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[US Housing Crisis]: Hope you can afford Luxury housing in the capitalist hellscape
Mill
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
The US housing crisis has been a issue cropping up lately. This isn't exactly new either and has been kicking around for several years now, it's just now things are getting really bad. One thing with this crisis, is it's easy to focus on how this can be a problem for the most vulnerable, low income individuals and be completely unware of how this is in some ways worse for the middle class. Myself, I got to watch as my friends and landlords spend over two years trying to find a house they could afford. They weren't poor enough to get assistance, nor were they wealthy enough to pick whatever they wanted in the Hampton Roads area of VA. Thing is developer don't feel it's profitable to make middle income housing, they want to make luxury housing to increase their profits, with some arguing that is the only way to make profits. There may not be enough low income housing; however, it's not uncommon for developers to have to put aside some, but low income people get prioritized for that housing. Essentially, this is another example of how the rich has fucked us over because they can choose any location to buy a house.
Right now this is probably worst on the West coast, namely in CA. This is likely a result of just more people being there. Still there are cases of people making sizable salaries, well above poverty, that are homeless and it isn't by choice. A host of shit feeds into this. Obviously, economic inequality is a big factor. Rich people buying up property can jack up prices. Even if a good chunk of this is the fact that there just isn't much housing and hardly any vacancies, someone buying up housing as an investment or so they can have a 2nd to whatever number of extra homes past the primary residences or in some cases probably for money laundering purposes, really doesn't help matters. There is also NIMBY assholes fucking things up by pushing for zoning that makes it harder to build stuff. Finally, as mentioned earlier, there is the whole issue of developer feeling it's not a viable business model to build anything that isn't luxury housing.
We're seeing some of the democratic candidates starting to talk about the housing issue. I'll pretty much state that someone is being naïve if they think this can simply be solved by price controls and building more low income housing. It'll help some. That means more housing for low income households and makes it harder for the rental market to price out people that don't want to or can't currently buy a home. Problem is that doesn't solve a number of other issues, if you're middle class, that still means several hours where you're spending tons of time searching for a house or in some places, you're making 50K+ and having a house there is a pipe dream.
Finally, a modern US crisis thread wouldn't be one, if we didn't have to be concerned with how the Trump admin could potentially fuck things up. The Trump admin has zeroed in on this issue and namely has hyper focused on in records to CA. For those just wading into US politics be your foreign or domestic, Trump's motive here has fuck all with being an honest human being. There are a number of things his administration has done that has probably made the housing issue worse. What he is trying to is find a way to stick to CA because he is a petty fucker and if he comes up with anything, it'll only be good enough to let him say "gotcha," and then turn to shit shortly after. This is particularly why the tentative thing approach they are leaning towards it rounding up all the homeless people and warehouse them, which tends to be the average approach for rich assholes like Trump, when they deal with homelessness. Just round up all the vagrants and throw them somewhere out of sight. As a Star Trek fan, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that there was an episode of Deep Space Nine, Past-Tense (2 part episode), the cast ends up back in time to the 21st and both Captain Sisko and Doctor Bashir end up in a fence in ghetto that is in San Francisco. Despite being from the 90's, DS9 still has a relevant take on this issue and why we probably don't want the likes of Trump involved.
Right now this is probably worst on the West coast, namely in CA. This is likely a result of just more people being there. Still there are cases of people making sizable salaries, well above poverty, that are homeless and it isn't by choice. A host of shit feeds into this. Obviously, economic inequality is a big factor. Rich people buying up property can jack up prices. Even if a good chunk of this is the fact that there just isn't much housing and hardly any vacancies, someone buying up housing as an investment or so they can have a 2nd to whatever number of extra homes past the primary residences or in some cases probably for money laundering purposes, really doesn't help matters. There is also NIMBY assholes fucking things up by pushing for zoning that makes it harder to build stuff. Finally, as mentioned earlier, there is the whole issue of developer feeling it's not a viable business model to build anything that isn't luxury housing.
We're seeing some of the democratic candidates starting to talk about the housing issue. I'll pretty much state that someone is being naïve if they think this can simply be solved by price controls and building more low income housing. It'll help some. That means more housing for low income households and makes it harder for the rental market to price out people that don't want to or can't currently buy a home. Problem is that doesn't solve a number of other issues, if you're middle class, that still means several hours where you're spending tons of time searching for a house or in some places, you're making 50K+ and having a house there is a pipe dream.
Finally, a modern US crisis thread wouldn't be one, if we didn't have to be concerned with how the Trump admin could potentially fuck things up. The Trump admin has zeroed in on this issue and namely has hyper focused on in records to CA. For those just wading into US politics be your foreign or domestic, Trump's motive here has fuck all with being an honest human being. There are a number of things his administration has done that has probably made the housing issue worse. What he is trying to is find a way to stick to CA because he is a petty fucker and if he comes up with anything, it'll only be good enough to let him say "gotcha," and then turn to shit shortly after. This is particularly why the tentative thing approach they are leaning towards it rounding up all the homeless people and warehouse them, which tends to be the average approach for rich assholes like Trump, when they deal with homelessness. Just round up all the vagrants and throw them somewhere out of sight. As a Star Trek fan, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that there was an episode of Deep Space Nine, Past-Tense (2 part episode), the cast ends up back in time to the 21st and both Captain Sisko and Doctor Bashir end up in a fence in ghetto that is in San Francisco. Despite being from the 90's, DS9 still has a relevant take on this issue and why we probably don't want the likes of Trump involved.
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The ability hasn't been there for ideas like this for as long as we've been alive. If they were we'd be seeing moves like this more during Democratic administrations but they aren't politically feasible. It's not about what we want, it's about who's going to vote for it in congress, and state obstruction from Republicans. America isn't Finland.
I think you're confusing ability with the willingness to do so though. The ability to do these things is there, you set aside the funds, you perform research into what facilities to buy and rehab, and you go and do the thing with the funds you've set aside.
Political Feasibility in this case isn't ability; ability is budgeting and logistics, things we are more than able to handle. What you're talking about are issues of value judgments and choices, and by and large even Democratic administrations have failed us in this regard, because they still buy into bullshit about homelessness and housing access and the purpose of housing in a capitalist economy. These are choices being made, and values being established and protected.
And by and large, in America the ability of a landlord to make profit from rents is valued higher than the need of people to have a stable roof over their head, a home they can always come back to and build a life from. And we need to recognize that if we're going to start fixing these problems.
Rent controls always seem like a hacky, ineffective fix, but social housing can be genuinely helpful in this situation. Especially if it’s not just for the very poor, so ghettos don’t develop. SF should be building a lot of it - but of course, the NIMBYS get in the way of that.
Also liked the idea of a vacancy tax, because housing is not an investment portfolio and shouldn't be treated as such. The specifics can be defined, like, for example, a property has to be either occupied or on sale, and if there's no buyers after X time, then the government buys it at a 50% reduced price.
That could create perverse incentives for developers to throw up shacks in a cornfield and list them at an inflated price.
Government comes in and buys one unit of your fourplex, somehow!
This is a terrible idea. Vacancy tax lol. How's this for a perverse incentive: community decides to boycott renting a house owned by the local gay activist, so it gets seized by the govt.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
https://www.vox.com/2019/5/17/18628267/jenny-schuetz-weeds-interview
Schuetz basically goes over the fact that there's two overlapping set of crises and one is technically much easier to solve then the other.
1) Low income people can't afford housing. This one is not actually that hard to deal with. You give people more money via housing assistance programs.
2) Lack of housing supply in specific areas of the country. Basically the exact places you'd think. This is the crisis more people generally think about. It's in large part a function of zoning and local control creating incentives that lead to bad larger-scale issues in the housing market. This one is very very hard to solve and basically any solution involves someone at a higher level of government stamping all over the local politics of a lot of neighbourhoods, many of them affluent.
As an addendum to the discussion that spawned this thread, the fact that rent control addresses none of the above is the basic problem with the whole scheme.
If by "the projects" you mean literally any sort of multi-unit housing, then yes.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I don't live in the US, but from what I gather a lot of cities have both a large amount of vacant homes and significant homeless populations. I don't think it's true that the homes and the people needing homes are just not located in the same places. As if the reason for all homes being vacant is that the population of the place just decreased. For one that seems pretty convenient, and for two the sort of thing that caused decreases in population also creates a lot of homeless folk.
For third it just doesn't track with what I know about real landlords and how they think. We are I think all familiar with the case of the landlord trying to force out the last renter of one of their apartments so that they can jack up the prices?
whereas if you build more social housing, landlords will presumably have to lower the rent to compete
yeah their prices are not merely a function of the cost of ownership to them. They ask what the market will bear, or in other words what people are willing or able to pay for having a roof over their head.
Just giving money to low income people will not work without some form of rent control. At least, I've never heard of such a thing working as a system.
The US is huge. The housing crisis just doesn't exist in most parts of the country, that's where you end up having vacant homes.
(There's the other side of this that people talk about, where there are vacant homes is the big cites that are having the problem, presumably owned by people sitting on them for investment, but IMO that is way overblown... there just isn't enough housing in the cites for everyone)
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
But the housing crisis you're talking about isn't really about people who are homeless. It's about people who live somewhere and want or need to live somewhere else but can't afford it. The OP pivots to the middle class in the third sentence, but the middle class is not facing an epidemic of homelessness.
Like, I get the feeling Kansas City and Savannah and Columbus and similar are punching way above their weight class, considering
NYC and the coasts were a trap 20 years ago and it hasn't gotten better
Why would they raise the rent to price them out? Then they get no money.
You are assuming they are taking the unit from someone else, which is the whole point. That's not the problem in question with low-income people in places where there isn't a housing supply shortage.
Yes, builders only build 'luxury' housing. They only ever will build 'luxury' housing because 'luxury' doesn't mean anything! The way you get non-luxury housing is by letting the luxury housing get lived in for a decade and stop being so nice. It's not like you're going to get new housing built that only has avocado green 60s bathrooms and busted-ass cabinets. 90% of the time the very newness of the construction is the luxury part*. I don't think it's helpful to get hung up on builder marketing and instead just get them building.
The thing to be concerned about is the types of housing. If it's all 4+ bedroom mcmanions out in the burbs that is a legitimate problem. But if you're in the city proper and it's a tower of 1, 2, 3 bedroom condos it doesn't really matter. If it's a tower of giant 2500sqft 15 million dollar condos that's bad. (Hi NYC!). You need the diversity of housing.
It sucks because it's the kind of problem you need to have started solving 15 years ago to get a fix today.
*amusingly a lot of the luxury stuff getting tossed up in these building booms is actually pretty crappy, since the builders know they can sell anything... so they will be next decade's fixer uppers.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
You can't just ship the homeless populations of the cites out to the country because there's cheap houses out there.
The reason there's vacancies there is nobody wants to live there. No jobs, no prospects.
The problem is everybody wants to live in the same places!
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
I wonder if the growth of remote work will alleviate that somewhat
Then explain all the fucking empty super-expensive apartments and condos in urban areas across the country. They make enough money using them as AirBnB or whatever combined with increases in owning the real estate that not being able to actually fill them isn't an issue for them.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
No, because those places don’t have the proper infrastructure, in this case actual high speed internet (not whatever Frontier is peddling).
That's the conundrum: a lot of these places aren't well developed and lack sufficient reliable connectivity for remote work to be a viable option. You have to fix that before remote work would even be a possibility.
That's a whole other thread but even for desk-based white collar work it has a whole host of problems with efficiency and management.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Because those are very expensive units and they are either holding them as investments or will only drop the price so far for various reasons.
The people on housing assistance or who should be on it are not renting the kind of units you are talking about.
You don't see a problem with this? Where construction of ultra-high-end housing that doesn't have sufficient demand to fill it continues to be constructed while construction of housing that people can actually afford is vociferously opposed?
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
It really doesn’t as the efficiency gauge is the same for a salaried employee (“did you get your shit done, was it done right, and done on time?)*, but Corporate America has a whole thing about you needing to be seen working.
*I admit I was less efficient when I had a job that allowed me to work remotely, but it was made up for in that I worked longer hours to ensure everything was done. To me that was a fair trade off.
Oregon’s Single-Family Zoning Ban Was a ‘Long Time Coming’
I imagine you're picturing some kind of super-rural area. Any 5k+ pop city I've seen in Michigan is serviced by Comcast with 100mbit available.
AirBnB is another issue. Basically, you can make more money renting out an apartment as an unregulated hotel room than you can renting it out to people who actually want to live there. The solution is to actually tax the people doing this, which after some growing pains, is starting to actually work:
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/28/751844133/this-digital-sheriff-helps-cities-wrangle-airbnb-rules
Cities are now putting laws in place to deal with this sort of thing, which should also help the situation.
Edit for a less snarky response: I’m not sure what qualifies as “super rural” but I’ve lived in suburbs of major cities where I had to be careful where I lived due to the ISP options.
I'm not sure what this has to do with what I was talking about or where this is coming from at all really.
Someone asked about why housing assistance wouldn't just raise rents. But part of the issue with housing is that there's a supply problem some places and just a general "people too fucking poor" problem all over the place. And the second one is not a supply problem.
Another great Silicon Valley flagship operation turns out to be a tax/regulation dodging scheme. This is my shocked face.
It turns out "disrupting" basic services and needs causes problems. Who knew.
1. American zoning laws are by and large insane. Frequently demanding low density housing, which will drive up prices. Japan apparently has a better approach: https://devonzuegel.com/post/north-american-vs-japanese-zoning
2. NIMBYs, there was an interesting article about a nice town where all of the existing buildings were against zoning due to NIMBYs. So expanding the town in the same, loved and high density, style was impossible.
3. Distrust of government housing. See "projects" comment by spool. The govt can be an excellent homes builder, especially when the free market fails.
4. In California in particular, the effect of land tax being frozen at buy price until next sale means that people will not move out of larger houses they no longer need, because they cannot afford the tax on a smaller house.
I'm from the UK, which has a huge housing crisis at the moment, but it has an entirely different set of causes (mostly 4, with some green belt/ listed buildings issues).