351–360 of 594 posts
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Credit reports do not have a section for "plays music loudly" or "secretly smokes by the bathroom window".
Why's that anything to do with you. Call the cops.
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…
The solution is pretty simple: build and unreasonable amount of housing. And entirely new cities. America has enough land. We could build new infrastructure, give people lots of land or build houses like we did in the 40s and 50s. Of the price of a house was brought down to 1x the annual salary of the median individual income some of these problems wouldn’t exist. We need to flood the system with investment and inven…
So it is not simple. "Just build more" always comes up in those discussions, and while it does help (and has been proven to help), it is not the definite answer for the housing issues.
Build a new city from the ground up with a bunch of cheap modern housing, walkable and all modern goodies and ... nobody will move. People don't move just because housing is cheap. Actually many people are willing to spend a significant amount of their income to live in specific places. We move to have a job, to build a career, to be close to friends and family, to have better access to entertainment and activities, ...
This is why most developed country experience rural flight. The housing crisis is (mostly) a big city problem. You can usually find extremely cheap housing if you go deep in the countryside. And building is also cheaper (the price of the land is less, there is less permits issues, etc).
And for big cities, "build more" is way more challenging. Ground space is limited, so one solution is to build more vertical, but it is costly and has its own limitation. Spreading may cause issue with water management and require big investment in a public transport infrastructure if you don't want to have a nightmare traffic. Pollution can be a very big issue, etc. And that's for all the non-political issues. The political side of things can get very messy, very quickly.
If there was a simple solution, every big city in the world would have done it by now.
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Wow, way to not actually read what a person said, and then quote things and say they mean something that they don't. I get that you don't like the concept of people owning property and renting it to others, but maybe stop arguing in bad faith? Here's a hint: it's possible to be doing something for the money, but not only do it for the money. It's possible to operate a business, but also be a well-meaning person who t…
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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.
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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.
Stoke on Trent was selling houses for £1 with improvement grants attached! https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/stoke-shows-why-selling-...
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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.
> “There is a subset of people, maybe the smallest subset, who are literally making a choice not to pay rent, and we don’t do well with acknowledging that but there is a subset for whom that is the case,” [...] Others bristle at the notion that some tenants are not paying rent just because they may be able to get away with it. These people absolutely exist. To pretend that they don't is willful ignorance. They are, h…
I anecdotally know of a few cases in Seattle where tenants with high incomes that could easily pay just don't. There is a subculture that actively encourages this type of behavior and the laws are setup such that there are almost no consequences for it. I've also met people who bragged about doing it. While rare, it is still common enough that it has become a real problem and has become socially acceptable in some ci…
What we see is iterated prisoner's dilemma. Enough people have had their landlords play "defect" against them (rent rises in excess of wage inflation, evictions, failure to do maintenance, intrusion) that the public have started playing "defect" against the landlords.
Same as in a lot of American public life.
Why this happens? That's because, the housing problem give the opposition a weapon to use against the ruling party, constantly hitting out and winning the sympathy of people. The incumbent administration has no other choice except pouring money into social housing and show that they are doing something to address the issue. No one cares about the actual fall out of this philosophy.
Just one of the evils of vote bank politics.
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The solution is pretty simple: build and unreasonable amount of housing. And entirely new cities. America has enough land. We could build new infrastructure, give people lots of land or build houses like we did in the 40s and 50s. Of the price of a house was brought down to 1x the annual salary of the median individual income some of these problems wouldn’t exist. We need to flood the system with investment and inven…
> The solution is pretty simple: build and unreasonable amount of housing. And entirely new cities. So it is not simple. "Just build more" always comes up in those discussions, and while it does help (and has been proven to help), it is not the definite answer for the housing issues. Build a new city from the ground up with a bunch of cheap modern housing, walkable and all modern goodies and ... nobody will move. Peo…
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Landlords typically have insurance coverage for damage by tenants, including lost rent.
This form of insurance is exceeding expensive and exceedingly rare. Large buildings self-insure (by having a ton of doors) and small landlords don't want to pay it.
For that price they will pay you the rent if the tenant is not paying, and take care of the getting paid by the tenant.
If landlords don't want to pay that, then they accept the risk of having to deal with a tenant who doesn't pay.