The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression • Hacker News Board

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#431

Post by JumpCrisscross » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 3:04 PM UTC

adra wrote: post #353

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building any housing is building affordable housing. Adding one home at the top of the price range, increases the number of affordable homes for someone, somewhere, by at least one.

Come tell that to the residents of Vancouver. We've had countless luxury condos made year after year for two decades and we're at around 3k/mo for a 1br.. tell us more about how building units that "regular" people can never afford that it's always helping them.

> tell that to the residents of Vancouver. We've had countless luxury condos made year after year

Developing in Vancouver is outrageously expensive. Its voters chose a lengthy approval process for new housing. High housing costs are a political choice.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#432

Post by breakyerself » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 3:04 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #419

zenkat wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing is cheap in West Virginia because it's currently experiencing the largest population exodus in the US. https://apnews.com/article/al-state-wire-west-virginia-lifes...

West Virginia didn’t outlaw new housing like Portland did. American cities largely rejected supply and demand over the last decades, as land-owning interests found alliance, variously, with renting incumbents and the economically naive. Charleston didn’t make better policy than Salem; it simply didn’t pass the bad ones.

I agree, but also think it's important to remember that the federal government didn't used to just leave it up to the private sector. The government used to be a major source of homebuilding. Had the federal government not abandoned the project of building public housing supply would be higher. They're much better equipped for overcoming local zoning limitations than a land developer.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#433

Post by luxuryballs » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 3:04 PM UTC

escapedmoose wrote: post #192

jongjong wrote: post #16

Part of the problem is government regulation. In some places, it's almost impossible to build new houses due to regulations. Some portion of the population wants to see house prices continue to increase and they will vote for politicians who will implement policies which will support that agenda. Of course this happens at the expense of another, also large portion of the population who do not own a house and have to…

Among my friends seeking to buy houses, the greater problem is the ability of large companies to buy up whatever is on the market, which they then immediately turn into a rental. It’s nearly impossible to compete with a company who will pay $50k over asking price, in cash, for the house you’re trying to get. Comparatively, immigrants don’t have the purchasing power to compete, so saying they’re the problem is a weird…

I have a hunch that companies paying $50k over to turn a house into a rental and governments paying the rent of immigrants are not things happening in a vacuum.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#434

Post by bombcar » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 3:05 PM UTC

adra wrote: post #353

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building any housing is building affordable housing. Adding one home at the top of the price range, increases the number of affordable homes for someone, somewhere, by at least one.

Come tell that to the residents of Vancouver. We've had countless luxury condos made year after year for two decades and we're at around 3k/mo for a 1br.. tell us more about how building units that "regular" people can never afford that it's always helping them.

It's like induced demand, but for houses! "Just one more house!"

At some point the market would flood and there wouldn't be as much demand anymore, but if every single person in Canada wants to live in Vancouver everyone is in for a world of hurt until Vancouver has 30 million dwelling units.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#435

Post by tzs » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 3:06 PM UTC

spir wrote: post #234

escapedmoose wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among my friends seeking to buy houses, the greater problem is the ability of large companies to buy up whatever is on the market, which they then immediately turn into a rental. It’s nearly impossible to compete with a company who will pay $50k over asking price, in cash, for the house you’re trying to get. Comparatively, immigrants don’t have the purchasing power to compete, so saying they’re the problem is a weird…

You only perceive corporate landlords as the greater problem because we're not living in the counterfactual reality where there are millions of new apartments that are inexpensive, tiny, safe, quiet, modern, clean, dignified, and well-located. In pretty much every major city in North America, it is illegal or there is too much red tape to build the affordable housing people actually want. Why is it that living in a t…

What counts as a major city?

When you start looking in cities that are under around 400k population you start to find plenty of price points under $2k.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#436

Post by MisterBastahrd » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 3:06 PM UTC

poorbutdebtfree wrote: post #130

somewhereoutth wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is not supply and demand for houses - there are plenty enough to go around (though often in the wrong place). The issue is that a sizeable underclass is being created that have no wealth, not least because what wealth they did have has been funnelled to the very wealthy. For example, medical bills. For example student loans. For example zero interest rates with zero wage inflation meaning accommodation cost…

[flagged]

The second amendment is not a credible deterrent to government violence. Those gun nuts can bring every weapon they like, all 400 million of them, to a battlefield and they will be wiped out in a couple weeks by the US military. They are not Afghanis who have spent generations surviving in war, they are fat fucks on blood pressure medication with gun fetishes.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#437

Post by Ajedi32 » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 3:07 PM UTC

User23 wrote: post #327

spir wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You only perceive corporate landlords as the greater problem because we're not living in the counterfactual reality where there are millions of new apartments that are inexpensive, tiny, safe, quiet, modern, clean, dignified, and well-located. In pretty much every major city in North America, it is illegal or there is too much red tape to build the affordable housing people actually want. Why is it that living in a t…

> build the affordable housing people actually want. And the unspeakable little problem that people don't want to live around the people who will be living in the affordable housing people actually want. Hence, NIMBY.

This is an interesting point. So the housing problem is (at least partially) a crime problem? Because I don't think there's anything that makes low income housing _inherently_ unpleasant to live next to; it's more a question of how the people who live there tend to conduct themselves, and to what extent that behavior is tolerated by the local authorities. I don't often see people complaining about living next to affordable senior living centers, so it's not really the income level of the residents that's the problem.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#438

Post by ToucanLoucan » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 3:07 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #414

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say this like every developer would be rushing out to build low-income housing if only they could. Developers build expensive luxury units because they can rent them for $2k a month by scalping tenants from nearby buildings who are currently paying $2.1k per month, because the buildings really don't cost that much more to build, the higher forecasted income from said renting makes it easier to sell to banks and g…

> housing the middle class is always going to be more profitable than housing the poor You could make this argument for any product. Of course it’s more profitable to cook steaks for the rich. That doesn’t mean nobody poor has ever eaten. About one percent of Americans are poor on a global scale [1]. Unaffordability of housing is a political choice. It is driven by an alliance between cynical and ignorant interests.…

> You could make this argument for any product.

Yeah you can, because the vast majority of products are built and priced for the middle class, including

> Of course it’s more profitable to cook steaks for the rich

Food, which is why we have vast areas in the USA where it is impossible to buy groceries without driving 40 minutes or more, which means fresh food is basically out of the question, which is fine anyway because those people probably can't afford anything but over-processed calorie dense foods that store well. Because again: producing food is not done because people need food, it is done because it is profitable. Or in the case of food deserts, it is not done because it is substantially less profitable. Much like building low income housing.

And Americans being rich on a global scale doesn't mean shit when median expenses for said "rich" Americans are getting more expensive all the time. Cars are basically entirely a poor tax on Americans, so yes, we all drive enormous and ridiculous vehicles, but those same vehicles are also slowly driving us all into fucking poverty because a century ago, the car companies killed any decent public transit in the vast majority of cities, and people like Robert Moses used building highways as a way to fuck over black people on a scale not seen since the abolishing of slavery.

Our houses are certainly nicer than most people's too, which is why we're spending upwards of 1/3-1/2 of the money we make on them, oftentimes not even earning equity in the process: half the money you make, just dumped in a damn hole, never to be seen again. And each time the housing market crashes more of the supply ends up in the hands of banks and hedge funds, ensuring it'll be just as expensive in the future for us to pay to live in. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, almost like everything is doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing.

You could live a comfortable lifestyle on an American full-time minimum wage in the Republic of Vanuatu, that's fucking irrelevant to everyone because no one who makes that wage lives there.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#439

Post by jxramos » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 3:07 PM UTC

macNchz wrote: post #377

spir wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You only perceive corporate landlords as the greater problem because we're not living in the counterfactual reality where there are millions of new apartments that are inexpensive, tiny, safe, quiet, modern, clean, dignified, and well-located. In pretty much every major city in North America, it is illegal or there is too much red tape to build the affordable housing people actually want. Why is it that living in a t…

SROs used to exist to fill that gap, but were largely banned over the last hundred years. The stupid thing is that now they basically exist again in the form of regular hotels, except city governments are the ones paying full price to house otherwise homeless people.

this would be interesting history to review in video format of someone walked through the before and after and the transition. This makes me think of these very old hotels which used to line a major street in my town that slowly faded away and crumbled. I wonder if they were SRO properties essentially.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#440

Post by ryandrake » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 3:07 PM UTC

spir wrote: post #234

escapedmoose wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among my friends seeking to buy houses, the greater problem is the ability of large companies to buy up whatever is on the market, which they then immediately turn into a rental. It’s nearly impossible to compete with a company who will pay $50k over asking price, in cash, for the house you’re trying to get. Comparatively, immigrants don’t have the purchasing power to compete, so saying they’re the problem is a weird…

You only perceive corporate landlords as the greater problem because we're not living in the counterfactual reality where there are millions of new apartments that are inexpensive, tiny, safe, quiet, modern, clean, dignified, and well-located. In pretty much every major city in North America, it is illegal or there is too much red tape to build the affordable housing people actually want. Why is it that living in a t…

What specific government policy is causing developers to only build $2k+/mo rentals? You can't just vaguely say "government" is at fault without connecting the dots.

This seems more like the market's fault. If homes in a particular area are going for $2k/mo, then that's what they are going for. If this is the government's fault, are you proposing price controls?