a bathroom. Similarly if someone locks themselves in to get high. The bathroom then not only doesn't give the broader public a place to pee, but also becomes a liability where whomever is responsible for it periodically has to have confrontational interactions. People and organizations seem to have a strong preference for avoiding such interactions and will go awkwardly out of their way to avoid them.
It's like once your city has a bad issue with homelessness, a bunch of public services get distorted around making them not be encampments. A couple examples:
- At one point SF was considering fare-free public transit and the mayor basically refused on the grounds that unhoused people would just use buses/trains as a place to hang out indoors rather than to go anywhere in particular. It's not that she hated the concept of public transit in particular so much as that having the ability to exclude the homeless was viewed as a way to keep transit as transit.
- The closest library to me got some press for shutting off its wifi after hours, not because anyone using the wifi was bad per se, but because a semi-permanent encampment was erected around it, so the unhoused population could access it.
> I think that's an unfair comparison insofar as a person speeding on the highway generally passes you by quickly and doesn't prevent others from using the highway.
Insane drivers doing dangerous shit are by far the biggest threat to my health and personal safety on a day-to-day basis. And next to nothing is done about them.
I welcome you to point to the part of my comment that says they don't deserve public bathrooms, public housing, or human dignity.
I'm not ignoring a thing. If you follow the thread to which I'm replying, it starts with someone discussing the "homeless by choice" and follows with someone suggesting there is not difference between the impact of a homeless person and a housed person on the community.
This analysis ignores the fact that homelessness itself is by and large the primary cause of mental health issues and drug addiction. It only takes a few missed paychecks before most people would end up on the street.
I'm not sure if I am ignoring it? There should be a housing option of last resort for people, full stop. The cause and effect between mental health and housing should be irrelevant when we solve for housing.
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~60% of Americans can't handle a surprise expense of $1k. "A few" missed paychecks is generally going to be more than a $1k disruption. My understanding is lots of places have relatively little protections for tenants. Once you're behind on your rent, how are people in this position going to catch up?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saving-money-emergency-expenses...
When I talked to people in shelters before that was literally the top reason they were there. Oftentimes it starts from car trouble or a health episode causing loss of income. Without friends or family that can take them in they go to a shelter if they can (those with pets oftentimes go directly to the streets or their cars). Many are able to find employment again soon but many don’t and a downward spiral begins quickly. Somewhere around 30-40% of Americans cannot afford an emergency $1000 expense and it’s probably only going to go higher.
> Somewhere around 30-40% of Americans cannot afford an emergency $1000 expense.
This oft-reported statistic is wrong. It's based on a survey that simply concluded that they wouldn't necessarily pull that amount from savings to meet an emergency expense. That doesn't mean they can't afford it or don't have more savings than that.
This seems to be the report and the specific section of interest: https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/emergency-savings-r...
You're right that the question they used is a bit vague, but there is a ton of other data in there that points to affordability as the main cause e.g.
"Nearly a quarter of Americans have no emergency savings"
and:
"Sixty percent of Americans are uncomfortable with their level of emergency savings — 31 percent are very uncomfortable, and 29 percent are somewhat uncomfortable."
It is the social sciences, they can find data for any viewpoint they want to push.
There are a lot of people right on the line though. May not be 40%, but it's a lot of people.
Depends on the country and its support systems. But there are plenty of stories of rapid decline, even in well run countries. A bad divorce followed by some bad decisions and suddenly you realise you have nowhere else to go but the streets.
Yes, it could be the case. But it isn't for most, which was the assertion.
> I very much doubt this is the case.
The "one missed paycheck away" is cited a lot, but it's not entirely false, if a bit of a hyperbole.
The majority of Americans (recent estimates I believe are around 60%) have no savings, and live paycheck to paycheck. So while not exactly "one missed paycheck away" it's pretty close. More accurate would be to say "Most Americans are one crisis away..."
Median weekly earnings for full-time workers in the US was $1,196 in Q2 - so, half of Americans make even less than that (~4,700/month). That's not a lot, and in a lot of areas of the country, that doesn't leave much room to save much of anything, especially if you have kids and need childcare.
Going off the BLS consumer expenditure survey from 2023 (most recent one I could find), average spent on housing was $25k/year or 2119/month, almost half the median monthly earnings. Just housing. Factor in food, transportation, healthcare, utilities and it's not hard to see how people can, and are, struggling, and are effectively one mishap from falling too far behind to catch up.
Although Median household income in the US is the more relevant figure, especially for things like housing costs, and that's at ~80k.
While most Americans don't have "emergency savings" (heck, I don't), most of the credible studies more realistically peg it as 25% of American adults or 1 in 4.
Yeah fair enough, household income paints a better picture.
Even so, $80k household isn't a pretty picture with today's housing and food costs except for the most LCoL areas, and in those the income is going to be considerably lower. To afford the US today, we need to be closer to $80k+ individually rather than for the whole household.
The median American has $5400 in savings. It varies, but people who don’t have a good support network can fall off the rails quickly, depending on there you live. Florida unemployment pays $32-275/week.
This is why you see so many homeless veterans. They often end up geographically separated from family and see relationships weaken due to time and distance.
Whenever someone says “mental health” as a causative factor in a social problem, that’s saying “don’t know, wont fix”
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In similar spirit to what dang posted in reply to you a few months ago: we empathize with your experience and can understand you feeling this way, but we need you to avoid expressing your feelings like this on HN.
Rather than fulminating and attacking other community members, which is clearly against the guidelines, please think of a way you can draw on your experiences to educate others who may not share your experiences and thus may not be aware of the reality for people in this situation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Your comment is against the HN rules. I urge you to reconsider your behavior.
It's true that their comment broke the guidelines, but in fairness your comment lacked substance, and qualifies as a shallow dismissal, which is also against the guidelines, and is ultimately the reason why it was so upsetting to that commenter. Please try to make comments more substantive in future.
>> There is no support system in this nation.
WHAT?
The US Federal Government spends over $3 TRILLION on social services. US states collectively spend around $1 TRILLION on social services.
This is what's available just in my state:
- temporary housing
- free drug treatment programs
- free addiction services
- free food at hundreds of food shelves that also offer other amenities.
- free public transportation
- free and low cost job training
- free and low cost pharmaceuticals and medicine
I've never been homeless, because in several instances, I've actually used social services to survive and get back on my feet because that's why they're there. People complaining there is no support system are either willfully ignorant these programs even exist, or are just too lazy to take advantage of them. And I don't remember ANYBODY in ANY of the non-profit, state funded or state run offices asking me about my race or sexuality before they offered to help me.
I honestly don't know what you're on about man, but saying there is no support system is pretty crazy to hear someone say.
Quite candidly for a lot of people whether or not there's enough "support" is just a matter of looking at outcomes. Are outcomes bad? Then (to some people) there is self-evidently not enough support.
Maybe the dissonance could be explained by being in different states? I can totally imagine social workers in some localities imposing their personal or religious beliefs on people needing help...
> WHAT?
Please don't use uppercase for emphasis or be inflammatory in your commenting style.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> a lot of people on the street right now are happy enough living on the street.
This must be one of the most brain-dead things I've read on this site. It's "not even wrong".
The issue with SROs is nobody likes being near them and the crime and drug use they attract.
My guess is as the asset bubbles pop, the marginal 70s-90s apartment complexes and second ring suburbs will be the new slums. People aren’t going to be able to afford cars as policy changes accelerate cost increases and wages continue to erode. City and near suburbs will be more attractive and expensive.
You already see this happening in larger metro areas to some extent.
If the bubbles pop that hard the state may ease up (reduce .gov imposed costs) rather than let those residents go from tax paying profit centers to assistance qualifying cost centers.
Slumlords make alot of money and pay alot of taxes.
In my town there used to be a lot of single-room units (there are of course none now), and my understanding is that the primary residents were migrant men working pretty much all day. They'd just crash in the rooms, all their meals and social events would be out in town or at their work place.
I feel as though there would be a different tenant in the modern era. Some would be migrant young men trying to save every dime, but many would be those suffering mental illness, and they'd fill the unit with tons of stuff. Can you imagine how much more stuff Americans have these days than they did back in say 1900? I genuinely think that the volume of stuff/garbage would be a legitimate fire or structural hazard. No landlord would want that. Back in the old days landlords had a lot more ability to force out any tenants they didn't want.
Yep the article shows a photo of a neatly kept room, the reality would be a bare mattress on the floor, piles of dirty clothes, trash, and hoarded posessions.
Drug-addicted and mentally ill people do not know how to keep even a moderately organized living space. Our city has tried "housing first" and it's been a disaster. The units are filthy, damaged, and the buildings don't pass minimal standards when the housing department inspects them because the "tenants" and their associates have destroyed them.
I do believe most SROs had a "no visitors" policy so that might help somewhat but there would have to be strictly enforced requirements about not trashing or abusing the property.
One of the last SRO left in Chicago is about 2 blocks from my house. They have extremely strict cleaning requirements and a no visitors policy. It seems to keep the damage to a minimum. I think the biggest issue there is how many of the residents really need aged care but can’t afford it.
Where are you? I think Salt Lake City did "housing first", and I seem to recall that it worked fairly well.
The average drug addict and the average person with mental illness is employed, well-dressed, and financially stable.
The average/median/typical recipient of EBT or welfare or whatever only receives it transitionally for less than a year. Yet at any one time the system is 90% lifers or at least long term users. Because anyone who isn't a lifer is in and out quick. Same problem mental institutions have.
I pulled those numbers out of my ass and you can play with the numbers to change the proportions but the problem still stands. At any one time the system is going to be somewhat saturated with the "problem people".
Now, I don't think that's a problem. If someone thinks they can develop and profitably run SRO housing with a bunch of those people then good for them. But that makes some people feel icky about it.
I think it’s clear the context is homeless people. The people you’re talking about have a place to live.
All cows are brown.
Dirt is brown.
Therefore, dirt is a cow.
Those aren’t the ones who housing-first advocates are building units for. The theory is the crazy people on the street will suddenly be not-crazy when they get an apartment
The vast majority of homeless people are homeless for economic reasons, like the loss of a job or household income, and the largest growing population of unhoused people are entire families.
Proposed housing units are literally for them.
The ones built in my town were for the “chronically homeless” these are people who are likely addicted, mentally ill, or very antisocial. They have burned every bridge they may have had and even their family has written them off. You can’t give someone like that an apartment and expect they will take care of it without extremely close supervision.
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The lack of the ability to sleep securely and the lack of a place to store your possessions are enough to drive someone crazy. Sure, some people might be homeless because they're incurably insane, but plenty of people are insane because of homelessness.
Well, two things.
First, I'm challenging the statement:
> Drug-addicted and mentally ill people do not know how to keep even a moderately organized living space.
Which is nonsense and a damaging stereotype. Drug addicts and mentally ill people exist in all areas of life and many are successful - more so than you or I.
Secondly, I'm challenging you on:
> The theory is the crazy people on the street will suddenly be not-crazy when they get an apartment
Because in fact there is now a great body of evidence that shows that housing-first, that is providing housing with no pre-conditions, is in fact extremely effectively at treating both uncontrolled addiction and untreated mental illness.
Yep, this is exactly what would happen. Anyone who has worked in industries adjacent to these types of people knows how it is.
At this price point, you're essentially only going to be renting to people who are currently homeless, which is great from a societal standpoint. However, you can't ignore the fact that substantial portions of the homeless community, and therefore your potential tenants, are either drug addicts and mentally ill people.
1 out of every 10 of those people will cause more property destruction than could ever be recouped in rent from the other 9. It just doesn't work for private landlords.
I bet those landlords could build housing that was sufficiently resistant to property destruction, which those renters would be happy to pay for at a sufficient rate - everyone would be happy. But it's the myth of consensual housing: isn't there someone you forgot to ask? The housing regulations would (and do) absolutely forbid anything that fit this niche.
I don't think it would be hard to carefully interview and vet each potential tenant. However, I don't even know if that would be legal nowadays.
Of course it’s legal to interview tenants in the States, a landlord should simply avoid violating the Fair Housing Act in a particularly flagrant manner while doing so. (E.g., they should avoid documenting in writing that they’re refusing to rent on the basis of familial status! This parenthesis possibly based on a true story.)
Give it another couple years and I’m sure the courts will dismantle the FHA. Then landlords will have to find something else to complain about.
Maybe but that’s pure speculation.
You're right. The town has speculated it to be the case and doesn't want housing for situations like this. Real estate investors also speculate it, and they'd prefer to cater to those with more disposable income.
Single-room units would bring down the cost of housing for everyone, but those with influence and money have decided that we don't want it in our community.
Many cities for example forbid single stair multi story buildings from being built, despite the lack of danger and much of their current stock being literally this, which greatly raises the costs to build denser housing since everything has to be at least a large building which are aggressively lobbied against by local NIMBYs
Seattle allows them, it wasn't a magic bullet. ` We need to look at historically successful housing and just legalize that.
For example - SF's row houses. You can't build anything like those due to rules about stairs, environmental laws about multiple family dwellings with internal stairs, and building codes that have such strict environmentally friendly rules that people cannot afford to live indoors.
Up here in Seattle I was inquiring about extending my roof out to convert my cape code into a salt shaker style house, basically giving me two more bedrooms on the same lot. From an environmental perspective this is great, my house is over 70 years old, it is a sunk cost in terms of building material, and it was already updated with modern insulation years ago. I had an energy assessment done with I first moved in, and basically was told there isn't much I can do except fix the duct work but sadly no one does duct work anymore (I tried to find someone!)
So anyway, my roof extension? The city would want me to replace my roof with larger wood so I could put in more insulation. An expensive undertaking that would have ZERO benefit to the house's energy profile. If they wanted me to paint the roof white, sure, that'd make sense and help more than $30k extra of roof work.
Another example is how the electrical code keeps getting more and more strict, such as having outlets every few feet in kitchens. That adds a lot to costs, with little to no benefit. If you add up all the incremental safety rules since the 90s, we're paying a ton for a very very small margin of improvement in safety.
And none of these rules are making houses better! "Home inspector discovers entire subdivision has leaking walls" is an entire sub-genre of video on YouTube.
So we're paying a lot small things we don't need (kitchens with a dozen outlets, AFCI breakers everywhere, 30k of lumber to save $5 a month on cooling) while the important things (walls that don't leak) are being ignored.
I think it's because the code writing associations literally have no choice but to keep adding new code to justify writing new versions. i.e. the textbook publisher grift
Hence why we are down to moving outlets over a inch every version
Buildings with three identical units stacked on top of each other used to be quite common in larger cities.
> Why Can’t American Cities Build 3-Flats Anymore?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37VBK0rJKSs
NOT A SINGLE CITY managed to lower down housing prices by increasing density.
Not Tokyo, not Moscow, not Austin.
That's a non sequitur. Tokyo is plenty dense and already has affordable housing.
Here's the chart of Tokyo real estate prices: https://www.globalpropertyguide.com/asia/japan/home-price-tr...
All while just 3 hours away by car, beautiful houses are crumbling into dust. You literally can get them for the price of the land tax, and there are even companies that specialize in finding them.
Any questions?
Yeah, affordable if you are on American digital nomad visa wages.
You have apparently no experience in Tokyo. plenty of cheap places.
First one I clicked, $600 a month
https://suumo.jp/chintai/jnc_000099304610/?bc=100450374320
I can find cheaper
> You have apparently no experience
Please don't cross into personal attack. Your comment would be just fine without that bit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Ah yes, a micro-apartment the same size as the average American kitchen [1], how affordable!
For comparison, Seattle WA has a minimum wage around 2.5x higher than Tokyo. Here is a larger apartment [2] that is only 1.33x more expensive than your Tokyo broom closet.
Go ahead and find something more akin to the American sized apartments (500sq+ for 1 bd) and you'll see that the prices are almost the same, with much lower wages across the board.
[1]: https://kb.nkba.org/2016/11/new-nkba-research-defines-averag... [2]: https://www.apartments.com/amherst-micro-studios-seattle-wa/...
The key difference is that microapartments are actually an option in Tokyo, whereas they are against code in virtually the entire US.
Well, duh.
As a result, the US also doesn't have such a collapsing population as Japan.
Math is simple.
Build more houses per year than people who want to move to the city. Prices will decrease.
NYC did this over 100 years ago, it became one of the world's most important cities.
SF did the same thing, it became a tier 1 world city.
Same for Chicago.
Then they stopped doing it.
Then no other city in America even bothered trying.
Also housing prices don't go down immediately with new construction, there is a latency. More so, sometimes prices just stabilize, but if prices stay the same for 5 years, and inflation and wages go up, that means the effective price of housing went down. If you keep building and prices stay the same for a decade, all of a sudden houses are affordable.
SF
> Build more houses per year than people who want to move to the city. Prices will decrease.
No, they won't. For the same reason adding a lane to a busy freeway doesn't increase the traffic speed.
Austin LITERALLY has falling housing prices from building more units
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-f...
> A massive apartment building boom in the Austin-Round Rock region has driven rents downward, real estate experts and housing advocates have said.
Why do you even think this?
The evidence is screaming that we are clearly in a massive housing shortage.
> Austin LITERALLY has falling housing prices from building more units
No, they don't. They got a one-time pause in the price growth from a _falling_ overall population. Here's the price chart for housing in Austin: https://imgur.com/a/WzauEIp
The population has either not yet recovered, or it has just recovered to the peak 2019 level. I have conflicting data. But nevertheless, once it comfortably passes the 2019 peak, the prices will continue growing.
They why dont we build as much housing as possible? Since if prices never fall or never even rise slower we clearly can make infinite wealth?
> They why dont we build as much housing as possible?
Because it's not possible. Large cities can't sustainably grow at more than single digit percentage per year speed.
And at that speed, the density/price death spiral easily consumes all the housing.
Seattle was mentioned here, and it grew its number of housing units by 25% over 12 years. Oftentimes leading the country in the number of active cranes.
Can you guess what happened with housing costs? I give you three guesses.
> Since if prices never fall or never even rise slower we clearly can make infinite wealth?
No. You get the fall of democracy, demographic collapse, and in general other nasty consequences when the bill comes due.
Because it's essentially a zero-sum game now. The population growth has mostly ended, so every new dense housing unit in NYC means a new abandoned house in rural Ohio.
Want a stat that will blow your mind? The US has 1.1 housing units per family. We literally have more houses than families in the country. Yet somehow it's a "housing crisis".
Migration rates are so high incumbent home owners view neighbors as a loss now and do everything they can to prevent more.
Denver Colorado has done it. For the most part Denver has been growing in a good way too, lots of new apartments zoned along light rail lines etc.
https://coloradosun.com/2025/04/26/apartment-rents-denver-fa...
Denver real estate index: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DNXRSA
Next "example", please.
Edit: as expected, the reason for the price pause is the falling population. https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST1Y2019.S0101?q=Denver,+CO
2019 - 727211
2021 - 711463
2023 - 716577
More and more data seem to confirm my points.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS12420Q doesn't seem to agree with you
I can't... I just can't.
You're pointing yourself at a graph that shows an exponential spike in prices up until 2023, just as my model of density-price death spiral predicts.
And the only reason the prices stopped growing is the population _decrease_ after COVID lockdowns. The ACS data series ( https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST5Y2020.S0101?q=Austin,+TX ) gives 979,263 people in 2019, and by 2023 it recovered to 979,200 after falling to 944,658 in 2021.
So no, Austin has not managed to lower prices by building more. It managed to do that by using a worldwide pandemic that lowered the city population.
And yes, lowering the population is the only way to lower the housing cost. You don't have other options.
No one is claiming that if you increase density the price will always go below the price before you added incremental units. People correctly point out with data the as you add marginal units the rate of price increase goes down. So the future price will be lower than it would be absent those marginal units. It's super basic economics.
I just made a post saying the same thing so I feel the need to play devil's advocate - Induced demand also exists. Seattle got hit by this last decade when the Bay Area had no more construction but we still had some, people flooded here for affordable houses. Denver also got a lot of this, and so did Austin more recently.
Math has to take into account that if 30k people want to move to a city, and you build 40k houses ( to drop prices), well now maybe 50k people want to move to the city and prices will still go up!
Austin is a bad example, since prices actually went down about 17% in the last 3 years.
If you create the regulatory climate that allows the market to provide housing, you can probably absorb a few tens of thousands of people over a few years. Most of these places don’t do that at all, other than Austin.
This article commits the cardinal sin of homeless discourse -- trying to conflate two things:
1. The "homeless problem", that is, the problem of mentally deranged or violent vagrants that make public spaces less usable or unwelcoming. This is difficult to impossible to measure, both in impact and in extent.
2. The "transient homeless", that is, the down-on-their-luck or otherwise situationally homeless people. This is easy to measure because these people will attempt to secure housing and services to get back on their feet.
Fixing #2, while worthwhile in itself, does nothing to fix #1. But well-intentioned people trying to fix "homelessness" find it much easier to address #2 because there are measurable outcomes, and no messy compromises to be made about civil liberties or individual freedom vs civil order. And this relies on the fact that since the same word is used, that it carries the same connotations. People hear "reduce homelessness" and they think that this means fewer people screaming about brainwaves and starting fights on the subway, but that's a completely separate issue.
EDIT: removed discussion of SROs to another top level comment to avoid confusing discourse here
I think there is also
3. Transient homeless that tried to get back on their feet but was met with the notion that all the options were eventually exhausted (they lived on their friend's couch until he got married). They even had dishwasher jobs, but inevitably, because rent was $2000 more than they would ever have - they decided to do drugs and live on the street because no amount of work at the wage they would be paid would ever make their life meaningful.
Yes, absolutely. They aren't two separate groups, there's essentially a pipeline from group 2 to 1.
Imagine struggling with addiction or mental health issues. Now imagine doing it without a safe and secure place to even sleep at night.
I'm sorry -- I fail to see how "mental health issues" is an interesting version of this. For serious mental health issues (of the form of #1) we simply do not have reliable treatment options aside from involuntary confinement.
For drug addiction the problem is more subtle but I question whether this part of the pipeline is worth considering when looking at the problem at scale. There is no serious attempt as far as I'm aware to measure the number of people that transition from #2 to #1 style homelessness, and since it is difficult to measure this it is very likely that solutions to #2 will have no effect on this pipeline.
While the idea of restoring SROs and other dormitory-style housing is a good idea to better serve the lower-cost end of housing, it is completely incompatible with modern ideas around tenant protection. For an SRO to work, you must be able to evict or remove unruly or uncooperative tenants to a degree that is far in excess of what is necessary for a regular apartment or for standalone housing, because by necessity the quarters are much closer. If a manager cannot evict an unruly tenant the entire SRO facility becomes uninhabitable.
> For an SRO to work, you must be able to evict or remove unruly or uncooperative tenants ... If a manager cannot evict an unruly tenant the entire SRO facility becomes uninhabitable. I remember hearing a recent US legal change that makes it easier to forcibly commit mentally ill people.
To be quite blunt: Someone who's making an SRO unlivable is mentally ill, and needs to be in a place that's appropriate to handle their needs.
Someone that makes an apartment building unlivable is probably mentally ill. The amount of disruption necessary to make an SRO unlivable is much much much lower.
Failing to clean up after yourself in the kitchen or bathroom; playing loud music or coming and going at odd hours, even things like having frequent visitors can be enough. SROs and boarding houses used to have all sorts of "unreasonable" restrictions because of the close quarters, and not having those restrictions makes this untenable.
Yes, this power will be abused arbitrarily by managers/landlords in racist and classist and ethno-cist (is that a word?) ways. Attempting to prevent that will lead to the same regulatory quagmires that got these things banned in the first place. You just have to accept the mild social injustice. If you cannot then SROs will have to be banned.
I wonder about demand. Who will these tenants be now? In my city they were day laborers and single poor people way back in the day. I don't know how much of that we have now / the homeless seem more like a mix now. Let alone issues of managing such places / social conflicts and so on.
Not saying it isn't worth a shot, all for it. I just don't know if this eats up that much demand / houses that many people these days.
I know a lot of Gen Z and even Millennial adults who are still living at home well after finishing school. I'm sure plenty of them would love to get out of their parents' homes but can't afford current rents, but might be able to afford an SRO.
In general I don't think many homeless people are going straight from the street to their own market rate unit. However some of them might be able to move into a sibling's spare bedroom after their adult nephew moves out.
Speaking as an older gen-Z-er living in with their parents, this is very true of me and many people I know around my age (most, now that I think about it). If I could live somewhere nearby that doesn't eat up 50%+ of my income I would go there in a heartbeat. On HN there's a tendency to assume people are either well-off or destitute drug addicts who have given up on life but there's a wide range in between.
Something like 40% of the homeless nationwide are actually working, employed, but unable to build up enough savings to rent an apartment.
Here's just one source I found on: https://endhomelessness.org/blog/employed-and-experiencing-h...
I got a tour of a homeless shelter a few months ago and the folks running it mentioned that one of their jobs is to wake up specific people at 6am, 7am etc so they can make it to work in the morning.
It's amazing to me that, in the US, we're discussing deregulation and privatization of so many functional and working parts of the government apparatus (the United States Digital Service, public broadcasting, the post office, etc.), when deregulation of the housing market would probably do the most for public good. Distortion of the market, which includes outlawing SROs, jacks up housing prices and indirectly perpetuates so many societal problems:
- Homelessness, which likely worsens mental health, increases drug usage, reduces tourism, creates a massive eyesore for everyone else, etc.
- Lack of disposable income—if folks are spending more on a rent or mortgage payment, they're not spending as much on goods and services.
- Inequality—artificially constricting the supply of housing creates a game of musical chairs, where some inevitably get left out and, because of that, can't climb up the social ladder. It also favors incumbents who already own homes or received their parents' home.
- Sprawl—zoning restrictions stifle the construction of high-density housing, which makes cities inaccessible, increases car dependence, negatively affects the environment, etc.
Is it possible to develop cheap SRO-style housing without needing it all to be clustered together? It's easier to convert a single building into a bunch of SRO units, but that's just a recipe for more community backlash and economic segregation.
Yes. There are all types of housing possibilities if it weren't criminalized. For example, in most cities in the US it is illegal to live in an RV.
Yeah I would not care about RV living so long as they aren't trash pandas and general hazards.
Trad homeowners with solar, grid connection could offer cheap power to help recharge faster.
All the land around economic centers is taken by suburbs, the only direction is up. There’s nothing wrong with that, this is the natural progression of city growth.
This is only becoming a problem because local communities are using their legal weight to prevent enough condos & apartments from being built to satisfy demand. So now we have more homeless people and high rent problems.
I think you're just describing standard mixed income housing, although the section 8 eligible units there are often nicer than what you would get in an SRO, they are often less nice than the market-rate.
Yurts.
this exists on very large scale for students in belgium, but not allowed for working adults.
Belgium is overpaying for labor then! Open up those dormitories for workers and you can squeeze employee costs down at least 20% and harvest that value! (cynicism)
>In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, landlords converted thousands of houses, hotels, apartment buildings, and commercial buildings into SROs, and by 1950, SRO units made up about 10% of all rental units in some major cities. But beginning in the mid-1950s, as some politicians and vocal members of the public turned against SROs and the people who lived in them, major cities across the country revised zoning and building codes to force or encourage landlords to eliminate SRO units and to prohibit the development of new ones.
So the greedy landlords are the would-be heroes of the story and the politicians are the bad guys?
> A wealth of research has examined the causes of homelessness over the past two decades. These studies consistently find that the cost of housing is by far the primary driver. For example, several studies have concluded that an area’s median rent correlates far more closely with its homelessness rate than factors such as weather, poverty rate, and rates of mental illness or substance use.
Curious to know about how homeless correlates to city / town / urban / suburban ect.
I don't encounter homelessness in expensive towns, but I do encounter it in expensive cities.
> I don't encounter homelessness in expensive towns, but I do encounter it in expensive cities.
Most likely because the cities have services available and the smaller towns don't. My wife works with the homeless where I live, and many in this small city are from the surrounding smaller, more expensive towns/suburbs - because of the lack of services in those towns, and their hostility to homelessness, they hop on a bus and come here because they receive much better care and have more opportunities.
I'd imagine this is common elsewhere too.
Somewhat glad to see this getting coverage. I question the use of "decimated" here, as it feels a bit misplaced? "How States and Cities Regulated Out ..." would have worked really well?
If states and cities only reduced the availability of these housing options by 10% since 1950, that would be newsworthy too
'decimated' means 'totally destroyed' in the same way that 'literally' means 'figuratively' now. Just roll with it. Anything else will make your head hurt.
No. Those are two hills I figuratively will die on.
Fair. I would still expect more leaning in to the abundance discourse, though?
"Abundance" doesn't really address housing the lower half of the market, though. The market will never be willing to provide housing at a price that everyone can afford.
The abundance crowd aiming to lower some regulations, though, is directly in this lane. Like, specifically so. One of their complaints is that it costs so much for the public sphere to build cheap housing. No?
Sure, I'd expect them here too. I can't say I'm unhappy they're absent.
Its still Fun. https://www.ymcachicago.org/community-services/housing/
Japan has lots of SROs.
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids both the poor and the rich from living in dorms past college.
> a small room with a shared bathroom and sometimes a shared kitchen for a price that is unimaginable today—as little as $100 to $300 a month (in 2025 dollars).
This is exactly what I rented when I moved to NYC two years ago. It was a month-to-month single room in a six-bedroom apartment. I’m not sure how legal it was, but I rented from a company with a web site, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That said, it was substantially more than $300/month - something like 4-5x
We seem to house inmates just fine at scale. Honestly, a prison room with internet/water isn't that bad if it was affordable.
Prisons are very expensive. Better off buying each person a luxury appartment than building a prison. We can spend a lot of money if we scare people and the bogey man is punished. Be it "criminal" "terrorist" "illegal immigrant".
I think you are on to something though. Get rid of the bad parts of prison and they are accommodation and a car-free city within.
Do we? Prison is expensive in the United States:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cost-per-prisoner-in-us-sta...
Arkansas is the lowest-cost state and still spends $23,000/prisoner/year. The median is $65,000/prisoner/year. 11 states spend over $100k/prisoner/year.
How much of that is surrounding infrastructure and overhead (guards, security, etc) that don't apply? Plus that includes all meals, medical care, instruction, and other resources in many cases.
We'd obviously want to model it around something like Arkansas. Remember, prison provides reasonable security, food, and clothing. Security will generally be better since regular people are not self-selected for criminality, and those savings can be moved over to improved food. Re-using the prison model for extreme low income and homelessness is not intuitive - but so be it (sometimes you have to use an anti-pattern).
Edit:
$100k/prisoner/year
That's crazy. Regular people don't live on that yearly.
> That's crazy. Regular people don't live on that yearly.
Yeah, there's either some severe inefficiencies there (or a ton of budget pork going to the wrong things), or it's a canary in the coal mine telling us that people actually should be making at least that much to live, and the fact that they aren't is a big problem, if not the main source of our societal problems.
Well, it is relatively easy to get into one...
Humor aside, there are people in the US who do get arrested for misdemeanors on purpose just to spend the night in a warm jail, and those that try to get into prison to alleviate chronic homelessness
Tennaments?
Affordable housing is a solvable problem - the problem is that nobody at the top actually wants to solve it. Too much wealth and power tied to real estate value.
In the United States, this seems to be true for most of the "big" challenges the country faces, from medical care to immigration and employment. They are solvable, but no one at the top likes the solutions so they allow the public to suffer, rather than even trying to solve anything. (And use the problems as rallying cries come election-time.)
Public housing is the future, baby.
Don't lay this at the feet of government. Government may be sociopathic and unfeeling but the state doesn't generally meddle in petty matters of poor people who have little to no wealth to extract or redirect except to curry favor with other elements of the population.
Lay this at the feet of the individuals who thought they knew what was right for everyone and leaned on the government to act. Be that action local zoning, state laws or federal thumb on the scale money with strings attached behavior.
Ideally, you'll even see the pattern and use it to crap all over contemporary examples of the same.
No sane person wants to have to share a kitchen and bathroom with random transient strangers, as in the USA's SRO model. This is really where learning from other countries makes sense - in particular, Japan's high population density has led to the micro-apartment - that's a much better option, though probably still requires some regulatory overhaul (and isn't very compatible with car ownership as population density becomes too high):
> "Japan, particularly in dense cities like Tokyo and Osaka, allows and builds extremely small private apartments, often between 100–200 square feet. Despite their size, these units almost always include a private bathroom and kitchenette."
> No sane person wants to have to share a kitchen and bathroom with random transient strangers, as in the USA's SRO model
In the US we call it a Bed and Breakfast and some people pay a premium for such accommodations!
Japan has more SROs than the US does.
Does anyone have pics of what the inside of one of these would have looked like?
Looked like? They are still around.. https://www.rwjf.org/en/insights/blog/2018/01/creating-a-com...
But housing a family of three...
We need more public housing. Period. It's disgusting we can't center this.
This article is pure bullshit.
The lowest-cost housing is not in dense slums. It's in the rural areas and smaller cities. There you can buy a small single-family home for the cost of an SRO in NYC.
By adding more SROs the city housing will get MORE EXPENSIVE in the end. They won't solve anything, they'll just create more misery.
> The lowest-cost housing is not in dense slums. It's in the rural areas and smaller cities.
You can buy houses in rural New York for $100k-$150k. In St. Paul, it's not hard to find a house for $300k.
Yet most of the discussion revolves around fixing the situation in coastal cities, instead of working on incentives or infrastructure that would encourage people to see what's available in the hundreds of counties and smaller cities that have ample affordable stock.
Living in a rural area is not actually either cheap or easy. You need the skills to either profit off the land, which is not a trivial thing, or you to have a job that will allow you to afford to commute.
What incentives are you imagining, relative to reducing the housing cost burden in areas that already have many of those incentives (for instance, access to easy irregular work or income sources)?
> Living in a rural area is not actually either cheap or easy.
Who's talking about rural areas? There are plenty of small cities with ~100k population. With the WFH, it's entirely feasible to live there.
But no, we're spiraling into an ever more toxic housing density/cost pit.
The parent is talking about rural areas: > You can buy houses in rural New York for $100k-$150k.
But for your comment, what percentage of the population do you believe qualifies for WFH? Do you think the population at risk of homelessness does? Are we going to see WFH hotel check in desks, restaurant servers, and other manual work soon?
Certainly if you have a well-paying WFH job you can work from nearly anywhere. I'm an example! I live in a rural area, precisely because I have a WFH job that enables it. But I still acknowledge that I'm that exception, not the rule.
1. These cities with ~100k population _are_ basically in rural areas. My prototypical example: Bend, OR.
2. You can live in real rural areas without doing agriculture just fine.
> But for your comment, what percentage of the population do you believe qualifies for WFH?
There are estimates that go as high as 60% of the working population in the US. During COVID, it went up to 72% but that clearly was not optimal.
> Do you think the population at risk of homelessness does? Are we going to see WFH hotel check in desks, restaurant servers, and other manual work soon?
These service jobs can also work in smaller cities. The _only_ way to solve the housing problem is by creating _more_ of these smaller cities or by increasing the size of existing cities by a bit. There's no harm if a 50k city becomes 100k by adding a couple of suburbs. And this provides plenty of population to need baristas, waiters, hair stylists, etc.
I'm very anti-urbanist and I'd like to see abominations like NYC to be demolished, just like we did with polluting factories. But there's always going to be a need for central places for services and businesses, and it's fine as long as they do not start growing uncontrollably.
You're saying that increasing supply (all else being equal) will increase prices? Seems like that turns standard econ on its head, so can you help me understand who you reached that conclusion?
> You're saying that increasing supply (all else being equal) will increase prices?
Yep. Exactly. With the caveat: the increase happens by increasing the _density_.
> Seems like that turns standard econ on its head, so can you help me understand who you reached that conclusion?
Here's another example. Suppose you give a billion dollars to everyone. Will everyone just become rich?
Housing is similar. When you build denser housing, it increases the attractiveness of the area for employers. They get access to a larger labor pool, so companies near dense housing are long-term more competitive.
This in turn increases the housing price, as workers want to live closer to employers.
Rinse, wash, repeat.
The end result: no large city managed to lower down housing costs by increasing density. It's a simple verifiable fact.
Edit: I checked data for Western Europe, Russia, US, Japan. It's possible that some citi in India or Malaysia managed to do that. But I don't have data for them.
I see what you're saying: all else will not remain equal. Your argument is that any increase in supply will always be more than offset by a corresponding increase in demand.
That is correct. An abstract spherical city in vacuum might be able to lower prices by building more. Or it's possible in a fantasy scenario where you suddenly drop a million housing units onto a city from orbit.
But cities don't exist in vacuum. And building new housing is always slow, so you can feasibly grow housing stock in a large city only by single-digit percentages YoY.
Yes, let's bring these back. In fact, why don't we just build Khrushchevkas and skip the whole proletarian revolution step? We can even start wearing the funny little hats with flaps and drink until we forget about freedom or dignity. We're beyond that anyway, aren't we?
With this level of wealth inequality and these seeming like a good idea, I'd say we're gearing up for a bloody good time, to say the least.
It's hard to imagine that abundant housing led to the truly adverse economic conditions in the USSR. Rather than offering a cheeky strawman perhaps you could give some real thought to alternative solutions you'd like to see?