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Comment by Jedi72 | Hacker News Reader

I think there should be much more focus on this kind of plan. People dont need income, they need housing etc. My concern is that if you swap out welfare and services for basic income inflation will eat away at it and sooner or later BI wont mean very much and we now have no services either.

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We have that kind of plan in large parts of Europe already. Germany guarantees housing, heat, food etc, but has at some point switched to distributing money instead of vouchers, so individuals have more freedom to decide where/how to spend it.

Used to. There is dramatically less public housing today than in the past (a lot of the old stock was sold to private investors) & not nearly enough new stock is being built.

Having a WBS in Berlin is far from ensuring you actually get housing.

It doesn't rely on public housing, the state will pay the rent for private apartments.

> Having a WBS in Berlin is far from ensuring you actually get housing.

That's true, but that's because of the limit of existing apartments, not because the government doesn't pay for it. Similarly, the government guarantees healthcare, but that doesn't mean that you will always be healthy.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a change in the housing market (that is: more building projects in general, but primarily more properties + subsidies given to cooperatives), but it's another issue.

Fair enough.

Regarding:

> the government guarantees healthcare, but that doesn't mean that you will always be healthy.

It guarantees you will always get treated if you seek such treatment (within reason, basically all actual medical problems will be treated for free here). I had spent 3 weeks in a hospital including numerous tests (MRI, CT, ultrasound) & concluded in brain surgery.

I paid next to nothing & despite nobody being able to guarantee the procedure would be a success I think this is as close as you can reasonably get.

I would be surprised if the same in the US will not have resulted in a hefty bill, even for most people covered under generous employer-backed health insurance.

I don't know about the US version, it probably depends on the insurance company. My point is just that there's no guarantee of success, only of trying.

If we need 4 million apartments, but only 3.5m physically exist, we can't decree the remaining 500k into existance, they still need to be built. They are currently not built for unrelated reasons (city planning, permits, speculation etc), not because "we" (as a society) don't want them to be built. I don't see that changing anytime soon in the large cities, because the population is generally against higher population density, construction projects and longer commutes. Policies will not change that, unless massive changes in laws take away citizen's ability to protest and stop new development projects.

Indeed, as housing becomes prohibitively expensive everywhere that people want to live in the US, I doubt someone living off basic income will even be able to afford any kind of home.

If however, we had government built apartment buildings that could be partitioned out and made available for free only to those who need it, that would actually help solve real problems, and wouldn’t even disrupt those who depend on their property values rising. Imagine such buildings right here in San Francisco.

Those exist in SF, and some of them are colloquially known as the projects[1]. The nice thing about UBI, is it avoids the issue of the 'welfare trap'. UBI isn't meant to directly impact the housing situation in SF, it's meant to help in places like Detroit, where the collapse of the auto-industry could have been mitigated somewhat had there been a UBI to help support the affected individuals and keep money flowing into the local economy. And this would also have a second order effect of relieving pressure on the high growth economies like NY/SF/LA, as folks would not need to immediately migrate away from low/no-growth areas in search of work.

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Life-at-the-bottom-S-F-s...

I do not see how UBI and a program to increase the housing supply are mutually exclusive. Indeed, housing is one of the few areas of real concern for UBI because the shortage of supply can lead to inflation in house prices with UBI present. Therefore a good plan to increase the housing supply plus a UBI to provide financial stability would seem to be the way to go.

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