Hacker News Reader

Comment by Schnitz | Hacker News Reader

That’s some third world stuff right there. This of course should be illegal. She’s taking a public resource (street parking), privatizing it by occupying it with her RV and then charging rent for it. Godspeed if you live on the street where she does this.

View on HN

My gut reaction is that (A) yes, it's an improper exploitation of public resources, and also (B) the severity of depends a bit on whether anyone else wants to use the space, varying between "hell no" versus "who cares".

With respect to (B), the article says:

> on the street in the East Meadow neighborhood of Palo Alto

Perhaps a Palo Alto native can chime in, but my remote map-searching suggests she's putting those RVs in areas [0] (18,20,21,28) where it seems reasonable for other people to complain, as opposed to some disued access road.

[0] https://paneighborhoods.org/neighborhood-map/

I'll guess by intersection of Fabian Way with E. Meadow Dr. on either of these 2 streets.

Fabian Way is an office/industrial area near the major 101 freeway with wide streets and plenty of room for the RVs. Seems entirely reasonable to park RVs there. The surrounding office buildings have acres of empty parking lots. I can see if they stay a long time or are broken down and it becomes a shanty town that would be a problem, but given the problem of stupidly high rents pricing people out of homes, this seems a reasonable solution. City could lease an empty office building and allow cars/RVs in the parking lot with services like security, showers and social services in the office building.

I was ready to agree with you but then you went to blame her and not the economic environment that made this viable—even desirable compared to alternatives. I could never imagine paying for one of these things unless I was in a truly desperate position. It's the zeroth responsibility of government to keep people from being desperate by providing better alternatives. Both because of empathy but also because desperate people have nothing to lose and people with nothing to lose are a powder keg waiting for a spark. This woman should have no customers because there's an alternative better than living in a RV with no plumbing.

For what she’s charging you could easily afford an apartment somewhere that isn’t Palo Alto.

I get what you’re saying but I think you’re going too far in the other direction. Some people are okay with a “bohemian” lifestyle and want to live on the beach in Venice or Palo Alto or whatever and will use exploitative means to do so.

Yeah, these people could just get apartments in Stockton, then spend four hours each day commuting to their jobs in Palo Alto. Totally makes sense.

apparently the other option, as seen in the comments, is that the government bulldoze the houses on that same street to build a highly dense row of flophouses

like I said elsewhere, just move where you can afford. wherever that is, it's probably a few decades away from being some future generation's dream home

I would like to see her expand onto the water with housing barges and eventually decommissioned cruise ships.

The other option would be more like, incumbent Palo Alto single family homeowners can sell their homes at a huge premium to developers who want to build multi-family homes there to satisfy the obvious demand for more housing.

The two types of houses:

60's starter homes breathed on by rich corpos like in Palo Alto

Flophouses

You must be a property owner, these are all just the same tired NIMBY talking points

Everyone who lives in a house on a piece of land is privatising a public resource. Yes, it should be illegal, but equally Prop 13 should never have been passed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com