Nobody's saying that you shouldn't spend money on a phone and save it for housing. Rather the opposite. People are saying that literally everything except housing (and healthcare) is so cheap compared to housing (and healthcare) that inflation measures (which typically exclude housing and healthcare) are pretty much useless.

This is the line I was responding to:

but if you can't afford to have a roof over your head I'd argue the smartphone is irrelevant.

A phone and tablet and internet access were essential to my ability to cope and eventually get back into housing. They aren't irrelevant.

If you want to argue we need to do a much better job of making housing something people can afford, I totally agree. If you want to argue that homeless people just are supposed to entirely cease to exist and not care about anything people in homes care about or something....no. That absolutely doesn't work as an argument.

The internet is a really massively helpful thing for people who are homeless.

I think what they mean is that if you can't afford shelter, it's little comfort to be able to afford a phone. Yes, the phone may be a tool that can help you find shelter, and it may help with coping with your situation and finding other opportunities, but in the end you're still trying to get shelter. If you could afford a home initially, you wouldn't need the phone to help you get one.

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.

Housing is more expensive in part because it's much more spacious than it used to be. We've torn down a million SROs (single room occupancy units).

When I say that, inevitably someone argues against it and tells me it's slum housing. So we have a world in which the folks with money and the folks who have the power to create housing only want to approve upper class housing and then act like homeless people are just lazy and not trying hard enough or something.

Before life got in the way I wanted to be an urban planner. I've had pertinent college classes and managed to find a hundred year old SRO and that's how I got off the street.

Would I like something better? Sure I would. But I don't have the money and this beats the hell out of being homeless.

I've talked about this stuff for years. I mostly get flak.

What makes this really bad is there are a lot more households with fewer than four people than there were when we invented the suburbs. But suburban single family detached housing designed for a family of 4.5 people is our default mental model for "proper housing" and now it's that on steroids and let's not let reality get in the way of our development of this kind of completely inappropriate housing that doesn't even fit the needs of our current demographics.

Yes, I'm cranky. I lived this crap. I've studied it. I get nothing but blown off, usually by people who know way less than me about these issues.

Why is your post being down voted?

I think your post makes sense.

Land is valuable and to maximise returns, building these SROs wouldn’t make sense in our profit uber alles system.

SROs don’t have too look like concrete blocks from ex communist systems.

This is what design thinking can achieve... just one example https://nestron.house/

It seems there is no money in helping the homeless or people with low income. I guess short term thinking doesn’t consider the cost of a gradually fracturing system, it doesn’t recognise the value of a cohesive society.

It’d be amazing if there was an incentive to build a million tiny houses.

Seems to me like we are secretly all in agreement but people are misinterpreting p1necone. Whatever.