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Comment by Qwertystop | Hacker News Reader

Markets clearly haven't solved the problem. They've certainly had the time.

Markets partially solved this problem a more than a century ago - the solution was "really shitty, cheap, shared housing". As a society we decided that such housing was unacceptable and banned it without providing a replacement.

"This enormously regulated industry doesn't yield outcomes we like for the poor! Obviously markets cannot solve this problem!" is a disturbingly common argument.

They were called "Rooming Houses" and we should bring them back.

The beautiful thing with democracy is that these housing solutions that provided an actual solution to homelessness where banned, are still illegal, and thus won't be "brought back" even if they make perfect sense, were preferred by the people who used them, are a free market solution, and much cheaper than the alternatives.

See San Francisco as an example of what happens when more money is poured in the "modern" solutions - very little reduction of the problem, if any.

I usually don't like libertarian solutions but this is not a bad idea given the United States' inability to solve the issue with their current tools. Right now we're very inefficiently running a couple of slightly better but very constrained in throughput homeless shelters instead.

Who's the "we decided"? Nobody in particular did actually...

So yes, markets failed to provide very cheap housing and not for lack of cheap land or costs of construction. It's just because they provide even worse profit margins. Deregulating the industry won't help with that.

The person you're replying to is referring to zoning and codes which preclude the economical construction of such rooming houses / SROs. These are decided on by elected government officials which very much means we decided.

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