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A record number of Americans can't afford rent

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Re: A record number of Americans can't afford rent

#41

Post by alexsereno »

darkwizard42 wrote: post #33

Looking to learn more on the subject, but why isn't it in the interest of any city these days to NOT build more housing? They are almost perfectly incentivized to attract working young people and families to help increase their tax base (property tax, income tax, sales tax) and housing would help them do that. Given most large cities are facing huge financial deficits, wouldn't this make sense? (Yes, I'm aware of reg…

This is quite simple, cities are run by voters. Any property owner, and all the landlords, are incentivized to keep housing stock as low as possible. To get around this you need federal housing regulation to prevent local governments from doing what’s clearly in their loudest voters best interest, and instead change the incentives to favor building high rise condos and dense housing

Re: A record number of Americans can't afford rent

#42

Post by ipnon »

darkwizard42 wrote: post #33

Looking to learn more on the subject, but why isn't it in the interest of any city these days to NOT build more housing? They are almost perfectly incentivized to attract working young people and families to help increase their tax base (property tax, income tax, sales tax) and housing would help them do that. Given most large cities are facing huge financial deficits, wouldn't this make sense? (Yes, I'm aware of reg…

The city is incentivized to increase housing supply, but the voters are not because their individual net worths are mostly in their home prices. Since a city is really just a set of geographically constrained voters, housing supply decreases.

Re: A record number of Americans can't afford rent

#43

Post by watwut »

jurassicfoxy wrote: post #10
blackt0wer wrote: post #4

It is worth pointing out that those who cannot afford rent often will not subsidize their situation by renting out extra space and taking on roommates, but instead suffer in isolation living alone. This false premise that "living alone" is some sort of social achievement needs to end.

> This false premise that "living alone" is some sort of social achievement needs to end. I agree. I find the idea of living around other people absolutely detestable, but I do often wonder how much of this is cultural.

It is cultural, because it used to be norm. That being said, that overcrowding did caused quite a lot of social and relational issues. Families want own flats and singles want own rooms for smart reasons.

Re: A record number of Americans can't afford rent

#44

Post by itsoktocry »

cglan wrote: post #25

This is basically the late stage of us continually not building enough housing for years and years. I'm not sure how anyone thought this would turn out differently. As long as housing is an "investment", which in turn means that people lock up big portions of their net worth into housing, and then vote against policies that would make housing cheaper (it's the rational thing to do) then this will be the outcome. Just…

>Just look at the 30 year fixed rate mortgages. They're an insane subsidization for homeowners.

Canada is in worse shape, and doesn't have 30 year fixed mortgages (most are 5 years), and you can't write off mortgage interest expenses. In other words, our homeowner incentives are worse, and yet the house crisis is also worse.

That's leaves what you mention off-the-hop: we aren't building enough. But why? Is it a supply or demand problem? My country is starting to believe it's the latter.

Re: A record number of Americans can't afford rent

#45

Post by MisterBastahrd »

After WWII, the US government made it a point that returning service members needed a place to stay and so they subsidized the building of homes across the country. If landlords have decided as a bloc that they need to gouge the living crap out of their tenants, then the government should step in and either put in price controls or spend a few hundred billion a year to subsidize new housing. If we can throw $50B at Israel and $60B at Ukraine, then we can spend $100B on homes for our citizens.

Re: A record number of Americans can't afford rent

#46

Post by rtz121 »

lukas099 wrote: post #31
EA-3167 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is inevitable when vast numbers of people all want to live as close to the centers of a handful of major cities as they can. You either build megacities, let the market dictate who can afford to live there, or maybe start seriously realizing that from an economic and environmental point of view... maybe remote work is the solution.

I'm not convinced remote work is better than the market solution from an environmental point of view. Seems like having people as densely concentrated as they can be is best from an environmental standpoint. Remote is definitely better than the status quo of subsidized suburbs housing car commuters though.

If we grind down humans into fine dust, we could fit trillions of people into San Francisco.

Re: A record number of Americans can't afford rent

#48

Post by gottorf »

gcgbcfy wrote: post #38
cglan wrote: post #25

This is basically the late stage of us continually not building enough housing for years and years. I'm not sure how anyone thought this would turn out differently. As long as housing is an "investment", which in turn means that people lock up big portions of their net worth into housing, and then vote against policies that would make housing cheaper (it's the rational thing to do) then this will be the outcome. Just…

This has been disproven so many times. There’s more vacant homes in the US than homeless people. But homes == money. As someone who is a real estate investor, it’s no secret, we are jacking up the prices. It’s what we do for a living.

> This has been disproven so many times. There’s more vacant homes in the US than homeless people.

It hasn't been disproven. There being more vacant homes than homeless people just means that the market isn't clearing, because the minimum price acceptable to the landlord is higher than the maximum price acceptable to the homeless. This could be from any number of reasons, none of which "disprove" the fact that the laws of supply and demand do in fact apply to housing.

As an analogy, there are always jobless people even when there are vacant positions to fill. Why? Because of a mismatch between the price of labor, which is artificially inflated by minimum wage laws and another hundred laws and regulations that make it costlier to employ someone, and the economic value generated by that labor.

Re: A record number of Americans can't afford rent

#49

Post by sjwhevvvvvsj »

cglan wrote: post #25

This is basically the late stage of us continually not building enough housing for years and years. I'm not sure how anyone thought this would turn out differently. As long as housing is an "investment", which in turn means that people lock up big portions of their net worth into housing, and then vote against policies that would make housing cheaper (it's the rational thing to do) then this will be the outcome. Just…

California is even more screwed up with property tax laws which essentially subsidize boomers (who have property taxes locked in based on the value of a home purchased in the 1980s!) to the detriment of anybody buying their first home (who pay tax based on current value).

I live in the Bay Area and know multiple households making well over $250k who rent largely due to the fact that those who bought 10-20 years ago are paying about 1/3 of the property tax of a new buyer today (even setting aside interest rates).

Re: A record number of Americans can't afford rent

#50

Post by brightball »

tmnvix wrote: post #5

A useful starting point in dealing with this (and the housing crisis in general) would be to determine what proportion of homes are not being used as a primary residence. I suspect it has risen dramatically over the past couple of decades. If it turns out that that is the case, the next step would be to find out why.

You hit the nail on the head here. The simplest way to solve this problem is a stepped increase in property taxes for home which are not the primary residence.

Just as an example:

Assume a baseline property tax level of say, 6%.

Primary residence - 2% discount to 4% Non-primary residence, in same region (county/city) as primary = 6% Non-primary residence, not in same region as primary = increase 2% to 8%

Non-primary residence owned by a corporate entity rather than a citizen = increase 4% to 10%.

You do that, it should make doing things like this much harder.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/21/how-wall-street-bought-singl...

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