
Affordable Housing Program Costs More, Shelters Less - mgdo
http://www.npr.org/2017/05/09/527046451/affordable-housing-program-costs-more-shelters-less
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slavik81
This seems like such a roundabout system. We run a program to give people
money to build housing and rent it out for less than it's worth to people who
don't have the money to pay full price for housing. It seems like you could
cut out a lot of the complexity just by giving the money directly to the
people who can't afford housing. Or, being a little less trusting, pay some
portion of their rent directly.

~~~
atemerev
This will just contribute to rising costs spiral, as it's already the case
with healthcare and education. Such kind of arrangements are only profitable
for existing big players in the market.

The only sustainable way to make something affordable is to push down the
prices. The only way to do it is to increase competition — which, in order,
requires dramatically lowering the barriers of entry.

But it seems that nobody is actually interested in that, and NIMBY attitude
and monetary diversion schemes prevail.

~~~
kefka
Yep, great idea. "push down the prices". In other words, lowering compliance
costs, regulatory costs, and in general any governmental barrier placed forth.

This is called "Trickle Down Economics". This works for saving more of the
elites money, but not for us. Frankly it just doesn't work, at all, when
looked at with a lens of government. But boy, will they sell us this package
that "It'll lower costs... We'll be able to hire more people.... We'll be able
to...". In the end, they stockpile and shovel the money out of the US.

If X costs $100 and by eliminating _ALL_ governmental costs, goes to $80...
and the average person only has $40, neither choice does a damn bit of good.
They're both unaffordable. But now, one pays less to the burden of citizenship
and public resource usage (aka Taxes).

You want to stimulate the economy? Put money in the hands of the people! Yeah,
you won't "save" that mythical $20 of compliance costs, but if the citizenry
has $150, now they can afford your X. Course, the argument here is that X now
goes up to $200. But Y over there is willing to play 'Supply and Demand' and
undercut X... Just like how things do now in many markets.

But, you know, something about socialist programs makes people get up and deny
the very facts about supply and demand, and competition. For some reason, they
all claim that everything will miraculously buffer up by Z% because socialist
programs.

~~~
closeparen
What could be more pro-capitalist and anti-worker than advocating to keep the
number of apartments below the number of workers so that landowners can charge
exorbitant rents just because they own stuff?

Landowners are coddled by protection from competition. We want to make their
lives _harder_.

There is no amount of money you can put in the hands of 100 people that
results in them all having apartments, when there are only 50 apartments.

~~~
kefka
We __already __have more than enough places to house everyone in the USA. The
quantity is already there.

For every homeless person, we have 5-7 houses empty (various stats around,
depending on number of homeless). [http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-
we-cant-just-put-ho...](http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-we-cant-just-
put-homeless-families-in-foreclosed-homes-2012-6) . We _already_ have the
supply. It's there. They are already built.

Now.. Who do these houses belong to? Banks. Insurance firms. In reality, any
company that needs illiquid money storage uses property. And they extract as
much worth as they can from that. That's only logical from their standpoint.
And maybe some office space, sure.

But all those houses are simply rotting as people aren't living in them. I
say, put them to good use. Eminent domain them, or tax them appropriately so
that individuals and families can get them.

I think you're mistaking me for some capitalist. If anything, I'm more
communist for essentials, socialist for 'effective member of society', and
capitalist for stuff on the edge.

~~~
closeparen
The obvious question is "Why are those houses empty?" Because they are in
places that people have felt the need to leave _en masse_.

People need to be near each other. Near family, support networks, schools,
social services, and jobs. It's not enough to have surplus housing "in the
US." We need it in the specific cities and neighborhoods with affordability
crises.

Your solution is for people to move thousands of miles to dead end towns with
no economic opportunities or social support networks? I think you have
mistaken yourself for their advocate.

Here's a litmus test: when you win, who benefits? People trying to collect
wages? Or people trying to collect rent checks?

How does your communist solution decide who gets to live in California and who
has to live in North Dakota?

------
zkms
There is a lot that could be done to fix this crisis that would not even
require more government spending -- drastically reform land use regulations,
zoning laws, and other similar regulations.

Laws that require fire sprinklers, escape routes, and floors that don't
collapse aren't the issue -- the issue lies with laws that mandate _a certain
amount of luxury_ (like minimum square-footage requirements, occupancy limits,
and restrictions on roommates who aren't family).

By mandating a certain level of luxury (and thus, of cost), the only effect is
to make sure that people who can't afford it will end up homeless; or
illegally subletting, squatting, or some other black-market, unsafe option
that leaves them at the mercy of slumlords who _know_ that they are the last
option for housing. It's crucial to note that _there is no backpressure
mechanism at work here_ \-- reducing housing options for people with the least
money will not cause the construction of housing that meets those standards.
Mandating luxury does not work without mandating supply as well. Such zoning
laws ended SROs and rooming houses (by prohibiting any new construction) and
such drastic reductions in the cheapest housing options have led us to this.

Mandating any sorts of minimum standards for luxury of housing units without
mandating supply will not fix anything. I use the word "luxury" intentionally
here -- from the perspective of someone who has had to sleep in homeless
shelters, a dry room big enough for a bed and with a door that locks (for
which one has the only key) is serviceable housing.

To quote Paul Groth,

> a good hotel room of 150 square feet—dry space, perhaps with a bath or a
> room sink, cold and sometimes hot water, enough electric service to run a
> 60-watt bulb and a television, central heat, and access to telephones and
> other services—constitutes a living unit mechanically more luxuriant than
> those lived in by a third to a half of the population of the earth. As
> Dolores Hayden reminds us, many of the world's people would consider an
> American two-car garage an excellent dwelling in its own right.

Hell, even the smallest commercial office space rentals are much cheaper (i've
seen some go for $200/month) and safer (they are in _sprinklered buildings_ )
than _any_ housing most USians can access. It is morally abhorrent for zoning
laws to criminalise renting a room inside a sprinklered building when the
alternative is living on the street or in a homeless shelter.

~~~
geezerjay
> Laws that require fire sprinklers, escape routes, and floors that don't
> collapse aren't the issue -- the issue lies with laws that mandate a certain
> amount of luxury (like minimum square-footage requirements, occupancy
> limits, and restrictions on roommates who aren't family).

If you believe that enabling unsanitary 3rd world hellholes, just because you
assume that would make housing a tiny bit less expensive, represents any type
of progress... Perhaps you should rethink your priorities.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
If building a bedroom breaks even at $1000/mo in rent, and there's folks who
can only afford to pay $250/mo in rent, there's two options: either they shack
up four to a room, or they go on the streets. How is four people living in a
room more of an unsanitary 3rd world hellhole than four people sleeping in the
streets?

~~~
candiodari
Well, easy: for a lot of people, they will improve their situation until they
have a basic minimal luxury available to them.

So by rising that minimum level of luxury they want, you're making them work
harder. The result is that the ratios are out of whack. By creating 2%
homeless instead of 0.2%, you're massively increasing average luxury, and
therefore making sure 20% don't live in shared housing with it's problems
(e.g. everything gets stolen, especially from the weak, and of course women
have some extra issues).

Your argument assumes that by lowering standards you can fix things. You can,
but only by creating other problems (sanitation standards going down by a lot,
for one thing, which WILL result in consequences).

It's pretty hard to see this until you've lived in both situations.

If you want to avoid this: [http://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/17/asia/china-
beijing-rat-tri...](http://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/17/asia/china-beijing-rat-
tribe/) then you need to accept that you're also creating homeless in the
process.

Better solution is to ease up on the limits on expanding supply. It's not like
it's construction costs preventing new buildings from going down.

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cubano
Oh man, is this a subject I'm currently experiencing first hand. Two months
ago I was illegally searched during a jaywalking stop and lost everything I
owned, including my much-loved remote webdev job, all my tech and clothes, and
pretty much all of my societal self-worth.

For the last two months I've been living on-and-off at a shelter, and the
problems are legion as far as working my way out of it.

Finding a decent paying job while navigating the shelter minefields? I battle
it everyday, but when someone steals your charging cords and toiletries while
you sleep and you lose all connections to the net for a week while you figure
out how to get a new USB-C charging cord with no income and miss a week's
worth of trying to find work, it's easy to be discouraged and wonder if you
will ever make it.

I'm 52yo and I'm exhausted all the time, except for a couple of hours in the
morning after I wake and work on trying to find work. According to the health
app in my phone, I'm walking 6-8 miles a day just getting between the local
Starbucks where I "work", the shelter, and places where I can find some crap
to eat.

What I find most odd is that there is absolutely no tech whatsoever at the
shelter...no public wifi, very minimal computer access (30min a day after
hours wait). Don't get me wrong I am incredibly grateful that the shelter
exists, and the kind folks working there are doing God's work, but too many
people "living" there are making no efforts to move on and just see the place
as a free flop-house.

Lately I've been sleeping in an empty lot near downtown because I've twice now
caught fairly serious illnesses sleeping at the shelter, and it's ridiculous
that you are expected to bunk-up at 3p everyday at a place with no public wifi
so someone like me can't work in the afternoon and evening..

Yes yes, I get it...I made the choices that put me in my shit-sandwich
situation, but doesn't everyone, even the "blameless" people depicted in this
story? Couldn't most have made better choices somewhere along their lives to
prevent themselves from having to live in low-income situations?

Much of the article discusses how the rich developers, in Florida at least,
are gaming the tax-credit side of building low-cost housing in order to enrich
themselves illegally.

Same old same old. I’ve known many building contractors in my life and almost
all employ various sorts of schemes to make extra money during the
construction phases.

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
> Two months ago I was illegally searched during a jaywalking stop and lost
> everything I owned, including my much-loved remote webdev job, all my tech
> and clothes, and pretty much all of my societal self-worth.

How does that happen? How does a search during jaywalking stop lead to loss of
those things?

~~~
magic_beans
I'm gonna assume OP had drugs on him and was subsequently arrested, but if not
that, there's no reason jaywalking should lead to the loss of one's entire
inventory of possessions and job...

~~~
vkou
There's no good reason for the police to conduct illegal searches either...

~~~
geezerjay
> There's no good reason for the police to conduct illegal searches either...

You have to take OP's word on that.

~~~
jnicholasp
> You have to take OP's word on that.

Is there a good reason not to?

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Mz
We razed something like 80% of SROs in the 60s and 70s when the Baby Boomers
were coming of age. They came from this bizarrely large "middle class" created
by WW2 and most of them didn't need nor want cheap entry level housing. Their
expectations set expectations and standards that we are still suffering from.

It is time to wake up, recognize that SROs and the like are needed and
recreate the societal fabric we tore out and never replaced.

------
ThrustVectoring
If we wanted to actually solve the homeless problem, we'd build cheap housing.
Pretty much everything else follows. This isn't politically feasible, since
everyone wants to make it difficult to do near them in hopes of foisting the
problem of "undesirables" off to anywhere else.

So assuming some long-term political will to overcome the NIMBYs, here's a
plan that'd actually work to solve SF's homeless problem:

1\. Design a standard-plan Single-Room Occupancy building, along the style of
the Russian Khrushchyovka [1]. Prefab / economy of scale, three to five
stories, no elevator, shared bathrooms and kitchens. Optimize it to be the
cheapest habitable room that you can give someone a key to.

2\. Pass a state law allowing a department to buy land and build one of these
regardless of local zoning and input. You want to stop us from fixing the
housing problem? Too bad, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

3\. Add in a feedback mechanism to force construction of more housing
where/when rents get too high. Something like set up a waitlist system and
automatically build another one of these when the waitlist gets long enough
inside a geographic area. Qualify people for free or subsidized rents based on
current market rates - rental rates go up, and you can make more money and
still qualify, which causes more people to enter the waitlist, which causes
more units to get built, which drives rents down.

------
rm_-rf_slash
This isn't a surprise.

Real estate and subsequent policy is hard. Everybody has to live _somewhere_ ,
and people who work have to work _somewhere_. Those places have to meet all
sorts of standards which cost money, even if we can all agree they are
necessary (ex: running water, bedrooms need window access for fire escape,
etc).

The costs of real estate raise the costs for everybody. The renter. The
company on floor 6. The bagel shop around the corner. When their real estate
costs go up, the rent goes up, the prices of bagels go up, and so on.

There is no magic wand to fix this problem. Like climate change, it is an
enormous problem that requires action on as many fronts as possible.

As far as we can tell, population will keep rising, and the value of land will
keep going up. Real estate cost problems are never going to just go away.

~~~
tabeth
Everything you've stated is true only if you limit your scope to some
arbitrary geographical region.

If you look at the greater picture, the reality is that most land on earth,
even land deemed livable, is vacant. There lies the solution to the problem.
The only question that remains is: how do we get people to move there?

~~~
dsp1234
_it is an enormous problem that requires action on as many fronts as
possible._

 _how do we get people to move there?_

It seems the two of you agree, unless you feel that _getting people to move
there_ is a small problem that does not require action on many fronts.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
Not really. Moving people sounds good in theory, but sparse communities are
much more expensive to maintain. Roads, utilities, services, and the grand
daddy of rural poverty: access to health care. Turns out freshly minted M.D.s
with six figure student debt prefer not to sacrifice their income by working
in rural America.

Also, once you move enough people, real estate costs go up again and the
problem isn't really solved.

~~~
tabeth
I don't think freshly minted M.Ds are hardly representative of America. Even
if they were, there's a middle ground between sparse rural areas and hyper
dense Tokyo's.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
You're missing the point. Rural America is more expensive than urban America,
and has fewer and worse quality services.

Absent government subsidies for matters such as the provision of roads and
utilities, as well as programs like Medicaid that help rural Americans find
health care, rural Americans would be dirt poor.

I live in upstate New York. I know well the cities, the suburbs, and the rural
backcountry. They are truly worlds apart.

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evjim
Space is as necessary of a life resource as water and air. We should look at
the 1800's and the Homesteading Acts as a template for a new land distribution
program. There is more than enough land for everyone to have a small chunk.
With technology it is easy to be connected and employed anywhere.

It is absurd that somebody is paying $550/month to live in a place without
running water. In under 2 months I built a cabin for under $500 and have
enough space to grow a garden.

~~~
tmh79
this is the opposite of what we should do. Spread out living situations
contribute hugely to global climate change. We should instead focus on
building so much housing in dense urban areas that there will be no scarcity
to provide value, and we should also institute a land tax to ensure that land
is used for its most efficient purpose. That will drive prices down and allow
people to live a sustainable lifestyle.

~~~
evjim
I disagree. Currently, people's food and goods travel thousands of miles
before reaching the user. Not too long ago, people grew most of their own food
or it came within 50miles. With technology, it would not be hard for people to
return to that lifestyle and still have many day hours to dedicate to
intellectual or fabrication pursuits.

I am very in favor of Georgist style land taxation.

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danielvf
It's kind of funny, but all the photos of the "good guys" in the article are
lit with light falling on the front of the face, while the "bad guys" are lit
with the key light on the side of their face, and at least on eye in shadow.

