21–30 of 42 posts
THe last time this actually happened, during the Great Bubble of the early 2000s, developers built as fast as they could sell, to anyone who could sign a a paper. It didn't matter if anyone intended to actually live in the buildings. Whole developments were built to stand empty. And when the bubble popped, indeed, prices crashed. Also, stock markets, banks, jobs, income. Foreclosures clogged the market. Corporate rea…
This presumes home building rates in the lead up to the GFC were unusually high, when in fact they were at a 50 year low: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3569920
I'm suspicious of a plan to help the poor that depends on rich people making a bubble pop. Somehow the rich always manage to put their losses onto the poor.
A counter argument I find compelling is that if people are buying property as a way of laundering money or stashing cash overseas then they may not care so much about the quality of the investment and that this breaks some of the assumptions about market efficiency.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This presumes home building rates in the lead up to the GFC were unusually high, when in fact they were at a 50 year low: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3569920
https://www.census.gov/construction/nrc/historical_data/inde...
We have a huge contingent of what I call vacancy truthers here in Berkeley and the rest of the Bay Area. Earlier this week a former candidate for city government was opining that new "gentrification tower" - actually tremendously expensive and not at all luxurious studio apartments in a 5 story building -- were all vacant! Look at all these available apartments! But these truthers simply never understand the numbers.…
The truth is that Californians love expensive housing. They love having lots of jobs that attract people outside their city. They also love yelling at the people they desperately tried to attract. They love homeless people and want to support their drug problems. They never put themselves into the shoe of outsiders or even developers and care about nothing except their own selfish desires. That's what true greed looks like. It's in plain sight and until that greed is gone nothing will change.
The analysis is so obviously wrong, I can't imagine any of this is real. It assumes that rich entities will buy property at high prices in a soon-to-be buyer's market. That they will not calculate ROI, will not predict market collapse and will easily loose money. The opposite, of course, is true. ROI will be meticulously calculated, bubble will not form. Development companies, unamused by weak demand will stop buildi…
I’m a YIMBY activist in my spare time. One criticism of my ideas I’ve seen is that building more housing in my city will attract more professionals to my city. Those people live in the new housing, not existing low income residents. I think this is because the shortage is so bad, and that these professionals would eventually displace residents no matter what.
You mean all those people you built offices for? Why did you build offices for them if you didn't want them in your city? Ever though about that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Land is priced at what the MAX a developer could make from developing the land. Short of completely changing everything about property development from the financing (artificially low rates), taxes (regressive), and development (zones) - there is no solution. If you could build more - someone would. You can't. And it's not like we can just change one thing. The entire market is forcing higher prices at every turn. 66…
This is lazy analysis. 1. Lots of industrial inputs are priced based on value they provide the consumer. That’s not what makes land special, and there are many mechanisms to have non-developers capture the value of land (cf. LVT, inclusionary zoning, impact fees). 2. Focus on developers is misplaced. There is no reason developers are structurally incapable of making their profits by building lots of units at low marg…
Greedy owners of single family housing want to drive the value of their house up because they can't easily invest into a second home. A lot of them also love the idea of halting progress at all costs, even if it harms them or their children in the long run.
I'm suspicious of a plan to help the poor that depends on rich people making a bubble pop. Somehow the rich always manage to put their losses onto the poor.