Comment by ethagknight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ethagknight | Hacker News Reader

Reading the article, unless I’m missing something, it sounds like people just don’t like the government housing they were given, maybe it wasn’t as good as what they had before.

They have to pay a lot to travel and visit their friends, but then again the housing is free?

A boy got his head stuck under a truck? Is that the development’s fault?

No local services like grocery is a challenge that takes some time for a market (or government) to respond to. I would hope schools and groceries and essentials begin to adapt to these new housing areas, but that’s a government control issue.

Personally, (and maybe a bit of a hot take) I expect government housing to be nothing less than a backstop before homelessness, and as such it should carry sufficient motivation to get out, but not too much motivation that you’d rather be on the streets. Because at the end of the day, a resident seeking free or subsidized housing is just a problem for the government to deal with, and governments do not have sufficient funding to deal with the problems in front of them, so things will get short changed.

I don’t expect my government to take care of me, because it couldn’t care less, and I’ve been totally screwed by broken government in the past.

> I don’t expect my government to take care of me, because it couldn’t care less, and I’ve been totally screwed by broken government in the past.

Depending on where you live and how well paid you are, 60% to 20% of your work's output goes into your government's pockets. Furthermore, the government is usually also in charge of zoning and building restrictions, thus directly responsible for homelessness (There are plenty of extremely poor countries where homelessness is virtually nonexistent. What makes people homeless is police tearing down illegal houses, not poverty).

Those are the very simple reasons people rightfully expect their government to provide them with free housing.

> "What makes people homeless is police tearing down illegal houses, not poverty"

This is a very good point, and i never see it mentioned - people will generally create their own housing out of whatever they have avaliable. These take the forms of refugee camps and slums, but they can and sometimes do evolve to something respectable over time - after all thats how housing began at the dawn of civilisation.

Now if the person's right to create his own shelter and solve his own problem has been taken away, then a substitute must be provided.

Every now and then we get people who make a mudhut or a tree house

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7826923/amp/Man-fights-live-inside-self-built-tree-house-council-bans-bushfire-risk.html

>"A boy got his head stuck under a truck? Is that the development’s fault"

I have met people who believe homeless adults should get no help, but I have never ever met anyone who believes we should leave homeless children to starve and die.

By extension, you should not put facilities for kids in an area of obvious danger.

> I expect government housing to be nothing less than a backstop before homelessness

This is not at all the historic situation/expectation in the UK.

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