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Apartments are terrible for people. Why not talk about needs for homes? Why can't America make small 2 bedroom homes anymore as seen in 1950s suburbs. It's either a mansion or an apartment now for new housing.
Here is a really good video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me put this in a way you might understand. Person A: My machine needs 4 GPU to train this model in Person B: There are 1000000 GPUs in Japan. Do you see how that's not helpful?
Are you suggesting that there are vacant homes in Japan that it wouldn't make sense to house US citizens in, or just saying random stuff?
We're in luck. There are 16 million abandoned homes in the US https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/vacancy-rates-stud... Easily takes care of the half a million people experiencing homelessness as well.
>but, but, apartments are bad.
Or
>nuke the suburbs
Both these takes are wrong. We need diversified development that meets peoples needs at all levels of society. From soviet style concrete apartment blocks to 3 acre single lot McMansions and everything in between.
F unbridled YIMBYISM, but especially F “BUT it will ruin neighbor character” NIMBYISM.
Fill in the gaps, be empathetic, and welcome new people to the neighborhood.
I feel like we need 4.3M new units just to catch up to where we should be. https://i.imgur.com/2lZgEDz.jpg
Household formation is tricky. With total fertility rate continuing to decline, it’s important to shift away from singe family starts to higher density (duplex, quads, mid rise mixed use, and condo towers, depending on what the local market calls for); as older cohorts age out and Boomers transition into senior or assisted living, that’ll free up housing stock. TLDR take the population pyramid into account, but still…
Maybe I have a dirty mind, but is the higher density supposed to help people meet others and promote reproduction or something? It seems kind of cynical that people are forced to pay more for less in modern times, especially with higher taxes. I wish I had a house vs. having a 1 bedroom priced at ~3k per month. My rent is basically the equivalent of a mortgage at this point. I don't really want to have to have a car though so I guess that limits my living options.
We're in luck. There are 16 million abandoned homes in the US https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/vacancy-rates-stud... Easily takes care of the half a million people experiencing homelessness as well.
edit to add: A couple of people have mentioned that the vacant homes are not in desirable locations. As an anecdote, I live in Park Merced in San Francisco and there are dozens and dozens of empty units here ready to move in. There are also dozens of families living in RVs around Lake Merced a few blocks away. I'm saying that the obvious thing to do is for SF to exercise eminent domain, pay the company that owns Park Merced for the property, then let the people in the RVs live in the homes. That might seem a bit expensive, but SF's annual budget for dealing with homelessness is one quarter of a billion dollars.
We could convert Park Merced into a place of healing and renewal where folks who need help can come and live in a home and have access to e.g. addiction treatment or whatever.
Apartments are terrible for people. Why not talk about needs for homes? Why can't America make small 2 bedroom homes anymore as seen in 1950s suburbs. It's either a mansion or an apartment now for new housing.
I'd really like to know the reasoning for that as well. I was in the market for a year and was interested in something outside of a city. I could afford the larger 5 bedroom homes, but had absolutely no use for that amount of space. Nice 2 bedroom homes in the suburbs just aren't a thing for some reason. Smaller homes exist, but the quality drops dramatically. Perhaps there is an untapped market for high quality 1-2…
This seems off - do they mean legal documented immigrants, because there are reports of 3000 undocumented people a day illegally coming into Texas via Mexico, some of whom are being bussed to other parts of America?
The concerns with 'building more apartment buildings' are resources in area - water, energy, transportation - and past disasters with places like Geneva Towers in South San Francisco which deteriorated into a crime ridden hell that had to be demolished in the '90's.
https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Remembrance_of_Genev...
I'm all for more housing but the US is a big place yet everyone seems to want to live in very small areas of it, egged on by the YIYBY crowd.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vacant != abandoned. Right from the article you linked, 2nd parg: "But this doesn’t mean millions of abandoned and dilapidated homes are withering away in the suburbs. Vacant homes can be unoccupied for many reasons beyond being uninhabitable. For example, a house can be vacant because it’s still on the market to be sold or rented or it’s a vacation home not currently in use."
There are approx 5.7M vacation homes in the US. There are also approx 550,000 homeless people in the US. A system which allows such misallocation is fundamentally broken. If this is what effecient resource allocation looks like, then I want something else.