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March 26, 2005

Housing and Humanity

Via Tyler Cowen I see Bryan Caplan's suggestion that before you get government housing assistance you ought to be required to take on some roommates, share a bathroom, and otherwise live the life of a college student. In principle I suppose this is fair enough, although I share both of Tyler Cowen's concerns-- that policing the living arrangements of people is generally undesirable and that the amount of money involved is so trivial as to hardly be worth the fire.

That said, I think Caplan is on to something bigger-- the relationship between welfare payments and hard bargains. If libertarian-types wish to cut government housing assistance, I think it's only fair to also lift government housing restrictions. People who need to live cheaply are sometimes forced to make hard bargains, bargains that political majorities find "unthinkable". Many jurisdictions limit the number of unrelated people who can live together, or the number of people who can live in X amount of space, or require certain amenities to be furnished. In much of New Haven, for example, it would probably be illegal for a person to live "like a college student" (multiple unrelated people sharing a single room and a hallway bathroom). I happen to think this is bad, and that we ought to make it easier for people in tough circumstances to make tough tradeoffs (and I think this is true regardless of whether we cut housing subsidies).

But it is interesting to me that most municipalities don't worry as much about a different tradeoff-- namely price and physical safety. The de facto situation in many urban areas, (e.g. Chicago) is that people who need cheap housing can find it by picking parts of the city where police protection is almost nil. It is interesting that we don't particularly encourage college students to make this tradeoff.

I suppose the near-anarchist types who want to privatize the police force think this is a good thing, but I don't. Presumably there are reasons having to do with enforceability and psychological bias that we do this, but that doesn't make it wise. So, if we are to take Mr. Caplan's suggestion-- that the poor should live like college students-- seriously, why not pursue it both ways, and also make sure that they are entitled to at least the level of physical security one can expect on or near college campuses?


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