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Comment by hokkos | Hacker News Reader

The reality of this housing policies is that it is currently bankrupting the city of Paris with a skyrocketing debt and growing local taxes. They spent enormous sum of money to buy old buildings at the historical peak of their price, buildings ill-fitted to house poor wide families and sometimes in very expansive neighborhood where they have to travel far to get access to cheaper groceries. Also the delta between the low rent and the theoretical market rate for the housing is insane, this is equivalent to several thousand euros in untaxed shadow income, all from randomness or special favor. All with the goal to transform 40% of the housing in socialised ones, this is a power grab of the mayor to assure them votes for the future and has always been the strategy of the communist towns surrounding Paris.

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I love how "giving poor people comfort" is always actually a "power grab."

I'm sure it does have political benefits for the mayor, but that's also a natural outcome of good policy. (Not the only one; often good policy actually has horrible backlash.)

This comment could be expressing some true ideas but I don't find it trustworthy.

There's a line somewhere where "giving poor people comfort" goes from providing good and useful social services to essentially a bribe. Where that line is varies based on who you ask - for some it's student debt cancellation (a US thing), for others it's $1000+ subsidies for housing, other people may not see any service the government provides as a "bribe" of any sort.

Caring about these bribes/"power grabs" is important (even if this guys comment strikes you as trollish). Just because you agree with a social service to benefit some group doesn't mean that the people in power won't abuse their power in the future. They might abuse their support by holding these social services (or "comforts") hostage. Once you have people who have adapted to living in their subsidized housing (which can/will happen quickly) you open the door for political leaders to say "you must vote for me or tolerate my bad behavior or else this goes away".

Even if the method by which "this goes away" is that the opposing political group would be the one to remove the social service, it's something that needs to be considered. To circle back, if you do something that is considered beyond the line of "comfort for poor people" and is seen as a "power grab" by enough people - you're more likely to have the opposition emboldened to eventually remove that service.

> There's a line somewhere where "giving poor people comfort" goes from providing good and useful social services to essentially a bribe.

I'm not sure I agree. Like giving out literal tons of candy and soda would be a political bribe but I wouldn't count it as "comfort"; it's poison. If you do think it's in the same category, I guess that would be my line - the aid should not be obviously harmful.

> you open the door for political leaders to say "you must vote for me or tolerate my bad behavior or else this goes away" ... Even if the method by which "this goes away" is that the opposing political group would be the one to remove the social service

But that's true of literally everything a government does, isn't it? It's the nature of power being centralized that if one person can force a change, their replacement can undo it. Even if the 1st person is completely earnest and never makes such a statement it is implicitly part of the process and people will make their votes with that expectation.

You are free to not agree that giving housing subsidies is not crossing the line into bribe territory. I would say it's important for you to understand that for many people, there is a line. Your example of unlimited candy and soda as being a bribe is a bit odd, but also seems demonstrative to me that your thinking on this is further to an extreme than you might realize.

And yes - this is true of everything the government does. That's why it's an important thing to consider when the government promises to do something or provide a service. It can go away at any time, and people who became reliant on it will suffer it's loss.

That's why I'm saying it's really important to consider that for some people, certain policies can cross a line for what feels fair or what feels like a political bribe. Like I said, you're free to disagree with where that line is, but pretending it doesn't exist (or just writing off anyone on the other side of it) is a sure fire way to bring about consequences that just might be worse than what was originally happening.

I'm not pretending people don't have their own lines, but I think they're fundamentally wrong to say the line exists within the space of "doing unequivocally good things for poor people [which admittedly may have negative downstream effects, as do all actions]"

> That's why it's an important thing to consider when the government promises to do something or provide a service. It can go away at any time, and people who became reliant on it will suffer it's loss.

Sure, it's something to think about, but it's not a realistic impediment to enacting a good policy. If the worst thing you can say about a policy is that "it might end, and that would be bad" you should do that policy. Besides, government programs tend to get institutionalized and are often much harder to undo than to do.

Can you provide some sources on the Paris city’s budget and debt? I couldn’t find anything on it. France’s debt looks roughly linear, which I imagine would support Paris a lot

https://cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/lep...

This is maybe interesting or useful: https://www.worlddata.info/europe/france/debt.php

It's a comparison of the debt per capita of France compared to the rest of the EU (in USD). It looks to me like France started to take on more debt per person around 2007/08 and as recently as 2022 had $13k more debt/capita than the EU, or +40% more debt per citizen.

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