Thanks for this, I think it's really important.

I wouldn't usually post, but I'm not sure if this is a shared experience for most HN people so here goes.

My hometown in Alaska didn't have a road out. The the market price of the least expensive apartments was approximately %100 of the full time minimum wage net income. People my age who couldn't live with their parents or be students often crowded secretly into small apartments, and sometimes lived in cars or squatted in the woods, all of which is uncertain, illegal, and a barrier to self improvement and long term planning. People who couldn't afford to live there also couldn't afford the plane ticket to Seattle, so they would get stuck.

There was no CS program at the tiny local university, so I moved "down south" to work, wait for residency, and become a student. I saw a lot of the same problems with a varying, but still impossible (rent):(minimum wage) ratio. I eventually decided that trying to work your way through school while paying rent is a dumb idea and I was later fortunate enough to find another way. Meanwhile I had, and saw, a lot of these kind of problems.

When you can't pay for normal housing, it's illegal to reduce your consumption. Leases have occupancy limits and loitering and squatting are illegal. When you live in a spare room, closet, tent, or car you can get kicked out, arrested, ticketed, or impounded. As far as I could figure out, public assistance was not given to young, able, single men.

So you choose between consuming more housing than you can afford, or breaking the law. The cheaper you live the more risky or illegal it is, so people kind of end up doing both. You do unsustainable things to pay rent like borrowing from family or credit cards. You avoid landlords and maintenance staff because you aren't on the lease, can't afford the rent hike for increased occupancy, can't pass the credit check, can't pay the deposit. Your car gets impounded because it's not registered. There's no bus to the suburbs. A cab costs most of your wage. You get fired for being late when you wake up in the morning and your car isn't there.

I saw this kind of thing first hand and I feel fortunate to have got out of it with out any long term consequences, except in my mind. My partner gives me a hard time because it still makes me a little nervous that I can't fit all my stuff in the car and be ready to leave town.

I'm not saying that I thought I had a right to live somewhere I couldn't afford. I just wished that people wouldn't judge me so harshly, or trivialize my problems. I tried moving to a lot of different places. Sometimes I couldn't get full time job. Sometimes I got fired. Sometimes I couldn't get a wage paying job, and had to settle for commissioned piece work. Sometimes I did day labor. Sometimes I couldn't find anything at all.

There are lots of ways to fail to earn enough for rent. As an able young man, I found people extremely unsympathetic to my inability to prosper, or afford "normal" things. I sometimes find myself listening politely while people say very unkind things about the poor, apparently without a clue that I take it personally. Of course they don't call them poor; they call them "tenants" or "unemployed" or "welfare cheats". I have even heard it remarked that _real_ poverty doesn't exists in the U.S. because we give them welfare and free food, so no one should complain. Can a person be happy without autonomy and mobility to chose their place and manner of earning a living? Is starvation the only legitimate hardship exists?

I like having labor and housing standards, but we need to acknowledge that there are people that are priced out of the regulated housing market. Their existence is effectively criminalized. I felt like the state wouldn't help me and wouldn't let me help myself.

I think market failures or structural problems are sometimes willfully overlooked in America in sort of the same way that the poverty couldn't exist in communist states.

I'm really not sure what to do about this, but it would be nice to start by admitting the possibility of some problem other than a lack of individual moral virtue.