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Comment by cwp | Hacker News Reader

I noticed this after spending time in developing countries. They are set up much better for being poor. Trivial example: you can go into a pharmacy and buy two aspirin. Some people can't afford 100 at a time, and don't need that many anyway.

Or rent: you can get a place to live for only $60/month. There's no running water, but it's clean and dry and it has a lock on the door. The cheapest place you can find in the US is a lot nicer, but also much more expensive.

Buses have no route maps, no shelters and no doors. They might not come to a complete stop when they pick you up. But you can ride for 25¢.

The US has a kind of minimum standard of living, but it comes with a minimum cost of living. If you can't afford that, you end up with nothing.

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This is what's ridiculous about much of the zoning and building codes here. People don't want poor people living in sub-optimal housing, so instead they force them to sleep outside or live with abusive people.

The liberal approach is to subsidize to maintain that base level, because of an awareness that the social outcomes tend to pay dividends in higher social unity, better health, etc.

Some people would rather pay for private security than for policy that makes muggings less likely, I suppose.

Is this what California, San Francisco, or New York do?

<State>, <City within the same state> <city within the same state with the same name as the state || state with the same name as the city within the same state>

.... yesn't???

They are all liberal governments with large GDPs or gdp per capitas who could implement any of these welfare programs if they chose to.

Not really, yet.

Pay for security rather than progressive social welfare policy?

I take it you've never heard of the NYPD or LAPD? "But they're not private security." Boy, I guess you got me there.

All sorts of things are like this.

The older I get the more I realize that you can't regulate the things wealthy societies do into existence. If everyone can't afford building code things collapse when you mandate that. If the economy is underpinned by bad working conditions or child labor things collapse when you regulate them. If people can't afford to eat at restaurants that follow some new code then they simply won't and those restaurants will fold. If you restrict the supply of some trade through licensing in the name of quality then you just get amateurs doing the lower dollar work for cash. A society has to be able to afford to do the things it mandates. People have to get wealthy enough to reliably afford "right" before you can legislate away "wrong".

> People don't want poor people living in sub-optimal housing, so instead they force them to sleep outside or live with abusive people.

People don't want poor people to live near them. That is the root of most of the zoning issues, it's not because they are actually worried about the quality of the housing stock that the people would live in.

I've seen some research on "relative income happiness" that suggest having poor(er) people nearby should increase happiness. Perhaps it doesn't apply if the income cap is to large...

Or perhaps people aren't actually rational utility maximizing machines and might not properly anticipate the utility benefits from the change.

Science is descriptive, not prescriptive. So no psych/social science research would ever claim that people are rational utility maximizing machines since they're descriptive by their very nature. And if people were rational utility maximizing machines such an effect would not be observed since happiness affected by social comparison is irrational. I don't understand how you came up with such a straw man.

I'm guessing sorisos is spot on with their last sentence. There's a big difference between being a millionaire surrounded by middle classers and being a lower classer surrounded by extreme poverty. Often times with happiness research there are caveats and ranges to keep in mind but the nuances tend to get lost in the headlines.

The reason is a fear of decreasing property values, not any inherent property of the people nearby.

> People don't want poor people living in sub-optimal housing, so instead they force them to sleep outside or live with abusive people.

No, mostly people don't want poor people or sub-optimal housing in their neighborhoods, for a variety of financial, perceived safety, and emotional comfort related reasons.

If it was just not wanting poor people to live in suboptimal housing, there'd be a lot greater effort to provide non-sub-optimal housing to poor people. There are definitely people with this concern, but it's not the driver of housing and zoning policy.

Technical fix: aircrete dome homes. E.g.: https://www.domegaia.com/

Beautiful, cheap, easy, fast, durable (fire- and earthquake-proof, "It will not rot, rust or decompose in water.", etc.) and regular folk can make them with "backyard-scale" foamers and construction technique.

Yeah they said concrete would end homelessness. It's not a technical problem, it's a people problem. Places that allow and encourage lots of dense, walk-able construction (like where I live) have low rent, places that don't do this have high rent no matter how cheap construction materials are.

A lot of cities in developing countries are built around cities/villages of the past. Today, they are redeveloping those, so they have infrastructural problems of the kind where they struggle to rip something out and redesign (unless you are China).

America got a clean slate in 1700s. And completely fucked it up over the years with massive suburbanization. America could have been Europe++ or Japan++ but instead we are a economic meat grinder with soulless suburbia being the pinnacle of a dream life.

I am originally from “3rd world country”, now my country is doing better, or worse. Depending on whom your ask. One thing I find very inefficient in comparing costs of living by converting everything to USD. In your example, $60 for our family used to be a lot. For example, it’s an amount of monthly pension of my grandparents, after having worked decent jobs their entire life.

Regarding aspirin, it interesting example. And I would argue, that it’s used to be the opposite: shortages were common, so everyone would try to buy provision, such as food and medicine, in advance. I recently witnesses a conversation, when a woman in her 30s complained that she could not find baby aspirin(or something like) for her kid because it was sold out, and her mother started literally yelling and berated for not having any in her home reserve.

Also people live in communities, not fortresses. Look at farmland villages in almost any country in the world and then see the US with sometimes literal miles between single houses. Suburbs are intended to keep other people out more than anything, but also don’t provide practically any services. There’s no corner store inside a suburb, one must exit first.

Not a great example. In the US, you can buy small quantities of drugs (or soap or whatever) in the travel section of a CVS, or in a dollar store. Usually this is held up as an example of the difficulty of being poor though (not a boon to the poor), since the unit price is, of course, higher.

The case I'm thinking of is informal. The pharmacist keeps a blister pack of pills behind the counter and will tear off as many as you want and sell them individually. The unit price is probably higher, but not exorbitant. It's probably against the rules, but the pharmacist deals with poor people all the time, and he isn't trying to gouge them.

And I think it's the perfect example. What good is a better unit price if you can't afford to buy in bulk anyway? If you're poor and you have a headache it's better to pay 25¢ for two aspirin than $10 for 100. Part of being poor is steeply discounting the future. The other 98 aspirin might take care of headaches for the next two years, but a lot can go wrong in in that time, and that $9.75 is money you need today.

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