The Other Part of Housing

Post date: Sep 19, 2016 3:55:43 AM

This week I started in what is currently our least fleshed-out area of research - housing policies to help locals stay in the area, instead of policies to regulate the rental market. It was difficult to find policies designed for a situation exactly like Venice - too many people with almost no locals on an island with no space for expansion* makes a better set up for a logic problem than a search criteria. Fortunately, there's an alternative: low income housing assistance is an extremely well documented topic with an impressive number of academic papers written on it, and the problem set-up is quite similar. Venice just has a few more zeroes after every dollar sign. Spending some time reading about low-income housing policies and Italian tenancy laws has driven home how complex real estate markets actually are. It's easy to get so focused in on something that it starts to feel like The Most Important Issue, but it's important to remember that when we're dealing with social systems that have been built up over decades and centuries by dozens of groups with conflicting interests. Keeping things in perspective has also been a theme for me this week personally, as I have had 2 computers break in the past 5 days.

On the subject of remembering that things are more complicated than we think they are, let's have a look at a basic flow chart of the Italian government:

* For those of you not familiar with the puzzle this made me think of, here's the Venice version of it, because I think it's entertaining:

There's a group of 100 people living in a city built on a lagoon. Each person has a coloured dot drawn on their forehead denoting them as a tourist (red) or a local (green). No person in the city knows the colour of their own dot, and none of them are able to communicate with each other, but they can all see and keep count of the number of people they see with each colour dot. If someone discovers the colour of their dot, they leave the city on a ferry that comes once every night.

Assume that the city is populated by perfect logicians, meaning that if a conclusion can be deduced, they will know it immediately, and that there are 80 tourists and 20 locals in the city. One day a team of WPI IQP students arrives, and after an exhaustively long project, they are able to communicate to the inhabitants that there is at least one tourist in the city. Who leaves the city after the completion of the project, and on which night?