But they'd still have the same choice they have now. Pay more for something better. Right now their choice is to pay more, potentially sacrificing something even worse, or to be homeless. Presumably the small living space is better than homelessness, right? And if it somehow wasn't, the latter would still be available, which is what happens now.
> My gut feeling is that the social consequences would be subtle and easily overlooked by officials but widespread and long lasting.
It has the potential to do the opposite. It makes low cost housing available (even if it sucks), which provides a backstop against high rents because people won't pay an extra $3000/month just for access to a window. But then the high rents go away and with them the incentive to constrain new construction, and then we can build more apartments that actually have windows.
Then the windowless space gets converted back into storage or something as long as better housing isn't forced into scarcity, but if it is then that space goes back into service suppressing high rents.
> Yes, it's on top of the wide livable areas though.
And so is the part of the office building on the exterior where there is a window.
It doesn't work like that. With cheap cells the low wages will adjust since some people are prepared to live in those, underbidding people that want to be able to see the sun in a race to the bottom.
That isn't how wages work. They're set by the local supply and demand of labor.
By your logic there would be no point in making housing more affordable at all because employers would just lower wages.
That logic doesn't work when the resident isn't paying the house, or not in full. A locality mandating housing is one example: if they go for the bare and cheapest minimum to fullfil an obligation for a specified number of houses, allowing for basement closets will result in more basement closets, without anyone being less homeless than they were before.
An employer providing rooms for employees is another. And there's so many more cases.
I see it the same way as minimum wages. Putting the bar too high is penalizing for everyone, but lowering it to the ground only breeds a hellscape.
> It has the potential to do the opposite.
But it's only a potential. And the other side is not hypothetical, it's what we had before the regulations, and it was bad enough that people agreed to put rules in place.
The root problem here is that you're trying to mandate housing rather than adopting policies that allow market rate housing to be affordable. When there is demand for housing and no law prohibiting it, people build housing. You shouldn't have to mandate it unless you're already screwing it up to begin with.
But even if you were to mandate some specific construction, you could set minimum requirements for that without prohibiting someone else who is under no obligation to build anything from building something inexpensive without those requirements.
> An employer providing rooms for employees is another.
Which doesn't even happen in urban environments unless it's some kind of tax dodge and then it's being supplied to affluent employees who aren't going to live in a closet.
Can you name a single company that actually does this for low wage employees in e.g. New York City?
> I see it the same way as minimum wages. Putting the bar too high is penalizing for everyone, but lowering it to the ground only breeds a hellscape.
I see it the same way as minimum wages. A worthless policy that doesn't even solve the problem it's supposed to solve, often makes it worse, and would have no purpose or effect in the event that we solved it properly.
It's also not really even that debatable that we've set the bar too high for housing. Never mind requirements for windows, we have requirements for parking and, in many areas lawns that consume the majority of the lot which in itself can only have a building of a low maximum height.
> But it's only a potential.
It's not a hypothetical, it's a thing that happens in particular circumstances -- namely the undersupply of housing. If you can fix that then it wouldn't happen but you wouldn't need it to.
> And the other side is not hypothetical, it's what we had before the regulations, and it was bad enough that people agreed to put rules in place.
People put the rules in place to price the "undesirables" out of the area, not to help them out.
If you were trying to help them out you wouldn't prohibit the only housing they can afford, you would adopt policies that result in the creation of lots of new housing that causes the market price of a quality unit with lots of natural light to fall to the price they can afford.
Easily overlooked? Hell no. That would be part of the plan from the start: punish the undesirables for being poor, remind them of their low status in society every single day.
The requirement that rooms designated for living need adequate access to sunlight came out of the desire to eliminate such discrimination.
As opposed to now, when they have to live under an overpass because they can't afford rent?
> The requirement that rooms designated for living need adequate access to sunlight came out of the desire to eliminate such discrimination.
It came out of a desire to force "undesirables" out of the area by preventing them from being able to afford any of the housing there, along with all of the other requirements that amount to "housing the poorest can afford is not allowed here."
The exception would be people who don't care, e.g. someone who works nights and doesn't want daylight in the place where they sleep while they're trying to sleep, and then all you're doing is depriving them of an opportunity to save money through their own circumstances.
The only reason a poor person in ordinary circumstances would choose lower quality housing is if we fail to provide affordable, quality housing, which is currently happening, and in that case if we also prohibit lower quality housing they end up under the overpass. So there is never any reason to prohibit it. Because you can't improve peoples' lives by removing alternatives, you have to create them -- they can themselves eliminate bad options by choosing better ones, but only if they're allowed to exist.
Roller shutters, nothing easier than that. These things are standard in Germany.
> The only reason a poor person in ordinary circumstances would choose lower quality housing is if we fail to provide affordable, quality housing, which is currently happening, and in that case if we also prohibit lower quality housing they end up under the overpass. So there is never any reason to prohibit it. Because you can't improve peoples' lives by removing alternatives, you have to create them -- they can themselves eliminate bad options by choosing better ones, but only if they're allowed to exist.
The problem is slumlords. Allowing usage of unfit rooms (i.e. no/small windows, basement rooms) for permanent living once makes it very hard to force landlords to upgrade these rooms or condemn them later on, and in 40 years society will still be dealing with that fallout. Rooms without windows to escape are deadly fire traps, and basement rooms can be just as deadly (or at least destructive) in floods.
Whatever we create now will most likely outlive us, so we better do it right now instead of just kicking the can down the road for the next decades!
The problem is not that they can't figure out how to cover the window, the problem is that you're forcing them to pay extra for the window they're only going to cover up.
> The problem is slumlords.
Slumlords exist because housing supply is constrained. If good housing was affordable, nobody would take a trivial discount to live in a slum.
> Allowing usage of unfit rooms (i.e. no/small windows, basement rooms) for permanent living once makes it very hard to force landlords to upgrade these rooms or condemn them later on
The key is to force them through competition rather than zoning. Nobody wants to live in a crappy apartment but they will if it's the only thing available to them. Make something better affordable and the owner of the crappy apartment would have to improve it to find a tenant.
> Rooms without windows to escape are deadly fire traps, and basement rooms can be just as deadly (or at least destructive) in floods.
Rooms don't have to have windows to have fire exits. "Floods can destroy your stuff" hasn't prevented every suburban homeowner from keeping stuff in their basement, and it's not obvious how that's even relevant to residential tenants keeping their stuff in the interior section of an above-ground floor of a formerly commercial building.
> Whatever we create now will most likely outlive us, so we better do it right now instead of just kicking the can down the road for the next decades!
Buildings last a long time. What you use them for can change in a week. If you turn a commercial building into low-cost apartments during a housing shortage and then you later resolve the housing shortage by building higher quality apartments, you can turn it back into a commercial building, or whatever else is needed at the time.
The problem is when you're prohibited from converting it to the use which is currently in demand, and then rents are high and people are screwed because you took away a bad option and only left a worse one.
> My gut feeling is that the social consequences would be subtle and easily overlooked by officials but widespread and long lasting.
The social consequences of getting rid of tenements have been people sleeping in tents by the overpass. 7,000 of them in my town of 730,000. (Up from 5,000 three years ago.)
Maybe we should give tenements a try again? It's not like the overpass option is going to go anywhere.
People who's lives are otherwise OK apart from an inability to afford housing tend to have support networks which provide them a better fallback option than living on the street, be that living with family, couch surfing, etc. Consequently, they tend not to get included in official homeless figures. The people who do get included in official homeless figures are going to have issues providing landlord the reassurances they need to rent to them, such as prior references, proof of employment, etc. etc. This is going to be true no matter how substandard the housing on the market is.
Instead, allowing tenement-tier housing is likely to lead to a reduction in supply of what is now the bottom tier, as landlords of that tier of property reorganise existing properties to cram more people in, reducing standards of living.
That just means the problem is bigger than the official numbers suggest. And mooching off your friends and family often creates resentment and friction, which leaves those people at risk of falling into the other group as soon as they have a falling out unless you can get them into their own stable housing.
> The people who do get included in official homeless figures are going to have issues providing landlord the reassurances they need to rent to them, such as prior references, proof of employment, etc. etc. This is going to be true no matter how substandard the housing on the market is.
That's not true at all. Lower cost units require less in the way of references because the landlord has less at risk when the value of the unit is lower, and has more trouble finding someone who wants to live in it.
You can also reduce the prevalence of these requirements by not making it arduous for landlords to evict non-paying tenants, which is the primary reason they care about any of those things now.
> Instead, allowing tenement-tier housing is likely to lead to a reduction in supply of what is now the bottom tier, as landlords of that tier of property reorganize existing properties to cram more people in, reducing standards of living.
This is not a reduction in standard of living for the people who were previously homeless or the people who choose to live in those new units in exchange for lower rent. Having a smaller apartment in exchange for lower rent is not inherently a reduction in standard of living, and generally wouldn't be what someone chooses unless it isn't.
The people who want to pay the existing rents for the type of units they're in now would be free to do so, if not get those units at a lower rent because the tenements have increased the number of available housing units and relieved some of the demand pressure on existing units.
"Welcome. Welcome, to City 17. You have chosen--or been chosen--to relocate to one of our finest remaining urban centers. I thought so much of City 17, that I elected to establish my administration, here, in the citadel, so thoughtfully provided by our benefactors. I am proud to call City 17 my home. And so, whether you are here to stay, or passing through to parts unknown, welcome, to City 17. It's safer here."
'Course, that particular dystopia was terrible for a whole bunch of reasons where population density was not one of them.
Have some housing in the "good" parts, but use the rest another way.
This is the road to hell. Anyone can always come up with an excuse for why something shouldn't be done and if you accept them all then nothing ever gets built and people can't afford to live.
Construction requirements should be for things that are profoundly dangerous and not obvious, like having circuit breakers on electrical circuits or constructing buildings that are structurally sound or having fire exits.
Anybody can see how many windows or bathrooms a place has and you don't die if you get your natural light from going outside or occasionally have to wait in line for the facilities.
This is one of my nightmares. What if we allowed people to live in basically confinment cells and they have no choice as they're broke af or the gov or their companies assigns them one in a relocation program.
My gut feeling is that the social consequences would be subtle and easily overlooked by officials but widespread and long lasting.
> Houses in the suburbs often contain a large amount of space with no windows
Yes, it's on top of the wide livable areas though.