Rental America: Why the poor pay $4,150 for a $1,500 sofa - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/10/16/she-bought-a-sofa-on-installment-payments-now-its-straining-her-life/ <comment><USER2> I find it saddening and ironic that commenters here are having trouble seeing the problem. The math is right there! The buyers should just stay within their means! However, if we talk about a topic closer to the experience of the HN crowd (say, Facebook's privacy policies), the tune quickly changes. People get up in arms about the privacy policy, or the ad model, or anything else that might affect their own lives.

Have a little empathy. These people sign contracts without understanding what they are agreeing to, and instead of their vacation photos, they're out thousands of dollars - substantial sections of their entire net worth. On the other hand, if that sounds good, there are all sorts of payday loan companies that would love investors for new branches I'm sure.

Edit: I don't mean the buyers don't grasp the full cost, but that they have difficulty projecting their lives 6, 12, 18 months in the future. I'm not under the impression the people in the story are dumb or ignorant.

<comment><USER3> I'm also bemused by the lack of understanding and empathy in this thread. For all the social righteousness spouted by HN as a whole, this is disappointing to witness

<comment><USER4> You're not considering that some of us may have actually been/are poor. My frustration at people throw their paycheck-to-paycheck earnings at Rent-a- centers isn't "oh, look at the stupid poors", it's "I've been there, and I know that you can get a $1500 couch for $50 cash if you are willing to get up at 5 AM on Saturday mornings and go hit garage sales."

The article's presentation of "These people have no options except to be horrifically exploited" is wrong at best, maybe even dishonest. No matter how much money you make, spending beyond your means because you have to have luxuries you really can't afford is a bad financial play.

I feel a lot of empathy for people who get caught in the RAC trap. They're digging themselves into a hole that they'll never escape from, and that's genuinely sad. But it's a fixable problem! They aren't victims of their circumstances, they're victims of their own consumerism. At the end of the day, each of us is responsible for what we choose to spend our earnings on, and if you choose to spend all your expendable income on instant gratification, that's your choice, and you get to own the consequences of that choice.

<comment><USER5> How similar was your situation? Did you have a family you needed to support? A full time job?

<comment><USER4> You realize that no matter how I answer this question, someone will say "Oh, you weren't as poor as X", and thus claim that I'm not qualified to empathize, right?

I had a family and was self-employed, which meant no guarantee of stable income and self-employment insurance, plus self-employment taxes. My take home covered rent, food, and basic utilities - usually. We certainly couldn't afford new furniture or appliances. We ate at a 10-year-old kitchen table that cost $100 from a grocery store with 4 chairs, which were literally falling apart from use. My couch was second-hand from a garage sale. My car was a used one that I learned to repair myself because I couldn't afford to pay a mechanic to fix it for me.

I could have "afforded" to rent furniture. I even looked at it at one point, did the math on it, and nope'd right out of there. My wife wasn't happy at all - she'd been campaigning for new furniture for a long time - but it was the right financial choice.

I'm in a much more stable financial situation now, but my kitchen table is a used one that my wife and I stripped, sanded, and refinished ourselves. My entertainment center we got from some friends who were moving and didn't have room for it. My TV I picked up on the curb, and it cost me $35 for a new DLP bulb. My coffee table I got for $20 at a furniture outlet store. I still have the garage sale couch.

<comment><USER6> I've been in a situation where I was in grad school. There isn't much money coming in if any at all, and no loans. That was years ago, even now when I moved and had to throw out the couch I had since grad school: I refused to pay more than $600 for a couch. It's unbelievable that someone would pay 800 for a single couch. I paid $550 for a love seat and a couch. Is it cheap? Yes, have I become a social pariah for doing so? The guests from last weekend's party certainly didn't give a toss.

<comment><USER7> How is it unbelievable that someone would pay $800 for a couch? If your $550 couch isn't the best couch in the world, then maybe there's a reason other people with different sensibilities and means would pay more than you would for a couch.

<comment><USER6> Point of clarification: my couch and love seat for 550.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Part of me is disgusted that this business is allowed to operate in this manner.

However, the sensible side is frustrated that these people aren't doing basic math. These people are choosing to buy something that they can't afford. Do they need these items? Does anyone need a couch? Does anyone NEED a TV/wedding ring? No. You can live without it.

End the end: All I got from this article was: "Look at these people who don't realize where they stand financially and refuse to accept that it's not where they'd like to be."

<comment><USER8> > Part of me is disgusted that this business is allowed to operate in this > manner.

I understand this sentiment, but it's risk mitigation. As the article points out, there are no options for these people outside of this. It's serving a market and it's doing so in a way that reduces the risk - in some ways for both parties.

Is it a smart move on the part of customers? I think it's hard to argue that it is, but I don't know that it's necessarily the fault of these businesses. If anything, it's a better move than going to an Amscot or getting a subprime credit card, because you're not wrecked financially nor is your credit ruined necessarily.

<comment><USER9> >> As the article points out, there are no options for these people outside of this.

Going without a 60" TV or iPad isn't an option?

<comment><USER10> The TV, no, but it is entirely possible that the iPad is being used for internet access. At this point in time a person without internet access is at a serious disadvantage to the larger population.

<comment><USER11> How about buying second hand computers or laptops?

<comment><USER12> The amount of computers just thrown away should be enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm annoyed at how this story portrays these rental ripoff places as being the only choice. Sure, _if_ you must buy a new $1,500 couch, then it's their only choice. But what about not buying expensive new furniture when you're poor?

I don't mean to blame the victim, here. But it really rubs me the wrong way that the article doesn't even mention the possibility that a person could _not_ buy stuff they don't need.

We could do with a lot better financial education. Far too many people think of large purchases in terms of a monthly cost. We could also do with usury laws that enforced better and harder to dodge. But we could also do with a discussion of these things that doesn't paint buying a $1,500 sofa as the "only option".

<comment><USER4> Or that they could buy it from Goodwill. Or a garage sale. Or through Craigslist. Or at any of the myriad furniture outlet stores that sell flawed and used furniture at pennies on the dollar.

There are lots of options, but they usually involve paying cash, which means having the discipline to save cash for what you want and not spend it when you want something else.

<comment><USER13> Or pick stuff up off the street on garbage day. Been there, done that, still have a garbage-rescue stool sitting around my expensive townhouse.

<comment><USER14> Sure, but the status implications of doing this severely depend on your general situation.

If you have an expensive townhouse, picking up furniture off the street can be seen as either being clever with your money or even "artsy" (especially if your refurbish it before putting it in your expensive townhouse).

If you are dirt poor, it just reaffirms your inability to afford actually spending money on things like that. And because being _actually_ poor (e.g. being raised in a poor family, lacking a reasonable level of education, having bad job prospects (no chance of career advancement), working three crappy jobs to barely sustain your household without being able to put any money aside, and so on) carries a lot of stigma, poor people tend to be more self-conscious about how poor they appear to their peers (especially peers that _do_ buy expensive crap even if they have to sign this kind of bullshit contracts).

There's also a distinct difference between being poor as a student or entrepreneur (because being poor is just a temporary thing and it's seen as a temporary sacrifice) versus being poor as a regular part of the workforce (why don't you just save some of the money or work more?) or unemployed (why aren't you working?) or even long-term unemployed (why haven't you been working? or from the employer side: there must obviously be something wrong with you or else you would have been working).

<comment><USER13> I agree, and that stigma is part of what creates poverty traps. However, it's still an option, and still something the article should consider before painting these ripoff artists as the "only option."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Perhaps she could have saved up the money on her own, but whenever she has > tried to do so, her stash has been wiped out to handle daily needs.

I...what makes you think you can handle payments on a lease if you can't save what you'd be paying on those payments otherwise?

People are really bad at managing money. The proliferation of credit has done immense damage to peoples' abilities to conceptualize what they can afford.

<comment><USER15> Because you don't need to save up as much to make payments on a lease. Those are, let's say $50 a month. As soon as you get your paycheck, you send that $50 to the rent-to-own agency, and that money is gone - they're "saving" it for you.

Whereas if you keep putting that $25-per-paycheck into a savings account (or a shoebox, or a hollowed-out book or whatever), there will probably come a time when being able to fix your car's transmission, or buying food to make sure your kids aren't starving, or having just one dinner at a place with cloth napkins, is going to seem more important than whatever you're saving for.

<comment><USER16> Yes, exactly right. All the more reason not to hobble yourself with crippling financial obligations just to get a new sofa. They're essentially locking themselves into a financial decision that cannot be undone, and therefore when, later on down the road, more important financial decision points present themselves, they're unable to cope.

But this ties into the poverty trap where you simply stop thinking about the future because you're out of hope.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Immediate gratification. It's easy to walk into Rent-a-center and come out with a TV, couch, iPad, laptop, etc without realizing that for those weekly payments, you could buy one of those items each month. In a few months you own them all outright.

This isn't just for low-income people. Plenty of people making a decent salary will go out and overextend themselves when they get their first apartment as well. Rent-a-center comes to take stuff back from people that make $60k/year just as often as they do from people who make $30k/year.

I'm also not sure I'd classify people as 'poor' who have $300/month they can spend on renting these items which are mostly luxury items. You can argue that you 'need' a TV or laptop to live, but you can get a $200 laptop or $200 TV, instead of $1,000 models.

</comment><comment><USER17> People are ignoring the elephant in the room: a lack of intelligence on the part of these people. It's one thing to have a CS degree and figure out the maths of owning vs renting, but quite another to expect a ninth grade dropout to do the same. The idea that all people are capable of making rational choices is a myth.

And yes, stupid people tend to be poor, and poor people tend to be stupid. I live in a country where the vast majority of people were kept uneducated (and I profit handsomely from the educational/intelligence differential between me and them). They would be eaten alive by big business if the government didn't make an effort to protect them-and the givernment knows it is into own interest to protect the poor in the interests of social stability, since there are so many of them.

The way I see it, is that governments in the US have no need to protect the poor from the consequences of their own stupid choices, even if it is ethically the right thing to do.

<comment><USER18> When the government deliberately keeps people uneducated, then I agree with you -- it's unethical to force people into that rut and then take advantage of them for being there.

But the government in the US is trying to get everyone educated -- not always effectively, though. I know some schools suck, I went to a public school in the middle of a ghetto. Many of the students came from impoverished families, and would routinely _bite the hand that feeds them_ when it came to education -- by disrupting class, (very proudly) not doing their homework, and whatnot. Watching that kind of behavior day-after-day took away any sympathy I might have for the consequences of their actions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It is interesting how this thread is split between messages of 'they should make better decisions' and then the reply/response that absolves the decision- maker by stating that it's the fault of the 'stress of poverty', not the fault of the decision-maker. I think the reason more people make these short-sighted bad decisions is exactly because they're being told that being in poverty doesn't have anything to do with the personal decisions you make but your 'circumstance'. If we tell people this, what motivation do they have to make prudent long-term decisions at the expense of short-term gratification? What they decide as an individual doesn't matter, or so their told - and they are told that it's a 'societal' problem, that 'society' needs to address/fix, so again, where's the motivation to make sacrifices at an individual level to increase one's lot in life?

Regardless of the reality - of the two statements "it's your decisions that affect your level of poverty" and "it's society's fault you are poor" \- one of these statements empowers the individual to make better choices, and the other discourages it.

PS: +1 to the folks who said garage sale / thrift store / second-hand couches. It's mind-boggling that anyone struggling w/ money would buy(/rent) new furniture.

</comment><comment><USER20> I find it saddening that the commenters here are having trouble with being empathetic.

People who are exploited don't need your advice. We all know that we _can_ live in a lean-to made of spruce branches and dry pine needles if we had to. That's not the problem these people have.

Maybe the commenters here offering their well-intentioned advice are unaware of the shame and guilt that goes with being poor. It is widely believed in popular culture that your financial situation and future are within your hands and beyond reasonable misfortunes, if you end up poor, it's self-inflicted: you mismanaged your money, you decided to have an alcohol addiction, you don't know how to follow safety procedures and lost your leg, you didn't study hard in school and save money to go to college. You didn't work hard enough. You're lazy. You're stupid. You smell. You could dress better. Blah blah blah.

The problem is that these rent-to-own businesses exploit that shame and guilt. They're using some pretty under-handed tactics to convince economically disadvantaged people that they can afford these luxury goods they clearly cannot. They try to sound appealing by offering luxury goods to people who cannot otherwise afford them so that they can stop feeling like they are failures. They obscure the true cost of their payment plans with sticker prices that emphasize the lowest term prices and not the full cost (car advertisers like to show the lease-cost in the commercial but are required in most places I know to disclose the full price of the car in the ad).

To say that these people are "stupid" for falling in with these businesses is ignorant of the predatory practices these businesses are using and the complicating factors which result in poverty.

</comment><comment><USER21> Reminds me a lot of the Sam Vimes Boots Theory:

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."

I know people that rent to own, and while part of me is screaming "WTF, save up for a couple of months" inside, another part understands the thought process that gets you things like couches NOW but at 4x the cost.

<comment><USER22> Snap! Made the same comment just now. I often wonder how popular Pratchett's books are in the US and whether people see the parallels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Alternate title: Why people who pay $4,150 for a $1,500 sofa are poor

<comment><USER24> This.

Some feel entitled to have something ("I want it, I _deserve_ it, I'm getting it, I don't care about consequences" \- yes, I often hear that one). Some think they can afford it but can't ("oh, it's just $30/mo, and I've got $100/mo to spare" \- and they do this 6 times). Some fall for fast-talk marketing ("look at this great-looking new $5000 sofa! for just $50/mo you can have it right now!" \- no timeframe specified, same thing is $1500 down the street). Some just don't understand finances ("I can't be broke, my credit card still works"). Some are proving something ("I bought it just to convince myself I'm rich enough to" \- yup, hear that one too). Some just trust it will work out ("I spend $150/day, my spouse takes care of it" \- while he gets second & third job, leveraging finances to the breaking point, as she ignores his pleas to stop). All of it adds up to: you're poor because you're spending $4150 for a $1500 sofa you could have gotten off Craigslist for $100 and which you didn't need anyway. Ignorant, willful or malicious, outgo > income => poverty.

I keep thinking back to a moment of comprehension: I was repairing a poor family's sofa (gratis, because I care even though I'd only met them that day), wondering why it was damaged the way it was, when the tweenagers asked me for a sheet of plastic to cover the window they had just torn the screen out of (and presumably had prior broken the glass) - hit me that they were in the state they were in because they had as a way of life wantonly destroyed what they had.

Yes, some are poor because life dealt them a bad hand; don't conflate them with those who CHOOSE to be poor. And to the currently lead comment: I am empathetic, and continue to assist the poor - but empathy wears thin when people make stupid choices on a regular basis and blame those who merely fulfill their demands & desires.

</comment></comment><comment> jack-r-abbit > "Perhaps she could have saved up the money on her own, but whenever she has > tried to do so, her stash has been wiped out to handle daily needs."

If you can't keep up with payments to yourself, you have no business entering into a contract to make payments to someone else.

</comment><comment><USER25> > Normal families have sofas, she says, and you'll do what it takes to feel > normal.

This is the problem. They have certain expectations set as to what a "normal" life is. A big, fluffy, crap sofa. Park the thing in front of the T.V. and waste your time.

Come to the Philippines, it's a great place to reset expectations. Personally, I would rather setup the "living room" in nomadic style. Throw a rug and some cushions on the floor. Maybe arrange them around a circular bamboo table on which you can set food on. Sit around that table and talk to your family and friends.

> Some weeks, they couldn't pay their cellphone bills.

In the Philippines, people don't have cellphone bills. Nearly everyone goes prepaid.

</comment><comment><USER26> Rather than berating people for not considering the cost, put it into a perspective you can see.

Sure, eating 10,000 calories in one meal is not something your waistline can afford, and you recognize that, but that's about what that one donut a week is equivalent to over the year. It's really easy to say "Okay" to something you really really want when it's a small periodic cost, and even if at some level you know it adds up, you still can make that mistake really easily, and get irritated at the person who keeps bringing them to the Friday meeting (or whatever). So some irritation at the system allowing this behavior might be reasonable.

<comment><USER13> Absolutely. And when an article talks about how eating one donut a week is the "only option" for many people to reach 10,000 excess calories per year, and never even mentions the possibility of _not_ eating 10,000 excess calories per year, there's something seriously wrong with the writing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This pisses me off so hard. This isn't some poor person needing a couch, this is downright irresponsible on the buyer's part, and then they complain about the pricing.

I can hit craigslist and get free couches that are perfectly usable all day long. My house is almost entirely filled with craigslist and garage sale furniture. I have a beautiful solid wood armoir for my 26" flatscreen tv. It and everything inside it cost less than 60 bucks.

I don't go out buying 1000 dollar 60" tvs for 5000 dollars. That's rediculous, nobody needs to, it's just consumerism at it's worst.

<comment><USER28> You're certainly right that buying an expensive item without having the money to do it is a bad idea, but think about the infrastructure and amount of time you needed to find those cheap items. You had a working computer or phone, an Internet connection, and enough knowledge to know to look at Craigslist. When you found your item, you probably had to arrange shipment, but it was no problem for you because you either had a car that could carry it, had a friend with one, or in the worst case, were able to rent one. Finally, you had several blocks of time that weren't already filled with things you had to do to handle searching Craigslist, maybe searching again, and finally going to pick up and take home your new piece of furniture.

I don't know your specific circumstances, and I apologize if the points above don't all apply to you. But it's important to realize that there are a lot of non-obvious resources that people from wealthy backgrounds have that they don't even think about which allow them to save money.

<comment><USER29> _...but think about the infrastructure and amount of time you needed to find those cheap items._

One can purchase a local paper for $1.00 or less. Yard sales and Goodwill stores are free and easy to peruse on a weekend morning.

Let's not pretend that finding a _couch_ is a herculean task, or _saving up the cash_ for a couple of months is nigh impossible.

<comment><USER30> You could buy a minivan to haul it (and finance it at a reasonable rate), and buy a craigslist couch for the amount she spent on her couch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> What about second hand couches? I'm not sure how it all goes in the US, but here in Holland, we can get tons of free couches that look fine, do people sell everything they want to get rid of over there? - [http://www.marktplaats.nl/z/huis-en-inrichting/banken- bankst...](http://www.marktplaats.nl/z/huis-en-inrichting/banken- bankstellen/bank.html?query=bank&categoryId=505&sortBy=price&sortOrder=increasing)

Stuff like this disgusts me. How is it even legal to charge so much interest?!

<comment><USER32> To provide some background, one needs to understand the United States is vast geographically. Driving for 2 hours over 100 miles (160 kms) is considered normal to a lot of people. That creates a huge gap among the poor and the middle class in terms of resources. I live in Chicago, and it is very, very easy to get a user couch in great condition for under $100 because the supply is plenty. People here can afford to get rid of their barely used furniture for whatever reason they like.

On the other hand, people living in the poor, rural areas have no access to this supply of cheap quality used goods. And they don't have the means to leave.

I would suppose opening up a business that transfer used goods from the rich area to poor area and capitalize on the margin would be a great idea in a lot of ways.

<comment><USER9> If you can drive over to Aaron's to get a couch, you can drive to someone's on craigslist to buy one (or have them bring it to you for an extra $20)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is exactly how the major wireless carriers work.

Consumers pay 2x for a phone because they can't afford to pay upfront for their phone. Or because they don't do the math to realize how how much more they're paying by financing their phone rather than saving up for it.

</comment><comment><USER34> Look at this on a micro scale. Cell phones. Tons of people have iPhones. You can watch it happen in real time inside any T-Mobile store. Every time I go someone stomps out without an iPhone, you know why? They abolished contracts.

Tell someone they have to spend $650 on an iPhone _today_. They will balk.

Tell someone they can spend $200 on an iPhone. They will sign their life away. And that $200 iPhone quickly becomes a much more expensive iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER35> TL;DR Luxuries cost much more for those who might not pay for them.

<comment><USER36> It should actually be TL;DR It's very profitable to exploit the poor.

<comment><USER35> Nothing about this is exploitative. Poor people have a very high chance of not paying these debts, so they are charged a much higher fee over time instead of being able to pay a lump sum.

These are not necessities for living. iPads, couches, and lamps are luxuries in varying degrees. These people can always make the choice to simply _not buy them_.

<comment><USER37> The cost of collecting from delinquent debtors does have to be taken into account. Here's the profit margins of the rent-to-own industry leaders in context (from their lobby group) [http://www.rtohq.org/legislative- resources/rto-vs-retail-a-p...](http://www.rtohq.org/legislative- resources/rto-vs-retail-a-profit-comparison/)

Massively overcharging poor people for products they probably shouldn't buy _is_ a profitable endeavour, but only in line with the margins made by budget retailers usually regarded as offering good value-for-money

<comment><USER35> This is a good point that I forget about. People seem to assume that just because the prices being charged are insane (and they are), then the business must be lighting cigars with $100 bills.

There is a _reason_ that the prices are so high. It's not just the "evil capitalists".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Interestingly the US and Great Britain complain that some other European countries do not stimulate their economy by encouraging debt financed consummation and therefore have export heavy economies (e.g. Germany). I guess this is the flip-side, poor people buying stuff they don't really need, without actually being able to afford them, because they have been conditioned to do so. It's not like you couldn't get a perfectly acceptable couch for a few hundred Euros or even for free.

Of course in the current economic climate anyone not investing properly and just saving money is losing roughly 2% to inflation and probably even more because the stock market has risen by much more. So countries where people have traditionally left lots of money in saving accounts get screwed over and those that are in debt are rewarded (the majority in the US and GB).

</comment><comment><USER17> In South Africa, most consumers are poorly educated, and ignorant, and furniture retailers have been milking them in a similar way for decades. The National Credit Act, introduced in 2007, was supposed to tighten up on reckless and exploitative lending, but they figured out all the loopholes. The Marikana massacre in 2012, which was the worst example of post-apartheid unrest can be traced to ignorant mineworkers having their wages garnished by creditors.

In the last few months, African Bank, which owned a furniture company, imploded.

JD Group, the dominant furniture retailer, that was built on exploitative credit, is spinning off its financial assets.

Still, there is more pain ahead. How ironic that the U.S. is allowing its poor to be exploited the same way.

</comment><comment><USER39> I used to volunteer with the American Red Cross, mostly going out to help people that were displaced by fires in their home. It was an amazing contrast to see. Almost every time we had a fire in subsidised housing units, they would be decked out like a Buddy's showroom, often complete with a bigger TV than I had. But if you went to cheap unsubsidized apartments or trailers, you'd see a lot more "found it at the curb" couches and milkcrates-as-shelves.

Part of that is transportation and availability. A guy living in a lower middle class or so neighborhood that drives a pickup is a lot more likely to find and grab a free / cheap couch than a single mom taking the bus to work.

</comment><comment><USER40> I call BS on not being able to afford Craigslist items. You can find leather furniture (i.e. low likelihood of bed bugs) for cheap.

</comment><comment><USER29> Proper title should be "Rental America: Why the _stupid_ pay $4,150 for a $1,500 sofa".

Let's stop sugar-coating this kind of nonsense and shifting the blame to predatory companies. _Nobody_ made these people spend their money on _non- essential_ furniture and electronics.

If we were talking about food, utilities, healthcare or shelter, it would be another thing entirely. But these folks have set aside delayed gratification and _voluntarily_ purchased luxury items at a mark-up that would make a theater concession stand manager blush.

<comment><USER14> That's only partially true.

Yes, nobody's pointing a gun at their head and forcing them to buy expensive crap.

But there's advertising everywhere. Advertising is there to get people to buy things they might otherwise not buy. I'm not against consumerism, but it's absurd to have companies spend billions on getting people to buy their stuff and then blaming the same people for their purchasing habits.

Humans are not rational machines. We're social animals. We do a lot of stupid things. But we're not any more stupid for not being able to grow beyond that.

<comment><USER29> _But there 's advertising everywhere. Advertising is there to get people to buy things they might otherwise not buy._

But if advertising is such an irresistible siren song, how come you and I -- and everybody else on HN -- are not up to our necks in debt to rent-to-own stores?

I don't think its because we're _special_. I think it's because most of us engage in some kind of critical thinking, self control, and can do basic math.

It is the responsibility of the _individuals themselves_.

<comment><USER14> If advertising wouldn't work, there wouldn't be so much of it.

Look at yourself critically. How many of your last year's purchasing decisions were based on actual _need_? And of those, how many times could you have bought something cheaper instead? And no rationalisations about cost and quality and long-term amortisations and whatnot, please.

Yes, poor people suck at managing their money. But at the same time the advertising industry focusses on them. A lot of price-based advertising relies on people not looking at it closely enough. Yay, free phones with mobile contracts. I can buy a new sofa for only $50/month (over the next ten years). This ringtone costs only 99 cents (if you subscribe for 3 ringtones per week at a cost of $2.97/week and all the ones you want are in different subscriptions and don't forget the offer code you originally subscribed with or you'll have a hard time cancelling the subscription when you notice it a month from now).

Our culture places a lot of emphasis on status symbols and wealth. If you're not wealthy, that's because you're lazy. If you can't afford status symbols to prove your wealth it's because you're a failure as a human being. This is an exaggeration, but it's what the mainstream media tells you and what the billboards shout at you.

I'm not saying it's impossible to manage your funds well if you barely have any. I've seen plenty of old widows in Germany be able to make do with welfare because they were used to not being able to afford anything (or even theoretically be able to buy anything if they had the money) throughout the post-war period, but we're talking about people who've learned to cope in a situation where it was entirely possible to freeze or starve to death even if you did everything right. Luxury meant having a variety of food on the table (or having spare tobacco for your own use, rather than for trading), not being able to afford the latest iPhone.

I would also argue that HN necessarily isn't representative of "average folks". The average HN user _is_ special. Not better, but different. There's a disproportionate amount of entrepreneurs (yes, they are the _exception_ ) for example. Plus, there's the survivor bias: if you're here, you probably haven't found it an impossible task to keep out of poverty (even if you ever were close to it). If you had, you wouldn't be here in the first place.

But the entire point is moot anyway. If everyone is able to engage in some kind of critical thinking, self control and doing basic math, and still there are a lot of people trapped in these cut-throat contracts, the average person is _evidently_ not sufficiently able to avoid them (and if those things are all it takes to do so, they are _evidently_ not as good at them).

But I think this isn't a question of facts, it's a question of ideology: I think it's our responsibility as a society to keep people out of situations where they become practically unable to act freely (even if they only have themselves to blame). You seem to hold the opinion that if they screw up their own lives, we have no obligation to help them and they only owe it to themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The attitude of renting or getting a loan for any consumer item is financial suicide.

Why they don't buy second hand I don't know? You can go to an auction site, get the same $1500 sofa for $500.

<comment><USER42> > The attitude of renting or getting a loan for any consumer item is financial > suicide.

When we moved into our house, we bought all our furniture on a zero-interest, four year loan. It made a lot of financial sense to pay a fairly low monthly payment and have the large amount of money available for investments.

<comment><USER13> Similarly, I _nearly_ got a zero-interest loan on the car I bought last year, but we changed our minds at the last minute when it turned out there was a nice hidden discount for paying up-front.

I think better phrasing would be that _needing_ to rent or get a loan for any consumer item is a bad idea. It's fine to take out a loan if you have the cash anyway but find it advantageous to hold onto it, but if you're relying on future income to buy the stuff now, it's a sign of trouble.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> No "the poor", but "the idiots". The family described isn't even poor, but they waste so much money trying to live a middle class lifestyle they live seriously below their means.

You're poor if you have serious problems having food and a basic place to live in at the same time, without spending anything on bullshit. If your problem is 'I can't afford this sofa', or a new ipad, you aren't poor, you just aren't wealthy.

</comment><comment><USER44> Other commenters are saying that people shouldn't buy it, a couch isn't necessary. I disagree. I've worked at 10 hour a day jobs of physical labor, where I come home too tired to do anything. Having a comfortable place to sit to recover is essential. Leaning against a wall is awkward. However, the chair I had was a 20 year old office chair falling apart. Super comfortable, even if I had to tighten the screws several times a year.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think the point several people have made about wanting a 'normal' life is important. The relentless advertising of an unachievable life that American, and other countries', media saturates peoples lives with must be a factor. I am reasonably well off and have no money worries, live in a country where differences between rich and poor are small. I could easily afford to buy a USD 1500 sofa, I could even without any impact on my life pay the over USD 4k that the woman in the article will actually pay. But in fact I have never done either, the leather sofa I have cost me the equivalent of USD 100, in fact it cost me another USD 50 to have it delivered. The point is that the sofa does not make me feel that I am poor so I feel pressured to spend more money on it. In addition it's simply expensive to be poor as several people have pointed out, see Vimes Boots on [http://discworld.wikia.com/wiki/Samuel_Vimes](http://discworld.wikia.com/wiki/Samuel_Vimes)

</comment><comment><USER45> Except for mattresses, there is simply no reason to buy new furniture. I'm an engineer, I had a house fire recently and will easily have the budget to buy new furniture for my house after it is repaired. But I plan on shopping at Goodwill, Savers and Craigslist. Because new furniture is not necessary. Why would someone who is much poorer than me think otherwise?

<comment><USER22> I upvoted you but not because I agree with what seems to be the implication, rather because I think it is an important question that gets to the core of the problem. >Why would someone who is much poorer than me think otherwise? It's, partly, because they are poorer than you that they think otherwise. The mere fact that it is new is part of what makes it attractive and because poor people often do not actually know how those of us who are well off actually live they aspire to what they assume are the trappings of wealth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> > _So Abbott and her husband walked into Buddy's this past winter, hoping to > replace the old sofa in their trailer, six years old, its wiring poking > through the bottom, cutting gashes into the living room floor._

I once bought a couch set for about the same price, but yet, thankfully, I could afford to pay for it up front. I got two loveseats and a couch for about $1600.

Funny story -- 6 years later, all were in perfectly fine condition -- the springs were NOT poking out the bottom, not cutting "gashes" in my floor.

I split up the set and sold them through Craigslist for about $950 total.

My total 6-year cost? $650, or $2/week for the whole set.

I'm not going to draw any broad conclusions on the wealth/capital/income gap or privilege, or anything like that -- but the author does readers a disservice to gloss over the poor assumptions that lead to many believing they are "forced" to make these kinds of purchases.

</comment><comment><USER47> I would be nice to see businesses focus on trying to help people to a solution rather than feeding their addiction. This business helping them buy material things is just as bad as the corner street drug dealer. They are just dealing legal items instead of illegal ones.

If a business model were to come along that would help teach them how to attain what they want through financially responsible means instead of loan sharking, I believe it would be incredible for the impoverished society.

I have been in this sort of situation and I know the mindset. You can not even understand how to set goals, to figure out how to better your future! You have no idea what to do, and these business prey on that mindset.

However, if you had a business that taught how to save for items you need and want, how to set goals and put away money, it would greatly change these peoples lives!

</comment><comment><USER48> The same thing that happened to the family in the article is happening to the commenters in this thread -- but in reverse!

Just as the furniture rental place likely never told the family that the weekly-payment total would be $4,150, the article doesn't clearly show the price the family was looking at: $57.64/week.

I'm much more sympathetic to their decision when looking at the two numbers they were faced with: $58 vs $1500. A bad sofa on Craigslist is $200.

It seems like a good solution to the problem would be to require the $4150 total to be made explicit on a standardized disclosure form, not unlike what you see on a home mortgage.

</comment><comment><USER49> The American educational system needs to do a better job teaching financial literacy, it seems - and they need to start that education early, before irresponsible people like this one drop out of school in ninth grade.

</comment><comment><USER50> Its interesting because:

1\. there is a logical reason the stores charge what they do("some 75 percent of items are returned or repossessed within weeks of the transaction" Anyone care to calculate what the interest rate should be on a loan with a ~75% chance of default?)

2\. The prices that stores charge are not a "good deal" and therefore increasing sales "hurts people"

3\. Shouldn't people be allowed to make decisions that may be against their best interest - at least in the U.S. there is/was a national sense of personal freedom and self determination

</comment><comment><USER51> >Abbott and Donald smoked a cigarette in the bathroom and sorted through the grim math

So they can afford cigarettes? I have a hard time feeling bad for people with low income and expensive vices.

<comment><USER52> Smoking is an addiction, and it is highly correlated with poverty for a variety of reasons, some of which I'm sure you can find if you step off the personal responsibility high-horse for a moment.

<comment><USER29> So at what point are the _individuals themselves_ responsible for their actions? Or is it addictions, poverty, and other external and unavoidable tragedies all the way down?

<comment><USER13> The point is when you're talking about large populations as a whole.

It's like the saying that if you owe the bank a million dollars, you have a problem, but if you owe the bank a billion dollars, the bank has a problem.

Here, if one person is stuck in poverty because of poor life choices, they have a problem. If ten million people are stuck in poverty because of poor life choices, we all have a problem.

Rather than point fingers and talk about "responsibility" and all the rest, it would be much more useful to simply talk about why this happens (both internal and external reasons), what can be done to help, and whether those actions are worthwhile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Funny thing about being broke, it seems to come with an intense even overwhelming desire to feel/signal otherwise in what are usually counterproductive ways.

Where I grew up, everybody was pretty damn poor. Still, probably half my neighborhood or more was beholden to Rent-A-Center for a dining room set or couch. Most were ashamed to shop at K-Mart or even buy generic cereal.

That said, I think IKEA could do tidy business by targeting a slimmed down catalog to the areas where rent to own thrives.

<comment><USER54> Basically, low status leads to a lot of stress.So unless the community as a whole is educated towards non-consumer ways , everybody is in a trap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> This reminded me of how much more people pay for houses on loan vs with cash. If you pay using a loan, you may pay double the cost by the time it is paid off. The only plus side with a house is the possibility that the value will increase and offset the difference some. No matter how you look at it, that furniture will never increase in value.

</comment><comment><USER56> What's probably just as infuriating to some is that I notice as my wife and I get older and get higher and higher incomes and assets it becomes increasingly easy to spend less money.

As an example, we just bought the company car my wife gets that we'd been driving for free for the last couple of years. We bought it at about 50% of the new value, an significantly discounted from the used price.

There's also things like deferred compensation, pension payments, etc that make it easier and easier for people with money to spend less and save more.

And related to the story, we never buy anything on credit. Not even the car we just bought. It's cash or bank transfer, or if we do pay by credit card for something it's paid each month. We keep our credit card limits quite low though.

<comment><USER57> Yes. It's amazingly expensive to be poor.

I have the luxury of using credit cards solely for net30 financing. Car loan -- maybe if I'm fairly certain my investment account will return more than the loan APR.

Without that cushion of liquidity, it's all too easy to slip into a cycle of needing credit to stay afloat. Saving small amounts doesn't feel useful, so you don't do it; and small charges don't feel like they will hurt you, so you rack them up.

It's a societal problem as much as a educational one. I have no idea where we go from here, but I wonder if social systems like basic income would help alleviate the problem.

<comment> ryan-c There's also the fact that, at least in the US, you can get credit cards that will pay you to use them if you have good credit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I invite all the downvotes, but my satisfaction comes from the realization that on the bottom of your heart you _know_ this is true:

Why stupid pay $4,150 for a $1,500 sofa?

Because when I was poor I collected one from the street for free. It hasn't even crossed my mind to go to a store when broken.

<comment><USER3> Did you have kids at the time? I don't think you would've been as comfortable picking up a sofa potentially infested with who-knows-what and your kids sleeping on it.

I've been poor too, but I had the distinct advantage of an education, which made it clear that certain choices were better than others. Let's not forget that not everyone enjoys that advantage (whether it's available or not)

<comment><USER38> Simply don't have kids when you are poor. Also it is perfectly reasonable to sleep on the floor in a sleeping bag/on blankets, maybe with some isolation beneath you. It is also much more healthy than to sleep on a couch. I lived most of my university life in a room with a desk, a chair and a mattress on the floor.

<comment><USER3> Your rationality could save the world, if only you added some pragmatism to it. Here's some things you have not considered:

* religion (the poor are more likely to be religious, most religions frown upon birth control) * abusive relationships (I've seen women go from comfortable living in their on home to being on welfare because after X years, their partners are abusive) * addictions * medical bills * onset of mental illness

<comment><USER38> Religion and birth control are both a question of indoctrination by the state. The Soviet Union and its satellite states managed to reduce religious belief fairly effectively, in the Czech Republic ~70% are atheist / non-believers, East Germany has similar numbers. They provided free access to birth control, abortions and infant child care. Of course none of this would be possible in most of the world, religious belief is too entrenched and there are no strong ideologies left that are prepared to fight it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Deaf, Blind Sue Over Web Shopping - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324373204578374483679498140.html#.UU2rRQQ5XuU.hackernews <comment><USER2> This has the potential to destroy online commerce in the US, and severely damage one area where mom n' pop stores can still thrive in America.

Amazon and other giant retailers could still survive, even if they where made to comply with all of these requests (although it would slow innovation considerably). Small online stores couldn't afford it and would simply shut down. This is bad for everyone.

This reminds me of what happened in Julian, CA - a small mountain town. An overzealous lawyer decided to start suing everyone with steps into their tiny bookstores and coffee shops as a means to extort money out of them. Several just shut down.

[http://www.utsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060729/news_1n29pinnoc...](http://www.utsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060729/news_1n29pinnock.html)

<comment><USER3> I think some are overstating the potential difficulties of making the ADA apply to American websites. A large part of compliance is just utilizing the accessibility tools built into HTML: semantic markup, proper use of alt and title tags, etc.

I do still see the possibility of predatory litigation. To protect small businesses, maybe the burden should shift to the web developers that they hire. Much like we expect contractors to know the ins-and-outs of building codes, we should come to expect web development agencies to understand their clients' legal obligations.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely not. There is a huge difference between something like plumbing where you do one or a few sets of well regulated activities and building infrastructure for businesses across many industries. Web programmers have a lot to be aware of just to do their own work, suggesting they should be responsible for their employers' or clients' legal obligations is completely unreasonable.

<comment><USER3> Who should be responsible then? If you shift the burden onto small business owners, that seems pretty unreasonable to me.

Imagine a small business owner asking their web developers if they used alt or title attributes properly? Absurd, right? I can't name a single plumbing instrument other than a plunger, and I don't have to because there is a division of labor. If my toilet gets backed up and it's not as simple as making sure the ball in the tank didn't get jammed, I call a plumber.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The intent of this is to help people access web content and applications, but it hasn't worked very well in the past, and it won't work very well now, because "accessibility" is very hard to define in concrete terms that a programmer can work with. Most organizations cheat and limit the definition to "can be read by a screen reader" and perhaps "can be navigated with a keyboard." Few if any address other accessibility problems, because it's just too damn hard to test for them all. (Reading comprehension, for example.)

A much better approach IMHO is to encourage companies to create or open their APIs, and to encourage those who need better accessibility or their advocates to create alternate interfaces to their services. Think of it like a "marketplace of user interfaces".

Perhaps instead of passing a law to force existing UI's to change, the government should work with private industry to encourage open APIs.

<comment><USER6> As a sighted individual i totally agree with you regarding APIs as the best course. Screenreaders are always going to be, at best, a kludge to let those with visual disabilities use a system expressly designed around the ability to see it. Different means of interaction can provide a much better experience.

However, in my interactions with people with visual disabilities, I've come to understand that for many of them, the ability to use the same technology as everyone else is actually quite important. Everybody else uses Windows, why shouldn't they be able to? Everybody else shops on the Amazon website, why not them? To say they should use a separate interface is tantamount to telling them to go to the special grocery store for the blind people.

I don't really know that this is a constructive way of thinking, but it's important to consider.

<comment><USER5>
      > However, in my interactions with people with visual
      > disabilities, I've come to understand that for many
      > of them, the ability to use the same technology as
      > everyone else is actually quite important.

Well of course. Computers are one (if not the) most important tools of our era, and everyone who wants to participate in our technological society needs to use computers in one form or another. But we shouldn't conflate putting computers to work for us with the user interfaces we use to control them.

The good news is that as more and more web applications introduce APIs, they're making it easier to change the interface but still use the tool. Companies could be encouraged to focus more their time and energy on supporting those in the community who want to build alternative interfaces for their applications, instead of using that time and energy to defend themselves from lawsuits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This rubs me wrong. It would be impossible for small businesses operating websites to comply with these directives unless they're made really simple to implement, which I doubt is realistic.

My father was blind for 30 years until he died but never tried to impose on society in any way in that period - I can't imagine him ever agreeing in the slightest with the proponents of these ideas.

<comment><USER8> Like all things, there's a balance, and like all good balances it should be flexible.

"No" is not acceptable, at least not to me. I have no disabilites, but I think that there should be accommodation for disabilities in society. Perhaps below a certain business income or traffic the requirements are reduced or go away, and that's where we're not very good at balance.

As commerce, government and social interaction move online, it becomes imperative (yes) that we make accommodations for disabilities. The more we are, the better we are, so it's good for "the rest of us" as much as for "them."

In the end, it's likely an "eat your spinach" issue as said in the article: you bring more people and benefit in by your accommodation than the accommodations cost. Where that falls down is the micro-operations, and that's where I think we need some balance. Big ops can afford all this and more, but you won't get _more_ big ops unless you let the small ops grow through that stage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This applies to online shopping, but many ADA policies will end up affecting startups. Just an example, think of a new AirBNB competitor: they facilitate reservations like a travel agency or hotel lobby, businesses that are subject to ADA regulations.

Of course, ADA takes a little additional time and care (not much, but hey, if you're agile and running lean, your MVP can't let regulations get in the way, right?) The government wants to regulate my site, but they just don't get it. ADA is the result of a dying industry that don't apply to me because I'm disrupting. DISRUPTING!

<comment><USER10> I could see it only applying once you reach a certain level. If you only have 100 customers, then it doesn't really matter, but once you reach 1 million customers, it might start to matter.

<comment><USER9> The moment you start becoming inaccessible, then that's your starting point. Various statistics point to 1 to 2% of the population being blind. So using that example, 50-100 is where you need to become concerned about accessibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "That could mean websites will be required to include spoken descriptions of photos and text boxes for the blind, as well as captions and transcriptions of multimedia features for the deaf"

"Mr. Smith also advises companies to ensure that people with motor disabilities can navigate websites without the use of a mouse"

As if I needed more reasons to not host my sites in the US.

<comment><USER3> I didn't take this quite as literally as Mr. Smith put it. He doesn't mean websites might need to hire voice actors to read out your content.

What he means is that you must actually use HTML's alt and title attributes properly so that screen-readers can produce these spoken descriptions.

That strikes me as a fairly reasonable burden.

<comment><USER12> Not to mention, it's an easy way to improve SEO[1].

[1] [http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/using- alt...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/using-alt- attributes-smartly.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In an interesting side note, the whole situation is getting worse in mobile- land. On iOS the accessibility framework (which allows devs to label UI elements for screenreaders, among other features) has been almost entirely co- opted for use in automated testing.

Lacking a real way to trigger UI elements programmatically testing frameworks have almost universally fallen back on hijacking the accessibility features of the OS to do its work.

This makes me very concerned for _actual_ app accessibility, since not only are we failing to implement accessible features (Apple's defaults are quite good, though imperfect) but we're actively breaking it instead.

<comment><USER9> Can you explain further? How does using the Accessibility framework in a way other than designed to facilitate testing (code that really shouldn't make its way into the final app anyways) get in the way of Accessibility in the app used by the end user? Are the internal hooks into the Accessibility framework overridden at the API level?

<comment><USER13> None of the testing frameworks I'm aware of alter the Accessibility framework itself - that's not the concern.

The problem is that we're corrupting the data being fed into the framework to further our testing ends. Things like accessibilityLabel and accessibilityValue which are supposed to power screen readers are now instead filled with semantic data to facilitate testing.

UI elements that aren't (and shouldn't) be screen readable now have accessibilityLabels attached to permit testing. UI elements that _should_ have accessibilityLabels have their default values overridden so some test can have visibility into internal state, etc.

You _can_ avoid this - by #ifdef'ing your codebase straight to hell to make sure these don't make it into the shipping app, but I also don't see this being done.

On the plus side it seems like TDD in general isn't a _thing_ in the iOS development scene, though it's picking up, so most apps haven't messed with accessibility yet.

<comment><USER9> So am I understanding correctly: the attributes assigned to UI elements can have hints for accessibility sake, and the testing tools are filling those attributes with tags to automate to act/assert an element? Info that's valuable to the testing framework, but garbage for accessibility?

Sounds like the testing frameworks have an obligation to provide a tool that can "clean" code for the final working version. Is there a way to do this in XCode without #ifdef'ing? (such as a pre-compilation plugin?)

<comment><USER13> Pretty much, yes. The more complex the app the worse it tends to get.

Say you have a button that says "Send Email" - the default accessibility label would have the screen reader just read the text, and that's great. And your testing framework can layer on top of this and, say, make sure the button works.

It gets a bit more complicated when you apply more rigor to testing - you need the ability to query the state of your program in a way that isn't truly necessary for usability, and forces developers to implement things in ways that are far from intuitive.

Take an example, let's say you're building a Facebook app. Instead of "Like This Post", you might have to label the button "Like joebob's post at 3/23/2012 2:17PM" just so the testing framework can uniquely identify one button over another. And this brokenness is hidden, since the visible button is still labeled "Like This Post".

Worse, say you want to test that a view changes size when interacted with. Now you're literally embedding sizes and coordinates into accessibility hints/values/labels to make this happen. This devolves very, very quickly.

There's been some promising progress on iOS automated testing - the fact that it's happening represents a maturing of the platform and an embrace of quality engineering rather than the seat-of-pants approach we've seen thus far. That being said, the most popular frameworks are still woefully immature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> From the article:

"The U.S. Department of Justice is expected to issue new regulations on website accessibility later this year that could take a broad view of the ADA's jurisdiction over websites. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

"That could mean websites will be required to include spoken descriptions of photos and text boxes for the blind, as well as captions and transcriptions of multimedia features for the deaf, said Jared Smith, associate director of WebAIM, a nonprofit group that trains and evaluates companies on Web accessibility.

"Mr. Smith also advises companies to ensure that people with motor disabilities can navigate websites without the use of a mouse, and to use plain language and a strong design to aid people with cognitive or intellectual disabilities."

</comment><comment><USER14> If websites want their business they will use the alt and title tag appropriately, I could be in the minority thinking we all ready have too many laws.

<comment><USER15> The ADA is a decades old law. What's changed is that the Internet has become a critical too for people to live their lives, and not just something nerds use. It's entirely appropriate that the ADA be applied online now. And let's face it, putting up some alt tags and making things keyboard navigable is far less expensive than making things compliant in the real world. Remember, this I'd just for sites engaged in commerce.

And if this stifles "innovation" in web site design, well that would be fucking fantastic. We really don't need more "innovation" by web site designers--they've already done enough damage to the internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Cherry-picking the article:

> .... and to use plain language and a strong design to aid people with > cognitive or intellectual disabilities....

How is this measured? This is the most disconcerting part of the article to me.

Taking it to an extreme, is Amazon liable when someone with cognitive impairments accidentally buys $10,000 of stuff with one-click shopping for failure to understand the concept?

Is ebay liable for inadequately explaining the concept of a bid at the level of someone with a 70 IQ?

</comment><comment><USER17> What about a marketplace for a solution to these problems? If I build a website I can't tell how disabled friendly it is, the best I can do is follow practises I find on some accessibility blog and maybe test it in a screenreader.

It would be a value add service to have a disabled person test their use of my site for various tasks and give me honest feedback.

</comment><comment><USER18> While I support the general cause of increased accessibility, I have a philosophical problem with "perfect or none at all" legislation. When the laws are passed, they are passed expecting lots of perfect making everyone shiny- happy, but they often get a lot of "none at all" with a side of frustrated resentment instead.</comment>


Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell developers they can build homes - <AUTHOR> https://www.city-journal.org/oakland-rezoning-california-housing <comment><USER2> The whole topic of conversation around housing affordability is backwards. Specifically, housing affordability is 100%, entirely, a problem of artificial constraints on supply by city councils.

(1) Americans consider housing to be an investment. An investment is only an investment if you expect a positive return over time. We generally want that investment to match or exceed inflation.

(2) That's antithetical to the idea of affordable housing. It's either affordable _or_ an expensive, appreciating asset. It literally cannot be both at the same time. The only reason it's worked thus far is the broad-based expansion of the US economy and of specific population centers like SF has masked the problem for many, many years. Especially in conjunction with 30-year mortgages requiring 2% down. That's some serious leverage.

We don't talk about the lack of affordable AAPL shares do we? That's insane, it's an investment, we _want_ it to go up. The less affordable, the better!

(3) Renters tend to be younger, transient and not vote. Owners tend to be older, wealthier, have deep roots in the community, and vote their asses off. They also aren't huge fans of change. They vote their interests: whatever keeps their, on average, largest investment performing well.

If you want cheap housing forget rent control. Allow developers to build up as high as the infrastructure can sustain. Allow smaller units, too, micro- apartments like whatever that place is on Mission, Panoramic. It's time to re- think the idea of housing as an "investment." We need to re-focus the narrative to make housing much more utilitarian.

This is reflected in major housing markets around the world, like Tokyo. They don't consider housing an investment, and they have some of the most affordable housing in any major metro in the world. [1]

[1] [https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco- housing-...](https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing- costs-tokyo)

<comment><USER3> Two thoughts

1) Isn't a developer also making an investment when they build these high as hell micro-apartment apartment buildings?

2) How do you avoid a race to the bottom in terms of housing quality when you allow said micro-apartments? Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods while the rich are living in abundant villas?

I'm all for affordable housing but it seems too nuanced to allow market forces to take care of it. I think the correct solution revolves around government subsidized/funded housing but that's a whole other can of beans.

<comment><USER4> Currently the poor are homeless or enduring multi-hour mega-commutes or stuffing a bunch of people into a single studio apartment. Well-located "barely livable wage slave pods" would be a huge improvement for a lot of people. I agree that the race to the bottom effect is a problem, but I think even the worst-case scenario would still be better than our existing housing situation.

<comment><USER5> Correct. A fire in a nice, completely unremarkable neighborhood about 40 miles east of San Francisco destroyed 4 units and made 35 people homeless. Almost 9 people to a home. And this is a solid 3-hour roundtrip commute from San Francisco or Mountain View. "Dickensian" is the word for it. Not literally, perhaps, because the housing situation in Dickens's time was even worse, but there is human misery on a broad scale.

[https://www.independentnews.com/news/chestnut-street-fire- in...](https://www.independentnews.com/news/chestnut-street-fire-in- livermore/article_c8f2e59c-e2e0-11e8-b09c-731ef788e7f9.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I saw this tweet recently, by patio11: [https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1199366332468224000](https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1199366332468224000)

"Tokyo has positive population growth of about 100,000 people a year, and rents and home prices are roughly stable for last decade.

How? Outconstructing NYC. And LA. And SF. And Boston. And Houston.

Combined.

Every year."

<comment><USER7> Tokyo is an 845 mi² megacity. Is population growth of 100k/yr something a city should aspire to? At a certain point I feel like some kind of family planning makes sense at larger levels of society just like it does with the family unit. I don't look forward to the day when there are 1000 mi² of concrete and 20M people crammed together where San Diego used to be

<comment><USER6> If people want to come live there you can either build homes for them or they will outbid existing inhabitants, housing prices will shoot up and less wealthy people will have to move out.

Those are the options. You can decide which one you look forward to more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> See also: Friday's "Don't Blame Tech Bros for the Housing Crisis" column:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/30/opinion/sunday/housing- cr...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/30/opinion/sunday/housing-crisis- silicon-valley.html)

<comment><USER9> Real galaxy brain take there. "Housing prices have always fluctuated, therefore these fluctuations are unrelated to this other highly correlated factor".

Not that I disagree much with the substance of pointing out Prop 13, etc, but you should also definitely blame tech for loading an entire industry into a metro area.

<comment><USER10> > definitely blame tech for loading an entire industry into a metro area

Supply and demand gonna supply and demand. It's weird to "blame tech" for existing and injecting a massive amount of jobs into our economy; there's _no_ metro region that could have handled that growth without the same effect on price, and there is no singular entity responsible for concentrating tech into a single city instead of distributed more evenly.

Maybe Houston could have come close to handling it without massive price increases, but I'm guessing Houston is too spread out to enjoy strong network effects, and probably would have become gridlocked with traffic to boot.

New York could have "handled" it, from a raw housing & transit perspective, but the region is already pricy and all of Manhattan (which has the best access to jobs and transit across the metropolitan region) has long since gentrified, so I don't know if that really counts.

(Of course, part of the reason no region could have handled it is precisely because of how Americans approach zoning and growth. Like our politics, our cities and neighborhoods seem to be static until there's an absolutely overwhelming force against the status quo, and even then sometimes that's not enough to change anything)

<comment><USER11> I'm biased since I grew up in Chicago, but I think Chicago could have handled it fine with the endless farmland to develop with housing especially if the companies put their offices in high rises downtown as Chicago has double decker trains that go from the suburbs to downtown [0]. We also love high rise architecture so there are plenty of high rises to live in downtown if you want to.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metra#/media/File:Metra- System...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metra#/media/File:Metra-System.png)

<comment><USER10> Growth only happens upwards or outwards. Your post seems to suggest that Chicago still has both available, which is (pleasantly) surprising to me as I was under the impression that every major american city had hit the limit on outward growth (usually because the roads are clogged by traffic and there's no political will to build more trains, so nobody wants more farmland developed).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > _the city passed a series of neighborhood plans in and around downtown that > relaxed zoning and removed parking requirements, making it easier and > cheaper to build._

Wait, you mean deregulation isn't just a republican talking point? And restrictive city (and state) governments were the problem this whole time???

<comment><USER13> Except its just as regulated, just differently. Its certainly not "the private sector policing itself." Efficient regulation that conforms to need is not the same as deregulation.

<comment><USER14> Removing parking requirements = fewer requirements = less regulation = deregulation.

Deregulation does not equal zero regulation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The reason midwestern cities hardly have housing bubbles like the coastal areas do is because old housing is cheap and competes with renting. Landlords can't afford to not be lenient. Although the only change I wish to see is that tenants could more easily enforce their rights and Landlords had to follow the law.

Most midwestern state governments are very laissez faire about the whole thing which is incredibly annoying. Apartment cleaning is illegal to make tenants pay for or withold a security deposit, yet they still do it anyway cause landlords know tenants aren't taking them to small claims for it. As a tenant, you need housing references. So taking your landlord to court over $100 is a surefire way to making you ineligible for further tenancy basically.

Landlords don't like tenants that know and enforce their rights.

<comment><USER16> > The reason midwestern cities hardly have housing bubbles like the coastal > areas do is because old housing is cheap and competes with renting.

Sure, but isn't the reason that housing is cheaper because those cities don't have anywhere near the level of demand that coastal cities have.

<comment><USER15> Yes and I'm not denying that. Also the midwest hasn't seen radical overvaluation of property that the coastal areas do. Since demand is so high there, the value of the property is not determined upon is "worth," but on someones ability to pay. You can see how that becomes a major issue when things crash. Suddenly many people lose out on the value of the place they paid for.

<comment><USER16> > Since demand is so high there, the value of the property is not determined > upon is "worth," but on someones ability to pay.

The monetary value of the something is by definition what the highest bidder is willing to pay for it. How would you determine it otherwise?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Oakland has built less housing per capita than SF over the last 5 years, as mentioned in the article. Appears like a few big projects finished construction and 2019 was an outlier year. The article implies this bounty will continue by citing "15,000 units in development" but doesn't mention that SF has 4x as many "in development" and many projects linger in that category for a decade and many never get built.

<comment><USER18> For large projects it takes 3- 5 years to get through municipal approval.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> How to increase the housing supply: get the government out.

Places in California requires things like requiring all homes to have a high amperage outlet in the garage for charging electric cars. Do you really think people that are struggling to keep a roof over their head are driving a Tesla?

<comment><USER2> Yes, let's get the government out, of deciding how tall houses can be.

Removing the requirement for a high-amperage outlet (a tiny incremental cost during building) is like an umbrella in a hurricane. Nice to have, but totally doesn't solve the real problem.

<comment><USER20> I think that was an example, not the entire point.

<comment><USER19> Lost on both of them. You should look up other useless stuff, like how many outlets are required in kitchens.

<comment><USER2> My argument is many of these represent small incremental costs and even if all of them were eliminated then affordability wouldn't change in any appreciable degree.

On the other hand increasing supply (even if somewhat more expensive in a per unit basis due to regulations that neither of us can really say are good, bad or cost effective) will.

It's the easy win.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm not sure what Oakland is doing is actually a major change. It's like something just triggered the money to flow to finish a bunch of projects in the east bay. But the spigot could just turn off again.

There's something broken in city planning that seems to be the largest hurdle to addressing affordability. Cities seem to want to have a box with a label on a map that doesn't change much. Then, if something changes within that box, there needs to be this big massive process. The "real fix" might be figuring out how cities can work on a smaller scale, not with these massive projects.

Just look at the report for the Oakland plan: [https://cao-94612.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/FINAL_DOSP- Publ...](https://cao-94612.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/FINAL_DOSP-Public- Review-Draft-Plan_082819_Compressed.pdf)

I'm struck by how much it must have cost to even _generate_ that plan. And, there's a ton of goals, but no feedback loop. As the plans are implemented over the next _decade or two_ , how do they know what's going well and what isn't?

</comment><comment><USER22> Not surprising. San Francisco seems to vote more owner friendly vs Oakland which votes more renter friendly. For SF I thought the recent proposition E was encouraging. It reduced zoning requirements on public zoned land for affordable housing. It was first proposition I've seen that reduces zoning requirements, it seems like a "toe in the water" for reducing complexity for addressing housing. Of course one might argue fuck toes in water we are in crisis, but given my first statement, I saw it as a trial balloon. Hopefully we see more aggressive measures in next few elections

</comment><comment><USER23> Lacking from the article are the statistics for how affordable those homes are and actual occupancy. Developers overwhelmingly love upselling to "luxury homes" that are kept as investment deeds in someones closet. NYC for example is building new apartments like bloody crazy, none of them are affordable to anyone other than investors.

<comment><USER24> The price of housing is determined by supply and demand, not the developer.

Building new housing lowers prices for _all_ preexisting housing.

<comment><USER25> > Building new housing lowers prices for all preexisting housing

This is not true in the US. Housing in the US is valued solely by the value of the housing around it (called 'comps' or 'comparables'). Building new luxury housing _raises_ the price for _all preexisting_ nearby housing, because your comparables will now be based on whatever the luxury housing prices are (even if your own house is very modest, even if your own house could never fetch a similar price, even if you never try to sell your house)

This is one of the big reasons you see pushback by rational, logical, well- informed residents in the US. Luxury housing _usually_ raises all non-luxury housing costs nearby, simply by proximity. Is is effectively a form of financial pollution. Some people's wealth is so obscene, that the mere fact it exists in a physical location, punishes everyone else in proximity to that location.

 _This is what Gentrification looks like in non-California, non-coastal cities_. Wealthy people artificially inflate the value of property in an area (which they can do, because there's never any limits or restrictions on construction of any kind, so they always build the highest-cost highest-margin property possible). And regular residents are now forced to bear that cost, forever.

It is possible to continue this bubble, irregardless of any actual demand for the housing, long after all real humans have checked out of the system. (See 2008 Financial Crisis). This process was not primarily driven by real people's housing needs, but by private capital's desire to store or grow their wealth, so real people have little control over it.

And, in non-Californian states like mine where property taxes are not locked in, but are recalculated constantly based on "market comparables", the bill for this financial pollution will hit you instantly on your next property tax invoice. Luxury condos go up on your block? Congrats, the tax bill for your old modest home is now doubled next year. Don't like it? Your only other option is to rent the unaffordable shitty luxury crap they just built.

<comment><USER24> > _Building new luxury housing raises the price for all preexisting nearby > housing_

If this was true, you could create infinite wealth by just building more and more "luxury" housing.

You will not find any economist agreeing with this "folk wisdom".

<comment><USER25> > If this was true, you could create infinite wealth by just building more and > more "luxury" housing.

I mean, it works until the bubble bursts. But the last time that happened, the federal government bailed out everyone participating in it -- they carefully re-assembled the bubble, like nothing had ever happened.

So, uh, until federal policy changes, this sort of does just create infinite wealth (on paper, at least).

<comment><USER24> Then the government should just do that and replace a lot of taxes with this income source!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> i have a plan small homes starting at 500sqft suitable for the x military also our elderly most will have small 1 room apartments to help with living costs. for every 2000 houses a collage will be built.max tuition will be $1500per semester and every 4 years tuition will go down 25% until it is free. 1st phase 150,000 homes priced approximtly 50,000 per home nothing fancy built to last all solar power stage 2 300,000 homes stage 3 electric glide monorail train coast to coast 2hr traveling speed of 2000 kmph change it starts now we the people are not asking we are demanding

</comment><comment><USER27> How much do you think it will affect housing prices? Is there a model that can predict the effect?

I'll be surprised if it helps a lot. Demand seems infinite.

<comment><USER28> > _Is there a model that can predict the effect?_

Yes, the model is called supply and demand. When you increase the quantity supplied, the only way the extra quantity can be sold, is if the price drops. If you increase the quantity supplied without reducing the price, the extra units will never be sold. Why would they... anyone who was willing to pay the previous price, would have already done so and will already have a home in SF/Oakland. The only way to fill the new units is to entice new residents who aren't willing to pay the previous price point.

<comment><USER27> Obviously. But, are you expecting a 10% decrease in prices, or 0.5%?

Why so defensive? I'm asking Because if it works, I'd like to sell the idea to skeptics. We all lean scientific here, right?

<comment><USER29> It's not him/her being defensive, it's basic economics that shouldn't have to be explained...

<comment><USER27> Sometimes one has to understand intermediate economics ....

For instance, in cases of inelastic demand and low liquidity (like housing), if prices are pegged at a maximum that buyers can pay, the actual equilibrium price could be much higher. In that case, a small amount of extra supply will not lower prices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> How can we think of housing without considering resource constraints. It's not just space to build vertically that determines how many homes can be built..it's traffic, infrastructure, roads, water, power, schools, essential services, public services, public spaces, community amenities..the list goes on.

Urban density cannot keep on increasing. You cannot 'keep on adding homes'. We are already having very high costs of living and this also contributes to unaffordability of Bay Area cities.

The only winner is the state which can get more property tax dollars in Bay Area and other urban centers than elsewhere in California. Essentially a handful of high tech dollar fueled California cities are subsidizing the entire state.

This state will implode with this 'high density is sustainable' and 'build and they will come' mantra. We are already having power outages, crumbling infrastructure, increasing water rates, more and more tolls, high rents, overcrowded schools and unending traffic jams. And the rent is nothing to sneeze at..

The high density lobby is going to incinerate my state. Having already witnessed the devastation this kind of building has caused in my home country, this breaks my heart and frankly I am terrified for the future.

<comment><USER31> _How can we think of housing without considering resource constraints. It's not just space to build vertically that determines how many homes can be built..it's traffic, infrastructure, roads, water, power, schools, essential services, public services, public spaces, community amenities..the list goes on._

High density living is potentially more efficient than low density living (look European or some Asian cities, etc). Indeed, the US model of the low- density mega-city is the thing that has become unsustainable - commuting from city to suburb or suburb-to-suburb involves a huge amount of infrastructure that is simple to build but expensive to maintain.

The problem of the US in particular is that low-density has had the upper hand for so long that efforts to produce sane high density get sabotaged in a variety of ways (look the difference in cost per mile of public transit in the US versus Europe).

<comment><USER30> You can also think China and eastern bloc. What people want is not high density housing but high density luxury living. Every home is no less than 1200 sq ft and two cars and 2 kids if it's a family..and a million dollar. This is not sustainable high density. It's a scam.

You can't compare Asian and European (i have lived in both places)high density building to what is touted in the Bay Area.

<comment><USER31> There's little evidence that "people" all want 1200 sq ft houses in the US. They are a zoning standard but a lot of zoning is a scam to push low density, extensive development.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think there has been a very successful diversion of derision towards 'Americans who own homes' and ignoring the vast majority of foreigners who own properties(both rent seeking and farmland) in the Bay Area as speculative/investment properties that they have purchased sight unseen.

Deriding pensioners on fixed income whose taxes actually built the infrastructure and schools and roads of the Bay Area is shameful..Whose final home is not 'speculative property', but their retirement nest egg. Not everyone has a pension from a public sector job.

Look into pension funds, foreign investors,insurance companies, university investment funds ..and yes, Wall Street..who are literally raiding California from the other side of our state to see how this inequality and unaffordablility is caused. And the Govt in the state of California seated in Sacramento is complicit in this.

On a broader scale, they are also stealing our water(example: family farms in Paso Robles can't grow their crops like alfafa and corn because of a water moratorium because Harvard investment funds have bought acres and acres to grow grapes in vineyards..and drilling wells at the fence line which makes it legal but essentially taps into aquifers and water tables meant for the entire region. 1500 ft when water was found at 300 ft.)

This is causing a divide between rural and urban causing the former to become unliveable and increasing population pressures on highly dense urban hubs.

<comment><USER32> What is the cause/effect here? You seem to be laying the blame at foreigners, wall street, etc for causing the housing shortage, but the cause/effect of voters/local governments prohibiting building housing -> housing shortage is pretty straightforward, I don't see why pointing it out should be "shameful".

I don't think homeowners are a unified block on this issue, but specifically the local organizations that put a lot of effort into preventing housing during a serious shortage seem to reasonably deserve some criticism. In the bay area even small proposals (like allowing 1 story of apartments over shops, or some mid-density near transit) often get killed by groups that uniformly oppose all housing.

<comment><USER30> Is it a housing shortage or an excess of population in urban centers?

What are you going to do living like sardines in a can where high density housing has been approved if there is a high cost to scarce water/power/infrastructure and support services.

<comment><USER32> The population hasn't increased tremendously, it's the price that has gone up. So it doesn't seem like excess population is probably the problem.

You could lay the blame at demand for housing in cities (instead of supply). It seems less possible to make housing affordable by reducing demand though.

I don't think it's wrong to dislike cities and to want to live in the suburbs or countryside. But people will need to commute longer and longer and pay more and more to landlords unless more housing is built.

I think what makes sense is for the cities to expand to accommodate the demand, then be surrounded by suburbs. If the people who want to live in cities can live there, that should make the suburbs more affordable. And there is no way to have an affordable suburb right in the city anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> They forget the human cost. Increasing density decreases quality of life. The people are the product of the cities in the commercial sense. The well being of the people is lost in the drive for infinite growth.

<comment><USER34> You opinion on density is just that, your opinion, not everyone agrees.

Density means a larger selection of jobs, increased variety in entertainment (ie: more likely to find something you personally love), increased selection of medical professionals, increased variety in food, ability to avoid driving commutes, kids who can self-manage without being driven everywhere, etc. To some people that's worth more cramped living, to others it's not. Quality of life is taken as a whole and not based on part of the whole.

<comment><USER35> > You opinion on density is just that, your opinion, not everyone agrees.

Sure but curious why that comment is downvoted and yours is not?

Disagreeement != downvote.

<comment><USER36> It's not stated as opinion, and has some ridiculous statements like this in it:

> The well being of the people is lost in the drive for infinite growth.

There is no drive for infinite growth, that I have found. People are just trying to have enough housing for everyone, yet this "infinite growth might happen therefore we are going to impose housing austerity" is the attitude that has been prevalent in older suburban homeowners, and that's exactly how we got into this mess of a housing crisis.

Categorically dismissing the large number of people that choose to live in cities because they prefer them is ridiculous. If it really were worse, prices would be lower in the cities than outside them. More people want what cities have to offer than are allowed to access them.

<comment><USER35> > There is no drive for infinite growth, that I have found.

What about Carbon emission projections. Isn't that proof of 'drive for infinite growth' ?

<comment><USER36> That doesn't make sense, unless your definition of infinite growth is not infinite.

Rather, I suspect "infinite growth" is a hyperbole to stand in for "everybody has it as good as I do."

And carbon emissions are a particularly bad example of that because carbon emissions are falling per person without a decrease in the standard of living for people, or for the amount of useful energy they use in their lives.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>