Hacker Cinema
Single White Female
1992 · Film · 108 min
Directed by Barbet Schroeder
Having recently split from her fiancé, Allison Jones welcomes new roommate Hedra Carlson. The young women quickly form a bond, but soon Allison begins to notice not all’s well with her new tenant.
1 neutralfrom 1 commenter
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
6 comments on Hacker News
Homelessness is an inherently hard problem to solve. Programs to "help the homeless" tend to make the problem worse. If you need to be homeless to qualify for help, there are perverse incentives at work.
We need a new housing model. Since World War II, average house size has increased, average household size (number of people in the home) has decreased.
We fundamentally need a different form of housing than what is getting fostered by policies and financing mechanisms largely created as part of the process of solving the last housing crisis by inventing the modern suburb and blanketing the country with it.
We now have a cartoonish 1950s single family home on steroids as our default expectation, thus the red queen effect. We have torn down a million single room occupancy units and expect as a default that single young adults in the city rent a bedroom in a 5 bedroom family home shared with unrelated single people in a living situation not designed for that.
Then we make horror movies about room mates, like Single White Female, and pretend this is inevitable and not a consequence of policy decisions that actively discourage builders from building homes that work for singletons, students, seniors and single parents.
Or the steps to reduce suffering are clear to them. You just don't like the conclusion they drew and don't approve.
There is insufficient affordable housing in the US. We build apartments designed for a nuclear family and expect young single people to get roommates and split the rent and then you see questions on the internet about "How do I deal with this roommate from hell?" and we make horror movies about it like Single White Female and continue to not offer housing options suitable for living alone on a budget.
Since WW2, we've torn down about a million SROs. We now think of SROs as housing for homeless people when it used to be normal market rate housing for single people.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
Some people are homeless because they left abusive situations. They decided "I would rather sleep outside than continue to put up with this."
But the narrative most people accept is that homeless people are all addicts and crazies and this somehow means it's a personal problem, they aren't trying hard enough, they would rather be high than in shelter.
Addiction is a hard problem to solve no matter your social class. We don't act like "Wealthy rock stars with a drug habit must be wealthy because they take so many drugs." but we conclude that there is a cause and effect relationship between drug use and homelessness.
It's basically prejudice talking.
People on the street tend to be square pegs who have trouble finding a slot that fits them. We've actively eliminated a lot of those oddly shaped slots and then act like "You just don't want to make your life work."
Homeless people aren't necessarily any more or less virtuous or hard working or whatever than anyone else. The fabric of their life came unraveled and they don't know how to readily weave it back together and then the world tells them "The beatings shall continue until morale improves."
I don't know enough about it to know if they are paying enough or if their payment rules need to change, but not everyone needs to be Britney Spears.
In fact, having tremendous wealth and fame come with additional costs. You end up needing a mansion, not for the space per se but for privacy and security. You end up needing bodyguards. Etc.
One way to make services like Spotify make sense for "average joe" musicians and other creatives is to address the other half of the equation: The cost of living for the average joe.
We basically only build upper class housing these days. The average new home in the 1950s was about 1200 square feet and housed about 3.5 people. These days, it's more like 2400 square feet (or more) and houses about 2.5 people
We have also torn down a million SROs and we largely have done away with things like boarding houses, where you rented a room and got breakfast and dinner as part of the rent and you supplied your own lunch elsewhere. Instead, we default to expecting young people to share a house or apartment designed for a nuclear family with a bunch of strangers. Then we make horror movies about it, like Single White Female, and then fail to go "Huh. Maybe that's not such a wonderful thing to insist young, single people do."
Health care is another major issue in the US. It costs way too much and many other developed countries handle that better, so we have many other examples to draw from. It's not like we need to brilliantly design something that's never been done before to make this work. We just mostly need the political will and to take our heads out of our butts in this country.
This is US-centric though.
As noted elsewhere, I'm pretty short of sleep, so I no doubt could have said some things better.
Yes, some of what I'm describing is very US-centric. But not all of it.
When I was growing up, most of the world lived and worked on farms. Within my lifetime -- in fact, within the lifetime of my children -- that changed and we now have more people living in cities worldwide than on farms.
The world has changed, but we still cleave to certain mental models that no longer serve us well. That's the super short version.
But anyway, since these suburbs are already built, couldn't this be resolved relatively easily by building public transport to the biggest suburbs?
Mostly, no. The suburbs actually built in the 1950s aren't so bad. A larger problem is the policies that era fostered in the US and the direction things have gone since then.
Average new homes in the 1950s were about 1200 square feet and held about 3.5 people. Today, the average new home is more than 2400 square feet and holds about 2.5 people.
There have been a lot of other changes as well in what is typical for a new home, but those details right there are enough to let you know that our homes have grown larger on average while our families have grown smaller. Meanwhile, we have a growing homeless problem (which people on the internet routinely want to claim is unrelated to housing supply issues and the high cost of rent, but the data doesn't support that conclusion).
Our family size has shrunk. Our homes need to also shrink and we need to return to patterns of development compatible with fostering walkable neighborhoods and transit-oriented design. Adding public transit to existing suburbs won't really achieve that.
The general assumption in the US is that young people should rent a place designed for a nuclear family and get a bunch of roommates to fill the extra rooms and split the rent. Then we make horror movies, like Single White Female, about basically what a nightmare this is. The internet is filled with horror stories of the roommate from hell and questions about "How on earth can I survive this or get out of this???"
We have eliminated about a million SROs. People object to SROs a "slum" housing. They are literally more comfortable with having people out in the street than with building housing that isn't upper middle class as our baseline expectation without providing jobs and incomes to support that as our baseline expectation.
While eliminating small homes that people could potentially live in as a single adult or childless couple, our millionaires are actively planning to eliminate jobs and create permanent unemployment. After eliminating jobs that paid on average $20k to $50k annually, our rich people here would like to institute UBI paying between $10k and $18k annually with an expectation that we will have 80 percent permanent unemployment.
Given that we have eliminated most housing across the US that costs less than $500/month to rent, there are a lot of places where $10k won't even pay your rent for the year, much less feed you. Without resolving our housing issues, there is no hope that some ridiculous scheme like UBI will do anything but shaft most Americans.
I mostly can't get people to really listen to me. They are too busy listening to multimillionaires and failing to see that those people are actively and intentionally planning to create a permanent underclass that will have no hope of accessing wealth ever again.
I was homeless for nearly six years while active on Hacker News. Simply being allowed to run my damn mouth in the same space as all kinds of millionaire businessmen absolutely didn't fix my life and lift me out of poverty and so forth. So I'm quite convinced that the entire point of wanting to create UBI is so that asshole rich people can wash their hands of poor people.
It's quite horrifying and I don't know how to stop it.
On the upside, the pandemic seems to have fostered some of the changes the world has been talking about for years and not accomplishing, such as reducing our carbon footprint and reducing pollution. So maybe we will find solutions anyway, in spite of bulling our way intentionally and on purpose towards a dystopian vision of intentionally shafting most Americans and telling them to fuck the hell off and forget about ever having any kind of a life.
SROs are going the way of the dinosaur and a lot of people no longer know what they are, so here is the obligatory link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
This comment is a little more on the ranty side than I really like. I'm just really short of sleep and tired of trying to be polite to people who literally don't care if their callous BS results in my death. So it's probably time for me just stop talking and attempt to go get some sleep.
Even better would be concrete solution specifications (link to something of substance?).
We've torn down about a million SROs in recent decades and zoned out of existence a lot of housing options that are being termed Missing Middle Housing.
The current YIMBY movement and Missing Middle Advocacy is the latest attempt to try to address this issue. New Urbanism was a previous one.
None of them get at the roots of the problem, which date to "the boys" returning home from WW2 and the birth of the modern American suburb.
In a nutshell, the vast majority of our housing financing mechanisms, tax incentives, etc etc are aimed at helping people get single family detached homes and homes today are more than twice the size they were in the 1950s while housing about one less person.
So our housing policies have caused "home inflation" in some sense. Homes are bigger and have more amenities -- or don't exist at all.
We now expect single people to rent a place designed for a nuclear family and get roommates to fill the empty bedrooms and split the rent. Then we make movies, like Single White Female, about what a nightmare it is to be forced to make ends meet by living with a total stranger and do nothing to change our policies.
I've made several stabs at trying to write about this, but none of that has gotten any traction.
Here's a few things by me:
http://projectsro.blogspot.com/2019/11/americas-housing-ghost-of-christmas-past.html
https://americanhomeworks.blogspot.com/
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-missing-middle.html
You are right that posting on the internet is mostly a waste of time. But I'm medically handicapped, so it's where I spend the majority of my time, though I would prefer to actually have a life. I simply don't.
I am involved in stuff locally in my small town. I'm no one important and it may never lead to better housing here. On the upside, the local police department does hand out my fliers for homeless resources -- which is mostly websites, mostly written by me. So maybe the time I spend online isn't a total waste.
Have a great day.
Edit: Those are not intended to be "substantive" supporting links. I've studied this problem space for decades. I wanted to be an urban planner before life got in the way. I don't know of any other sources that will say exactly what I would like them to say. Sorry.
I literally just answered exactly that and the answer is "Increase the supply of affordable (in the most literal sense of the word) housing in the US because there is a nationwide shortage." I don't mean "affordable housing" as some euphemism for government owned housing. I mean stuff you can get for under $600 that doesn't require you to own a car to get to it. There is a dearth of such housing across the entire freaking nation.
For every 100 families living in poverty on the West Coast, there are no more than 30 affordable homes
https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-poverty-west-coast-no-30-affordable-homes/
The Clear Connection Between Housing Costs and Homelessness
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-clear-connection-between-housing.html
The Missing Middle
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-missing-middle.html
I actually "majored" in this in college, so to speak. Before I spent nearly six years homeless, I wanted to be an urban planner. I was pursuing a bachelor's in Environmental Resource Management with a concentration in Housing intended to eventually also get a Masters in Urban Planning. As part of that program, I took a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy.
I feel like I repeat these exact same points ad nauseum on Hacker News.
Our housing policies have increasingly encouraged a very upper class version of single family detached homes designed for nuclear families and our demographics have diverged from that population. We literally don't build housing designed explicitly for the needs of single people, childless couples, etc and we have more such households than we used to have.
We now have this insane expectation that single people should rent housing designed for a nuclear family and fill the extra bedrooms with strangers to split the rent. Then we make movies, like Single White Female, about what a nightmare it is to have to live with total strangers to make your life work.
We've torn down more than a million SROs. We've largely zoned out of existence new Missing Middle Housing.
People can't rent what doesn't actually exist and affordable housing in a walkable neighborhood mostly doesn't exist in the US. We simply don't build it.
Then we run around acting like homeless people are all crazies and junkies, irresponsible, don't have self discipline, etc etc. and when you say "Just build more housing that works for people" you get crazy-making replies saying "But WHY?????"
Because it would fix the vast majority of this problem. That's why.
And then I feel like spitting nails because I don't know what I need to do to more effectively communicate about this thing that I've literally studied.