So no one here is arguing that homeless people shouldn't have phones or internet or anything like that, rather they're arguing that we'd have better housing opportunities if shelter was what had become so cheap, rather than phones. So measuring inflation based on the prices of non-critical goods is fine if you already own a house, but it fails to reflect reality for people who are struggling to make rent.

>Rent- get a roommate or rent a room instead of a one bedroom flat. Rent is reduced from $1400.

While that is an option, it is not reasonable to make that assertion for the millions of people struggling without adequate housing. How can you tell people, with a straight face, that have been sexually assaulted, robbed, or battered by previous roommates that they should continue to put themselves at risk because they can't afford the market rate for a 1br apartment? Many people that are housing insecure face discrimination in their searches as well. Landlords have countless incentives and ways to refuse renting to people who they perceive as poor. Credit checks, wage statements, large cash deposits. Then there's everything they can learn during a showing. How do they dress, are they wearing Wal-Mart clothes or Patagonia? Did they bring their same sex partner? Are they BIPOC? Do they have a nice car or no car? Is everything they own in their car? I think that I've said enough to make this point but I can continue if you want.

>Use a prepaid phone plan to reduce from $100.

Phones are still several hundred dollars, and are effectively disposable items. In conversations about poor people we cannot assume they can afford to put up several hundred dollars for a used phone. $100 might be on the high end, but I am thinking more about the amortized all-in costs of phones. Stuff like cases, chargers, screen protectors, that often get sold to people at stores under high pressure sales tactics. We also need to consider access. If someone just broke their phone and need a new one ASAP or they'll lose their job they are at the mercy of what's available to them at that moment. They may not be able to shop around or know how to do a price comparison between providers. They may get coerced into signing expensive multi year contracts by dishonest sales reps of which the total cost is not apparent for weeks.

>Use a slower speed or share internet to reduce from $100.

That's not always an option. For years, the cheapest non-dsl, option available to me was cable internet, for over $100/mo without a contact. For people with housing insecurity signing multi year contracts is scary because they have no reason to believe they will live in the same place for that long.

>Motorcycle or cheaper car to reduce from $530.

Motorcycles are not a rational option for virtually everyone. They're unsafe, and at greater risk of being stolen in the areas poor people are congregated. I'm not saying the car payment is $400, but ones either paying more upfront for a reliable vehicle or on the back end in repairs. If one gets burned enough by scam repair shops and used car sales people they'll inevitably look to cars with manufacturer warranties. Poor areas have more sketchy repair shops and high pressure used car sales lots that straddle people with high interest car payments, even if they qualify for great rates.

>These aren’t impossible problems and are things that are really common to deal with. I worked with people in Manhattan who slept three to a bed. That obviously sucks but assuming that every single person should have a one bedroom flat with their own car and luxury internet and phone is not as good an assumption that people will adjust their spending.

I think you're making wide assumptions that are not reflective of the reality poor people face. It is callous to assume that poor people have the same ability and education to know how to navigate things like loans, auto repair, comparison shopping, house hunting, etc while they're possibly homeless and probably working in excess of 40 hour weeks barely scraping by. This is my lived experience, I've seen too many families that do everything right get absolutely crushed into homelessness because the company the worked for blew up, they got scammed, or were disabled by a workplace accident. These conversations are overly reductive when we cannot focus on the specific contexts under which people fall out of 'normal' society into homelessness or near homelessness. Without this context we cannot have reasoned discussions about the factors that lead to homelessness and prevent people from escaping.

Some things I routinely talk about:

This country tore down up to 80 percent of SROs over the course of a couple of decades, probably because the Baby Boomers didn't need that kind of dirt cheap housing when they came of age. We never rebuilt.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/02/the-rise-and-fall-of-...

The American concept of "proper housing" is rooted in the housing boom that followed soldiers coming back home from WW2 and most of our current policies, financing mechanisms, etc are rooted in that era. The default expectation was that it was housing for a nuclear family and we are still being haunted by the ghost of those expectations, though they don't really serve us well anymore for a variety of reasons.

So when people talk about the need for "affordable housing," most people seem to hear government subsidized housing, The Projects, and poverty housing. I'm not sure how to get around that. It absolutely isn't what I mean.

I mean we need to develop demographically appropriate housing, such as SROs that a single person working at Taco Bell could afford. We also need that housing to be viable without a car. The reality that you basically need a car to get around in large parts of the US and the cheapest housing typically requires a car is part of the problem here.

For most Americans, housing is their single largest expense and a car is their second largest. This is in the process of changing as Millenials give push back against such expectations, but it is still largely the norm here.

I don't know of any good terms that already exist for trying to make such distinctions. They might need to be invented.

So, first, we need a variety of housing options that effectively and appropriately serve lifestyles other than nuclear family with kids, a full time homemaker and a primary breadwinner. We currently are trying to force-fit people into such housing who don't live that way. For example, we assume that the answer for single young people is to rent a place designed for a family and then get enough roommates to fill up all the bedrooms and make the place affordable.

And this is a nightmare option for many people. Rooming with total strangers is inherently problematic.

Second, we need housing that doesn't de facto assume that you own a car and have a driver's license and all that. We need housing that serves people who don't want to have a car or who can't do that for some reason, whether cost or age or disability.

I don't really know of terms in common usage for either of those concepts. Those are some of the things I have in mind when I talk about a need for "affordable housing," but it isn't what other people hear when I say that. They hear "Craptastic slums that no one wants to live in and no one wants in their neighborhood" or they hear "socialism where we just hand people homes they can't afford" or something. And that's absolutely not what I am going for.

As for the gadgets which you alluded to as contemporary society's savior just a few replies ago, I tend to attribute their existence to the basic research and, yes, cheap microcontrollers that made them possible, rather than the glorified middlemen who repackaged them as high-margin luxuries and sold them with spyware.

> So, like a child faced with this problem, you surmise we should take things from the wealthy and give them to the poor.

Also, like a concerned and informed adult, but yes.

>Exactly how much more should they be spending,

However much it would cost to house them permanently (and reduce housing insecurity in general), bounded by tax revenues, of course.

>and why would that change anything?

Well, generally-speaking, when a homeless person has housing, they cease to be homeless.

>Let's make this simpler for you.

I'd like you to stop projecting your own insecurities on me.

That- right there - is the reason we have poor.

Which is an objectively bad price for housing.

One of the things that tends to not enter these discussions is that the US has torn down about a million SROs[1] and largely zoned out of existence the ability to build other small scale homes currently being called Missing Middle Housing.

When walkable neighborhoods were more the norm and you could get just a room or small place as market rate housing without having to go through some government program with long wait lists, you could live on not much money. Now a car is practically required to make life work in the US, housing is expensive as hell and then we argue about income and I get told by random internet strangers that the high cost of rent is irrelevant to discussions of homelessness, and never mind that studies contradict such claims.

Meanwhile, housing costs and the fact that it's so hard to live without a car tends to not come up at all in discussions of this sort.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy

There are more empty homes in America then there are homeless people, but that doesn't mean that the richest country in the world cannot afford to have a roof over its head.

This is not even considering the easy way out, which is more immigration.

It's one of the reasons advocates for the poor often seem to speak a different language to their opposition.

If you live in median-and-above-land, you think of all costs existing on a spectrum. Fancy dinners for $100 on one end. Rice and beans for pennies at the other. This is true for clothes, smartphones, furniture... lots of things. There's a spectrum with options all along it.

It is not true for housing, transport and a lot of other, unavoidable expenses. Housing is the extreme example. Say an average smartphone is $350. $700 buys a luxury phone. $175 gets you an decent phone. Say median rent is $1500. Going above $3k will get you a palace and $750 probably doesn't get you anything. Quality, below median prices is on an extremely steep curve.

Household economics are just completely different below and above a certain threshold... and this has gotten more pronounced over the last generation or two.

Ireland has/had a whole literary genre of stories about miserable poverty-stricken childhoods. They paint a very vivid picture. If you compare it to poverty today, besides being less harsh, it's quite different. They had housing. It was basic, often insecure, but they did have housing.

Food was scarce. That's no longer the case. Stuff though... they had no stuff. No bed, no mugs, no shoes, no pencils. Getting these things was an epic mission and served as a landmark. That is all changed now. Stuff is extremely abundant. Basics like housing and transport are almost as scarce as they were in the bad old days.

The upshot of all this is that we underestimate how poor poor is.

You know, there are pretty simple and century-old technologies that let us build more units of housing on a given piece of land. The problem is that we choose not to use them: https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/r.... Or see http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201... for a broader view.

Housing doesn't intrinsically need to get more expensive. But if we make it impossible or difficult to increase the supply, we're going to see prices rise. This isn't really about money "floating to the top;" it's about legal and regulatory problems.

B. I would like to address the housing crisis per se as a first line of defense rather than wait until people are homeless and then try to decide who merits help and what the cost-benefit ratio is and etc.

For many people, if there was enough affordable housing, this whole argument about their merits and defects and etc wouldn't happen at all. There would, no doubt, be other arguments but my research indicates lack of affordable housing is the primary issue here.

>since we're talking about probably less than 1% of all workers.

cool. congrats on proving it's an edge case. A+ case analysis.

so what? it's cool with you that 1.3 million people can't afford housing? even if it were 0.1% of workers? why should literally anyone be unable to afford housing? we're not talking iphones and gucci bags here - we're talking about the bare minimum needed to stay off the street.

Having spoken to a number of homeless folks, a common pattern is that they really aren’t interested in housing. If you have no dependents, would you rather spend your life a slave to the capitalist corporation/mortgage/property-tax/landlord complex, or just camp out in an area with nice weather year-round, in a community of like-minded people, doing whatever suits your fancy?

1. https://phys.org/news/2017-03-housing-homeless-cheaper-socie...