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Darmok eats Challah at 12NagraHamilton Nolan
6/22/16 1:34pm
If you say move out of the city to a suburb, go f- yourself. Some people live in Pennsylvania just to get to work in Manhattan. That is no way to live.

If New York is mostly full of poor people, it’s amazing how those developers manage to pack their expensive condos full of the rich.
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  ThidrekrDarmok eats Challah at 12Nagra
  6/22/16 1:43pm
  Nobody said these expensive condos were operating at full occupancy. In many cases, they’re just owned as “investment properties.” If there’s anything I’d love to see a crackdown on, it’s that.
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  e30s2kDarmok eats Challah at 12Nagra
  6/22/16 1:48pm
  Common and tired argument here in San Francisco too. The usual response is “move out of the city if you can’t afford it!”...but there aren’t any suburbs within 2 hours drive of the city that are any cheaper, especially after factoring in job opportunities and commute costs & time. And even in this magical world where people who can’t afford to live in a city move away - then who the hell ends up teaching our kids, working at cafes, delivering our mail, and driving our buses, taxis, even goddamn Ubers?
  
  Of course then they’ll blame regulation and say the market will figure itself out and teachers earning $200k will be delivered to your children via smartphone app. So OK, let’s just dismantle everything and leave it up to the businessmen. Just trust them!
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Sara-Slaughter607Hamilton Nolan
6/22/16 2:29pm
I am one of those unfortunate souls who spends over 50% of my salary on rent. I live paycheck to paycheck. I have a 30K gross salary but I also pay $1000 a month for daycare. My rent is 900. It was easy when I had a partner and a second income, but he left so the burden is all me now. Don't have an extra room to rent out. The math just doesn't add up. My mother says "Move to a cheaper Place" to which I say "COOL! Can I borrow first, last, and security and the cost of a rental truck to move all my shit?" You can imagine how that went over. STOP TELLING PEOPLE TO "JUST MOVE". It is NOT that fucking easy. I am absolutely trapped where I am unless I want to spend $8k buying out the rest of my lease to leave early. This sucks. For a LOT of people, this fucking sucks.
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  opiumsmabytchSara-Slaughter607
  6/22/16 2:47pm
  I am one of those unfortunate souls who spends over 50% of my salary on rent.
  
  Right there with you. Once I set rent and some money for bills aside, there’s not a whole lot left. Just started a third job, but 16 hours days suck.
  
  “Move to a cheaper Place”
  
  That shit drives me bonkers too. There is no such thing. Not if you want to stay in the same city and then all the logistics on top.
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  Fist of the Pon FarrSara-Slaughter607
  6/22/16 3:08pm
  When it mention this stuff to my mom, her reaction is always “well, that’s not how it should be”. But she consistently votes for people who’ve made the economy what it is today. I’ve yelled her a number of times that you have to vote based on how things actually are in the real world, not based on how they should be in some fictional reality in her head, but it never takes. And that’s part of the problem - people who cannot see that the “dream world” the Republicans have sold them isn’t attainable, and who think everyone who’s struggling is the deserving poor.
  
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DirtbagSurferHamilton Nolan
6/22/16 1:35pm
AirBnB is a huge contributor to this problem in many communities. We are having yet another town council meeting where I live in Ocean Beach San Diego tonight to combat this neighborhood and community destroying scourge. This goes well beyond the impact it has on astronomically raising rents. What it does to the social and local business structure of neighborhoods and communities is an enormous problem as well.
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  ReburnsABurningReturnsDirtbagSurfer
  6/22/16 1:55pm
  This is such a classic Californian complaint, I couldn’t help but laugh when I read it.
  
  It may create some localized problems, but even in a place like San Diego, the amount of housing stock they are removing from regular residents is a paltry number compared to the overall population of the greater San Diego area.
  
  In areas like San Diego the problem is that in order to fit all of the people who want to live in the area into the area, single family homes can’t really provide the real solution.
  
  Not only that, coastal cities probably should tread lightly when playing around with the ongoing evolution of how people engage in tourism.
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  e30s2kReburnsABurningReturns
  6/22/16 2:18pm
  Oh please. Here in San Francisco there are about 10,000 units advertised on AirBnB. Less than 2,000 of them are legally registered. Yes - compared to the TOTAL size of the city this is a drop in the bucket, sure. In that vein, a thousand people being killed in a terror attack is nothing compared to the population of the world, amirite?!
  
  Even a few thousand apartments being illegally rented - which IS the case - is YEARS worth of new construction pipeline. We keep saying build more housing - which is being done, at a rate of a few hundred units a year - but there are thousands of clearly illegal businesses flipping housing stock in to short term rentals, and suddenly that is something too small to care about? The city (along with NYC and potentially LA this week) just passed more laws to hold AirBnB accountable for illegal listings that might finally have teeth to work - and they’re scared shitless; rightfully so trying to keep their valuation propped up before their IPO.
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MattHamilton Nolan
6/22/16 1:54pm
Build more housing.

That’s a good start but we also need to strengthen rental laws, specifically pertaining to the responsibilities that a landlord/property owner has to do to make a given property reasonably livable. We need laws that set reasonable time frames for landlords to complete necessary repairs. We need laws that prevent price gouging on rent. And we need to give these laws real teeth. Not some piddly ass fine that a landlord can pay no problem and then go back to being a slum-lord. No, we need laws where if you fail to abide by rental laws X number of times (or less based on the severity of the infraction) then the government, most likely through HUD, can come in and use imminent domain to seize the property.
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  greysweaterMatt
  6/22/16 2:06pm
  Thank you. My best friend lives in a nice pre war building in Brooklyn. Her window has been broken for weeks on street level. She is terrified someone will be waiting for her when she gets home. Her heat also didn’t work for almost a month in NOVEMBER. There are other little fixes needed, but those are the big/scary ones. She has never actually spoken to her landlord, he once ran down the street when she saw him leaving their building.
  
  Oh and she and her roommate pay $2,000/month each for the privilidge. Makes us crazy.
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  Blues-for-Mr-Charlies-Angelgreysweater
  6/22/16 2:15pm
  $4000 a month to get the same treatment black tenants used to get while paying $400 a month for the same apartment. Real Estate agents done fooled the shit out of the middle class.
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Mount_PrionHamilton Nolan
6/22/16 1:37pm

Certainly not a new problem. And there’s a reason this piece is titled Pruitt-Igoe.
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  PsonicPsunspotMount_Prion
  6/22/16 1:41pm
  There’s a documentary about Pruitt-Igoe called The Pruitt-Igoe Myth; you can watch it on YouTube (or in higher quality by ordering the DVD direct from the filmmakers’ website). It is a truly stunning piece of filmmaking and a sobering, breathtaking look at the way that America has mishandled poverty—always.
  
  (I’m not affiliated with the film; I’m just a teacher with a Master’s in American Studies who is fascinated by the issue at hand. And ETA: serious Philip Glass points!)
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  PsonicPsunspotPsonicPsunspot
  6/22/16 1:44pm
  Also: Candyman, which has aged to become an even far more interesting entry in the “sociological study” genre than it was in 1992.
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HarlotOScaraHamilton Nolan
6/22/16 1:39pm
I know you only like to blame the “rich” for these problems, but the government is also part of the problem. Because of the way that Section 8 housing works, they are pushing people out of some rental markets.

http://www.abcactionnews.com/marketplace/la…
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  therealdealjohnnyscarecrowHarlotOScara
  6/22/16 2:56pm
  The general idea of a program like section 8 is not only noble, but needed. However, the practice put in place to administer the program is broken beyond repair. Underfunded, and understaffed, not to mention the inability of landlords to properly evict problem tenants (here in MA, section 8 basically gives the tenant a life estate interest in the unit), and the iniabilty to properly scrub the roles of tenants when they would no longer qualify/need additional assistance leads to a very broken system. As an attorney that has worked on both sides of this issue, I am not surprised, nor upset that more landlords do not participate in the program, and I counsel my clients to avoid it at all costs, because once the machine starts up, it's hard to stop.
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  Sara-Slaughter607therealdealjohnnyscarecrow
  6/22/16 3:00pm
  Here in Buffalo, we have some units that are delegated specifically for people who meet that income standard, but then we used to have ‘Housing Choice’ vouchers, which allowed you to choose your OWN unit anywhere you wanted as long as it fell within the parameters that Section 8 required (you’re not moving into a luxury unit, but at least you’re not smack in the ghetto, is the point) and that dried up over 10 years ago. The waiting list for that was 2-3 years. I was lucky enough to receive a voucher which helped me out greatly as a young single mother in college, but I lost it when I moved out of state for a job opportunity. I'll never get that back.. and now I pay about 60% of my total income toward rent. It sucks. :(
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╰(　´◔　ω　◔ `)╯< Woke and BokeHamilton Nolan
6/22/16 1:43pm
We should bring back boxcars and encourage folks to ride the rails as their permanent home. Imagine a fleet of housing trains crisscrossing the nation collecting our hobos, roustabouts, and ragamuffins and just, well, just keeping on collecting them until we have one enormous train stretching from sea to shining sea. Sweet home of Liberty.
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  Mary-Grace╰(　´◔　ω　◔ `)╯< Woke and Boke
  6/22/16 1:47pm
  Include Wi-Fi and I'm there.
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  OKTOBERFIST╰(　´◔　ω　◔ `)╯< Woke and Boke
  6/22/16 1:54pm
  Wasn’t that an post apocalyptic indie film starring Captain America and the great Asian actress, tilda swinton
  
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CrewBabyHamilton Nolan
6/22/16 2:10pm
My friend escaped a domestic violence situation with her child. She’s working for the first time in years as a server. She has been absolutely unable to find a place to live that she can afford, and we’re not anywhere near a huge city. She and the kid are now living in my guest room, while she struggles every day trying to find a place to live, or they’d be homeless. Brutal, everywhere it’s brutal.
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  Blues-for-Mr-Charlies-AngelCrewBaby
  6/22/16 2:19pm
  Your friend is lucky to have you. No one took in my daughter and me because they believed social safety nets work.
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  CrewBabyBlues-for-Mr-Charlies-Angel
  6/22/16 2:54pm
  She’s been very disillusioned on that score. The shelters are terrible (and full), childcare is nearly impossible, and finding even an efficiency apartment under $600 a month just does not seem to be happening. I wasn’t going to let them live in their car, that’s not acceptable especially with a child.
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BIlllingtonHamilton Nolan
6/22/16 1:32pm
Capitalism: only people with a lot of money can live comfortably. Working as intended. Next!
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  toothpetardBIlllington
  6/22/16 1:42pm
  Yep, every day there’s just a little less capital to go around. The system works!
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  Sid and Financytoothpetard
  6/22/16 2:08pm
  You can’t even keep score with socialism. What’s up with that?
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Frankenbike666Hamilton Nolan
6/22/16 3:46pm
This goes along with Republican and Clintonian economic principles, that the poor just disappear and are no longer a problem.

A big part of the problem, is location. Property value is growing while the cities have outgrown their working class, who are no longer economically useful in volume for manufacturing. To a city’s balance books, the poor are an economic liability. The economy regards these as “surplus people”, and it assumes that the surplus is liquidated just like any other resource, when it’s no longer needed.

Cities don’t raise their poor populations to become members of whatever new economy is floating the city. They import people with the appropriate skills from elsewhere. How many people who work at Gawker in New York, or have media jobs in LA or San Francisco or Seattle or Portland or any other city with a housing shortage...were born and raised in that city?

In any group of 30 people that I worked with in the VFX industry when it was still strong in LA, I was often the ONLY one who was even born in California.

There’s your problem right there. All those people moving into the city, displace the people born in the city, whose descendents must economically compete with the newcomers for residential space.

In the competition between wealth and the poor, it is traditional for the poor to lose every time. The traditional solution when this has happened in the past, is mass migration.

I have no idea whether there are programs to enable migration, since that can be costly. But that’s the natural economic solution historically. And I’m pretty certain if there were a program to move people out of the cities, there would be a very racist element trying to prevent them from emigrating to their towns where the jobs are.

There’s also the political problem of enabling migration out of cities. The Democratic Party would get decimated. Concentrated poor in cities are a big part of the Democratic voting bloc.
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  Ceci N'est Pas Un BurnerFrankenbike666
  6/22/16 3:59pm
  So Clinton is both trying to decimate the poor urban population while also blocking their move to other places to ensure enough votes? That seems...like a bad plan.
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  Frankenbike666Ceci N'est Pas Un Burner
  6/22/16 4:41pm
  No one is trying to decimate the poor. But no one is really trying to help raise them up and get them out of the trap of living in a city that doesn’t need or want them there anymore.
  
  But local politicians, including Congress members, like their power bases reliable. And city politicians? They’re the worst of all. Local politicians not only don’t want their poor populations moving out, they prefer reckless reproduction and population growth. People are votes are power.
  
  Oh sure, they’re happy for isolated gentrification because it grows the tax base with a minor effect on demographics. But overall, they don’t want to load that ox cart too heavily.
  
  The fact is the status quo has enormous momentum. Changing it requires enormous organizational stamina, while opposing the will of the large economic interests. No one is going to take out millions of dollars in bank loans, to make apartment buildings for poor people on some of the most valuable real estate in the world. And liberals tend to have only so much energy they’ll invest in policies which go against their self interest.
  
  I don’t even know if we would hear about this sort of thing in alternative media if it wasn’t for the PPOP (poor people of privilege) who tend to work for it. The people displacing the real poor. Not much of an issue on other media.
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