Why affordable housing is scarce in progressive cities • Hacker News Board

Re: Why affordable housing is scarce in progressive cities

#101

Post by AnthonyMouse » Tue, Nov 20, 2018, 2:27 AM UTC

kokokokoko wrote: post #98

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it is bad policy, then can someone help explain why unaffordable housing is currently a world-wide issue? 1) Because the incentives for enacting the bad policies are widespread, so the bad policies are widespread, so the problem is widespread. 2) It isn't. See cities like Houston and Tokyo which have lower housing costs than San Francisco or NYC.

It does appear to also be a problem in Tokyo [1] Houston's economy is still recovering from a natural disaster [2] Are we sure this is not simply the product of a global shift towards populations migrating to urban centers? And maybe we might want to look at what is causing this rapid migration? For example economic growth has almost always gone hand in hand with rapid urban migration. "We know of no coun- tries that…

> It does appear to also be a problem in Tokyo

Those prices are still substantially lower than they are in NYC or San Francisco. Notice also that despite the volatility the current price is ~3% higher than it was when record keeping began a decade ago. This is significantly below the rate of inflation. And the bottom of that graph isn't at zero -- it's also exaggerating the level of volatility.

> Houston's economy is still recovering from a natural disaster

That would be relevant if they were problematically high prior to the hurricane.

But would you prefer San Antonio? Phoenix? Jacksonville?

> What am I missing here?

Saturation. If the NYC metro area (8683 sq mi) had the population density of Mumbai (73,837/sq mi), it would have population 641 million. The US population is 325 million. Therefore that population density is impossible in the NYC metro area (without a massive, implausible degree of international immigration exceeding what's permitted under existing law). Moreover, it can absorb even fewer additional people at the same time as the same occurs in San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, Boston, Los Angeles, etc.

There exists a point where there is enough housing for everyone who wants to live in that city, at which point building more does not attract new residents, it only lowers prices for existing residents (as more landlords compete to not be the one with an empty unit).

Re: Why affordable housing is scarce in progressive cities

#102

Post by SolaceQuantum » Tue, Nov 20, 2018, 1:43 PM UTC

analognoise wrote: post #90

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the greater context here misses the trauma behind being forced to move out of a home. Being separated from your social network, familiar surroundings, into a new and unknown environment can be highly traumatizing to the people who move and the community which loses its members. Children have their educations interrupted, elders lose a family of support, adults need to forge new friendships in a time where we…

"Trauma" - moving? Your ancestors could handle a trip across the country (or an ocean) where half the people died along the way, but people can't handle moving out of some shitty midwestern town entirely supported by the coal plant that's scheduled to shut down to pursue a job because the local Church and T-ball league they're involved with is there? I'm increasingly not sure the boom in population has been worth it…

I would make the suggestion to practice good-faith examination as to why I would state that moving under economic pressure is traumatic. It isn't "local Church and T-ball". It's "local Church, whose pastor is the only person who supported me when I was assaulted in school". It's "T-ball league, where my son has developed lifelong friendships that I'm ripping him out of". Humans need their social network to survive. Moving strips them of their social network and forces them to build again, much of it less successful than the original.

Re: Why affordable housing is scarce in progressive cities

#103

Post by solotronics » Tue, Nov 20, 2018, 6:13 PM UTC

hedvig wrote: post #14

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #3

> a shortage of new construction, a lack of tenant protection "Tenant protection" -- especially rent control -- is a nontrivial cause of the shortage of new construction. High rents are a signal to developers that there is money to be made constructing new housing. If it's not possible to make the money, they won't do the construction, which is what rent control causes. You get a population of existing residents with…

Why aren't there developers that are willing to make 17% margins instead of 20% margins? You know what I'm saying. Related Group has always been happy to and does to this day build luxury units that get scooped up by elite Venezuelans and Russians. Who will build non-luxury units? The owners will claim they're luxury for the next 40 years, so there's no real trickle down effect.

there is a factor of risk as well

you could have different margins and wildly different risk factors, and investment groups will go with the lower risk choice

Re: Why affordable housing is scarce in progressive cities

#104

Post by analognoise » Thu, Nov 22, 2018, 9:18 PM UTC

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #102

analognoise wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Trauma" - moving? Your ancestors could handle a trip across the country (or an ocean) where half the people died along the way, but people can't handle moving out of some shitty midwestern town entirely supported by the coal plant that's scheduled to shut down to pursue a job because the local Church and T-ball league they're involved with is there? I'm increasingly not sure the boom in population has been worth it…

I would make the suggestion to practice good-faith examination as to why I would state that moving under economic pressure is traumatic. It isn't "local Church and T-ball". It's "local Church, whose pastor is the only person who supported me when I was assaulted in school". It's "T-ball league, where my son has developed lifelong friendships that I'm ripping him out of". Humans need their social network to survive. M…

I don't care about those people's connections to subsidize them. Let them learn to adapt, like everyone else.

Re: Why affordable housing is scarce in progressive cities

#105

Post by SolaceQuantum » Fri, Nov 23, 2018, 2:53 PM UTC

analognoise wrote: post #104

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would make the suggestion to practice good-faith examination as to why I would state that moving under economic pressure is traumatic. It isn't "local Church and T-ball". It's "local Church, whose pastor is the only person who supported me when I was assaulted in school". It's "T-ball league, where my son has developed lifelong friendships that I'm ripping him out of". Humans need their social network to survive. M…

I don't care about those people's connections to subsidize them. Let them learn to adapt, like everyone else.

This is a distinctly different claim than my claim that it is traumatic to be forced to move and the subsequent non understanding what is traumatic about it. Instead it is a claim that the trauma does not matter. I would then argue that it does matter, in that the lack of compassion towards traumatic events actually prevents efficient calculations in understanding why people don’t move or why assuming people will learn to adapt isn’t necessarily reflective of reality. The claim is not that people will not adapt, but that the quality of their lives will be fundamentally lowered as a result of being forced to move, due to massive loss in human interaction infrastructure. That this doesn’t matter to you is your choice, of course. I’m merely stating that this is a consequence that should be acknowledged during the transition period.

Re: Why affordable housing is scarce in progressive cities

#106

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Nov 24, 2018, 1:05 AM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #85

yourapostasy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another way would be to make moving something to look forward to, rather than a trauma. This assumes your own lived experience is prescriptively good for everyone else. There's more than one way to the same goal. Let's put the situation another way. At a certain socioeconomic strata, which describes most of HN's readership, networking is loosely coupled to one's geographic nexus. Walk the gradient beyond that strat…

Social networks are certainly important and I don't mean to dismiss anything. Instead I'm suggesting that there may be more than one way to deal with a problem, but this is rarely discussed. What can be done to help people make connections after a move?

[deleted]

Re: Why affordable housing is scarce in progressive cities

#107

Post by yourapostasy » Sat, Nov 24, 2018, 1:08 AM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #85

yourapostasy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another way would be to make moving something to look forward to, rather than a trauma. This assumes your own lived experience is prescriptively good for everyone else. There's more than one way to the same goal. Let's put the situation another way. At a certain socioeconomic strata, which describes most of HN's readership, networking is loosely coupled to one's geographic nexus. Walk the gradient beyond that strat…

Social networks are certainly important and I don't mean to dismiss anything. Instead I'm suggesting that there may be more than one way to deal with a problem, but this is rarely discussed. What can be done to help people make connections after a move?

> What can be done to help people make connections after a move?

That's asking a programmer, after a death march shipping at all cost ditching any notion of version control/QA/TDD/etc., 99% of the budget spent, and a bug is found in the field, "What can be done to help us never make this kind of mistake again?"

By the time people are forced out of long-time homes and moved away, the majority of damage is already done in most cases. If they are relatively young and resilient, then they might recover. But you're never going to erase the precarity they experience in the meantime, and at the ragged edges, that precarity is all it takes for many to plunge them over the abyss into homeless desperation.

Going further up the methodology stack so to speak, there are any number of remedies available and discussed to death. Acta non verba though, so I'm doing what I can within my own personal scope.