Comment by stevenjohns | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevenjohns | Hacker News Reader

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> What you propose is a giant subsidy to middle class life at the expense of poor people.

The "poor" people are extremely poor to the point that you cannot comprehend. And they have to stay there and live there for their entire lives because the current system forces them to. It is impossible for them to move out because of how unaffordable the cities are and how heavily the system is rigged against them. They have nothing. These people are already commuting long distances and already live in unregulated, unmarked ghettos. Here[0] is a photo of one of those places I took back in March so you understand the extent of it.

The only people who "lose" here are the current land owners of legal properties. Renters will end up with lower rent because housing will rapidly devalue to a tenth of its original value - every single house will stop being the foreign investment opportunity that it currently is.

> This would take land that currently houses poor people and make that illegal.

Clearly it's not retroactively applied. Town planning and zoning almost never is.

> It also bans building a house with a courtyard on a lot below a certain size.

I mean, I guess? But it also forces properties to have back and front yards, as well as side access, instead of being 100% concrete built wall-to-wall through to the footpath.

> This wouldn’t help poor people. It would just force them to commute to their work from further away.

I'm not sure how it would do anything else other than help poor(er) people and allow them to start living inside expanding cities rather than living on the extreme outskirts.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/b2AKhfJ.jpg

Your photo shows a natural stage of development of most rapidly industrializing places. (Actually, this is the second stage of development for most neighborhoods, after a first stage consisting of all temporary structures with no infrastructure or services whatsoever.)

Shanty towns looked just like this in quickly growing American and European cities 100–150 years ago. And look like this today throughout Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, ...

People living in those conditions are not permanently poor and hopeless. They are upwardly mobile (albeit from a very low baseline, often as rural peasants forced off their land by lack of rural economic opportunity), with neighborhoods improving rapidly, and generally quite a dynamic economy.

Come back and take another photo of precisely the same spot in 25 years and you will see something dramatically different: decently constructed permanent structures; proper plumbing, electricity, sanitation, roads; real city services; and in general an integrated normal city neighborhood as the city keeps pushing outward.

Many of the kids growing up in those shanty-towns today will be small-business owners, and plenty of their kids will be highly educated white-collar professionals.

Observers who try to interpret poor neighborhoods with middle class standards end up so focused on the apparent discomfort involved that they can’t see the parts that are ingenious, fascinating, hopeful, and rapidly improving.

Maybe it worked that way in some other countries, but in a lot of places in Latin America, that is not how it works. Most slums just get more crowded, larger, and managed by thugs (lately, drug dealing foreign cartels are taking over) over time.

For example, take a look at Villa 31, a slum near Buenos Aires's downtown, in 1935 [1], around the time it first appeared, and now [2]. After almost a century, the precarious buildings are just getting higher, and more densely populated. Several attempts where made to relocate the people along the years, but having a high percentage of the population being illegal immigrants, it becomes highly unpopular to just give those people a new apartment, while there's a housing deficit. Lately, there's been more efforts in providing them a housing solution, because a judicial ruling forced the government to do it. But even then, there's no sign of the population in the slum being reduced (probably because they are replaced by newcomers, mostly illegal immigrants, that need a "first place to live" close to the downtown).

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Villa_De...

[2] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_31#/media/Archivo:Villam...

> having a high percentage of the population being illegal immigrants, it becomes highly unpopular [...]

Presumably the great-grandchildren of residents from the 1930s are not still “illegal immigrants”.

> probably because they are replaced by newcomers

Oh... so this is not actually the same people living there. Well what happened to the families who lived in this place 25, 50, or 80 years ago?

You are correct about people having chances to be upwardly mobile, but in my experience in Africa that means that eventually they just move away to a more decent area.

The low economic areas grow very fast due to an influx of more poor people, but they don't develop much over time. If anything they tend to degrade due to extremely poor service delivery etc.

> The "poor" people are extremely poor to the point that you cannot comprehend.

There are people living 12 to a room on the first floor of my apartment block, probably 24 to an apartment. In Shanghai good construction jobs have dorms on site, bad ones they sleep on the floor or on the street in summer. I have a reasonable idea of what poverty looks like in middle income countries.

> And they have to stay there and live there for their entire lives because the current system forces them to.

No, it doesn’t. It constrains their choices, all of which may be terrible but it doesn’t force them to. They’re where they are because either they or their parents moved to the city because the city was better. Making building densely illegal forces them to live far from where they work. People choose some combination of price, density and location. Removing choices rarely makes people more free.

> It is impossible for them to move out because of how unaffordable the cities are and how heavily the system is rigged against them.

If the cities are that bad why don’t they move to the country? Unskilled agricultural labour doesn’t pay much but starvation is not common in Latin America outside Venezuela.

> They have nothing. These people are already commuting long distances and already live in unregulated, unmarked ghettos.

And if planning laws made building densely illegal they’d still live there but there’d be no prospect of moving closer to where they work. Sprawl would have been legislated in place of density. The middle class would have nice places to live where there could have been housing for those less fortunate.

> The only people who "lose" here are the current land owners of legal properties. Renters will end up with lower rent because housing will rapidly devalue to a tenth of its original value - every single house will stop being the foreign investment opportunity that it currently is.

If there is demand it will be supplied or it won’t. If it’s not supplied the people who don’t get it will be those with least resources. If 100,000 people demand housing and there’s only legal housing for 50,000 the other half will go unhoused or live somewhere illegally. Restricting supply will not change this.

How can not building housing possibly help the poor? How can building less housing possibly help the poor? How can forcing people to live far from where they want to live help them?

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