351–360 of 817 posts
So much of the journalism we read is heavily processed and barely-reported and it's startling to see how much of a superpower simple shoe-leather reporting actually is. Derek Thompson's an incredibly sharp writer, but not really a subject matter expert on housing economics; all he did here was read papers and call up the authorities they cited, and the narrative behind those papers collapsed. We're often so down on j…
Here's how a rational market works. If I build an apartment complex, eventually those apartments will get older and more affordable. And even before that upper middle class folks will move in, freeing up their previous homes.
But that's not how many in local governments see it. So you have affordable housing quotas on new developments.
You have developers building units for the homeless at 600k each. https://abc7news.com/post/new-high-rise-building-house-skid-...
Affordable housing vouchers, section 8, etc, become a dystopian nightmare.
11 year waiting list. https://laist.com/news/section-8-waiting-list
The problem is twofold, first it's too difficult to build homes. In California you can literally just claim a new highrise will block your sunlight and make you sad. That's enough to delay a construction.
Parking requirements ensure space that could be occupied by people is instead reserved for vehicles. Plus the parking structure itself drives up the cost to build, 30% of your construction cost isn't unreasonable.
On a macro level, many cities should of fixed their issues with inadequate housing construction decades ago.
On a personal level, you need to go where you can afford.
After about 4 generations of living in LA about half my family has left. It's more than possible to make it off a middle class salary, but you need to make that choice.
If you stay in an unaffordable city you can't wait around waiting for politicians to fix it.
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There's also a large lobby group that is fully invested in building new houses, namely real estate developers, and since most politicians at a high level usually need large campaign contributions, they are fully invested in it as well.
Are you suggesting that the problem with housing is that we are producing too much of it?
Most interesting proposal I heard on this topic, is that the solution to housing prices is to ban renting altogether. It's so radical that it's almost impossible to predict if it would be better or worse. But at least it had the moral ground that rent is one of the last remnant of pre-capitalist lords and barons economies. The idea being it would commoditize housing. Millions of units would now be for sale, prices wo…
What about wealth inequality as the root cause of housing shortage? Even if supply is eased, the wealthy (those who have enough capital to earn passive income) will buy the extra supply and rent to the poor. The Piketty effect takes over, they invest their profit in more housing, wealth inequality continues to get worse, and while more housing exists, it owned by an increasingly small cohort. Personally I'd like to s…
What about wealth inequality as the root cause of housing shortage? Keep building. Eventually there are more houses than people who want to be in them, regardless of whether or not they're being rented or owned. When that happens you'll see the prices fall. After all, if nobody wants to rent your house, you'll either rent it for lower or sell it. If nobody wants to buy it, you'll lower the price. Ad nauseum.
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Long permitting processes also encourage construction of larger SFHs. The permitting cost is largely fixed whereas three profit margins scale with the value of the home which mostly scales with the size of the home
yes bigger houses to an extent are way more profitable because there is a somewhat linear relationship between sqft and value but houses have a lot of fixed cost. there's probably a sweet spot around 2500sqft in suburban/exurban Dallas Fort Worth to maximize the market for the house and still generate low $/sqft such that the guy building something bigger next tract over isn't crushing you on $/sqft. that 2500sqft ho…
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Reporters used to start at something like the City News Bureau.[1] For a century, the City News Bureau covered local news for Chicago and sent it in to the local newspapers. Lasted until 2005. Young reporters started there, covering every police station, every major crime, every major fire, every major trial, and getting the facts right, or else. The bureau`s unsentimental motto: ”If your mother says she loves you, c…
Sorry to derail this thread on journalistic merit.. I just thought that this other thread on housing microeconomics is worth pointing out, to anyone who might be excited about the prospects of enlightened tax policy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44750961 > This is most clear in insurance data where replacement cost is isolated from land value.
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tptacek is asking how investors buying properties to rent them out, which clearly leads to increased rental supply, then somehow supposedly leads to higher , not lower, rents.
Recognizing your frustration with reality's failure to adhere to the academic: the fact is that rent rates for corporate-owned units generally don't go down. At least, not in recent history. In the rare cases where cartel behavior doesn't work to cement rates, and owners have to respond somehow to market conditions in order to avoid cash-flow disruption, they will offer "specials" that lower the out-of-pocket cost, b…
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I guarantee you all your Oak Park neighbors are the type who were With Hillary in 2016 (probably calling Bernie a sexist) and voted for Biden and against progressive income tax in 2020. They are not leftists. You seem to be having some trouble understanding the difference between democrats, liberals, and leftists. T&K are fundamentally dishonest about the role of euclidean zoning in american cities, who supports it a…
Sounds like you're just applying somewhat arbitrary purity rules to what falls into the "leftist" bucket or not. I believe that for most people "leftists" means "on the left side of the political spectrum", and so, in the US, it would be a strict superset of democrats & Liberals. But for you, it sounds like it's only subset of these, based on some criteria you haven't made explicit. Fair enough, but that's a somewhat…
I'm not even very far left and I identify with the term because party leadership are all 80yo and out of touch.
While we’re debunking that can we debunk the weird leftist conspiracy theories around index fund companies like Blackrock “buying up all the residential homes.” Yes, the largest index fund company that sells investment products that allow people to invest in indexes (entire markets) is going to defacto be a custodian on holdings across the entire economy, including homes. Operating the funds offered in your 401k does…
"You have to force behaviors. At BlackRock, we are forcing behaviors." - Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock.