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Baby boomers are making it harder for millennials to buy homes

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Re: Baby boomers are making it harder for millennials to buy homes

#41

Post by kevinburke »

jrapdx3 wrote: post #36
kevinburke wrote: post #23

I'm going to sound like a broken record here but there are policy and other decisions being made in the Bay Area that are restricting the housing supply and driving up the price of existing housing. You don't have to be a bystander in this process, you can help lobby for more supply. A list of propositions and legislation to support (SF, Brisbane, Mountain View, the CA state legislature) can be found here: https://ne…

The question I have has several parts, but fundamentally I wonder if the housing supply could even be increased enough to materially affect housing prices. Not saying that the housing supply isn't excessively restricted, but how much can restrictions be decreased and how much difference would it make? An analogy is building freeways to relieve traffic congestion. What regularly happens is that additional roads or add…

> fundamentally I wonder if the housing supply could even be increased enough to materially affect housing prices.

Yes, it can; SF built 5,000 units last year, a record, and rents and owner move-in evictions finally declined. At the very least, building more housing can prevent further large price rises.

> BTW this is what's happening here in Portland OR, where a building boom has been going on for years. The area population has increased, housing prices are still out of range for many people.

The question is what would happen if you didn't build the housing. I contend that the people moving in would outbid everyone for the existing housing stock, which would drive rent increases even more than rents are currently going up. It may be that the new housing is just keeping things at a base level.

Flipped on its head the logic here doesn't really make sense; destroying existing housing stock would be disastrous for rents and prices, it makes sense that building more would help prevent increases.

Re: Baby boomers are making it harder for millennials to buy homes

#42

Post by ScottBurson »

mythrwy wrote: post #13

Speculation and free markets are great and all and there is a time and a place for those and it allocates capital more efficiently than central planning (from what we have seen so far) and freedom to attain wealth is a beautiful thing. That being said, there are basic human needs that should be met by any civilization of note. And if a civilization doesn't then it is failing. These needs include the the opportunity t…

You might find this enlightening: http://www.henrygeorge.org/pcontents.htm

Re: Baby boomers are making it harder for millennials to buy homes

#43

Post by kevinburke »

smrtinsert wrote: post #38
kevinburke wrote: post #23

I'm going to sound like a broken record here but there are policy and other decisions being made in the Bay Area that are restricting the housing supply and driving up the price of existing housing. You don't have to be a bystander in this process, you can help lobby for more supply. A list of propositions and legislation to support (SF, Brisbane, Mountain View, the CA state legislature) can be found here: https://ne…

the headline is still very applicable to other metro areas.

True, though the Bay Area is unique in the amount of leverage NIMBY's have in the process, through "discretionary review", CEQA lawsuits, EIR appeals, and other tactics...

Re: Baby boomers are making it harder for millennials to buy homes

#44

Post by kevinburke »

nitrogen wrote: post #40
jrapdx3 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question I have has several parts, but fundamentally I wonder if the housing supply could even be increased enough to materially affect housing prices. Not saying that the housing supply isn't excessively restricted, but how much can restrictions be decreased and how much difference would it make? An analogy is building freeways to relieve traffic congestion. What regularly happens is that additional roads or add…

But before too long the roads are jam-packed again, the problem isn't solved, just have more cars clogging traffic. Isn't that a good thing, indicating greater economic activity?

It's a well known feature of transportation planning that traffic expands to fill available road space: http://www.culturechange.org/issue8/traffic%20expands.htm

The argument is, if the traffic is just going to expand to fill the new roads we build, then why not build more densely instead and help people have shorter commutes. Also some arguments around vicious cycles of building more roads, leading to more traffic, leading to demand for more, bigger roads, etc, vs. supporting biking/walking/public transit

Re: Baby boomers are making it harder for millennials to buy homes

#45

Post by Mz »

jmclnx wrote: post #27

Not really the Baby Boomers fault, but bad decisions made over the past 30/40 years are coming to fruit. Right now only a hand full of cities have 'real' jobs and those cities have strict zoning laws (and NIMBY). So young people in the US, if they want to make any real $ need to move to those cities, otherwise all they will have are 'mcjobs'. I would not be surprised to see slums like the type seen in many poor count…

An awful lot of US housing policy and general expectations are rooted in what happened when the soldiers came home from WW2. Modern suburbs were born of it. Then, in the 69s and 70s, massive amounts of affordable housing, like SROs, was straight up torn down because Boomers came from unprecedented wealth and mostly did not need cheap dives just starting out.

I think they kind of can be largely blamed, but probably not for the reasons most people would think of.

Re: Baby boomers are making it harder for millennials to buy homes

#46

Post by kevinburke »

jmclnx wrote: post #27

Not really the Baby Boomers fault, but bad decisions made over the past 30/40 years are coming to fruit. Right now only a hand full of cities have 'real' jobs and those cities have strict zoning laws (and NIMBY). So young people in the US, if they want to make any real $ need to move to those cities, otherwise all they will have are 'mcjobs'. I would not be surprised to see slums like the type seen in many poor count…

If you show up to City Council or Board of Supervisors meetings, most of the NIMBY's are in fact Baby Boomers. So I do think they share some of the blame; at least in California they've more or less pulled the economic opportunity door up behind them.

Re: Baby boomers are making it harder for millennials to buy homes

#47

Post by saosebastiao »

jrapdx3 wrote: post #36
kevinburke wrote: post #23

I'm going to sound like a broken record here but there are policy and other decisions being made in the Bay Area that are restricting the housing supply and driving up the price of existing housing. You don't have to be a bystander in this process, you can help lobby for more supply. A list of propositions and legislation to support (SF, Brisbane, Mountain View, the CA state legislature) can be found here: https://ne…

The question I have has several parts, but fundamentally I wonder if the housing supply could even be increased enough to materially affect housing prices. Not saying that the housing supply isn't excessively restricted, but how much can restrictions be decreased and how much difference would it make? An analogy is building freeways to relieve traffic congestion. What regularly happens is that additional roads or add…

If you consider the fact that developers have been building at near peak-Dubai paces in Seattle for salable prices that are much lower than the bay area, I'd say you're worried about nothing of consequence. If you merely let them, they'll build until they can't cover their costs.

Re: Baby boomers are making it harder for millennials to buy homes

#48

Post by mjevans »

humanrebar wrote: post #30
jmclnx wrote: post #27

Not really the Baby Boomers fault, but bad decisions made over the past 30/40 years are coming to fruit. Right now only a hand full of cities have 'real' jobs and those cities have strict zoning laws (and NIMBY). So young people in the US, if they want to make any real $ need to move to those cities, otherwise all they will have are 'mcjobs'. I would not be surprised to see slums like the type seen in many poor count…

> Not really the Baby Boomers fault... Eh... when the housing market corrected in 2008, it could have settled at a lower baseline but it was politically urgent to make sure that baby boomers could still on their houses as profitable investments.

So in other words it didn't correct (actually it really didn't in the parts of the west coast (of the US) with 'real jobs')

Re: Baby boomers are making it harder for millennials to buy homes

#49

Post by scythe »

jrapdx3 wrote: post #36
kevinburke wrote: post #23

I'm going to sound like a broken record here but there are policy and other decisions being made in the Bay Area that are restricting the housing supply and driving up the price of existing housing. You don't have to be a bystander in this process, you can help lobby for more supply. A list of propositions and legislation to support (SF, Brisbane, Mountain View, the CA state legislature) can be found here: https://ne…

The question I have has several parts, but fundamentally I wonder if the housing supply could even be increased enough to materially affect housing prices. Not saying that the housing supply isn't excessively restricted, but how much can restrictions be decreased and how much difference would it make? An analogy is building freeways to relieve traffic congestion. What regularly happens is that additional roads or add…

In order to increase the housing supply "significantly", you need to increase zoning limits in >10% of the relevant population-weighted land area. However balkanization makes it impossible to do this through a single political entity.

The solution IMO is a "trigger" law that will increase zoning heights in a suburb when the nearby suburbs pass similar laws. This prevents any one town from becoming gentrified if they raise their growth rate above the regional norm.

Re: Baby boomers are making it harder for millennials to buy homes

#50

Post by omegaham »

mythrwy wrote: post #32
manyxcxi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wholeheartedly disagree that land in the US is anyone's birthright, with the exception of people of native descent, and they (painting with a VERY wide brush stroke, I know) generally didn't believe in land ownership to begin with. I do agree that speculation has driven to some crazy things in the US housing market. Though I'm not against speculation in any market per se, when we see what banks, businesses, and oth…

I hear you and apologies for the rant. Down votes are entirely understandable as I don't care for radical sounding rants either. I'm not saying in in the US, nor concretely, but philosophically I think when a person is born they inherit the right to inhabit a piece of earth. You shouldn't arrive in the earth and not be able to sleep on piece of it without paying someone. I guess I feel that land in general belongs to…

> Leave wealth building for bitcoin and Apple stock and companies that make mascara.

The flip side of this - people then complain that we have 25 different high-tech varieties of boner pills while the developing world is dealing with antibiotic-resistant infections and malaria. Despite the SV Founder Changing The World rhetoric, most people are in business to get paid. People go where the money is.

If you declare that no one should get rich off of bread because it's A Basic Necessity, you're going to find that the bread biz is going to stagnate while endless innovation happens in the Twinkie and tortilla chip biz. Some martyrs who are willing to sacrifice their career prospects to work in bread will stick around and make process, but the legions of people who are just looking for a non-shitty job are going to stay far away.

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