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Comment by funkyy | Hacker News Reader

From when giving stuff for free to people helps them? How will they learn to save and organize their lives? Social welfare was never a solution to ANY problem when provided long term to the same people. Instead of giving for free lets do this - ask people to work for 8 hours a week cleaning streets etc - and IN EXCHANGE their water bills will be paid off.

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Do you seriously contend that the problems plaguing Detroit are a result of their residents' collective failure to organize their lives properly? I think most people agree that the rampant poverty in Detroit -- and the resulting unpaid water bills -- are largely a result of city-level mismanagement and the evaporation of employment opportunities resulting in tax-revenue death spiral. We're talking about a city where the police sometimes just don't show up in response to burglaries and the school system doesn't provide city-wide busing. And you're here lecturing the entire population of Detroit about financial responsibility.

Perhaps there are some Detroit residents who, if they were just a little more organized, could get themselves into a better situation. But some of them are just in bad situations no matter what they do. And who knows, maybe some of them haven't paid their water bills because they have decided that food, shelter, and medicine are more important. But nah, best to leave them with no running water. Otherwise, how will they learn?

Edit: I suspect if the city of Detroit offered the deal you're suggesting, there would be lines for it around the block (though even these lines would contain only the people who had transportation to get to the line, had someone to watch their children while they worked, etc.).

Detroit has also raised the price of water a couple times over the last decade to make up for budget shortfalls from lower tax revenue. I think it's more than double what it was in 2005.

Right. There have been increases in the price of water in Detroit. And they're angling to increase them again.

So shouldn't the project focus on providing decentralized water management to residents (roof capture, condensing from the air) instead of funneling money into a system used for tax collection with the side effect of providing water?

Solar can be used for distributed generation, why can we not provide distributed water production?

From talking to hundreds of people over the course of running this project, in many cases, what we have is not a failure to organize one's life. Instead, it's life events such as being laid off or having a medical issue get out of hand and force a person to leave work and forgo a salary that cause people to fall behind and need assistance.

In other cases, people are in situations where they're not earning enough to cover all of their life expenses, but the water department itself has turned them down for assistance. We see their attempts to do the best they can in their payment patterns. $25 here, $50 there as soon as they can.

These are not people that sit around actively looking for handouts. And many people we've helped have volunteered to help us however they can.

These people were doing fine before all the jobs disappeared. Whatever's wrong with Detroit, it's not that all the people magically forgot how to "organize their lives".

And objectively, giving people money works pretty well. https://web.archive.org/web/20101107195857/http://www.econom... https://web.archive.org/web/20141111020223/http://www.vox.co...

There is a growing opinion and growing number of studies done on the subject. That is, simply giving poor people cash helps alleviate poverty in better ways than (many or most) organized projects can, as the theory is that they better know how to spend it on their needs than those in position to help.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/10/25/240590433/what-hap...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/opinion/let-them-eat-cash....

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141214/christopher-bl...

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