America doesn't need new cities. There is an unbelievable amount of space wasted within every city and any urban planner can show you. Development policy in the 40s and 50s was backward and we continue to suffer the consequences today.
Absolutely, but it's easier to build quality mixed use development and walkable, bikable neighbourhoods when you don't have thousands of NIMBYs screaming down every proposal.
Pick your favorite place on the planet. Then tell me if 8 billion people can live there, and would it be the same place if they did?
I know the answer to both of these questions, and so do you.
I don't understand why we can't just copy another country's housing strategy. There are many countries in the world where housing is affordable, relatively high quality, and the homelessness rate is low. What are we doing that makes this problem so seemingly intractable? Why is our approach to public housing seemingly worse than any other approach in history?
A bit of a misnomer. Housing is, actually, extremely affordable across the US - just not in major cities. You can plunk $10-$20K and get land and a homestead in dozens of states. Agree with the other comment that overbuilding is a reasonable strategy, but if you look at Detroit downtown (mid 2010s) having an overbuilt downtown is bad too. It's a hard problem.
That's actually the same in most countries: the cities where everyone wants to move to (examples from Germany: Berlin, Hamburg, Munich) become unaffordable, and at the same time smaller cities and villages in less desirable areas (e.g. in East Germany, but also in more remote areas of Bavaria) are depopulated - there you can buy a cheap house, but you can't get a job. Remote working would have helped to somewhat alleviate this, but no, now we all have to go back to the office so we can sit there and spend the whole day in Zoom/Slack/Teams calls instead of doing the exact same thing from home...
How is renting different from hiring in that regard? Nobody would consider requiring employers to hire the first qualified candidate, but at the same time, we don't allow employers to discriminate on the basis of race. Why couldn't the same law apply to residential leasing?
Are we sure that law is working as intended? Or are employers simply not admitting to factoring race into the decision? It is next to impossible to prove a candidate was rejected on the basis of race, especially when you can legally reject someone for not being a "culture fit" on the team. I'd also argue the stakes are higher when leasing, so landlords will be less likely to take a chance on a race they don't like. M…
>t is next to impossible to prove a candidate was rejected on the basis of race
It is possible to prove a company is disproportionally one or the other when making the claim. Of course when an industry has far less applicants or members of a certain group that's to be expected but still.
Consequentially I've heard of some pretty blatant race based selection especially in the US.
It's just that that selection ends up excluding white people (or east asians)
A while ago I even discussed with a hr person here on hn who was defending their hiring of that sort with the most flowery wording about 'just giving priority' or 'reaching out to members of their prefered group specifically' fist if all they get is not the desired group.
Singapore doesn’t have crime like the U.S. There is also no free public housing. You still must work and the housing is subsidised. But not free.
Why bother with such details? Class warfare is right, and details are details. /sarcasm For example mixed income housing is really nice for “us” that have been in generational poverty. For “them” it is just living with signals of alcohol abuse, domestic abuse and more. All while their children get a good front seat into “empowerment”. With sarcasm over, details matter, complexity matters, social assistance matters, a…
Singapore system won't work in USA cities. Their town councils are near scholars level. Quite a few of them doctorate. They are pretty much selected on 2 criteria, merit and perceived likability with accountabilities evaluated both by government and locals citizens. American leaders are selected based on sound bites with zero accountability to citizens for maybe 2 years to 4 years. They do accountable to mega donors which almost always work against for the good of the public. Singapore also have world class city planners that entire America have never experienced or seen before. Heck even China look up to Singapore during 80s and 90s for advice. And the quality of people going to USA in the last 10 years are very low. Look at Singapore Amos going there. Meanwhile hundreds of American engineers migrated to Russia and China.
Yes, discrimination based upon characteristics that aren't immutable is perfectly fine and something we do every day. I discriminate against my neighbor who invited me over drinks in favor of my best friend who invited me to his birthday. I discriminate against the potential hire who doesn’t have experience in this line of work in favor of the person who’s a nationally renowned expert. I discriminate against a tenant…
I get where you’re coming from, but none of them are scarce inelastic resources. The work one especially doesn’t feel like discrimination. It’s also very different - you’re hiring someone to do a job for you, vs wanting someone who’ll pay rent on time and not destroy the property. A mediocre employee vs an excellent employee can make any huge difference to a business. That’s not the case with renters - if person A an…
> if person A and person B both pay on time and don’t trash the place then they are quite fungible.
Based on those two sole criteria, no, they aren't. Person A might call weekly about trivial matters that they should be taking care of themselves (lightbulb burned out, oven needs cleaning, refrigerator water filter needs replacement, etc.), while person B just takes care of things and doesn't bother the landlord.
Absolutely, but it's easier to build quality mixed use development and walkable, bikable neighbourhoods when you don't have thousands of NIMBYs screaming down every proposal.
Pick your favorite place on the planet. Then tell me if 8 billion people can live there, and would it be the same place if they did? I know the answer to both of these questions, and so do you.
I live in one of the most populous metropolitan areas on the planet because it's the best place to live in the world. Increasing density and population is working great so far; maybe it won't scale all the way to 8 billion, but as and when there's a problem we'll deal with it.
Nothing on that list sounds like a particular hardship. Your "Oh, and" is unfortunate and ought to be addressed, but then again, that was intended as your cherry-topper, not your main course. This is people's _homes_ we're talking about here, not a baseball card where privileging the owner is without too much consequence. If you lack the empathy to understand why this is a special case, maybe don't be a landlord.
Actually landlords have a reasonable expectation you don't turn _their home_ into a crack house and no one should be forced to rent to scumbags.
It may be the landlord's house, but it's not their home. A home is something you live in.
For those looking for the actual data. It's from 2024 - says nothing about the current situation. * ~37K affordable housing units (baseline) across ~400 projects * 89% rent collection rate (down from 90.6% in 2023) * That's 600 units that went 'delinquent' in 2024 - assuming a $24K 'base' rent (just a guess) that's $15M in lost rent. * Deeply troubled projects (that can't survive without this rent) are at 11% - seems…
Rents are going down in Austin, Texas despite an increasing population and lots of landlords.
> The uptick in rental delinquency isn’t new. It started six years ago It has nothing to do with Mamdani, for those of who don't want to bother to read. Most of this occurred under Eric Adams's watch. Anecdotally, I do think covid made people a lot more aware of how deeply backlogged the housing courts are. It seems like a lot of people (like the anonymous one in the article) realized they could not pay rent and avoi…
It’s fascinating that America can be the world’s superpower(?) and yet huge swathes of society still live in unstable conditions like this.
> It’s fascinating that America can be the world’s superpower(?) and yet huge swathes of society still live in unstable conditions like this.
Because huge swathes of society choose to live in these unstable conditions.
They could move to Detroit or even Salt Lake City, but they prefer the lifestyle of New York City.
Doesn’t help that the landlords want to squeeze the renter for what they are worth. It’s weird to me that shitty landlords are normalized but shitty tenants get a (rightfully) bad rap. These laws become the way they are because landlords brought it upon themselves for the most part - they’re keeping assets that have massively increased in price and want to extract more and more out of the tenant. If you have a home t…
I'm not sure what you mean by "squeeze the renter," but it's hard to find any person that invests substantial money (risk) in a business that doesn't want to maximize profits and charge what the market will bear. Laws became the way they are because policy created a housing shortage, and renters are a bigger voting block than landlords.
I look at it this way: housing is a basic human necessity. Structuring it as a standard business is a detriment to society. Sure, being a landlord is a business, but the whole "maximize profits" thing and "charge what the market will bear" thing should not be allowed for housing.