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To meet demand, US needs 4.3M more apartments by 2035

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Re: To meet demand, US needs 4.3M more apartments by 2035

#111

Post by kelseyfrog »

marcinzm wrote: post #88
kelseyfrog wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Capitalism is very inefficient overall so it's sort of obvious that there'd be waste in all segments however at the same time it leads to better human quality of life overall than other systems we've tried. Or in other words if you waste 25% of 100% more than you're still ahead by 50%.

Sorry, but I'm not interested in engaging with capital-realists. "The best of all the bad systems" platitudes doesn't really anything for people without homes.

Re: To meet demand, US needs 4.3M more apartments by 2035

#112

Post by rufus_foreman »

hahaxdxd123 wrote: post #21
kvetching wrote: post #9

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.

Because more and more of us want walkability and all the amenities that come with it. None of my age ~25 friends have plans about moving to the suburbs, but we are disappointed at how NYC rent increases mean we will struggle to afford a nice place in Manhattan.

>> None of my age ~25 friends have plans about moving to the suburbs

Oh to be young again.

Re: To meet demand, US needs 4.3M more apartments by 2035

#113

Post by wahern »

trebbble wrote: post #33
arbuge wrote: post #8

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."

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the…

Some scholars argue that the famines in Africa toward the end of the 20th century were more than anything else a result of the collapse of economically sustainable local agriculture resulting from rapid industrialization and cheap imported grains. Food became so cheap that farms couldn't produce enough income as going concerns; people quit farming en masse. Populations in countries with little local agriculture remaining became exceptionally vulnerable and susceptible to price and distribution shocks, such as from monetary or military conflict stressors.

Many other countries have historically avoided famine in part because their political systems depended upon and heavily favored local agricultural interests--not the laborers, but specifically the financial security and opportunities of the agricultural land-owning classes. And when and where they didn't, e.g., Ireland in the late 19th century or China in the mid-20th century, things played out in predictable fashion.

Such emphasis doesn't create an optimal state of affairs for maximizing overall wealth and economic equality, but it's one way, however primitive, to buffer volatility and minimize the chances of catastrophic food failure; and helps explain why such seemingly unfair socio-political favoritism, often with seemingly perverse side effects, persists today, let alone in the 1930s.

Re: To meet demand, US needs 4.3M more apartments by 2035

#114

Post by marcinzm »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #111
marcinzm wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism is very inefficient overall so it's sort of obvious that there'd be waste in all segments however at the same time it leads to better human quality of life overall than other systems we've tried. Or in other words if you waste 25% of 100% more than you're still ahead by 50%.

Sorry, but I'm not interested in engaging with capital-realists. "The best of all the bad systems" platitudes doesn't really anything for people without homes.

Neither does your complaining about capitalism with no actually usable solutions to the problem of homelessness. Like I said in another post you seem to care more about hating capitalism than helping the homeless.

Re: To meet demand, US needs 4.3M more apartments by 2035

#115

Post by trinovantes »

kodah wrote: post #40

Articles like this miss the fact that having a shelter is one thing, but homes are also an important investment for the people that live in them. So much so that they are the default strategy of most financial planners and are only rivaled by complicated financial tools that involve insurance savings programs. I welcome the talk about more housing, but people need to remember: most of what we need aren't rentals. We…

Here's a crazy idea: a basic human need shouldn't be an investment vehicle.

Re: To meet demand, US needs 4.3M more apartments by 2035

#116

Post by sillystuff »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #86
bluedino wrote: post #6

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.

A very large percentage of people experiencing homelessness have severe issues with mental illness or substance abuse. How do you propose to deal with the damage caused to homes that will likely be common? I'm hugely in favor of guaranteeing housing, but putting homeless people in random houses and apartments scattered across the country is unlikely to actually work. Do any other countries actually do this to solve h…

50% of homeless in US were kids in foster care. And, 1 in 4 kids in foster care become homeless after aging out.

Some US homeless are mentally ill, but the majority are people without any safety net-- either societal (since they reside in the US), or familial.

https://nfyi.org/issues/homelessness/

Re: To meet demand, US needs 4.3M more apartments by 2035

#117

Post by TulliusCicero »

sillystuff wrote: post #116
TulliusCicero wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very large percentage of people experiencing homelessness have severe issues with mental illness or substance abuse. How do you propose to deal with the damage caused to homes that will likely be common? I'm hugely in favor of guaranteeing housing, but putting homeless people in random houses and apartments scattered across the country is unlikely to actually work. Do any other countries actually do this to solve h…

50% of homeless in US were kids in foster care. And, 1 in 4 kids in foster care become homeless after aging out. Some US homeless are mentally ill, but the majority are people without any safety net-- either societal (since they reside in the US), or familial. https://nfyi.org/issues/homelessness/

> the majority are people without any safety net

I mean this is essentially true by definition, but it doesn't conflict with mental illness or substance abuse problems being factors as well.

I don't disagree with your point though. We could do much better as a society. There should always be some bare minimum safe and secure housing available, even if it's basic.

Re: To meet demand, US needs 4.3M more apartments by 2035

#118

Post by antisthenes »

wahern wrote: post #113
trebbble wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the…

Some scholars argue that the famines in Africa toward the end of the 20th century were more than anything else a result of the collapse of economically sustainable local agriculture resulting from rapid industrialization and cheap imported grains. Food became so cheap that farms couldn't produce enough income as going concerns; people quit farming en masse. Populations in countries with little local agriculture remai…

You have to realize that these are baby steps for our civilization.

Only since the 1920s and commercial fertilizer use has food become abundant to such a degree, and logistics so sophisticated that we could fathom supplying excess food to multiple entire countries.

It is doubtful that the people who conceived plans for providing such aid foresaw all the consequences of their actions, because there was simply no historical precedent for such a scale of intervention. Food was scarce. Countries usually didn't have enough of it. It only seemed like the best way to alleviate that was to just _give people food_.

As it turns out, maybe that wasn't the best way, but it was lieky a lesson that needed to be learned the hard way.

Re: To meet demand, US needs 4.3M more apartments by 2035

#119

Post by welshwelsh »

Ninjinka wrote: post #44

There is no such thing as "to meet demand." If there were suddenly 4.3M more apartments, prices would drop, and suddenly there would be more demand as more people believe they can afford to have an apartment. Students who previously would have lived with their parents would want their own apartment. People with roommates would suddenly want their own place.

Excellent. Everyone should have their own place

Re: To meet demand, US needs 4.3M more apartments by 2035

#120

Post by RhysU »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #99
krschultz wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an owner of a vacation home and a large donor to homeless charities: this is completely divorced from the reality on the ground. It's a false dichotomy proposed as a way to block solving the problem of limited housing where it's acutely needed. My ski house in Vermont does absolutely nothing for the homeless people in my neighborhood in New York. If you put someone in that ski house what would it do? Sure it would…

You seem to be focused on navigating the effects of the current system by relocating people. I'm not sure where you got this from. I'm interested in modifying the system which allows for such outcomes, not managing the outcomes themselves. Please take a systems-level approach that seeks root-cause adjustment and not simply an amelioration of symptoms.

To be perfectly awful, 552K homeless out of 335M people is about 1.6% of the US population.

Even high-functioning and privileged individuals seldom have their shit together 98% of the time. I can't go 5 days without doing something chillingly stupid.

It is frankly astounding that we achieve better than 98% on any homelessness metric. A long forgotten ancestral memory says: there but for the grace of God go I.

Root cause: humans stink individually but we are robust in aggregate.

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