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.
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.
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.