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LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

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Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#171

Post by maddyboo »

onion2k wrote: post #142
tylerhou wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What concrete data do you have to suggest that luxury homes aren't being occupied at significantly higher rates than general housing stock?

https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/pretty-vacant "Wealth investment leaves an estimated 125,000 homes in London without anyone living in them." There are 268,385 empty homes in England according to the government (people get a tax break in most parts of England if they own a property that is unoccupied and unfurnished so its quite easy to track empty homes), and half of them are luxury houses in London. I'm not sayin…

What is the rationale for giving such a tax break? That seems ridiculous.

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#172

Post by BurningFrog »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #83
dcolkitt wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one big way to prevent this downward trend in quality of life is to build more cheap housing One pedantic quibble. It's not necessary to build cheap housing specifically. It's perfectly fine simply to build more housing of any type. Today's new expensive housing will indirectly create more cheap housing in the pre-existing housing stock, by pulling demand out of the market. Throughout all of American history, new h…

Yes but we have a crisis now which means that we need both regular market housing now and affordable housing now. We do not uh have the luxury of building luxury housing only then waiting 40 years for it to eventually become affordable.

If you build enough luxury housing it will become cheap right away.

San Francisco has ~400k housing units. If you build a million more, prices will go down very sharply.

When there is more housing units than people who want to live there, prices go towards zero, whether they're "luxury" or not.

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#173

Post by slg »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #155
slg wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This generally doesn't happen for two primary reasons. First cities are not closed systems. Places like LA and the Bay Area have a built up demand that exceeds housing. The new housing would have to be added at an extremely high right to keep up with that demand otherwise the city just grows rather than becomes cheaper. When a city simply grows, the cheaper units never flow down to the bottom of the market as someone…

> cheaper units never flow down to the bottom of the market “Never” is too strong. It happened to me in New York. I negotiated down my rent on account of nearby buildings with better amenities opening at slightly higher but similar enough pricing, net effective. Meanwhile, Brooklyn and San Francisco were busy blocking all new construction, thereby forcing their restaurant workers to compete with millionaires.

You are disputing a point I never made. I didn't say "no units ever get cheaper". I said when growth outpaces new housing "cheaper units never flow down to the bottom of the market".

You said yourself that the new construction had slightly higher pricing meaning your unit was in the same basic market as the new construction and also implies you likely were not shopping at "the bottom of the market". Do you think you would have been able to negotiate your rent down if the new building was in an entirely different class and was charging 2x or 3x your rent?

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#174

Post by nerfhammer »

TchoBeer wrote: post #95
BobbyJo wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Market housing creates affordable housing by displacing demand. No matter what kind of housing you build, as long as it gets built now it will lower prices now.

More luxery houses would lower prices for luxery housing, but not necessarily for affordable housing. I don't know how much those are competing markets

New housing is always relatively "luxury" because newness is itself a luxury. Much of what is relatively affordable now was relatively "luxury" when it was built. But if you stop building anything new it would be like trying to keep the price of cars down by banning new cars – what will happen after a decade or two if you did that?

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#175

Post by slg »

stickfigure wrote: post #169
slg wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This generally doesn't happen for two primary reasons. First cities are not closed systems. Places like LA and the Bay Area have a built up demand that exceeds housing. The new housing would have to be added at an extremely high right to keep up with that demand otherwise the city just grows rather than becomes cheaper. When a city simply grows, the cheaper units never flow down to the bottom of the market as someone…

With sufficient deferred maintenance, today's 3 bedroom luxury condo is next decade's slum. It takes time to reach steady-state.

A 3 bedroom luxury condo never becomes an SRO hotel with shared bathrooms regardless of how little maintenance goes into the place. A neglected property will obviously fall down market in terms of desirability, but a place like that will never reach the actual bottom of the market.

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#176

Post by CivBase »

barbecue_sauce wrote: post #128
tylerhou wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately as the Tiktaalik mentioned, we have a housing shortage now. So the trickle-down economics of luxury housing won't work for at least a generation. What data are you basing this claim off of? Many people (especially young people in finance and tech) move every few years, and some of them want luxury apartments. That reduces the demand for cheaper housing stock. A 25 y/o moving to SF isn't going to buy a…

A 25 y/o moving to SF isn't going to buy an apartment period.

I'm confused. What will a 25 y/o moving to SF buy? They can't all be homeless or wealthy enough to buy a house in SF.

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#177

Post by maffydub »

onion2k wrote: post #145
dnautics wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's not occupied isn't it losing money at least by bleeding to property taxes?

Yes, but property values in London are increasing at a rate that more than pays for that (many times over actually).

Do you have any data on that?

Currently living in zone 2 north-east London and house prices have seemed pretty flat for the last couple of years. Flats have had a surge due to current stamp duty holiday... and prices outside London seem to have increased a lot with people anticipating a permanent move to remote/hybrid working.

Taxes on empty properties aren't high, but you still need to consider maintenance... and there's an opportunity cost of leaving a house empty rather than renting it out.

Just interested in your data - thanks!

Update: found https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/pretty-vacant in one of your sibling posts - was that what you were referring to? I just read it (on my phone, so might have missed it), but didn't see any numbers for investment returns here... and there was a fairly-extensive section talking about London property being used for money-laundering instead - is that what you're referring to?

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#178

Post by treeman79 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #160
Klinky wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing prices in my area have literally doubled in the last 5~ years. Sitting on a house doesn't look so bad with those returns. At the same time flipping is also a housing investment method that inflates prices while often diluting the quality of the housing market, as it's often not done properly. Let's also not forget the housing crisis saw a lot of money pouring into bad investments. Assuming people only make wi…

> Sitting on a house doesn't look so bad with those returns Those returns are underwritten by voters rejecting new housing. If that political landscape changes, the incentives for landholders evolve.

That, and inflation showing up in certain areas.

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#179

Post by BobbyJo »

drewmate wrote: post #148
BobbyJo wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Market housing creates affordable housing by displacing demand. No matter what kind of housing you build, as long as it gets built now it will lower prices now.

I think you're mostly right, but it's not as straightforward as 1 dwelling per household and everyone just moves up a rung. Market housing could get bought up by people who are currently living with roommates (but would like their own home) or one of the 52% of young adults currently living with their parents.[0] Those spots are then unlikely to become available for the homeless. This is just another symptom of the m…

Why are those people living with roommates? Because they can't afford not to. If they suddenly move out and fill up a space they otherwise couldn't afford, that requires that prices have gone down.

price = F(supply, demand) therefore demand = G(price, supply) and supply = H(price, demand)

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#180

Post by tomjakubowski »

Auracle wrote: post #161
ahelwer wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea why people believe NPR to be progressive. The joke name "Nice Polite Republicans" exists for a reason. Liberal news coverage of homeless issues rarely takes a progressive framing, anyway.

There’s an easy litmus test for news organizations - words. Do they use Latino or Latinx, for example? Illegal alien vs. undocumented immigrant vs refugee. Sex vs gender assigned at birth (usually when talking about a trans person). NPR used to be fairly centrist, but these days they’re far to the left. If I turn on my car there’s about a 9/10 chance my local station will be talking about some form of identity politi…

When you tune into public radio you're most likely not listening to NPR. Public radio stations draw their programming from many sources, including in many cases shows produced by the station. NPR does distribute more content to public radio stations than do APM, PRI/PRX, or WNYC, but their programs don't comprise a majority of public radio content.

Unfortunately your litmus test especially doesn't work that well for NPR, at least in one example. They distribute (but do not produce - partly because it wouldn't meet their editorial guidelines) a show about issues facing Latin Americans in the United States called Latino USA. Yet nobody who listens to it would deny the show takes quite a strong progressive stance on political issues.

I'd also add that NPR's most popular shows, the newscasts Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition, are all remarkably boring politically and take a sort of weaker sauce version of the BBC's neutral and somewhat hostile approach to interviewing, regardless of political bent.

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