Q14 - Lucien: Public-housing advocates

[sugarspinspun]

I can't exactly understand why B is wrong and why C is correct.

I thought that it initially appeared that Lucien was using "available" as "not occupied" instead of its intended "affordable" but at the end of his argument he states that people are only homeless because they can't/won't pay rent so I thought that proved C to be false because his argument understands the lack of affordability.

And with regards to B, Lucien does only use him and his friends as very strong evidence of availability even though that's not especially strong. Is it that the mention of scientific studies is too strong a requirement?

[ohthatpatrick]

Good questions/points.

My first question to Lucien, if I were arguing with him, would be, "Where do you and your professional colleagues live?"

If he and his professional colleagues live in fancy, upscale apartments, then I don't think the vacancies in their buildings are at all relevant to the question of whether there is enough low-income apartments for the homeless.

Lucien's building and the building's his colleagues refer to are only relevant to this conversation if they are "low-income apartments".

(C) is getting at this problem in a weird and slightly indirect way.

Imagine that we know Lucien is wealthy enough to live in a decent apartment. When he says, "Since apartments clearly are available ...", we would stop him and say, "C'mon, Lucien. Homeless people couldn't afford apartments in your building, so those vacancies are not relevant to the idea of 'insufficient housing'."

Those vacancies aren't "clearly available" to a homeless person, because he/she couldn't afford them. Lucien is using available just in the technical sense of unoccupied.

His claim at the end is that homeless people must be unable to work or unwilling to work. He does NOT say that homeless people are unable to pay the rent, which is what you were suggesting would go against (C).

In terms of (B), you were right to realize that the dealbreaker is bringing up scientific evidence, which is out of scope here.

(B) is close to airing a genuine complaint: Lucien's entire argument is based on the anecdotal observations of him and his colleagues. That's not very convincing evidence to address a city-wide phenomenon.

Lucien IS treating these informal conversations (plus his own observations) as sufficient to reach a general conclusion.

But he is NOT claiming that they are AS STRONG as controlled scientific studies. So that part of (B) is just too extreme and out of scope.

== other answers ==

(A) The author dismisses the claim that "there is insufficient housing for the homeless" as absurd, not the claim that "there are many homeless people in the city".

(D) This is somewhat tempting but so weakly worded that it doesn't really weaken the argument. It's not crucial to the author's argument that ALL apartment buildings have vacant apartments. He's only trying to prove that since there are SOME vacancies, it's wrong to say that homelessness is due to lack of housing.

(E) "who would pay" is beyond the scope of Lucien's argument, so it can't be relevant to our criticism of his reasoning.

Hope this helps.