Medium publication by Ferenstein, covering Silicon Valley politics, housing costs, inequality, and the history of privacy.
HN commenters cite it in debates on housing and inequality and for its long history-of-privacy piece, which one calls interesting and unintuitive context.
I have no doubt that this program works, even if the success has been overstated [0]. What we really need to think critically about is how exportable the concept is. And really, it comes down to one singular reason, housing costs[1]. High housing costs like those in most coastal cities contribute to higher inflows into homelessness and lower outflows out of homelessness, which means that higher housing costs increase the total number of homeless people and the duration of homelessness. They also increase the capital and administration costs of administering the program, often by a factor of two or more.
So in a city like Seattle or San Francisco, you're going to have drastically more people to house, for drastically longer periods of time, and at higher fixed and variable costs. I have no problem believing that this solution if exported to San Francisco, New York, or Seattle, would cost anywhere between 1-2 orders of magnitude more than SLC as a percentage of total population.
IMO, anti-housing-development trends in our most economically important cities truly have become the US' largest source of injustice in the 21st century [2].
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/27/utah-homeless-shelters-housing-first
[1] https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-salt-lake-city-rent-trends
[2] https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/a-26-year-old-mit-graduate-is-turning-heads-over-his-theory-that-income-inequality-is-actually-2a3b423e0c#.vr3asyt59
This unfortunately doesn't seem realistic:
> Moglen proposed deploying "freedom boxes" at every street corner—cheap hardware running free software, deployed everywhere, that encrypt everything, anonymise everything, and blind the service providers to our activity.
b/c the last mile is the priciest part of a telco's network. Unless the telcos are forced to do it, it has zero odds of happening.
Also, let's not forget privacy as we know it is a distinctly modern idea. The "right to privacy" was coined with the advent of cameras in the 1890s:
https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/the-birth-and-death-of-privacy-3-000-years-of-history-in-50-images-614c26059e
The main new thing today is the ubiquity of the public sphere owing to IT. Inadvertently ending up on a picture in the late 19th century was a rather trivial intrusion of privacy; the same picture posted on FB today instantly makes it available to anyone with an internet connection. Not saying privacy has little to no merit, but nothing short of a full-blown societal rethink is going to make taking and sharing those pictures stop - a piece of hardware just won't help.
Paraphrasing the classics. It is the housing market stupid.
Really, Even living in a place with very low population density(Rural Mass/NH). Rents are high (and scarce), you need at least 250K to buy a small house. Houses are old, Lot's are big, big distances, very few new houses are built every year. I can't even image how blue collar families do it. If you think about it, it even makes local companies less competitive, since they need to pay more so people can barely survive.
This resonated a lot with me.
https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/a-26-year-old-mit-graduate-is-turning-heads-over-his-theory-that-income-inequality-is-actually-2a3b423e0c#.iljcrro5m
Some economists have started to suggest that exclusionary zoning policy is the main driver of wealth inequality. And California is pretty much the world leader in exclusionary zoning policy.
https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/03/wealth-inequality
https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/a-26-year-old-mit-graduate-is-turning-heads-over-his-theory-that-income-inequality-is-actually-2a3b423e0c
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/19/meet-the-26-year-old-whos-taking-on-thomas-pikettys-ominous-warnings-about-inequality/
https://www.mercatus.org/publication/how-land-use-regulation-undermines-affordable-housing
>>An internet company in a 10-story building would love this scheme, though, because they could generate billions in revenue but be taxed at the same rate as a local neighborhood of people who owned their homes for a few decades.
That's irrelevant, because the ultimate owners of the corporation - the shareholders - will always be in demand of land. Real estate explains most of the growth in wealth inequality in the US over the last 60 years:
https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/a-26-year-old-mit-graduate-is-turning-heads-over-his-theory-that-income-inequality-is-actually-2a3b423e0c#.cdpw0fizt
Here's a recent paper that did take on that issue:
http://www.mit.edu/~mrognlie/piketty_diminishing_returns.pdf
> Recent trends in both capital wealth and income are driven almost entirely by housing, with underlying mechanisms quite different from those emphasized in Capital.
If the paper reads too academic, here's an accessible write-up:
https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/a-26-year-old-mit-graduate-is-turning-heads-over-his-theory-that-income-inequality-is-actually-2a3b423e0c