And you seem to miss the fact that with UBI you have no incentive to live and stay in an expensive area.
For the deposit amount on an average house where I live I would cover 80% of the cash price of a bigger house country side. But you know, I'd have no work.
The problem is not housing, the problem is cramming all the work in cities. My last 3 jobs could've been done remotely, I asked and was always denied even while offering to take a pay cut.
I and many like me despise living in cities, we do not live there by choice. I've slightly moved out of a big one (London) but still live/work in the outer rim where housing is a dream far away, even on a way above average salary.
Give me UBI and I quit my job to settle country side tomorrow, so would my wife. So would a few of my colleagues.
Like many people here on HN, I can work from anywhere with electricity, Internet and decent cell phone coverage. But I still strongly prefer a bigger city, and I even prefer to be close to the city center, not out in suburbia. The reasons are many:
- close to the city center I can chose between some of the best schools in the country for my kids. Outside the city center, I would have to chose a mediocre school. In the cuntryside, I would have to have to go with whatever is there
- I like going out with my wife. In the city we can chose between all kinds of cuisines, cafes and bars. In a village, we would be lucky to find a pub with fries. In suburbia that would be a strip mall.
- Shopping in easy in the city center. Whether you like it or not, you need to do groceries on a daily basis and to buy clothes etc every now and then, and this is far easier when you live in the city.
- I like to walk for things (walk my kids to school, walk to do groceries, or just walk for the sake of it). Curiously, I find that this is easier in the city center with sidewalks and parks than in the countryside, where I would walk in the side of a highway or road.
- In the city center I can do sports (tennis, soccer). Yes, I might find that option in the countryside or in suburbia, but in the city I can chose between 10 different teams, venues etc.
- I like people. There are many more people in the cities, especially younger people.
- I like to travel. I can take the metro to the airport in the city and visit hundreds of places within a a few hours of flight. Driving 2 hours to the nearest local airport to transfer to a bigger airport would kill that. I live far from my family and friends. They would visit much less if I didn't live near an international airport.
What I am trying to say is that I think nowadays people live in the city for many other reasons than work.
See https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/01/the-s... for one example.
I think we both agree there.
From my own limited sample I see the opposite trend as well, people who would rather live country side.
What I was getting at is that even if people like me are a small sample (20%? more, less, who knows. If anyone has got numbers I'm interested), if you free us to go live country side suddenly there's more space and housing available for people like you.
If we are talking about a UBI, we might as well start treating people like people again instead of job-executing machines!
But who cares, we'll go trash Mars with Elon.
That's probably too radical!
I am homeless. I also have portable income. I have already used that fact to move someplace cheaper. That failed to get me back into housing. I plan to move again in the near future to move someplace even cheaper.
So, no, I am not missing anything. You are just LA LA LA not listening to the fact that if you cannot find housing cheap enough that your pathetic low income will cover rent, fuck you. So, I stand by my statement that UBI won't really do shit all if we don't solve the affordable housing issue.
If you're a halfway skilled programmer you can scrape together the equivalent of what you'd get on any sort of realistic UBI doing small freelance jobs while living in the country side.
If there was a serious safety net that guaranteed a decent quality of life, a significant portion of people would be taking on those options and leave the city centers.
That's one of the problems with UBI. It has a negative impact on productivity which is bad for society.
Speak for yourself, cowboy. It's ironic, considering how affectionate HN claims to be towards "disruption" and the many of us who have learned by doing, that this comment exists here. We should not make arbitrary judgements as to what someone else deserves, especially in regards to feeding his or her family, by applying our own sensibilities so broadly.
Please consider some re-framing. Everyone deserves to be part of society. Everyone ought to have the chance to contribute to the extent they can. No one deserves to be thrown away and forgotten.
Example: My wife's uncle can't hold a job and requires assistance for basic life tasks like figuring out how to live on his own. He wakes up everyday at five, takes the bus to the hospital and works as a (volunteer) greeter. He is not capable of a lot of tasks you'd associate with the idea of a job, but the work he does benefits society (makes the world better) it also benefits him to be able to give back.
Have you ever walked into a place and had no idea what to do next? Have you ever benefited from someone calm and welcoming who provided a quick hello and simple directions? Have you ever felt lost and just needed a human to help the littlest bit? There's room for a lot more humanity in the world I see around me. I don't know if there's strictly a financial need, but it would sure make the world a better place.
But back to my uncle by marriage: His work and his maintenance of basic needs are decoupled. I would argue that he deserves both. I don't know what you deserve or what you've earned or the relationship between the two. Let's just remember not to throw people away as we plan the future we'll all live inside.
A job implies that someone somewhere is paying for that job to exist. In a free society, you can't make it compulsory for someone to pay another individual to do work that isn't valuable to the person doing the paying.
If a society does not provide an individual the potential to live a comfortable life, the individual has no incentive to help that society.
bring back genuinely affordable housing
Getting into or out of a city is this recurring nightmare, of feeling trapped in a car or cramming into a train compartment with 250 other people.
We know how to fund, develop and create residential neighborhoods, but the interconnect with commercial and industrial zones, as lives change across decades becomes the challenge. People resist being packed together in stifling ways, and rightfully so. Some people hate the claustrophobia of cities, and some people chafe at simply having neighbors. Very few people would advocate for randomly assigned neighbors, if random includes ex-convicts for violent crimes, which becomes a reality in large cities.
If it were as simple as just building many reasonable houses, and bringing any people into them, to meet the needs of anyone who wants a place to live, this would have been solved a hundred years ago.
The concept of low-rise residential & commercial is very recent, and was a reaction to the cold war (eg: lets spread out, nukes can't kill us all then!). You end up with sprawling burbs covering your best farmland, and a crapton of infrastructure to maintain at great expense. If it weren't for federal infrastructure subsidies covering the up front capital for infrastructure, most suburbs would not exist.
You can build dense, multi-story complexes with good insulation and seperation, were it not for running into your neighbors at the mailbox, you'd hardly see them at all. Most buildings built from 2002 on in Seattle are of this caliber, and having put up walls before, stapling some insulation between isn't that hard or expensive, and is worth every dollar if you plan to live there.
The solution is to fast forward through the easy parts, do not block it. The trouble then becomes managing mixed age classes.
Neither can anyone else be trusted to know what the students want or need.
At least it looks like that these days.
Kids nowadays have even a more PC curriculum. Lord help them. My 15 year old niece who we are raising comes home with some pretty crazy stuff that is required.
I started college, but quit. I've been lucky/smart in my career. I started out in the Army and moved to Federal LEO that didn't require a degree. During the 90's I took a buyout and shifted into IT.(Still don't have a degree) Went back into the Army in 2007 and left in 2009, broken. (BTW I have Post 9/11 GI Bill, and still don't go.) Was tired of IT and ironically thought I would drive a truck. As the NYT article stated, what a thankless job. People treat you as second class citizens and the pay was horrible. Back to IT where I make a very good living and live in a suburb working in that suburb. 20 minute commute most days. Yes housing is expensive, but I have a rural property that is my refuge. Yes if I lived there, I would be hard pressed to find work. The only grocery store is a Piggly Wiggly that can't be more than 10k square feet. There farthest parking space is as close as the disabled ones at WalMart, so you need to be content with limited restaurants and stores and you pretty much have to have a car. I see people walking here and there, but that isn't something many can do.
As side note, my rural county has only two permit requirements. Electrical and Septic. I can build a house out of Popsicle sticks and no one would say boo about it.
Some observations on human nature, based on first hand experience. This is anecdotal evidence, but I have family members, friends and neighbors that have worked in factories. During conversations with them about changes taking place in their workplaces I hear about how they don't like them. Most of these changes are technological in nature. Most, not all, of these folks are too lazy to learn a new machine or process. All they want to do is come home and watch TV and many cases drink and do it all over again the next day. Go to work run a machine and make quota, go home.
These folks are smart enough to learn, but just don't want to. My Grandpa was like this. He was content to go work and straighten drills all day, go home read the paper, watch the news and go to bed. He wasn't a drinker.
I would ask him if he got bored straightening drills all day and he would just shrug. I couldn't get my mind around doing something that boring all all day. This was the 1970's BTW.
Just my 2 cents.
It's impossible to solve affordable housing by constructing more buildings and regulating prices. The only solution is to decrease demand, and large scale UBI helps do that because it frees people up to move to cheaper cities without having to worry so much about finding a job there.
There's a ton of affordable housing in the United States, the problem is the lack of jobs in those locations.
Why do we still have archaic zoning that forces worthless parking to be built (sub-$0.50sqft parking vs $3-4sqft housing)? Fixing this alone would cut $150 to $300 a month off rent in many complexes, as it is another massive cross-subsidy that goes markedly unused in newer buildings.
Lets not even touch on how zoning in nearly every city blocks high density development in smart areas (eg. adjacent to mass transit) and causes medium to low density, super expensive slum to be built. Who really wants a $600k 2 bed/1 bath home when a similar condo would be less than half the price on the same land?
TL;DR: Zoning is killing our cities and causing horrid price increases. Kill zoning, keep fire code, watch housing prices stabilize.
I do.
So I bought a place with a similar "you 'overpaid this much' ratio". Why? So we could live in (/on the edge of) Cambridge and have a small yard for my kids and dog to play in, have BBQs, grow plants and flowers, have a driveway/garage, a basement for projects and tinkering, etc.
It quite literally means that I will have to work 5-8 years longer before retirement to afford the excess we paid over a condo in a similar neighborhood. To me, that tradeoff (which is enormous - 12-20% of my prime adult years) is worth it.
The result is that while purchase prices (which are unregulated) have continued to increase in line with the rate of increase in other desirable world cities, rent prices are increasing at a much lower rate - and they started relatively (compared to purchase price) low to begin with.
Of course it's not a perfect system and i wish they'd cut down on the burocracy to enable building more units faster, but it did show an effect.
(Don't get into a suburb trap though. Mixed use is best to reduce unnecessary traffic.)
Dense development is cheaper in both the short term & long term, if we remove zoning barriers to it we can have affordable, unsubsidized and non-rent controlled apartments in Seattle. Instead we mandate worthless parking be built, despite that it is extremely costly and goes unused quite often, while capping and limiting how large & tall buildings are, kneecapping sustainable, affordable housing.
It's impossible to solve affordable housing
by constructing more buildings and
regulating prices.
> I seriously doubt that most people today would feel like someone with a 2nd grade education or even an 8th grade education deserves a job
Thankfully, a large number of people in the world support the idea of feeding the hungry in a way or another.
I desperately want to figure out how to establish an adequate earned income. I am not pro Basic Income. You can keep your charity. It is almost never anywhere near even the very average, middle of the road quality of the cheapest fast food places.
When free food is as good as what you relatively rich people are eating, then you can talk to me about how wonderful this impetus is. Until then, I would like a fucking adequate earned income, thanks. And I would like to see that standard applied more generally.
People who imagine they are generous, good people are very, very often just justifying incredibly bad treatment of other people that they don't really believe deserve a real life, like they have. If they believed that, instead of giving charity, they would create jobs and build affordable housing. But, no, we can't do that. And fuck you all to hell to the poor schmucks ending up homeless because of the incredibly shortage of affordable housing. Y'all all must just be losers. It couldn't possibly be that society as a whole is all kinds of fucked up and you just happened to draw one of the excessive number of short straws.
To be honest, I find that people who genuinely believe that about themselves are oblivious to how utterly hypocritical and inconsistent they are as human beings.
Some of the worst people in history have acted out of perceived righteousness.
I'm less concerned with what people's feelings are than I am about results. The problem here is the minimum wage. We send people to sub-par schools in shitty areas, denying them the ability to get the skills to be productive. Then we require employers to discriminate against them if their productivity is insufficient to justify the minimum wage. Without the minimum wage that abysmally educated person would be more likely to get some amount of productive work and learn skills which would make them qualified for other jobs with higher pay.
Wow that is a very controversial opinion. With a higher minimum wage, that person would have disposable time they could use for whatever they want, including study.
It's all well and good to want to study but for some their are many roadblocks. Not all bootstraps are made at the same length and some are just a little too short to reach.
Perhaps reducing or eliminating the minimum wage would make employers more productive and more profitable; they could then put that money back onto circulation, making life better for the entire economy. Or it could reinforce the concentration of wealth and put companies into the awkward position of not having anyone to sell their products to.
That's a very shallow view of the market, pretending like moving one thing doesn't move everything else. If the price of labor goes down, the price of goods and services will shortly follow suit. That's why shit produced in China has been so cheap, labor is cheap.
>Perhaps reducing or eliminating the minimum wage would make employers more productive and more profitable;
It would increase the economic efficiency of the entire system. The employers are already productive and profitable, they just ship your job to China where labor is cheaper. Not only are you unemployed, but every moment you lack a job your market value is decreasing. Nobody wants to hire someone who has been unemployed for a long time. You're also not building useful skills, or a reputation/references for being a good worker.
Average education levels for women when Abe Lincoln was president was 2nd-4th grade level. People routinely quit school after 8t grade. Often, only people who wanted a serious professional career went on to high school.
It is within my lifetime that we moved from more than half of all people living outside of cities to more than half living within cities. Not terribly long ago, most jobs were farm related in some fashion.
I don't know what the solution is, but I seriously doubt that most people today would feel like someone with a 2nd grade education or even an 8th grade education deserves a job as they are, without first getting more education. As society evolves, there tends to be upward pressure on how much education is needed to get even an entry level job. This is not merely assholery by the people running the bureaucracy or whatever. Things seem to genuinely get more complicated and take more skill.
I think one big piece of the puzzle is that we need to bring back genuinely affordable housing. It has largely gone the way of the dinosaur. I think this puts enormous pressure on people, regardless of what kind of job they have. It cuts off a lot of avenues.
But I seem to be howling into a void. Everyone seems to be discussing UBI and largely ignoring the fact that even if you cut everyone a check for some kind of basic income, if we don't solve some of our housing issues, you will still see growing numbers of people either homeless or crammed together like sardines in a space not intended to hold that many people.