Comment by manholio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by manholio | Hacker News Reader

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I cannot shake the feeling that the bulk of those social benefits could be captured by offering a very compact "cage-home" like storage closet, that can be locked and allows sleeping and storing one's valuables, with access to bathroom and a minimal food preparation areas.

Nobody should be forced to sleep rough, in the cold and dirt, where they are vulnerable to rapes, theft and beatings, such a life turns the kindest soul into an animal. 20 sq. feet of lockable closet with a mattress and shelves to store one's minimal belongings could mean maintaining their humanity and preventing turning them into dangerous criminals.

This would be so cheap to offer that it could be a basic human right, I would certainly pay taxes for it before other stupidities promoted as measures against crime. It's definitely not an incentive to be poor, those who can afford can rent a larger space, it would be a minimal guaranteed, free baseline: no matter how bad you fail in life, you will still get to be treated like a human being.

That would be effective and cheap, but also illegal in most places because of building codes. Eg https://reason.com/video/2016/12/09/los-angeles-homeless-tin...

> The city owns thousands of vacant lots, many of which have been abandoned for decades, that could provide sites for tiny house villages or other innovative housing concepts that can have an immediate impact.

Sad and deliberate. We have more than enough to expansively build houses for everyone, but we don't simply to make a few richer.

Cage homes are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flophouse#Cage_homes_in_Hong_K...

So are/were cage hotels; further in that page,

> A 1958 survey by Christopher Jencks found that homeless men preferred cage hotels over shelters for reasons of privacy and security

and more at http://historyapolis.com/blog/tag/cage-hotel/ ).

> Cage hotels emerged in Minneapolis in the late 19th century, as a way to house the migrant laborers who came to the city to find work and then to stay while they spent their earnings from the railroads, the farms and the logging camps. By 1895, there were 50 cage hotels in Minneapolis. While these hotels provided a cheap place to stay, the rest of Minneapolis found them increasingly distasteful. The city outlawed new cage hotels in 1918, but they were such an established institution that some of them lasted for four more decades.

The flophouse WP entry points out: "gentrification and higher real-estate value has further eroded the ability of flophouses and inexpensive boarding-style hotels to make a profit"

However, that skips over how (non-poor) people "found them increasingly distasteful", even a hundred years ago.

Yes, that's exactly the model I'm referencing.

> how (non-poor) people "found them increasingly distasteful", even a hundred years ago

That's easy to explain: exclusionary zoning, maximum density requirements, aesthetic rules etc are all forms of selection based on social status. Class and racial lines are strong and people strongly want to keep the "character" of their area, i.e to live near people of comparable social status.

It’s so weird to me that this is a near-universal definition of “character” because every neighborhood I’ve ever been in that’s segregated by class has been absolutely miserable and boring.

"The sound of gentrification is silence" - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/09/let-bro...

exactly. I'd be willing to contribute to humane encouragement into such a scheme. I would no doubt also include free health care and a robust detox and addiction and psyche programs.

i believe that, ironically, the less progressive jurisdictions already provide this service while the more "progressive" districts have not yet made it mandatory.

We have an excess of seacans (ocean shipping containers) in America. Slip a molded, insulated, stainless steel shell into it, designed for wash-out. Provide community kitchen/toilet facilities, and community storage facilities. Make it easy to move to a different cluster of seacan shelter, so that people can find their community. Provide a lot of social services to these communities, help people get over their addictions and traumas.

Speaking of trauma, we’ve had quite a few global-scale mass human death events this past few generations. Every family has experienced a hugely traumatizing society-destroying event within the past four generations. World wars. Genocides. Civil war. Social revolutions.

These are experiences that fundamentally wreck a lot of people. They come back or live through it, and end up broken. Maybe they withdraw, maybe they get angry or violent, maybe they let their kids run wild, maybe they are too restrictive — in the end the family suffers trauma and society suffers from their trauma.

Little wonder, then, that we have addiction and behavioural problems up the wazoo.

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