101–110 of 1001 posts
Younger people need to join the YIMBY movement in droves. Your economic future depends on removing the crushing restrictions on building new homes, especially homes in high wage cities. The older Boomer generation will never change its NIMBY views. Never.
https://www.semafor.com/article/05/23/2024/is-congress-havin...
There is no solution that doesn't involve building lots more houses.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1.8M/year (55+ cohort) is potentially not fast enough to bring about housing policy change in a timely manner from this alone. Non market housing is also a necessary component besides YIMBY. Housing locked up from market forces is housing that can remain affordable. Vienna is an example: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I think you’ll find the real problem is that younger homeowners face the same incentives as old ones
1. There are a ridiculous amount of abandoned properties, when I walk the streets of major cities, sometimes more than half of the buildings even in expensive areas are boarded-up.
2. Meanwhile I am afraid of being homeless soon, I lost my job recently, and the unemployment benefit I can receive is literally half of my rent. Thing is, there is no "worse but cheaper" place to move to. I already live in a "0" apartment, with the "0" referring to the number of rooms. The apartment is literally just an empty square with kitchen sink and bathroom stuff. I don't even have my workstation anymore because literally there is no physical place for it inside the apartment.
People are like: "Build more homes". Yet the amount of abandoned properties (by the way, this also include abandoned farmland! Government is upset that there are tons of that, and the result is land with zero management, with wildfires, poachers, drug traffickers...) is greater than the number of families needing.
I always assumed when the baby boomers retired there would be a flood of big family houses coming up for sale. I see it in my parents that they're pretty comfortable staying in the family house as long as possible, I'm happy with this. It is made a lot easier by the fact that prices keep going up so staying in a house that is oversized financially is rewarding. I'd like to think it'll all come to and end one day as t…
None of the measures mentioned in the article — lower interest rates, lower transaction fees, down payment subsidies — will lower costs. Every one of them will raise prices. You can only fix this with supply: build homes.
There’s another way to fix it. You can regulate financial speculators. In the US 1/4 of all US homes are owned by financial institutions. I doubt it’s very different in Europe unless they are regulated. This situation ensures only the rich can own a home as buyers are competing against hedge funds.
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Situation in Europe is often reported in misleading ways. Everybody calls it "housing crisis" - but we do not have millions of homeless roaming the street. It is actually a "moving crisis" - people want to move to nicer places but can't afford it. I.e. here in Germany, we have close to 1M perfectly habitable empty flats/houses - but they are in rural areas or the countryside. Indeed there is high demand for urban are…
So, there is an urban housing crisis, or housing crisis for people that need to live near jobs or other people then?
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I recall a thread from someone from South America in the Slovenia subreddit, where they said they wanted to move to Europe because it's impossible to afford a home where they currently live. The response was basically "yeah, welcome to the club pal". It's definitely a global issue, rising population mixed with late stage capitalism.
Is this late stage capitalism in the room with us now?
Younger people need to join the YIMBY movement in droves. Your economic future depends on removing the crushing restrictions on building new homes, especially homes in high wage cities. The older Boomer generation will never change its NIMBY views. Never.
So developers can build more low density unaffordable housing that includes nearly no social housing?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Situation in Europe is often reported in misleading ways. Everybody calls it "housing crisis" - but we do not have millions of homeless roaming the street. It is actually a "moving crisis" - people want to move to nicer places but can't afford it. I.e. here in Germany, we have close to 1M perfectly habitable empty flats/houses - but they are in rural areas or the countryside. Indeed there is high demand for urban are…
That's because a house 100km away from the nearest job is not cheap. Even rural area houses are very expensive compared to what jobs in those rural areas pay. This makes them even more of a trap. The rents will go up. And yet, even more jobs will leave those places. And then you haven't saved up, because the amounts were tiny