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[US Housing Crisis]: Hope you can afford Luxury housing in the capitalist hellscape

135

Posts

  • EncEnc A Fool with Compassion Pronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered User regular
    OremLK wrote: »
    As a side note, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with most people being renters. Treating housing as the One Great Investment for the middle class is what underpins a lot of destructive NIMBY behaviors. The 1950s "new American Dream" of everybody owning a single family home with a white picket fence in the suburbs was always fundamentally flawed.

    Home ownership, and especially generational home ownership, is actually a really good stabilizing force for bolstering a solid, well-paid middle class. The farther we get from it, the more susceptible significant drops in quality of life become for the majority of Americans. That doesn't mean everyone needs their own house with a picket fence. Condos are just as great a force, but ownership of property is really a good thing to ensure a more egalitarian economy over renting.

  • PantsBPantsB Fake Thomas Jefferson Registered User regular
    .
    Heffling wrote: »
    @ Enc I think it is also worth addressing the wage stagnation since the 2007/2008 housing crisis occurred. Many Gen Xers and older Millennials lost their housing. Gen Xers living in the first non-starter home were often pushed back into a starter home, while Gen Exers and Millennials in starter homes were pushed into the renter market. Many businesses (both domestic and foreign) came in and bought up this suddenly available housing at foreclosure pricing and turned them into rental units or allowed them to lie fallow. This significantly reduced the available purchasable housing. And the stagnation in wages since the 2007 crisis has prevented these fallen Gen Exers and Millennials from being able to rebound. So we've created a permanent rental class.

    Personally, I have always felt that the government failed to protect individual citizens in the wake of the housing crisis; instead they favored the financial institutions. And we've lost a generation of home ownership because of it.
    The median real household income of millennial is higher than that of prior generations.
    https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/12/11/young-adult-households-are-earning-more-than-most-older-americans-did-at-the-same-age/
    FT_18.12.04_IncomeGenerations1.png?resize=420,514

    Now if you want to talk about net worth or home ownership rates that's something with a stronger basis. Its also hard to divest it from a relative antipathy towards suburban lifestyles for the millennial cohorts though. Home ownership rates overall are higher than they were until the 1990s (about 1995's level) but are 5-7% (overall) lower than their peak in the 2000s for under 35. How much of that is because people don't want to live in the 'burbs as much because cities are safer, more fun and where jobs are? Or because people are getting married/having kids later? For instance there's a drop of 5% for people who have above median income from peak home ownership and 3% for below median income. Its hard to identify preference from inability.

    The biggest issue is more rent being too high relative to income. That makes it hard to save up for a house and build net worth in general. For all the income/student debt talk that's actually the thing with the biggest difference from previous generations

    11793-1.png
    day9gosu.png
    QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
  • DoodmannDoodmann Registered User regular
    PantsB wrote: »
    .
    Heffling wrote: »
    @ Enc I think it is also worth addressing the wage stagnation since the 2007/2008 housing crisis occurred. Many Gen Xers and older Millennials lost their housing. Gen Xers living in the first non-starter home were often pushed back into a starter home, while Gen Exers and Millennials in starter homes were pushed into the renter market. Many businesses (both domestic and foreign) came in and bought up this suddenly available housing at foreclosure pricing and turned them into rental units or allowed them to lie fallow. This significantly reduced the available purchasable housing. And the stagnation in wages since the 2007 crisis has prevented these fallen Gen Exers and Millennials from being able to rebound. So we've created a permanent rental class.

    Personally, I have always felt that the government failed to protect individual citizens in the wake of the housing crisis; instead they favored the financial institutions. And we've lost a generation of home ownership because of it.
    The median real household income of millennial is higher than that of prior generations.
    https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/12/11/young-adult-households-are-earning-more-than-most-older-americans-did-at-the-same-age/
    FT_18.12.04_IncomeGenerations1.png?resize=420,514

    Now if you want to talk about net worth or home ownership rates that's something with a stronger basis. Its also hard to divest it from a relative antipathy towards suburban lifestyles for the millennial cohorts though. Home ownership rates overall are higher than they were until the 1990s (about 1995's level) but are 5-7% (overall) lower than their peak in the 2000s for under 35. How much of that is because people don't want to live in the 'burbs as much because cities are safer, more fun and where jobs are? Or because people are getting married/having kids later? For instance there's a drop of 5% for people who have above median income from peak home ownership and 3% for below median income. Its hard to identify preference from inability.

    The biggest issue is more rent being too high relative to income. That makes it hard to save up for a house and build net worth in general. For all the income/student debt talk that's actually the thing with the biggest difference from previous generations

    This is why it's important to talk about home prices in terms of income multiplier. We've moved from a 2-3x multiplier to a 6-10x multiplier. Much like college costs the price increase has vastly outpaced the income increases over the same time period.

    Whippy wrote: »
    nope nope nope nope abort abort talk about anime
    Sometimes I sell my stuff on Ebay
  • tinwhiskerstinwhiskers Registered User regular
    One thing I've noticed popping up near me is these "Town Squares" in the suburbs and exurbs. Where they build a bunch of condos and apartments and 3-4 story retail/office combo places. Often co-located with various big box and grocery stores. They aren't all that cheap-although they are all brand spanking new.

    I make fun of them, as they are sort of "living in the city, but safely away from all the brown people", to the point where like every restaurant in them is an outpost of somewhere downtown(which is all of 15-20 minutes away in most cases). But I do think they are a response to 1) boomers aging out of home upkeep and 2) wanting to build more housing within a reasonable commute to downtown core while not having anywhere else to put it, and are a potential answer to how to increase the density of suburbs. Suburbs are basically a normal city neighborhood spread out over 10x the amount of space. Filling them in is more than simply putting smaller houses on smaller lots. You need to make the route people traverse to just get a sandwich, go to the office or grab a beer much shorter too. I grew up in the burbs, and once the old roadhouse bar that was there forever closed I think the nearest place I could go spend a buck was a mile and a half away.

    https://www.drexeltownsquare.com/DrexelTownSquare.htm

    byuj094xlxzm.png

    6ylyzxlir2dz.png
  • SleepSleep Registered User regular
    There's a few big developments around boston and it's outlying metro regions like that. Assembly Row region in somerville comes directly to mind.

    The entire seaport district is just super luxury condos. By super luxury condo I mean a 650sq foot apartment, with some decent in building amenities (you are very unlikely to use) that costs 1.8 million dollars.

    Archology living is the future.

  • CalicaCalica Registered User regular
    One thing I've noticed popping up near me is these "Town Squares" in the suburbs and exurbs. Where they build a bunch of condos and apartments and 3-4 story retail/office combo places. Often co-located with various big box and grocery stores. They aren't all that cheap-although they are all brand spanking new.

    I make fun of them, as they are sort of "living in the city, but safely away from all the brown people", to the point where like every restaurant in them is an outpost of somewhere downtown(which is all of 15-20 minutes away in most cases). But I do think they are a response to 1) boomers aging out of home upkeep and 2) wanting to build more housing within a reasonable commute to downtown core while not having anywhere else to put it, and are a potential answer to how to increase the density of suburbs. Suburbs are basically a normal city neighborhood spread out over 10x the amount of space. Filling them in is more than simply putting smaller houses on smaller lots. You need to make the route people traverse to just get a sandwich, go to the office or grab a beer much shorter too. I grew up in the burbs, and once the old roadhouse bar that was there forever closed I think the nearest place I could go spend a buck was a mile and a half away.

    https://www.drexeltownsquare.com/DrexelTownSquare.htm

    (Image from original post spoilered to not clutter up the page)
    byuj094xlxzm.png

    Those places feel depressing and borderline creepy to me. Corporate-owned commercial parks pretending to be neighborhoods, with consumers housed on-site for their* convenience.

    *the owners', I mean.

  • shrykeshryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular
    edited September 2019
    One thing I've noticed popping up near me is these "Town Squares" in the suburbs and exurbs. Where they build a bunch of condos and apartments and 3-4 story retail/office combo places. Often co-located with various big box and grocery stores. They aren't all that cheap-although they are all brand spanking new.

    I make fun of them, as they are sort of "living in the city, but safely away from all the brown people", to the point where like every restaurant in them is an outpost of somewhere downtown(which is all of 15-20 minutes away in most cases). But I do think they are a response to 1) boomers aging out of home upkeep and 2) wanting to build more housing within a reasonable commute to downtown core while not having anywhere else to put it, and are a potential answer to how to increase the density of suburbs. Suburbs are basically a normal city neighborhood spread out over 10x the amount of space. Filling them in is more than simply putting smaller houses on smaller lots. You need to make the route people traverse to just get a sandwich, go to the office or grab a beer much shorter too. I grew up in the burbs, and once the old roadhouse bar that was there forever closed I think the nearest place I could go spend a buck was a mile and a half away.

    https://www.drexeltownsquare.com/DrexelTownSquare.htm
    byuj094xlxzm.png

    I've seen a few setups like this around these parts. They never work well imo, although I think they could if used properly.

    The key problem they seem to run into is that they are like a fake town centre. Yeah, you can live here and go to these specific things in walking distance but everything else is still far away in sprawled out strip malls and it's not like the rest of the suburban area has decent transit or anything so so in the end you just end up with standard suburban usage patterns unless you are going to the very specific businesses in that specific square. Basically, the rest of the suburb hasn't changed and so people just live in them the same way as they would if you hadn't built it because they have to.

    I think if you built them as part of a larger plan and they were actually the town centre where all the businesses were and there was actually a transit plan to move people to those businesses and the like, it would work. But you can't stamp them on top of preexisting design problems and expect them to function.

    Maybe other places they build them properly, I don't know.

    shryke on
  • [Expletive deleted][Expletive deleted] The mediocre doctor NorwayRegistered User regular
    I'm just thinking that's a terrible park. It's really just a big, empty lawn.

    Sic transit gloria mundi.
  • EncEnc A Fool with Compassion Pronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered User regular
    edited September 2019
    These mixed-use developments y'all are dunking on are the actual answer to suburbia. There are well developed ones and poorly developed ones, but small towns making medium density urban cores is the first step toward mass transit. First you have to have a high density kernel to put your station at, then you connect it with the next closest. You don't run a subway or rail line to an empty shopping plaza, you need enough people and facilities at the location to make it worth connecting to.

    Looking at Orlando, for example, all the ten thousand tiny cities ringing the actual city have been working as part of a larger regional urban planning initiative centered around the Sunrail project. Right now Sunrail is fairly limited in scope, being one primary transit line connecting about 16 city cores, but if you look at the long term plans, every other city in the area is preparing their comp plans for connections over the next 20 years. From Ocoee to Oviedo, Deland to Kissimmee, the car-cetric city of Orlando is slowly shifting and the Sunrail is getting a lot of usage for both entertainment and commercial travel.

    When you get the poorly executed ones, like that picture Tinwhiskers posted, usually the reason is that a city offloaded the work or money onto a private corporation as part of a lend-use project. Essentially the city ceeds the land to the developer for 10-20 years to do what they want with, even levying taxes on residents and businesses, and in return the city gets the majority of the costs and work of accelerating their comp plan offloaded onto the developer. In turn, the developer quickly tries to get everything up and running as swiftly as possible as they make the most money if they have it developed and hold it as fully occupied during the lend period (so finishing in 5 years and having 5 to collect the lion's share of the taxes is a really winning proposition). Sometimes these work extremely well, especially for a cash-strapped city. Plenty of times, though, you end up with poor construction, bad execution, and a developer who didn't really know what they were doing.

    Enc on
  • EncEnc A Fool with Compassion Pronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered User regular
    Although, that Drexel Town Center is a remarkably bad design, looking at the actual layout:

    20171025_PARKINGDIAGRAM.jpg?Large

    It's mostly parking. It's designed more like a strip mall plaza than an actual mixed use complex, and that photo implied greater density than you are actually getting here.

    Compare something like Baldwin Park:

    BaldwinImage2.jpg

    Where this was an Army Base and large, luxury homes neighborhood which were both redeveloped in the middle of Orlando at the same time. The pink and orange are 3-5 story mixed use offices and condos, the yellow on the right side are low-income apartments and luxury apartments in even numbers, with about 50% of the right being exclusively low-income properties (which are super nice and have a beautiful view of the lake). The yellow on the left are million+ luxury townhouses and spec mansions to boost the tax base, and the yellow in the median are townhouses and mixed density condos ranging from 200k to 800k (which is pretty much the full spread of housing costs for our region). So you took a place that housed about 50 residential single family homes and a disused military vehicle depot and turned it into a medium density kernel housing about 8000 people as of a few years ago. The developers made a mint, it hugely boosted property values of the area, and is an example of how it can go right.

    The difference is all in execution. The Drexel Town Center looks like a developer who only really made commercial properties using stale answers to a modern question.

  • HefflingHeffling No Pic EverRegistered User regular
    PantsB wrote: »
    .
    Heffling wrote: »
    @ Enc I think it is also worth addressing the wage stagnation since the 2007/2008 housing crisis occurred. Many Gen Xers and older Millennials lost their housing. Gen Xers living in the first non-starter home were often pushed back into a starter home, while Gen Exers and Millennials in starter homes were pushed into the renter market. Many businesses (both domestic and foreign) came in and bought up this suddenly available housing at foreclosure pricing and turned them into rental units or allowed them to lie fallow. This significantly reduced the available purchasable housing. And the stagnation in wages since the 2007 crisis has prevented these fallen Gen Exers and Millennials from being able to rebound. So we've created a permanent rental class.

    Personally, I have always felt that the government failed to protect individual citizens in the wake of the housing crisis; instead they favored the financial institutions. And we've lost a generation of home ownership because of it.
    The median real household income of millennial is higher than that of prior generations.
    https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/12/11/young-adult-households-are-earning-more-than-most-older-americans-did-at-the-same-age/
    FT_18.12.04_IncomeGenerations1.png?resize=420,514

    Now if you want to talk about net worth or home ownership rates that's something with a stronger basis. Its also hard to divest it from a relative antipathy towards suburban lifestyles for the millennial cohorts though. Home ownership rates overall are higher than they were until the 1990s (about 1995's level) but are 5-7% (overall) lower than their peak in the 2000s for under 35. How much of that is because people don't want to live in the 'burbs as much because cities are safer, more fun and where jobs are? Or because people are getting married/having kids later? For instance there's a drop of 5% for people who have above median income from peak home ownership and 3% for below median income. Its hard to identify preference from inability.

    The biggest issue is more rent being too high relative to income. That makes it hard to save up for a house and build net worth in general. For all the income/student debt talk that's actually the thing with the biggest difference from previous generations

    This chart is VERY difficult to parse. I think the lines represent age at a particular year along the chart, rather than current age. Because it wouldn't make sense to have 22 year olds today have wages charted back to 1967. But the age brackets just aren't representatives. There should be a vast income difference between your average 22 year old and your average 37 year. And why track ages up to 72 and not stop at 65 or 67?

    Also, you can see that household income tracks with depressions/recessions very closely. You can say there is wage growth if you only look at 2011 to present, but we're below the levels of the 2001 dot-com bust, and barely above wages seen all the way back to the 1990 oil price shocks. According to this chart, wage levels are basically unchanged in the past 30 years. Which is what I meant by wage stagnation. Heck, according to your article, women in 2000 brought in $37,100 and now bring in $39,000. Hardly a huge improvement over a 17 year span.

  • CalicaCalica Registered User regular
    Enc wrote: »
    These mixed-use developments y'all are dunking on are the actual answer to suburbia. There are well developed ones and poorly developed ones, but small towns making medium density urban cores is the first step toward mass transit. First you have to have a high density kernel to put your station at, then you connect it with the next closest. You don't run a subway or rail line to an empty shopping plaza, you need enough people and facilities at the location to make it worth connecting to.

    Looking at Orlando, for example, all the ten thousand tiny cities ringing the actual city have been working as part of a larger regional urban planning initiative centered around the Sunrail project. Right now Sunrail is fairly limited in scope, being one primary transit line connecting about 16 city cores, but if you look at the long term plans, every other city in the area is preparing their comp plans for connections over the next 20 years. From Ocoee to Oviedo, Deland to Kissimmee, the car-cetric city of Orlando is slowly shifting and the Sunrail is getting a lot of usage for both entertainment and commercial travel.

    When you get the poorly executed ones, like that picture Tinwhiskers posted, usually the reason is that a city offloaded the work or money onto a private corporation as part of a lend-use project. Essentially the city ceeds the land to the developer for 10-20 years to do what they want with, even levying taxes on residents and businesses, and in return the city gets the majority of the costs and work of accelerating their comp plan offloaded onto the developer. In turn, the developer quickly tries to get everything up and running as swiftly as possible as they make the most money if they have it developed and hold it as fully occupied during the lend period (so finishing in 5 years and having 5 to collect the lion's share of the taxes is a really winning proposition). Sometimes these work extremely well, especially for a cash-strapped city. Plenty of times, though, you end up with poor construction, bad execution, and a developer who didn't really know what they were doing.

    Yeah, the ones around here are only accessible by car and are surrounded by acres of parking lot and/or highways.

    Also, they don't have the kind of necessities one actually needs within walking distance. It's all high-end retail and overpriced restaurants - no groceries, pharmacies, banks, post offices, etc.

  • tynictynic PICNIC BADASS Registered User, ClubPA regular
    In purpose, it reminds me of the Hausmann developments in Paris, which for a long time were part of what made the city so livable*. Differences being, of course, that as 19th century initiatives they weren't designed around the almighty automobile, had walkability basically built-in, and it was reasonable to expect the retail space would be primarily local and mixed-use.

    *high end chains and rising housing costs have made these places a lot less communal and functional over the last decades, but they're still lovely to walk around in.

  • EncEnc A Fool with Compassion Pronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered User regular
    Yeah, you need a grocery store, parking garages, city services, the works to make it go right.

    In my hometown's version, which is a bit on the upper end of this, all city services moved to the new kernel, a major park facility with day care was added, and the existing grocery stores and similar facilities were retained just outside it with pedestrian bridges added for folks to get to them from the kernel. You can live a walkable life for most things you need right in the kernel, exempting a few specialty things like gasoline pumps and certain banks (though the city's credit union has a strong presence).

  • OremLKOremLK Registered User regular
    Enc wrote: »
    These mixed-use developments y'all are dunking on are the actual answer to suburbia. There are well developed ones and poorly developed ones, but small towns making medium density urban cores is the first step toward mass transit. First you have to have a high density kernel to put your station at, then you connect it with the next closest. You don't run a subway or rail line to an empty shopping plaza, you need enough people and facilities at the location to make it worth connecting to.

    Looking at Orlando, for example, all the ten thousand tiny cities ringing the actual city have been working as part of a larger regional urban planning initiative centered around the Sunrail project. Right now Sunrail is fairly limited in scope, being one primary transit line connecting about 16 city cores, but if you look at the long term plans, every other city in the area is preparing their comp plans for connections over the next 20 years. From Ocoee to Oviedo, Deland to Kissimmee, the car-cetric city of Orlando is slowly shifting and the Sunrail is getting a lot of usage for both entertainment and commercial travel.

    When you get the poorly executed ones, like that picture Tinwhiskers posted, usually the reason is that a city offloaded the work or money onto a private corporation as part of a lend-use project. Essentially the city ceeds the land to the developer for 10-20 years to do what they want with, even levying taxes on residents and businesses, and in return the city gets the majority of the costs and work of accelerating their comp plan offloaded onto the developer. In turn, the developer quickly tries to get everything up and running as swiftly as possible as they make the most money if they have it developed and hold it as fully occupied during the lend period (so finishing in 5 years and having 5 to collect the lion's share of the taxes is a really winning proposition). Sometimes these work extremely well, especially for a cash-strapped city. Plenty of times, though, you end up with poor construction, bad execution, and a developer who didn't really know what they were doing.

    These mixed-use developments--usually described as "New Urbanism"--are better than typical suburban sprawl, and some of them are done pretty well. A lot of them are done really poorly like the image above, where they're basically just an outdoor shopping mall pretending to be real urbanism. A sea of parking surrounding some storefronts, basically, with maybe one apartment building and a few townhomes in walking distance.

    The best ones are integrated into an existing residential area, centered on a good public transit connection like a light rail station, and have lots of dense housing in walking distance of the commercial areas. And some developments basically tick off those boxes. Stapleton in Denver jumps to mind as a pretty good (though far from perfect) example. Another pretty good one is West Village in Dallas, which is no West Village, NYC to be sure, but it's not half-bad.

    I still prefer organically built, fine-grained dense urbanism, but that's almost impossible to do in the current legal and lending climate. I will say that I will take even the worst outdoor shopping mall with a single apartment complex and a handful of offices over an actual traditional indoor shopping mall with only retail and no mixed-use component. Even the smallest move toward urbanism is better than nothing, which is what we've been getting for the last 50 years.

    My zombie survival life simulator They Don't Sleep is out now on Steam if you want to check it out.
  • EncEnc A Fool with Compassion Pronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered User regular
    Dense urbanism isn't going to happen at scale in the Sunbelt. While high density urban cores are expanding, you can't functionally seed a second one somewhere in the carpet of suburban edge cities successfully. Most local economies can't support more than one urban core. In the long term, all these medium density places will fill together into a much denser population sink than what we have though, and some of the more successful ones may, in turn, grow large enough to become a urban core.

  • shrykeshryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular
    OremLK wrote: »
    Enc wrote: »
    These mixed-use developments y'all are dunking on are the actual answer to suburbia. There are well developed ones and poorly developed ones, but small towns making medium density urban cores is the first step toward mass transit. First you have to have a high density kernel to put your station at, then you connect it with the next closest. You don't run a subway or rail line to an empty shopping plaza, you need enough people and facilities at the location to make it worth connecting to.

    Looking at Orlando, for example, all the ten thousand tiny cities ringing the actual city have been working as part of a larger regional urban planning initiative centered around the Sunrail project. Right now Sunrail is fairly limited in scope, being one primary transit line connecting about 16 city cores, but if you look at the long term plans, every other city in the area is preparing their comp plans for connections over the next 20 years. From Ocoee to Oviedo, Deland to Kissimmee, the car-cetric city of Orlando is slowly shifting and the Sunrail is getting a lot of usage for both entertainment and commercial travel.

    When you get the poorly executed ones, like that picture Tinwhiskers posted, usually the reason is that a city offloaded the work or money onto a private corporation as part of a lend-use project. Essentially the city ceeds the land to the developer for 10-20 years to do what they want with, even levying taxes on residents and businesses, and in return the city gets the majority of the costs and work of accelerating their comp plan offloaded onto the developer. In turn, the developer quickly tries to get everything up and running as swiftly as possible as they make the most money if they have it developed and hold it as fully occupied during the lend period (so finishing in 5 years and having 5 to collect the lion's share of the taxes is a really winning proposition). Sometimes these work extremely well, especially for a cash-strapped city. Plenty of times, though, you end up with poor construction, bad execution, and a developer who didn't really know what they were doing.

    These mixed-use developments--usually described as "New Urbanism"--are better than typical suburban sprawl, and some of them are done pretty well. A lot of them are done really poorly like the image above, where they're basically just an outdoor shopping mall pretending to be real urbanism. A sea of parking surrounding some storefronts, basically, with maybe one apartment building and a few townhomes in walking distance.

    The best ones are integrated into an existing residential area, centered on a good public transit connection like a light rail station, and have lots of dense housing in walking distance of the commercial areas. And some developments basically tick off those boxes. Stapleton in Denver jumps to mind as a pretty good (though far from perfect) example. Another pretty good one is West Village in Dallas, which is no West Village, NYC to be sure, but it's not half-bad.

    I still prefer organically built, fine-grained dense urbanism, but that's almost impossible to do in the current legal and lending climate. I will say that I will take even the worst outdoor shopping mall with a single apartment complex and a handful of offices over an actual traditional indoor shopping mall with only retail and no mixed-use component. Even the smallest move toward urbanism is better than nothing, which is what we've been getting for the last 50 years.

    Eh, my experience around places I've lived they are basically cargo-cult new urbanism. Some area gets redone, the local government approves the project based on some fancy looking presentation and a desire to "do something like that thing I keep hearing about that's good" and then it's plunked down in a sea of normal suburban development and basically does nothing because it's not actually connected to anything and the second you get past the new construction, it's the same old thing, which basically prevents it from having any impact.

    I'm generally skeptical of their ability to have any real impact at all because one area can't overcome the basic problem of the rest of area being designed, or realistically not designed at all and just done, to support a completely different style of living.

  • JuliusJulius Captain of Serenity on my shipRegistered User regular
    Aioua wrote: »
    Julius wrote: »
    Aioua wrote: »
    Julius wrote: »
    Quoting from the other thread.
    HamHamJ wrote: »
    Lanz wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Simpsonia wrote: »
    Yeah, but usually those price controls [tangentially] touch interstate commerce. I can't imagine how a purely local issue like landlord-tenancy could be argued as interstate commerce. Second even if he was somehow able to pass that, I can't imagine a court anywhere that upholds that.

    I can't even figure out how you'd administer it. Is rent control even state level policy? I thought it was usually municipal.

    You'd need some sort of federal funding stream you could use to lean on these municipalities to force them to enact their own rent control schemes.

    And that's not even touching on the problems of rent control as a policy.

    Random thought: Landlording partially works because you can write off expenses on your federal taxes right? So if you go out of the rent control scheme you can no longer do that. I'd think that'd be enough in most places but probably not in the NYC like places.

    Not a huge fan of the general idea though. Rent Control has a huge amount of issues in implementation, though I understand the motivation.

    Rent control is just flawed as an idea. The problem is supply.

    And the more general issue with housing is local control. My understanding is that dealing with that ends up as a state issue at the end of the day, since municipalities are mostly devolved powers afaik. Assuming you wanna light yourself on fire taking that power back anyway.

    Is the problem really supply when there's about 1.5 million vacant homes across the country?

    https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nearly-1-5-million-vacant-us-homes-in-q3-2018-represent-1-52-percent-of-all-single-family-homes-and-condos-300739953.html
    IRVINE, Calif., Oct. 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- ATTOM Data Solutions, curator of the nation's premier property database, today released its 2018 Vacant Property and Zombie Foreclosure Report, which shows that nearly 1.5 million (1,447,906) U.S. single family homes and condos were vacant at the end of Q3 2018, representing 1.52 percent of all homes nationwide — down from 1.58 percent in 2017.

    Yes. Because houses are in certain places and generally cannot be moved to some other place where people actually want to live.

    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?

    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)

    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.

    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!

    You can't ship out the homeless, but there are also homeless people in cities with vacant homes. Real Free Market ideology suggests that the prices would go down until those people would be able to afford those homes, but very obviously it doesn't work that way. Even a vacant lot has more value than homeless people can ever obtain to buy it, and there is no incentive to becoming a landlord to people with very little money. There are cheap houses, but some people can't afford cheap.

    And that's even ignoring the personal biases owners may have against homeless people, or situations where owners aren't even really aware of the property. The fact is that there are plenty of places in the US where it is both true that, A) there are a bunch of vacant homes, and B) there are a bunch of homeless people unable to live in those homes.

  • JuliusJulius Captain of Serenity on my shipRegistered User regular
    The thing is that homelessness is an entirely different thing than is suggested here. Homelessness isn't (directly) caused by too many people wanting to live in the same places! People don't become homeless because they moved to a place they couldn't afford and couldn't move back! That's not how any of it works!

    For one, people generally become homeless in a place and then remain there. Because their network and maybe even job is there. And because they usually can't afford to move to a place where they certainly can't afford a home! They're locals and the issue is not always because they couldn't afford rent any longer.

    For two, homelessness is a huge barrier to renting. No landlord will even consider you if you can't prove where you lived the previous six months or so. Essentially, the homeless are no longer competing in the market. They won't be getting homes when the prices go down.

  • SleepSleep Registered User regular
    Julius wrote: »
    The thing is that homelessness is an entirely different thing than is suggested here. Homelessness isn't (directly) caused by too many people wanting to live in the same places! People don't become homeless because they moved to a place they couldn't afford and couldn't move back! That's not how any of it works!

    For one, people generally become homeless in a place and then remain there. Because their network and maybe even job is there. And because they usually can't afford to move to a place where they certainly can't afford a home! They're locals and the issue is not always because they couldn't afford rent any longer.

    For two, homelessness is a huge barrier to renting. No landlord will even consider you if you can't prove where you lived the previous six months or so. Essentially, the homeless are no longer competing in the market. They won't be getting homes when the prices go down.

    Uh anecdotal and all, but not for nothing this is exactly how both me and my sister had homelessness stints. We were trying to leave the dead end place we grew up got to a new place and promptly couldn't afford the new place we were trying to be. I lucked out by literally having no home to go back to, sold years prior, and having a halfway decent network of friends that let me couch surf till I could find some employment. My sister ended up getting pulled home after my parents found out she was living in her car. I'm just saying there's a lot of ways to find yourself homeless.

  • AiouaAioua Ora Occidens Ora OptimaRegistered User regular
    Julius wrote: »
    The thing is that homelessness is an entirely different thing than is suggested here. Homelessness isn't (directly) caused by too many people wanting to live in the same places! People don't become homeless because they moved to a place they couldn't afford and couldn't move back! That's not how any of it works!

    For one, people generally become homeless in a place and then remain there. Because their network and maybe even job is there. And because they usually can't afford to move to a place where they certainly can't afford a home! They're locals and the issue is not always because they couldn't afford rent any longer.

    For two, homelessness is a huge barrier to renting. No landlord will even consider you if you can't prove where you lived the previous six months or so. Essentially, the homeless are no longer competing in the market. They won't be getting homes when the prices go down.

    I don't disagree with you here.

    The people moving into the city aren't the new homeless, they're just the demand part of the broken supply/demand that drives up rents.

    The rents go up (but salaries don't) making it more likely that someone already struggling loses their home.

    life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
    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
  • CelestialBadgerCelestialBadger Registered User regular
    The only way to make money out of providing housing for the homeless is to rent out tiny, horrible flophouses. Of course, that's better than the streets. But these places tend to be health hazards.

  • CantidoCantido Registered User regular
    Sleep wrote: »
    There's a few big developments around boston and it's outlying metro regions like that. Assembly Row region in somerville comes directly to mind.

    The entire seaport district is just super luxury condos. By super luxury condo I mean a 650sq foot apartment, with some decent in building amenities (you are very unlikely to use) that costs 1.8 million dollars.

    Archology living is the future.

    Those bubble things in Sim City?

    3DS Friendcode 5413-1311-3767
  • FeralFeral MEMETICHARIZARD interior crocodile alligator ⇔ ǝɹʇɐǝɥʇ ǝᴉʌoɯ ʇǝloɹʌǝɥɔ ɐ ǝʌᴉɹp ᴉRegistered User regular
    I'm not even sure what point you are trying to make here. I was responding to a poster talking about how "in a decade" property values would automatically degrade and turn once expensive homes/rentals into more affordable options.

    My point is that is not happening. Because the current middle-class market is saturated with properties calling themselves luxury because of refits and remodels, we aren't actually seeing the normal curve where older housing gets cheaper. It gets remodeled, if it is good shape, or torn down if it is not.

    I've seen the same pattern in multiple cities. That's the supply and demand that's not happening. Maybe you have to live in the United States to understand how it works in action.

    Housing isn't magic; it isn't immune to the effects of supply and demand. It's just that we've been starved for supply for so fucking long, especially in walkable, transit-rich cities, that we can't even see the depth of the problem. We see a handful of condos go up in our neighborhood, a fraction of what we actually need, compare it to the even paltrier amount we got in years prior, and wonder why prices aren't stabilizing.

    The effect that Aioua described is called filtering, and it is real and well-documented. Example: Housing Production,
    Filtering and Displacement, from UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies (PDF link)
    or Stuart Rosenthal's Is Filtering a Viable Source of Low Income Housing summarized by City Observatory here. If it isn't happening in a particular region, it's because that region isn't building enough housing (as Rosenthal observed). However, as the Berkeley study notes, the satiating effects of new housing are regional; latent demand makes analysis more complicated at the micro level.

    In other words, if we build a shitload of housing in Central Seattle, rents in Central Seattle might rise in the short-term because Central Seattle becomes a cool up-and-coming neighborhood that attracts young professionals. However, when analyzed on a regional level, those new renters are coming from somewhere, and their migration eases demand in other parts of the region.

    If the regional overall isn't building enough housing, then the constrained supply drowns out the effects of depreciation and filtering. As City Observatory put it:
    Perhaps the most important nuance, however, is that strong regional housing price inflation—that is, metropolitan areas where home values grow much more quickly than the cost of other goods—can make filtering happen much more slowly, or not at all. That helps explain why homes in New England and the West Coast filter about 35 percent more slowly than homes in the Midwest or South. In those coastal regions, severe restrictions on new housing construction since the 1970s have created a “shortage of cities,” driving up home prices and preventing the kind of filtering that has historically produced the lion’s share of affordable housing—and which still does in much of the rest of the country.

    every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.

    the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
  • Ninja Snarl PNinja Snarl P My helmet is my burden. Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered User regular
    Julius wrote: »
    The thing is that homelessness is an entirely different thing than is suggested here. Homelessness isn't (directly) caused by too many people wanting to live in the same places! People don't become homeless because they moved to a place they couldn't afford and couldn't move back! That's not how any of it works!

    For one, people generally become homeless in a place and then remain there. Because their network and maybe even job is there. And because they usually can't afford to move to a place where they certainly can't afford a home! They're locals and the issue is not always because they couldn't afford rent any longer.

    For two, homelessness is a huge barrier to renting. No landlord will even consider you if you can't prove where you lived the previous six months or so. Essentially, the homeless are no longer competing in the market. They won't be getting homes when the prices go down.

    For anyone unfamiliar with moving costs, I live alone and I don't have a lot of stuff (I don't even fill up a 1-bedroom apartment with a living room yet) and it still cost me $3000-$4000 to move across the USA. That's just for physically moving the things I own and doesn't even include something like having the additional cash for first month's rent plus a security deposit to rent somewhere or the actual cost of travel.

    Even if it costs you far less than that, imagine trying to do it with no money already, no place to story your belongings in the interim, and no certainty of a job on the other end to even cover the costs. Plus there are the travel costs of actually going to another city for job interviews. Even if the prospective employer will cover the travel costs, you still would have to either own or sink the money into clothes acceptable for an interview and likely pay to move to that location if you get the job.

    So if you have no money and no permanent address already, you're facing huge obstacles in moving somewhere with jobs, even if you know where there is a job at. There's no way to work your way out of nothing when you can't earn anything because the system is set up only to recognize people who are already earning money.

  • FeralFeral MEMETICHARIZARD interior crocodile alligator ⇔ ǝɹʇɐǝɥʇ ǝᴉʌoɯ ʇǝloɹʌǝɥɔ ɐ ǝʌᴉɹp ᴉRegistered User regular
    Julius wrote: »
    Quoting from the other thread.
    HamHamJ wrote: »
    Lanz wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Simpsonia wrote: »
    Yeah, but usually those price controls [tangentially] touch interstate commerce. I can't imagine how a purely local issue like landlord-tenancy could be argued as interstate commerce. Second even if he was somehow able to pass that, I can't imagine a court anywhere that upholds that.

    I can't even figure out how you'd administer it. Is rent control even state level policy? I thought it was usually municipal.

    You'd need some sort of federal funding stream you could use to lean on these municipalities to force them to enact their own rent control schemes.

    And that's not even touching on the problems of rent control as a policy.

    Random thought: Landlording partially works because you can write off expenses on your federal taxes right? So if you go out of the rent control scheme you can no longer do that. I'd think that'd be enough in most places but probably not in the NYC like places.

    Not a huge fan of the general idea though. Rent Control has a huge amount of issues in implementation, though I understand the motivation.

    Rent control is just flawed as an idea. The problem is supply.

    And the more general issue with housing is local control. My understanding is that dealing with that ends up as a state issue at the end of the day, since municipalities are mostly devolved powers afaik. Assuming you wanna light yourself on fire taking that power back anyway.

    Is the problem really supply when there's about 1.5 million vacant homes across the country?

    https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nearly-1-5-million-vacant-us-homes-in-q3-2018-represent-1-52-percent-of-all-single-family-homes-and-condos-300739953.html
    IRVINE, Calif., Oct. 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- ATTOM Data Solutions, curator of the nation's premier property database, today released its 2018 Vacant Property and Zombie Foreclosure Report, which shows that nearly 1.5 million (1,447,906) U.S. single family homes and condos were vacant at the end of Q3 2018, representing 1.52 percent of all homes nationwide — down from 1.58 percent in 2017.

    Yes. Because houses are in certain places and generally cannot be moved to some other place where people actually want to live.

    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?

    Well, one complication is: what exactly do we mean by "vacant?"

    The US has roughly 14 million vacant homes, however "vacant" in this sense can include homes that are

    * recently purchased, but waiting for the owner to move in
    * owned as a second house or a vacation home
    * unsuitable for human occupancy for health and safety reasons
    * foreclosed and/or abandoned

    The relative magnitude of these categories is vastly different between cities. The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy looked at abandoned homes and found an enormous difference in prevalence between cities. (PDF link)

    In short, the places with the most abandoned homes are "legacy cities" - cities that have been in economic decline since the big recession, suffering both job and population losses. These are cities like Detroit, Birmingham, Cleveland. Meanwhile, "magnet cities" like San Francisco, Seattle, and Austin have far fewer abandoned homes.

    When activists & wonks talk about vacant homes in magnet cities like SF & Seattle, they're talking about a different category entirely: properties being used as vacation homes and/or investment properties. These are homes that are owned and being maintained, they just aren't occupied by the owner year-round (or at all). This is a tough nut to crack, assuming that simply seizing them is politically out of the question, some cities have had some luck with regulating AirBnBs and/or imposing vacancy taxes.

    Unless we literally put homeless people in New York on a bus out to Detroit, we can't just put homeless people in abandoned houses. Even if we did, around 40-50% of homeless people are employed, so we'd be asking them to abandon their jobs. Most homeless are only homeless for a year or less; it's a temporary circumstance for most people and asking them to uproot their lives to move to someplace where there are far fewer jobs is not a sustainable plan.

    Meanwhile, if a house goes abandoned for too long, it becomes uneconomical to renovate it back to suitability. Notoriously, when banks turn foreclosed properties over to local governments, they tend to bulldoze the buildings on them - they don't want to be held liable for the buildings and the governments accepting the donations don't want to renovate the buildings.

    every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.

    the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
  • CelestialBadgerCelestialBadger Registered User regular
    If you made AirBnb illegal it’d result in more hotels being built.

    Second, third etc homes of rich people are a problem in some cities. Probably best to just tax them higher.

  • LanzLanz ...Za?Registered User regular
    edited September 2019
    https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jul/25/alexandria-ocasio-cortez/ocasio-cortez-new-york-city-there-are-3-vacant-apa/

    So from this, no matter how you shake out the math, NYC appears to have more vacant housing than it does homeless people.

    At what point is this not just our priorities as a nation regarding housing, and how important it is that housing be treated as a form of investment and source of profit, rather than the establishment of stable housing as a human right?

    Lanz on
    waNkm4k.jpg?1
  • LanzLanz ...Za?Registered User regular
    edited September 2019
    If you made AirBnb illegal it’d result in more hotels being built.

    Second, third etc homes of rich people are a problem in some cities. Probably best to just tax them higher.

    Is there really a correlation between the need for hotels and the use of AirBnB in that manner?

    I'm not sure the demand for travel has actually been increased with its advent. Then again, outside of prices (and even that is a guess/presumption, I need to research to see if those are cheaper on average), I'm not sure why one would necessarily opt for AirBnB over a hotel anyway.

    Lanz on
    waNkm4k.jpg?1
  • CelestialBadgerCelestialBadger Registered User regular
    Manhattan pied-a-terres are often rich foreigners from less stable countries parking wealth for a quick getaway if things turn sour. Taxing apartments that belong to absent owners, and taxing them deeply if the absent owners live in another country, is the answer. Canada has had good results doing this.

    Of course, first you need to ban the obfuscation methods that rich people use to obscure who is the owner (shell companies.)

  • MortiousMortious The Nightmare Begins Move to New ZealandRegistered User regular
    Lanz wrote: »
    If you made AirBnb illegal it’d result in more hotels being built.

    Second, third etc homes of rich people are a problem in some cities. Probably best to just tax them higher.

    Is there really a correlation between the need for hotels and the use of AirBnB in that manner?

    I'm not sure the demand for travel has actually been increased with its advent. Then again, outside of prices (and even that is a guess/presumption, I need to research to see if those are cheaper on average), I'm not sure why one would necessarily opt for AirBnB over a hotel anyway.

    I have used AirBnB a couple of times, though I try to avoid it if I have similar options.

    One is location. Hotels aren't everywhere, so if you need a place to stay within a residential area, it's pretty much AirBnB or a normal BnB. The latter tends to be more expensive.

    And you can rent entire apartments or houses. Useful if you're staying a while since it'll include facilities like full kitchens and laundry rooms.

    Move to New Zealand
    It’s not a very important country most of the time
    http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
  • NobeardNobeard North Carolina: Failed StateRegistered User regular
    Feral wrote: »
    I'm not even sure what point you are trying to make here. I was responding to a poster talking about how "in a decade" property values would automatically degrade and turn once expensive homes/rentals into more affordable options.

    My point is that is not happening. Because the current middle-class market is saturated with properties calling themselves luxury because of refits and remodels, we aren't actually seeing the normal curve where older housing gets cheaper. It gets remodeled, if it is good shape, or torn down if it is not.

    I've seen the same pattern in multiple cities. That's the supply and demand that's not happening. Maybe you have to live in the United States to understand how it works in action.

    Housing isn't magic; it isn't immune to the effects of supply and demand. It's just that we've been starved for supply for so fucking long, especially in walkable, transit-rich cities, that we can't even see the depth of the problem. We see a handful of condos go up in our neighborhood, a fraction of what we actually need, compare it to the even paltrier amount we got in years prior, and wonder why prices aren't stabilizing.

    The effect that Aioua described is called filtering, and it is real and well-documented. Example: Housing Production,
    Filtering and Displacement, from UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies (PDF link)
    or Stuart Rosenthal's Is Filtering a Viable Source of Low Income Housing summarized by City Observatory here. If it isn't happening in a particular region, it's because that region isn't building enough housing (as Rosenthal observed). However, as the Berkeley study notes, the satiating effects of new housing are regional; latent demand makes analysis more complicated at the micro level.

    In other words, if we build a shitload of housing in Central Seattle, rents in Central Seattle might rise in the short-term because Central Seattle becomes a cool up-and-coming neighborhood that attracts young professionals. However, when analyzed on a regional level, those new renters are coming from somewhere, and their migration eases demand in other parts of the region.

    If the regional overall isn't building enough housing, then the constrained supply drowns out the effects of depreciation and filtering. As City Observatory put it:
    Perhaps the most important nuance, however, is that strong regional housing price inflation—that is, metropolitan areas where home values grow much more quickly than the cost of other goods—can make filtering happen much more slowly, or not at all. That helps explain why homes in New England and the West Coast filter about 35 percent more slowly than homes in the Midwest or South. In those coastal regions, severe restrictions on new housing construction since the 1970s have created a “shortage of cities,” driving up home prices and preventing the kind of filtering that has historically produced the lion’s share of affordable housing—and which still does in much of the rest of the country.

    So why is new home construction so restricted in New England amd the West Coast? Seems like it's an easy fix where everyone benefits. Build new housing, attract more people, more business springs up, city gets tax money, just good stuff all around.

  • FeralFeral MEMETICHARIZARD interior crocodile alligator ⇔ ǝɹʇɐǝɥʇ ǝᴉʌoɯ ʇǝloɹʌǝɥɔ ɐ ǝʌᴉɹp ᴉRegistered User regular
    If you made AirBnb illegal it’d result in more hotels being built.

    Well, AirBnBs at least need to be registered so the people profiting off of them have to pay taxes - including the hospitality tax paid by hotels.
    Second, third etc homes of rich people are a problem in some cities. Probably best to just tax them higher.

    I totally agree.
    Lanz wrote: »
    https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jul/25/alexandria-ocasio-cortez/ocasio-cortez-new-york-city-there-are-3-vacant-apa/

    So from this, no matter how you shake out the math, NYC appears to have more vacant housing than it does homeless people.

    At what point is this not just our priorities as a nation regarding housing, and how important it is that housing be treated as a form of investment and source of profit, rather than the establishment of stable housing as a human right?

    Critically, they found 79,000 available apartments on the rental market, vs 68,000 homeless people. (Granted, I strongly suspect that the actual number is higher; the usual methods for estimating the number of homeless tend to underestimate the number of homeless people who are staying in hotels, crashing on friends' couches or in garages, or are otherwise temporarily but unsustainably housed.)

    If we had more money available for housing subsidies, if programs like Section 8 weren't enormously cash-strapped and subject to untenable waiting lists, we could take a huge bite out of homelessness. To compare, Singapore, population roughly 5 million, has roughly 1000 homeless people. Yes, you read that right. (The official number is approximately 300 but, again, that's too low.)

    That said, NYC has an overall vacancy rate of 3%. Vacancy rates below roughly 7% are associated with economic problems - people unable to find housing within a reasonable commute distance of their work, people unable to find housing suitable for their lifestyle (for example, families who need extra bedrooms for their children, or disabled people who need ground-floor housing without stairs), people living in unsafe conversation units, bidding wars on rentals, shadow markets and bribery, etc.

    We need more housing subsidies to help defray the cost of housing for poor people & the homeless, and we need more housing in hot cities like NYC

    every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.

    the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
  • FeralFeral MEMETICHARIZARD interior crocodile alligator ⇔ ǝɹʇɐǝɥʇ ǝᴉʌoɯ ʇǝloɹʌǝɥɔ ɐ ǝʌᴉɹp ᴉRegistered User regular
    Anyway, to support one of Lanz's points, our national mythos that housing is an investment is really a major driver behind this crisis.

    Housing can either be:

    A) Affordable to the middle class over the long term.
    B) A safe investment for the middle class over the long term.

    Choose one.

    Why?

    If the median cost of housing grows faster than inflation, you have B, but eventually housing becomes less and less affordable to people of finite means.

    If real wages keep pace with the cost of housing, then you have A, but that means that housing values aren't appreciating fast enough to be a good long-term investment.

    And that says nothing of the small decisions we make along the way - city planning departments catering to NIMBYs who argue that undesirable developments (like homeless shelters) reduce their property values, or homeowners associations issuing restrictions that ultimately keep housing prices higher.

    Phasing out the mortgage interest deduction would be an excellent start.

    every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.

    the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
  • FeralFeral MEMETICHARIZARD interior crocodile alligator ⇔ ǝɹʇɐǝɥʇ ǝᴉʌoɯ ʇǝloɹʌǝɥɔ ɐ ǝʌᴉɹp ᴉRegistered User regular
    Lanz wrote: »
    If you made AirBnb illegal it’d result in more hotels being built.

    Second, third etc homes of rich people are a problem in some cities. Probably best to just tax them higher.

    Is there really a correlation between the need for hotels and the use of AirBnB in that manner?

    I'm not sure the demand for travel has actually been increased with its advent. Then again, outside of prices (and even that is a guess/presumption, I need to research to see if those are cheaper on average), I'm not sure why one would necessarily opt for AirBnB over a hotel anyway.

    Vacation rentals that are full houses or condos are pretty nice. Like Mortious said, they often have full kitchens and laundry. They're larger, quieter, and good for larger groups. And in an ideal world, they are pretty affordable - yes, you're renting a larger space, but you're not paying for the staffing and upkeep that a hotel requires.

    I have nothing against vacation rentals, but I do think they need to be regulated and taxed appropriately. AirBnB is on my shit list only because they've been fighting regulation and taxation tooth & nail.

    every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.

    the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
  • SleepSleep Registered User regular
    Cantido wrote: »
    Sleep wrote: »
    There's a few big developments around boston and it's outlying metro regions like that. Assembly Row region in somerville comes directly to mind.

    The entire seaport district is just super luxury condos. By super luxury condo I mean a 650sq foot apartment, with some decent in building amenities (you are very unlikely to use) that costs 1.8 million dollars.

    Archology living is the future.

    Those bubble things in Sim City?

    That's the basic hyper futuristic realization of them.

    Our more contemporary realization of it is something like:

    https://inkblockboston.com/

    Or the higher end version:

    https://www.redfin.com/MA/Boston/133-Seaport-Blvd-02210/unit-1919/home/169060541

  • BrainleechBrainleech 機知に富んだコメントはここにあります Registered User regular
    Cantido wrote: »
    Sleep wrote: »
    There's a few big developments around boston and it's outlying metro regions like that. Assembly Row region in somerville comes directly to mind.

    The entire seaport district is just super luxury condos. By super luxury condo I mean a 650sq foot apartment, with some decent in building amenities (you are very unlikely to use) that costs 1.8 million dollars.

    Archology living is the future.

    Those bubble things in Sim City?

    Yes and no
    Think of Kowloon Walled City but more of a cyberpunk ideal.
    When I played the Jovian chronicles rpg I found it interesting as most of humanity lives on orbital colony so space is at a premium. most people in the game have a 4m cube as their living quarters.

  • FeralFeral MEMETICHARIZARD interior crocodile alligator ⇔ ǝɹʇɐǝɥʇ ǝᴉʌoɯ ʇǝloɹʌǝɥɔ ɐ ǝʌᴉɹp ᴉRegistered User regular
    Nobeard wrote: »
    Feral wrote: »
    I'm not even sure what point you are trying to make here. I was responding to a poster talking about how "in a decade" property values would automatically degrade and turn once expensive homes/rentals into more affordable options.

    My point is that is not happening. Because the current middle-class market is saturated with properties calling themselves luxury because of refits and remodels, we aren't actually seeing the normal curve where older housing gets cheaper. It gets remodeled, if it is good shape, or torn down if it is not.

    I've seen the same pattern in multiple cities. That's the supply and demand that's not happening. Maybe you have to live in the United States to understand how it works in action.

    Housing isn't magic; it isn't immune to the effects of supply and demand. It's just that we've been starved for supply for so fucking long, especially in walkable, transit-rich cities, that we can't even see the depth of the problem. We see a handful of condos go up in our neighborhood, a fraction of what we actually need, compare it to the even paltrier amount we got in years prior, and wonder why prices aren't stabilizing.

    The effect that Aioua described is called filtering, and it is real and well-documented. Example: Housing Production,
    Filtering and Displacement, from UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies (PDF link)
    or Stuart Rosenthal's Is Filtering a Viable Source of Low Income Housing summarized by City Observatory here. If it isn't happening in a particular region, it's because that region isn't building enough housing (as Rosenthal observed). However, as the Berkeley study notes, the satiating effects of new housing are regional; latent demand makes analysis more complicated at the micro level.

    In other words, if we build a shitload of housing in Central Seattle, rents in Central Seattle might rise in the short-term because Central Seattle becomes a cool up-and-coming neighborhood that attracts young professionals. However, when analyzed on a regional level, those new renters are coming from somewhere, and their migration eases demand in other parts of the region.

    If the regional overall isn't building enough housing, then the constrained supply drowns out the effects of depreciation and filtering. As City Observatory put it:
    Perhaps the most important nuance, however, is that strong regional housing price inflation—that is, metropolitan areas where home values grow much more quickly than the cost of other goods—can make filtering happen much more slowly, or not at all. That helps explain why homes in New England and the West Coast filter about 35 percent more slowly than homes in the Midwest or South. In those coastal regions, severe restrictions on new housing construction since the 1970s have created a “shortage of cities,” driving up home prices and preventing the kind of filtering that has historically produced the lion’s share of affordable housing—and which still does in much of the rest of the country.

    So why is new home construction so restricted in New England amd the West Coast? Seems like it's an easy fix where everyone benefits. Build new housing, attract more people, more business springs up, city gets tax money, just good stuff all around.

    Sometimes it's because people have legitimate concerns about the latent demand that new housing will bring in. Remember how I said that new housing alleviates costs region-wide but can cause latent demand at the neighborhood level? If individual neighborhoods or small towns have a say in choosing where housing gets built, they'll get caught in a collective action problem where nobody wants to invite new housing into their backyards but want it to be built in some other neighboring city. The countries that manage housing efficiently - like Japan - manage it at a regional or even national level. Small municipalities and local neighborhoods have limited say in planning decisions. The US is exceptional among developed nations regarding just how much power we give municipal governments over development planning.

    Even if costs don't go up for homeowners and renters, there are undesirable ancillary effects at the hyperlocal level. Maybe you don't want construction noise next door. Maybe you take a car to work and you don't want more traffic on your street. Maybe the local schools are already overcrowded. To be honest, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for people who are more worried about traffic or construction noise than they are about housing for human beings, but at least that falls into the usual definition of a collective action problem - individual actors have to accept some personal cost for the betterment of the whole, and that's always difficult.

    That's the charitable explanation. Our local/municipal planning system also enables a lot of uncharitable, irrational, or xenophobic behaviors. Some incumbent residents don't want to live next to undesirables - whether the definition of 'undesirable' includes young people, brown people, and/or poor people. Some people just fear change. Others have bona fide misunderstandings what the real effects of policy will be.

    It's just like any political controversy. Some concerns are legitimate, some are hateful or stupid.

    every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.

    the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
  • tbloxhamtbloxham Registered User regular
    Remember also that homeless people tend to migrate slowly towards cities and regions which are both long term livable outside in a tent, and regions which provide them support and don't bus them out of town or kill them. So, homeless people do migrate to cities like San Francisco and LA, and away from Phoenix and Las Vegas. Now, this is a smart decision by them (compounded by viscious uncaring actions by other cities where they just bus the homeless out of state en masse) but it does mean that San Francisco is dealing with homeless people from across the western states and beyond.

    Homelessness is a national issue, which needs to be resolved nationally.

    Expensive housing is a regional and national issue, which can primarily be resolved regionally by stripping zoning powers from local municipalities and forcing them to accept moderate density expansions near transit hubs and BUILD MORE DAMN TRANSIT.

    "That is cool" - Abraham Lincoln
  • EncEnc A Fool with Compassion Pronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered User regular
    edited September 2019
    If you made AirBnb illegal it’d result in more hotels being built.

    Second, third etc homes of rich people are a problem in some cities. Probably best to just tax them higher.

    Most places already do this.

    Enc on
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