31–40 of 126 posts
This is something I've been trying to understand for a long time. In New York City because of the rent controls it seems like the market rate has diverged alarmingly from the subsidized rents. From my perspective it seems like this propagates the "Tale of Two Cities" and makes it a much wider leap to go from rent-control or subsidized housing to market-rate. In my naive opinion it seems like in a system without all o…
That gets to be fairly expensive so where's the money going to come from? My proposal is a national growth tax, whose money is redistributed from areas which don't grow to those which do. That money will be used to pay for infrastructure improvements needed to house those people as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forget about housing for a minute. Would you agree that a speculative boom can cause an increase in demand?
That's not the crazy part. The crazy part is arguing that building additional supply in response to that demand will _increase_ prices.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best way to end a speculative bubble is to crash the price by increasing supply.
...potentially degrading your urban environment in the process. My point is that, if a particular housing market is experiencing a shortage of supply due to a speculative boom, but has sufficient housing to actually house people, then you have two options: tackle the supply side by building more houses, or tackle the demand side by addressing the cause of the speculation (e.g. tax incentives could be encouraging this…
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/7/americas-suburb...
In addition as I've watched rents around me rise, and anticipated my own rent rising, I wonder at the expectation that we should continually get less for more. My house isn't getting any newer after all.
If my employer decided to cut my pay by 10 or 20% every year there's no way I would stay, and yet I must admit that I have tolerated this behavior from my landlords.
Unlike commodities or consumables, for which unrestrained markets influenced by collective expectations of supply and demand are not routinely shocking, the expectation that my house, in which I already live, and for which I have been paying consistently for years, suddenly being much more expensive ... well that feels like a hole in the social contract. A problem to be remedied by legislation if the governing societal expectations do not naturally lead to a different equilibrium.
What if the expectation was that if you let someone live in your home you are granting them significant rights, significant stability, and are assuming significant risk of losing money? This set of expectations is well known elsewhere, but not so much where I live.
So while I am willing to be convinced that a humane and equitable improvement to a cities housing situation can be achieved by building more housing, I would hate for legislative restrictions to be ignored as complimentary and beneficial efforts.
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This claim keeps popping up. I’ve yet to see it include a citation. Maybe today will be different.
It’s in this very article. What other outcome could happen?
Nothing in economics says it's obvious without observation or experiment that adding expensive housing in SF helps affordability for lower income brackets.
I live in a very interesting area, across the street from me is a different city with housing costs roughly 10x the costs of mine. I am daily confronted with the absurdity of pricing of housing. In addition as I've watched rents around me rise, and anticipated my own rent rising, I wonder at the expectation that we should continually get less for more. My house isn't getting any newer after all. If my employer decide…
This doesn't seem to address high end housing vs (unsubsidized) low end housing. Is a hundred new units with marble countertops as good, holistically, as a hundred with laminate? I think a lot of the opposition revolves around frustration with developers building luxury when the intent of the given policy was low or mid market units, combined with a belief that units targeted at the needy market segment would be the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not the crazy part. The crazy part is arguing that building additional supply in response to that demand will _increase_ prices.
Yes, I can't see how that could be possible.
Notice there are not a lot of speculative booms in things the world only has three of.