this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
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I think a big component of the problem is location. I may have a different perspective living in a low cost of living city. Just a few years ago I lived in a two bedroom apartment that was $650/mo. It was old and not very nice, but totally functional and reasonably safe. It was a bigger complex so the landlord was a management company. They weren't amazing or anything, but they held up their end of the lease. I understand the situation somewhere like NYC or California is going to be radically different.
I think that's where a really interesting question comes in though, do people have a right to housing? Or a right to housing in the place they're currently living? It's a big difference. Forcibly relocating people is... Problematic at best. But there are places like LA where it's almost physically (geologically) impossible to build enough housing for everyone who wants to live there.
If you haven't already I'd recommend listening to the podcast mini series "according to need" by 99 percent invisible. I really appreciated the perspective it offers into some of the practical challenges of trying to get homeless people housed.
Ultimately I don't know that I'd call housing a "right", purely for semantic reasons, but I do think the very existence of homelessness and housing insecurity is a devastating critique of our social and economic systems. I didn't think we'll ever have a system that completely eliminates renting/short term housing, but we do clearly need to change a lot of things about how housing works now.
I had an enormous reply essentially "yes-and'ing" your reply (I agree with it, but wanted to add a "but" in a few places), but...into the ether it went. I'll listen to that podcast mini series.
One thing I wanted to add is that I grew up in Atlanta, so I agree that plenty of folks should leave NYC and LA. However, there's plenty of folks there necessary for the city to function, and I think that legislation is probably the only viable way that things will change for them, since lower-income folks are just being squeezed from all directions, given how much of a commodity real estate has gotten since the last big housing bubble burst.
Again though, I'm not an economist, so my ideas are certainly not immediately viable, and I agree there's little chance of "solving" most of this under the best of circumstances. I just think there's too much greed, especially related to housing, that can be improved. We're a rich enough nation that we can do better. Also I just wanted to be sure to give your nice comment a thoughtful reply, because the internet is too toxic in general, and we need to try to make it otherwise. Have a nice end of the year