the problem of affordable housing is actually very simple and the solution is obvious; too many people are moving to big cities; so everyone ends up competing for increasingly limited real estate (in a desperate bid to cut their commute times to less than 2 hours per day).

One of the main reasons why so many people are moving to urban centers is because that's where all the jobs are; it's a direct result of the centralization of capital in the hands of corporations. Corporate HQs are in big cities because they want to get access to the best talent and corporations are more likely to find talent in places where there are lots of people to choose from.

One solution would be for the government to introduce legislation to encourage companies to hire remote workers. Another solution would be for the government to introduce legislation to make the economy less focused on corporate growth.

Due in a large part to corporate lobbying, whenever a politician is presented a choice between a free solution and an expensive one; they tend to pick the expensive one.

You want the population clustering into big, transit-centric cities to unwind car-dependence and avert climate change.

The current urban migration is basically a reversal to the mean and should be beneficial in the long term.

Racism absolutely played a role in how it went down, as did government policy. But the invention of the modern suburb grew directly out of the events of WW2 making it possible for the US to rapidly build large numbers of homes.

People moved away from urban centers because they believed (correctly) that living in dense cities detrimentally impacted their health. This later accelerated in part because of racial reasons.

Housing demand could have easily been met (and was met in Asia and Europe) by building denser urban structures, which is what you would expect to happen if there was a confluence of housing demand, increased wealth, and a general interest in living in cities. There was no interest in the latter, which is why suburbanization took place.

Capital naturally wants to aggregate and trickle up, not trickle down. So if most of the newly minted Fed money was injected at the bottom (instead of at the top as is the case now), it would probably flow through the whole system more efficiently.

We need a progressive tax on corporate revenue (ex > 100M 0.1%, >250M 0.3%, >500M 0.5%) so companies have to pay more if they use economies of scale to consolidate power. It should be more expensive to be big.

It is, but they can afford it because when it comes to access to capital, they're at the front of the line. When the Fed creates new money through government loans or engages in open market operations, corporations are the first entities to get a hold of that money. It's like they have pipelines that feed new Fed-generated cash straight into their bank accounts.

Just look at Oracle; their software is mostly legacy. They make all their money from huge government contracts. The government doesn't really care about how inefficient or expensive Oracle is because the money comes from taxpayers; if the government overspends, they can just get more money from the Fed.

Perhaps the government needs to create that money through UBI instead.

SROs used to be pretty commonly available. We tore down up to 80 percent of them over the course of two decades, probably because Baby Boomers were wealthy enough to not need something that cheap. We never rebuilt them.

I think rebuilding them would be a step in the right direction.

They used to be just normal rentals for people just starting out who didn't have much money. If you watch old movies or movies set in a prior era (like "A walk in the clouds"), this was normal market-rate housing for folks without tons of money. And that's mostly not the case anymore in the US.

Also, the last time I looked -- back when I actually lived in the San Francisco Bay Area well over a decade ago -- SROs in San Francisco were already more than $1000/month.

I would like to read through the several thousand page Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, but I'm having trouble finding the time. I haven't gotten very far.

I am trying to create pilot programs and find things that actually work. I would like to stop just shooting down suggestions that don't work and start saying "Well, we did x, y and z in my small town and that got such and such results and here is how you can try to replicate that." But I'm still struggling to make ends meet myself, and yadda. So it's slow going.

In my mind if you have the interest to read HackerNews you would have the skills to get a decent job that would get you off the street. I'm clearly unaware of the obstacles that prevent that and would like to learn more.

I live in South Africa and the inequality here is horrendous but most of that is due to a disparity of education. There is a shortage of skilled workers so in my mind someone with HN interests wouldn't struggle to find enough work to avoid homelessness.

Part of it is that housing policy here has serious issues. We have changed zoning, etc, such that it is nearly impossible to build the kind of walkable communities that existed in this country before the automobile took over. The New Urbanist movement tried to build walkable communities. They found it very challenging to get such plans approved at all.

Another piece is that we don't have good health care policies. Most people on the street in the US have some kind of health issue, whether medical or mental health. Our policies in the US don't do a good job of providing for such people. Most developed countries have much better policies for dealing with people with serious issues of that sort.

Here are a couple of my blogs if you want to try to read through them, though I don't know if that will really answer your question:

https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/

https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/

I would like to see the affordable housing shortage tackled and the health care issue resolved. I think if those issues are not resolved, basic income will likely actually make things worse for poor people who will then get dismissed as not trying hard enough, not managing their UBI, etc. I think giving UBI to people in the current American climate will just mask the real problems and make people who are comfortably well off even more callous about "Not my problem. It's just a personal issue and the world isn't obligated to fix your personal issue."

I already get told on a regular basis that the housing crisis isn't really a problem. It isn't a problem for the well-heeled, so they don't see why others find it so monstrous and impossible.

Note that the University system is a form of this - and it worked! springing up "college towns" all over the country, many then creating job centers for decades.

The problem is that big cities (esp Silicon Valley) have figured out how to "poach" newly formed companies: you can have my capital, but I need you to relocate...

It should quickly progress so that you have to sell your eleventh house to pay annual tax for tenth and to count your properties you should include the ones you own directly but also the ones owned by entities you own.

This tax would be even good if the money gathered was used for any purpose other than basic income. It incentivises ownership by dropping property prices and discourages rent seeking hoarding of finite and basic resource.

Go to a smaller town and housing is pretty cheap there. If you get a larger influx of people moving there because of cheap housing, then those cities will suddenly have more job openings available because they have to meet the needs of more people.

Let me correct that for you: a single, childless person cannot maintain a lower-middle class living standard on $1000/month. If you start giving up amenities, you can live on less money. You don't need cable TV, nor do you need to have a budget for eating out. Of course, the two single biggest savings you can do are a) move to a lower cost of living area and b) get a roommate or two. Half the rent of a 2-bedroom apartment is going to be about 50-60% the rent of a one-bedroom apartment.

Basic income shouldn't be targeted to ensuring that people can afford to bum around on no income in a high-cost of living area. If you want to live in a high-cost location, you should secure the income to live there.

Sam Altman and other tech giants are proposing basic income as a means to provide for people incapable of getting jobs due to automation permanently eliminating jobs for large numbers of people. They predict permanent unemployment of up to 80 percent of the population.

The jobs being eliminated currently pay between $20k and $50k. Once they eliminate those jobs, they are talking about giving you about $10k and no hope of ever having a full time job again.

Please go talk to the people who are proposing UBI as a solution to this scenario, not me. I am not actually pro UBI. I am for seeing this as another industrial revolution and further improving worker's rights. Among other things, the first industrial revolution gave birth to the expectation of a 40 hour work week in order to spread earned income around.

I am all for people working for a better life. But people like Sam Altman would like to design a world in which that is simply not possible for most Americans and would like to then throw a few crumbs to the masses for whom a job is simply not a possibility in the world they foresee and would like to optimize for.

(Though I think if your goal is to eliminate jobs -- rather than find ways to redistribute work -- then UBI needs to be designed as a middle class income, not a poverty level income. Otherwise, you are an asshole in my book if this is the world you want to design for people who aren't already millionaires.)

The part of the problem that nobody ever seems able to solve, is what you do for existing owners who are locked into a 30 year mortgage on their $1,000,000+ property. You would effectively be wiping out their life savings. There would need to be some way of appeasing the existing owner base, before you can ever solve the housing crisis.

In the 1950s, most new homes were around 1200 square feet and held about 4.5 people. Today, the typical new home is over 2400 square feet and holds about 3.5 people (IIRC).

I see zero reason why 2400 square foot homes would lose any value whatsoever if we built more small homes so people who can't afford a house that big can still afford a place of their own.

One factor why house prices are high is that demand exceeds supply. By building small homes, a lot of demand would be catered to by a new pool of housing. Heck, even those who could afford bigger houses but prefer smaller houses for whatever reasons (eg. frugality) would be removed from demand side. So now there would be a downward pressure on house prices.

This means that downward pressure on home prices amounts to slowing hyperinflation to a more reasonable rate. This isn't remotely the same as gutting the equity for existing homeowners (much less putting them "upside down," where they owe more than the house is worth).

http://www.worldpropertyjournal.com/real-estate-news/united-...

Finding something under $550 almost anywhere I'm the US that isn't senior housing or a trailer is challenging. They exist, but it's not as readily available as many people seem to imagine. There are places for less than that, but if you expect some kind of decent housing on a budget, it's a tough thing to find.

I live without a car and that complicated things. A lot of places don't have walkable neighborhoods or good transit. If you need a car to get around, that substantially increases your real cost of living.

I get really tired of repeating myself on this topic. I also worry that I will get viewed as someone harping on it or with a political agenda for simply trying to rebut the endless statements about how poor people can just move someplace cheap.

I'm poor. I have portable income. I'm a former military wife who doesn't mind moving. And I found it incredibly challenging to find someplace to move that I could afford and where I could readily access basic essentials like groceries and good internet service without a car.

If "just move someplace cheap" was all it took, I would have shut up about my problems years ago and just sat around humming to myself about how slick I am and how all the other poor Americans are just dummies who are doing it wrong. It's really not that simple. Even if you have portable income, finding an affordable, livable place in the US is challenging.

It complicates things quite significantly. In fact, if you were to remove this constraint then the problem becomes much more tractable. This factor alone limits you to urban locations because public transit alone is hard enough to find and absolutely nowhere in the US had decent public transit outside of an urban core except for a few cities that are already expensive to start with. There are not many of these places where you are not going to be competing with either university students, well-paid 20/30-somethings, or both.

To be honest I don't think any American city is going to provide this and until Americans get over their automobile fetish I don't think any place will even try to serve this requirement. It is quite normal in Europe, but only big, expensive cities work well for people without cars.

I'm wondering if you've thought of how much having that portable income would have helped you if you were actually able to drive.

If 90% of people with portable income were able to drive would they be able to move to cheaper places successfully? If that were to happen then the 10% who couldn't drive would suddenly find less competition (and therefore lower costs) for renting places in the areas that actually had good public transit options.

My medical bills are supposed to be thousands per month. I live on under $2000 per month most of the time. I am vastly more productive in dry areas with little ragweed and I need much less in the way of medical care.

This is part of why a lot of these one-sized-fits-all solutions for poor Americans are fundamentally bad ideas: They optimize for one metric only -- upfront cost -- and completely ignore large numbers of other issues.

The reality is that "cheap" solutions are often very expensive. Poverty is an expensive way to live.

If you look at the lifetime cost of a solution, the "cheap" answer is often the absolute most expensive in the long run.

Saying poor Americans with portable income should just leave the country doesn't strike me as a real solution, for a long list of reasons.

As the American population ages, this is increasingly becoming an issue. If you need to drive to maintain your independence, you lose your independence when you can no longer safely drive, possibly because you simply don't see well enough anymore, even if you are otherwise competent.

My sucktastic eyesight is part of why I no longer drive.

One of the issues in the US is that small towns and rural areas often lack high speed internet. If we could spread high speed internet to small towns and rural areas, that would help. It would make it easier to shop online for things not supplied by local stores, keep yourself entertained, do some socializing via internet and even have an earned income as a remote worker if that's what you want.

This was one of the things I checked for before moving to a small town to get back into housing. Since I do earn money via remote work, I need reasonably high speed internet to make my life work. I can't function on dial-up speeds.

Many people casually suggesting poor people should move to cheaper parts of the US don't seem to realize that those places may not have high speed internet. Good internet access can go a long ways towards making life without a car work. If you have neither a car nor good internet, moving someplace cheap in the US can be a serious hardship that cuts you off from having much of a life at all.

But it should be easy to get a visa to live in Mexico, Costa Rica, Portugal, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovenia, etc.

Thailand and India are more complicated, yes, but getting out for a couple of days every and year and coming back is not such a big issue.

Moving to countries which are objectively unsafe outside of a few protected tourist hotspot areas isn’t a good idea for anyone who’s vulnerable.

And I think the reality of this statement is lost of many folks, because it's not just large cities that have this problem. I live in a moderately sized city (~100k people) and rents here are nearly $1000/mo for an average one bedroom apartment.

Everybody starts getting basic income? Rents will rise to eat up the majority of that income without some external control. The same way we needed unions, minimum wage, etc. we need a collective bargaining system for the renters vs. landowners. Rent control, what have you. It's kind of the antithesis of the American dream but what we have isnt working all that well.

There is a serious homeless problem in the US. Some folks "living somewhere" are living in a tent or an illegal Air BnB etc.

They live together when they prefer to have their own base (like 4 workers sharing the same 2 bed-rooms). They also live with their parents, as inconvenient as it is.

No there is a housing problem.

The west could leverage by doing that plus having an option to have a country side home and car for the weekend. Instead we have busy highways, old buildings, slow common transportation, etc...

New York is a good example but it blows my mind why they don't invest more in the subway, modernize the buildings, etc... Plus it cost a fortune to live there.

Free markets need 'choice' to work efficiently, consumer choice, manufacturers choice, its always labour who don't have 'real choice' as you need to work to survive, it's not a choice. And no labour market is ever liquid or fluid enough to afford 'choice' and the very nature of labour makes quick choice difficult.

What basic income has the potential to do is introduce choice in this critical component of free markets and give it the same power as capital and consumer choice.

However given how disruptive it is to 'entrenched interests' its an extremely difficult idea to pull off. It defines the bitter struggle between capital and labour for 300 years and there won't be easy wins. Studies, funding, motives, methodologies, data need to be examined carefully as they could be studies simply to discredit the idea and kill it at birth, or reduce it to a 'extremely basic income' as a tool to subsidize employers.

I think there's a general problem here, about the "how much you got?" economy -- increasingly many critical goods are charged for in a way that effectively eats up any gain in income. For example, college and health care -- you get hit with an obscenely high bill and they just figure out how much you can really afford and charge that.

If you took all the investors out of the housing market, housing should cost just the price of construction.

$500k properties are torn down to build new homes.

Is this really the demographic that should be optimized for? Seems there's a nice financial incentive to find a partner and split the cost of rent. As a single childless person myself (who has shared rental houses with a friend for several years now to lower costs of rent and keep it "affordable") I've been led to believe that the cost of having children amortizes (especially as you add more children) with incentives, and really pays off as you get into old age. If it were up to me I'd rather optimize for the family unit rather than singles.

We have more singles, more childless couples and more single parents. Their housing needs are not being met. We expect young single people to rent an apartment designed for a family and get roommates.

If that works for you, that's already available. The assumption that someone with basic income should get a roommate is an assumption that they really aren't allowed to aspire to the same things as middle class people, like a space of their own.

A lot of women currently de facto use a romantic partner as a means to cover rent and it causes all kinds of problems. Expecting people to pair off to have a decent place is essentially expecting a polite form of prostitution.

What it really boils down to is that an average middle class family in the past had a full-time housekeeper. Typically, those housekeepers were single women. Nowadays, that same demographic group has kids of their own. I wouldn’t call it prostitution so much as pragmatism.

Which then puts you into a situation where your financial and housing security is dependent on a relationship working.

No thanks. That's not a nice incentive.