Comment by DiscourseFan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DiscourseFan | Hacker News Reader

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It's not really something the federal government can do much about. There is a vast difference between the availability of affordable housing between a state like, say, California, and New Jersey. The latter has far more programs, and far more available stock, and far more perfectly livable, undeveloped land where new housing, offices, stores, etc. could be built for the long term. California, on the other hand, has little to no affordable housing stock, and since it is so hard, already, with the available space to build new single family housing (and because, in the past, affordable housing programs in large apartment towers have turned out to be hotbeds of societal ills, so nobody wants to build high-density affordable housing) prices have skyrocketed and whenever a natural disaster, which is common in California but very uncommon in New Jersey, comes and destroys a bunch of houses, all the sudden a bunch of people become homeless.

All these issues are dealt with at the level of the municipality and the state, the federal government has significantly less power here. Now, I am no expert in affordable housing programs, if someone who has done more research on this topic would like to come and correct me, they are welcome. But this is my basic impression from what I've seen.

> affordable housing programs in large apartment towers have turned out to be hotbeds of societal ills, so nobody wants to build high-density affordable housing

The problem isn't with high-density affordable housing but with building housing that segregates people based on income level. High-density development is a good thing generally and makes a neighborhood more varied and vibrant in my view.

The problem comes from concentrating poverty into a single location. Instead, the United States should spread it out evenly with affordable housing throughout our cities and neighborhoods. The development patterns in the United States end up with two extremes: single family houses or large apartment blocks, with nothing in between (the missing middle problem). There is a lot of implicit segregation by income there, even at the single family housing level, since different housing developments tend to build roughly the same size house repeatedly in any given development. Rather than building neighborhoods where everyone has roughly the same income level, as the United States does now, it would be better to build neighborhoods that can accept people of all income levels. That way, the problems associated with poverty and similar issues are diluted throughout a city and never concentrated.

I agree that concentrating poverty makes things worse, however, that is highly unlikely to change. The development patterns you mention are the explicit result of planned development with the express purpose of segregation. The US is the way it is because it's how the majority of people prefer it to be. Nobody wants to see the ugly underside of poverty. Most people prefer to wall it off. Out of site out of mind.

I’d normally agree, except in America it’s very difficult for local governments to handle homelessness because they seem inherently incapable of learning from each other and building a corpus of best practices that they can share and adopt.

American local governments go out of their way to do everything as if they’re the only ones facing an issue, and I think solving that tendency in American governance is likely way harder than solving anything in the homelessness space.

Even outside of that there are very large downsides for local governments to handle such issues because any successful system would likely attract more people from other parts of the country which would put an even greater financial burden on local taxpayers. Considering cities are cutting services like libraries, etc. it’s a huge disincentive for any local government to enact an actual effective solution.

Can't the just build housing on federal land?

There’s tons of empty malls that the government can buy right now and at least they could let people living in their cars park there. I mean they won’t even do that. They won’t even ban making it illegal to live in your car in this country.

Most federal land isnt where people want to live.

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