There are a lot of building codes that are incredibly stupid.
For things like this (homebuilding) where the competition is heavy and consumers have a choice (within a spending limit), I feel only the most bare of safety requirements should be law. All other standards related to efficiency, "above-and-beyond" safety and design considerations should be met and advertised via certifications.
Almost every zoning law probably has a good reason behind it, ostensibly. Someone died in a fire because there wasn't a window, so every room needs a window, for example. But if we legislated like that for every accident, we'd be suffocated by regulations.
If I had to guess, it's also liability derived from the close proximity of houses in urban setting. The home owner might be cavalier about fire safety or noise containment, but his neighbor might have a strong opinion about those, the strength of the opinion being directly proportional to the proximity of two dwellings.
> the former accountant ended up outdoors after a divorce and a brain tumor.
Sounds like our current resource allocation system here in the US is working great! Seems like a totally sensible reason for a human being to be forced to live without basic shelter. They obviously have no useful skills to provide society so let's just throw them away. What a time to be alive!
As a Brit and a left leaning type, it baffles me to see America. From talking to friends who live there (I won't pretend I know fully) but it seems between income, state and property taxes you guys pay a lot. Add in health care and it seems you pay in line with or above many European countries. Yet with your society's wealth there seems a resistance to supporting your own people, and almost actively seeking to add to the poverty through the prison and court system. It seems crazy, when getting these people up and productive, would not only be the moral (Christian?) thing to do, but would ultimately also add to the wealth of the nation.
Is it because in America who are 'your own people'?
Americans complain about taxes more than perhaps any other people from a rich nation, but we frankly don't pay that much. The OECD average is about 35% of GDP. The UK pays right about that. The US pays ~27% of GDP. And of course even with that relatively small amount of revenue, a lot of it goes to uniquely American spending schemes like defense or NASA, both of which are vastly better funded than their European equivalents. So it's really not all that surprising that lots of other stuff doesn't get funded much.
And city property tax where the majority of all homeless housing initiatives are funded from, even though homelessness is really a national problem as they migrate to the cities with the best weather and benefits, further straining individual city resources like San Jose.
We pay almost 50% in taxes which I think is close to what you guys pay in Europe. The lions share goes to Washington where as far as I can tell it either evaporates or gets spent on very expensive jobs programs like the F-35. Our states do a better job generally and provide the bulk of the services. However in many cities and states the budgets are consumed by pensions leaving less for services each year. A person who works in government can retire with 80% pay at 55 after 20 years with their pension based on last 2 years. As people live longer, many people are collecting pensions for more years than they worked.
The problem is that we already pay a lot in taxes and we get poor returns on this money as it is. I think there would be more people willing to pay more if they thought money was the answer and it would help people. Most people think the money would just be wasted.
At the same time we also have large numbers of people who pay no taxes, 51%. So as our population grows, the demand for services increases but the percentage of tax paying citizens is not increasing.
> The lions share goes to Washington where as far as I can tell it either evaporates or gets spent on very expensive jobs programs like the F-35.
About 2/3 of taxes go to the federal government. Half of federal spending is on Social Security and medical spending (Medicare, Medicaid, etc.). About 16% is defense and international security assistance.
> At the same time we also have large numbers of people who pay no taxes, 51%.
About 45% of households pay no federal income tax, but most of them still pay federal payroll taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, and so on. The estimated tax burden for the lowest income 20% of the population is 19.2%, less that the overall 30%, but still significant.
Regarding federal payroll taxes, i.e. Social Security and Medicare, it's not accurate to lump these in with other taxes as they are basically forced-savings. And due to their progressive nature, low-income individuals will get more out then they ever put in.
I looked through and it seems to me they excluded the 7.65% for social security and Medicare. I don't see it explicitly mentioned, at least, and some of those numbers seem too low to be including it.
Mandatory spending was 65% of our budget last year the majority of which goes to healthcare, pensions, and social security. Defense was over half of our discretionary spending. I'm hopeful that the US could make changes in defense spending but healthcare and pensions will screw us and it will be our own fault.
The second you open a conversation with "We are going to reform pensions" or "We are going to guide health access in medicare" politicians have stepped on too many voters' toes and the system falls apart.
If the US adopted a policy for medicare similar to the UK's NICE it would be derided as "death panels".
I think we all want an easy ride and regrettably the people who will end up paying for it are going to be the people with little to no say.
I'm not disagreeing with everything you said, BUT, most pension plans I have seen only pay about 1 to 2 percent of your (ending) salary per year of service, which means something in the range of 20 to 40 percent of your ending salary when you retire, rather than 80 percent. I'd really like to know about this "4% per year of service" job, so I could apply :-)
However, the part about "pay spiking" by taking on a more difficult or higher cost of living locaiton, but higher paying, job in the last 2 or 3 years, is very true. It would probably make more sense to average your entire career.
It's a shame private companies don't offer pensions anymore, but I guess that was just a thing for my grandparent's generation.
"At the same time we also have large numbers of people who pay no taxes, 51%. So as our population grows, the demand for services increases but the percentage of tax paying citizens is not increasing."
By large number of people who pay no taxes, I assume you are referring to working age adults? In other words you exclude those under 18 years age, most college students, retirees, people with major disabilities, those who choose to stay at home to take care of their kids because child care is unaffordable? Also most of those who pay no income taxes still pay sales tax, social security tax, medicare tax and (sometimes) property taxes.
I'd say that as well. A lot of people criticize our tax structure (probably with good reason) but a common criticism is that we don't pay enough in taxes and that we end up starving useful resources because of it. That criticism is pretty much false. When you count federal, state, county, and local taxes, and then throw in things that don't typically get counted like mandatory expensive-as-fuck health care, we easily pay just as much or more than many well functioning first world countries.
What we're really good at is throwing our money either in a dumpster or into corrupt people's pockets. Weve got farm subsidies, corporate health care, bombs in the Middle East, transit infrastructure that is 5-10x more expensive than anywhere else in the world, heavily subsidized roads, and pork barrel spending as the only way to break up congressional gridlock. We've fucked everything up, and it's probably too late to do anything about it.
As a fellow left leaning Brit the pull yourself up by the bootstraps thing always seemed strange, sometimes people just don't have the bootstraps to start with!
And, just as the literal interpretation of the phrase, the figurative interpretation is impossible (even if you have bootstraps). That's why it's not happening. It's enough though, for the masses of people to be stupid enough as they are in America to believe that this is possible to create such a messed up society.
Well, most important is how inefficient the country is. All governments are corrupt: thats true in Europe, its true in Canada, but its 10x true in the US. It's no China or Russia, but its pretty bad.
Second, you said "resistance to supporting your own people". Well, even if you don't resist, thats very difficult because figuring out who "your own people" is, is nearly impossible here because of the immigration situation.
Regardless of stance on immigration, the fact is that the way to most efficiently reduce poverty will differ based on if someone has been here all along and got screwed, based on if they are refugees, or if they came by other means. You have to analyze the pipeline and allocate resources, people, and programs for both prevention, and for safety nets.
People make it so damn hard to differentiate and allocate logically, its impossible to be efficient there.
(Note that I'm a green card holder, I wasn't born in the US, so this is just what I'm seeing in polar contrast to my home country). When data is collected and surveys/analysis presented, most of the time everything will be mixed in without separating root causes (someone who fell into poverty because of medical bills, is a very different problem to solve than someone who came here being poor in the first place). And then there's the racism situation...
So authorities are left with 1 size fit all programs that get abused left and right, with corruption sprinkled in to make it harder. Yeah, its impossible to fix things this way.
I've found that America makes a lot more sense when you think of it as a country run by rich people, with a whole lot of workers. For the rich, this place is amazing.
The rich have all the political power, so this makes sense. You'd think the working class has political power but their opinions are controlled by the wealthy.
So for the people running America, there's nothing to fix. The system is designed to produce exactly what it produces. The fact that there's no shelter or health care for the poor is a result of the fact that the poor in America are discarded. We don't have a cultural respect for human life here. We have business. And business doesn't need poor people. They're not good workers or good consumers.
I'd like things to be different, and I'm working on it, but I don't have much power at the moment.
> I've found that America makes a lot more sense when you think of it as a country run by rich people, with a whole lot of workers. For the rich, this place is amazing.
That's an excellent insight, and it agrees with my experience. When I lived there I was earning minimum wage, as were all my (local) friends and I was not impressed. Friends who needed surgery could not afford it, could not afford car insurance, etc. etc.
A few years later I met an Aussie working in a very high paying Engineering job and he loved the country because when you have money, you can own and do anything you want. You are a god.
>We don't have a cultural respect for human life here. We have business.
It blows my mind that masses have not voted to do something about this to better their lot.
I think there are often several candidates in the primary election for any given office (not just president) that would like to, but it only takes one stalking horse funded by the rich in either party to ad-bomb the election, fragment the vote between the better alternatives, and rake in a plurality of the votes for the win.
There are probably several ways around that, but why change it, since the system is "working"?
You missed one thing about the poor: they are useful as slaves--which is still legal in America. So America spends billions, maybe trillions over the last four to five decades to incarcerate people for anything, especially normal everyday human endeavors so they can be enslaved, provide free labor, and provide a base for others to profit off their pain. Most of these people are, of course, people of color, whom America has enslaved since before it even existed as America, so there is an additional benefit of removing them off the white-controlled streets. No analysis of American poverty is complete without acknowledging this fundamental factor: race and slavery.
It would only make sense if the poor also believe they are "temporarily embarrassed millionaires." It is amazing how many are opposed to policies that would benefit them the most.
Well just look at the president candidates for the most powerful and richest country in the world. How is that possible that in a whole country of many smart people these two individuals could get someone's votes.
Based on what criteria? You can tell who the richest person in the world is by subtracting his liabilities from his assets and arriving at a large number. US budget liabilities exceeded US budget revenues for quite a bit now.
Looks like the conservative crowd on HN is downvoting you, but that's probably because the truth makes them uncomfortable. The United States is by far the richest country in the entire history of the world. Every American should be deeply ashamed and embarrassed by the sheer number of people who don't have access to the most basic needs.
Honest question: Do any class or all classes of people (citizens, legal immigrants, illegal immigrants, refugees, criminals, teachers, disabled, adults, children, or any other type of people) have a right to a home or some other minimum level of shelter?
Seems like discussion on homelessness would be slightly easier if we started from first principles or at least some place where there is closer to a consensus.
It's important to recognize that the problem isn't that shelter is expensive, but that land is expensive.
And to reframe the question, do all people have a right not to be excluded from land (without a commensurate payment)? I believe the answer is a resounding yes.
How about the people who decided that they didn't like their land in Nigeria, but decided to move to Dublin, Ireland because they like it there better.
What then?
Government creates property rights, which is what Land really is about, and there appears to be a limited supply to go around. Thereby only citizens of a country who pay taxes should have the right to own Land. Does this make sense?
If that literally happened there would be ructions. And those two groups are not that dissimilar.
> Georgists (including myself) tend to see anything less than open borders as deeply immoral.
Large numbers of Nigerians moved to Dublin. Robbery, fraud, violence shot up immediately and the CSO (gov stats) shows they are mostly not working and are recipients of state aid.
I used to believe in open borders once until I started living in some estates with migrants and started seeing the horrendous shit they were up to. Stealing cars, beating people up, probably murdering people judging by some of the awful sounds and continual police visits. I still do, but only for people like me. It might not be based on ethic identity necessarily but it should be based on something. Geekdom perhaps.
Otherwise, unwelcome though it is, violence is an inevitability.
Those borders were there for a reason. If you remove the borders then you need to remove the reason also. Until then we shall resolve conflict with violence. Calling that immoral solves nothing.
That's because Mr Sharkley, I am not against people mingling but people clashing. Pushing for open borders is a basic denial of human nature.
I think the denizens of this website would get along because regardless of race or class our cultural values are similar. Culture reduced to a single person is a personality, and ours are quite similar. And this is a very recent development yet the distinctions between different groups of people online are well defined. When I first met a large group of computer geeks in person, it was like coming home from a distant journey.
I agree that geographical boundaries are somewhat arbitrary but I don't agree that the idea of borders themselves are immoral. They seem more like a natural and organic adaption to the world. Birds of a feather flock together. That is what open borders proponents are up against, they are lumpers in the eternal battle between the lumpers and splitters.
> Similar arguments were made against dismantling the institution of slavery
I didn't make an argument that some people are intrinsically disposed to being slaves so I'm not sure what similarity you are seeing, perhaps you could develop that into a comparative explanation since I do not see it.
> You are doing nothing to argue that closed borders are moral,
I made no such claim. It is you who made a claim about morality and borders. You are the one who would be required in a classical debate to give up a rhetorical explanation for the motion.
> just that implementing open borders has caused problems in some cases.
That is indeed my claim. I think many countries are similar enough that an exchange of citizens would not lead to significant disruptions. The states of California and Texas are quite different but I presume they wouldn't kill each other. However should 500 years pass I would be much less confident about that statement because the differences may be too stark by then.
A exaggerated version of this is North Korea and South Korea. Two countries, with a common language, genetics, yet in less than fifty years the differences have become profound. In another fifty years they may be irreconcilable.
There is no real reason to believe all groups are destined to become one people, which is what most open borders proponents I've met do believe. The borders mostly exist because of politics, it was never geography or ability to commute with transports that caused splitting.
I think we're dealing with something that organically happens with group dynamics, like how a village behaves differently to an urban metropolis, and I don't think open borders people have explanations for these dynamics.
What I do know is that historically large population movements of different peoples are a prelude to war. They always have been and I see no reason why they won't be once more.
> What I do know is that historically large population movements of different peoples are a prelude to war. They always have been and I see no reason why they won't be once more.
I agree more with the concept that strong borders are the prelude to war. To quote H.G. Wells:
> It was just this dignity of government which the crude Darwinism and the Kiplingism of the later Victorian years were destroying. Competition and survival were accepted as the basal facts of life. “War is the natural state of nations,” said a popular London men’s weekly the other day, with an air of repeating something universally known. “Peace is only the interval of rest and preparation between wars.” In accordance with such ideas the growing boy was exhorted to be “loyal” to his school and contemptuous of other schools, “loyal” to his class against other classes, “loyal” to his nation and contemptuous and fierce towards other nations, “loyal” to the English-speaking peoples and contemptuous and hostile to the German or French-speaking. His instinct for brotherhood was narrowed and debased. The universal brotherhood of mankind was laughed to scorn. All life was bickering, he was taught; and yet the whole course of history has shown that the bickering nations perish, and that the alliances and coalescences of peoples and nations ensure the life they comprehend.
Your name sounds Irish actually. Have you ever lived in an areas with a large foreign population? Do you have any experience of those cultures apart from the television and holidaying.
You have to understand this is nothing to do with individuals. This is about groups and they don't behave like individuals somehow.
I've worked with a chap from the Congo, model citizen. Also a South African with a temper who couldn't work to save his life. I've worked with a guy from Pakistan and it was a car wreck because his views on women could only be described as vile, I literally saw him watching a woman being stoned to death for adultery and he thought it was hilarious. You don't want to live next door to somebody like that with your family.
There are good people everywhere. This is defined by me as whether those people are like us. It is just that you have to discriminate when people are doing evil things, sometimes in prodigious quantity. There's no two ways about it. Values really are that different in different places. There are parts of our world in which the rape of children and slavery are not illegal because they are so common and even when they are made illegal the practices continue. There are tribes that literally practice human sacrifice and cannibalism, still, in this world. These are their cultural values!
That means borders, and if you don't allow borders on the outside of a country then they develop themselves on the inside of a country. Look at the USA, they have gated communities because there exist predominately minority group areas with high crime rates.
A border is basically a filter for people. If you are saying this is immoral you need to explain why castle walls and border patrols are a recurrent feature of humankind since forever. The borders are literally in the landscape around us in Europe. This is something that goes way deep and it won't be shifted by waving your hands philosophically.
There are horrible cultures in the world; I agree.
> That means borders
NOPE
This merely traps people where these bad cultures are, and this in my mind is the great immorality. You cannot tell a person "you live in a failed place, but you stuck there forever in poverty, and because of the luck of where I am born, I am entitled to greater things."
You allow for a free movement of people, you will perhaps see a transient spreading of some worse cultures, but in a free marketplace of ideas, they will not remain ascendent-- barbarities and oppression simply aren't very effective. Loss-aversion is no way to build a community.
> and if you don't allow borders on the outside of a country then they develop themselves on the inside of a country. Look at the USA, they have gated communities because there exist predominately minority group areas with high crime rates.
Very true, which is why Georgists pull for a Land Value Tax, which would do much to end this segregation.
"""
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948 at the Palais de Chaillot, Paris. The Declaration arose directly from the experience of the Second World War and represents the first global expression of what many people believe to be the rights to which all human beings are inherently entitled. The full text is published by the United Nations on its website.[1]
"""
Most of the right do not recognize the UN as a moral authority.
I view the UN generally as 'not even wrong'.
With leftist propaganda, it is not what they say that matters. It is what they leave out.
They come up with things that sound to me like this:
"Everybody has the right to a chocolate bar, because chocolate bars are delicious and everybody ought to have one"
Then I think 'Well, that sounds like a nice thing' but who produces these bars of chocolate. How many bars? What are the limits on this new standard?
These kinds of questions are invariably never answered. You just get a bunch of blowhards leaping down your throat shouting about how you don't care about the children who never experienced the joys of chocolate or something.
All I can say is, I hope you don't mind if I go ahead and build the cornucopia machine?
I don't give a wet slap about ideology, left or right or anything else, but I do think everyone should have as much chocolate as they want. Bathe in it, why not?
If no one stops me there will be floating castles and highways to the stars. ;-P
The problem is humans being jerks (people call it "human nature" but I say that's a cop-out.) We could make this world a paradise with a wave of our hands, but we have bad dreams.
To me it seems like society has decided to taboo major lines of inquiry in physics, chemistry and biology because it didn't like some of the answers it got initially.
These are my bad dreams.
Research into nuclear energy, the source of all power: Taboo. Not even taught in Britain anymore. No building for decades but lots of empty promises.
Research into genetics, the source of all natural variation and adaption. Taboo. The cult of egalitarianism has seen to that.
Research into drugs. Not many people know this but there exists a reverse of Moore's Law called Eroom's Law in the phamaceutical industry. Ignoring the recreational drug side of things which is tabooed, outside of DARPA I don't know any mainstream research into fine motor and brain chemical control in conjunction with control by computation.
The core problem with all of this tabooing is that we're prevented from opening up new avenues of exploration. You could taboo some things and it wouldn't matter because they're just a leave node on the tree of ideas, but if you outright forsake an entire branch node then you lose much more than just the thing you tabooed. Nuclear energy physics and genetic manipulation of humans are definitely branches and not leaves.
Sorry for the delay in replying, I missed your response for a bit.
I didn't mean that you or the guy in the TED talk were jerks. I'm thinking more about e.g. the people still supporting a certain handsy clowntroll as candidate for U.S. President. Enough said on that though.
I agree that nuclear power suffers from a "taboo". It's crazy that we don't develop and use fusion. Personally I count solar power as fusion but it's not the same as, say, working jet-packs that never run out of fuel.
I think people just don't get fusion power, what it means, what it enables. But on the same token: could you trust fusion jet-packs to the general public in a world that still contains suicide bombers? I am freedom-loving and egalitarian as all hell but I just don't think that would be wise.
Coming at it from another angle, I am convinced that we have all the technology we really need already. I'm not against more research, not at all, not even a little, but I don't feel the urgency anymore.
We've got this. The limiting factor going forward has everything to do with psychology, in my opinion.
I agree. It's in our heads. We've got to leave the funk behind before we can do something proactive.
Silicon Valley is sometimes overly optimistic but I prefer that to the cynicism I felt in the UK.
Europe in particular really needs some successes. I think I could do something with affordable housing that would scale but we'll have to see. Am confident I wouldn't get venture funding but I have an angle or two. I intend to build a demonstration model as a proof of concept and then hopefully some traction will occur through internet-magic.
Good luck with your projects carapace! We've got this!
This right is present twice (once as an article on housing, another as a right to own property) in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Note that "right" implies that you cannot be denied something arbitrarily, it doesn't mean someone somewhere will go out of their way to supply you with that.
Think of it as a call option - you have an undeniable right to exercise it under the terms of contract, but it doesn't mean the brokerage or anyone else have to finance this transaction in case you're low on funds.
I don't know the answer, but I'd like to follow it up with the questions "And to what extent should location preference be accommodated? Does one have a right to continue to live where one was born? To live in the city of one's choice? Or is the right (if it exists) just to a safe place somewhere?"
A cluster of "tiny homes" is indistinguishable from a "trailer park".
There are actually very nice trailer parks / prefab house / mobile home communities, that cater to specific populations (especially retirement communities). They have a bad reputation in general because of the modal kind of person who inhabits them, not some sort of inherent characteristic of the construction style.
Am I alone in finding this "tiny home" trend insane? There's nothing wrong with downsizing, but just call it what it is: a mobile home or a trailer.
Companies have been engineering mobile homes for decades to be highly efficient, long lasting, and fuel efficient for towing. Slapping a bunch of heavy wooden shingles on one and calling it a "tiny home" is just feel-good hipster nonsense.
Except that most cities criminalize living out of your vehicle. Renting a space to put your RV, mobile home, etc. is a non-trivial expense for many.
I read an article about how emotionally draining it was for people to constantly have to move around, worry about police, get hassled by residents, not know where they could shower or eat, etc. but I can't find it now. Not to mention I can't imagine how hard it is to fall asleep and actually rest with all those fears.
Tiny Houser here. Could be insane. Mz called me eccentric recently. Sounds like a prelude to the full thing!
> There's nothing wrong with downsizing, but just call it what it is: a mobile home or a trailer.
You can call it whatever you like. There is a certain amount of class warfare between Tiny Housers and people living in RV parks which I won't try to justify.
> Companies have been engineering mobile homes for decades to be highly efficient, long lasting, and fuel efficient for towing.
This is not true at all.
1. It is not legal to live in trailers.
2. Most mobile phones are not capable of being 4 season dwellings because they don't meet air tightness and insulation levels of traditional houses.
3. Mobile homes were originally not supposed to be for permanent trailer parks. RV living is a hack like THs are. I think it started after the Great Depression, which would be analogous to the Great Stagnation we're in that produced the popularity of Tiny Houses.
4. The most important thing is the use case for a TH is totally different to an RV or mobile home. A TH is supposed to be lived in full time and quite rarely traveled around with. 90% of tiny housers would only move their house once a year and many of them never will. The people who have them light enough for frequent travel are the exceptions.
5. A properly constructed Tiny House will last > 60 years like a traditional house. RVs don't have that longevity.
> Slapping a bunch of heavy wooden shingles on one and calling it a "tiny home" is just feel-good hipster nonsense.
Traditional housing has identical materials and procedures to Tiny Houses. I suppose a house is just a bunch of material slapped together as well.
I think if you stepped inside a well built and designed Tiny House, your skepticism would fade away. They really are different to mobile homes. The sills are thicker, the furnishings are more homely, the walls aren't plastic. There are some really nice mobile homes out there but they just don't have the same use case.
One negative thing I shall say about Tiny Housers is that some of them think they 'chose' this lifestyle being they're superior beings. A minimalist lifestyle is fine but it is primarily about economics.
Yes. That's largely why they exist. Zoning codes were often created with an explicit goal of keeping poor/black people out of rich/white neighborhoods.
Not sure why you're being down-voted, other than that the evidence you provided isn't very compelling. For people who think this is hyperbole, it is not.
Zoning codes also exist for a lot of other (good) reasons, but there are large sections of zoning codes (esp. regarding the type of housing allowed within a residentially zoned area) that were absolutely created with explicitly and openly racist intent. Sometimes those sections of code are still with us today. Sometimes they've been removed. But in both cases, the effects of those zoning laws on communities reverberates today:
Sometimes selfish rather than racist. I've had a discussion with a coworker from a suburb who was against a referendum on a state affordable housing law. He was worried it would let poor people move in and use his town's good schools without "paying their fair share." So there are lots of bad reasons for these rather than just racism.
Residential segregation is the large scale observable effect of small biases. http://ncase.me/polygons. To end residential segregation is to either end the biases themselves or the freedom to express them. Either approach is rather distopian, with strong reverberations in the worst abuses of the Soviet regime.
First, there's a huge amount of space in policy design between "zoning laws with racial segregation as an explicit goal" and "Soviet regime restriction on personal choice re: where to live".
Second, a lot of people's preferences are a much more nuanced than toy game theoretic models assume.
What? Eliminating ass-backwards zoning laws that enforce 'aesthetic character' is a Soviet dystopia? How?
And here I always thought that the best example of a Soviet dystopia in housing was the row after row of cookie-cutter prefab Krushevkas [1]. That and the constant lack of housing. In fact, restrictions on aesthetics, driveway sizes, etc, only exacerbate the problem.
Look at the data. How many cities around the world have an utopian mix of people, where millionaires live next to homeless tent encampments and [insert ethnicity here] live mixed with [insert another ethnicity here].
The uniform cities I can think of are Soviet cities. Soviets worked hard to Harrison Bergeron their populations, and also to eliminate any shred of social cohesion other than the prescribed love for the Party. And even in Soviet cities, the Party leaders live in their own nice segregated neighborhoods, far removed from the Krushevaks the forcibly uniformized rest of the population is forced to inhabit.
I think the intent here is to provide a very basic shelter, basically a place to sleep, without a kitchen or a bathroom. I assume there would shared bathroom facilities on site.
Building (or other) codes generally require private bathrooms and kitchen areas in new residential construction.
This is a mistake. As soon as you allow squatters to essentially start building shanty town communities, you are going to start exacerbating a lot of problems: drugs, crime, rape. All one needs to do is travel to Brazil and see the favelas to see the effects of an unchecked, institutionalized homeless population.
People have pointed out that some crime concentrates in these tent cities in Seattle. But I have yet to hear evidence that it's actually creating more crime. And there's plenty of crime that happens outside of those places in Seattle, like a totally insane number of car break ins.
For things like this (homebuilding) where the competition is heavy and consumers have a choice (within a spending limit), I feel only the most bare of safety requirements should be law. All other standards related to efficiency, "above-and-beyond" safety and design considerations should be met and advertised via certifications.
Almost every zoning law probably has a good reason behind it, ostensibly. Someone died in a fire because there wasn't a window, so every room needs a window, for example. But if we legislated like that for every accident, we'd be suffocated by regulations.