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Comment by speeq | Hacker News Reader

I think housing should be a basic human right. Just get Elon Musk to build affordable underground tunnel homes with his Boring company. He wants to build a city on Mars, so why not test the technology (and social aspects) here on Earth where it's much easier.

Housing is a political problem, not a technological one.

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I agree that it's a political problem, but your solution is baffling to me. Instead of addressing the inequalities above ground, like millions of homes going unused while millions of people are homeless, you want to let a private company put poor people in mole-man colonies underground??

At least in the US, the millions of empty homes are mostly in places people don't want to live, for a variety of reasons (mostly related to limited opportunities).

If you wish, you can buy a lovely, well-located mansion for $800,000 in Milwaukee right now: https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/40453573_zpid/globalre...

Or one of the many empty houses for around $20,000: https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/40456506_zpid/globalre...

Note that you will need to do substantial renovation, lead abatement, etc, and when you're done, the house will probably be worth around $50,000 at most, and not be in a safe neighborhood.

The political problem is mostly around providing enough homes in the places people want to live. The technologies to do this (multi-story apartment buildings, electric mass transit) are generally over 100 years old.

We can name the two different classes of people that result as "Elons" and "Murlusks" after him.

Well there is some sense to it: with the extreme weather we have to look forward to thanks to climate change, it'll make a lot of sense to burrow underground and live there. Underground colonies would be mostly immune to hurricanes, for instance, and probably a lot easier to keep warm when polar vortexes result in -50C temperatures outside in the winter, and easier to keep cool when it's 60C+ in the summer.

Maybe it'll be like the history of lobsters, where it starts as housing for the poor but eventually becomes housing for the rich.

You got me there. Somehow I doubt Elon Musk would be moving into the rabbit hole next to mine, however.

I guess the preferable option would be to create high-speed affordable transport so that location won't be an issue to people. I'm not sure which one is more feasible.

The former (high-speed affordable transport) will certainly be part of the solution in twenty years. If by no other means, then by lvl 5 autonomous cars.

There are some hugely perverse incentives in western society where you aren't guaranteed shelter, food, and medicine while the world is overflowing with extravagance and wealth.

This isn't making your poor comfortable, its about human decency. The whole point of society is that the collective be worth the effort for the many, but for many that participation just means exploitation and desolation for the endless profit of capitalists they will never even see in person but whose influence keeps them in endless toil with an empty, unfulfilled life.

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