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What if public housing were for everyone?

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Re: What if public housing were for everyone?

#51

Post by bee_rider »

jonfw wrote: post #14

public housing doesn't address the root of the problem. Housing prices are insane because it's expensive and difficult to acquire and develop land. There's two primary reasons- zoning, and speculative investment that keeps good land off of the market. This make land very expensive to developers and limits competition. Developing, rezoning, acquiring land can take expertise and political capital. Small developers have…

“Speculative land investments” doesn’t sound dramatic enough. How about: A Land Value Tax will prevent wealthy corporations from leeching off developing communities and pushing the property market out of the grasp of young families.

Re: What if public housing were for everyone?

#52

Post by tokai »

bregma wrote: post #33

Public housing is for the poors and the ethnics. That will not change as long as policy is set in the interests of neither. Regulations are captured to Keep Your Hands Off My Stash and to possibly embiggen it. It is the way.

US has people that has no ethnicity? That's pretty wild.

Re: What if public housing were for everyone?

#53

Post by ejb999 »

pydry wrote: post #25
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the program is perfectly palatable to voters. [...] The problem is that the investors who fund political campaigns and media oligarchs hate HATE HATE public housing, because it reduces the value of their property investments. I'm not sure that's largely true. I suspect that many property-owning voters are okay with the concept of public housing, but are less ken on the actuality that building public housing increas…

[flagged]

It is almost comical how you want to blame those evil 'conservatives' for this - I guess that makes it easy for democrats to have excuses about why they haven't solved the problem in places where they 100% control the statehouse and legislature and the purse strings.

If liberals/democrats were truly in favor of public housing, then places like California would have a surplus of housing options available for everyone - or are you somehow suggesting that even though conservatives that cannot even come close to winning an election in CA, that they still somehow control all the levers of public policy?

Re: What if public housing were for everyone?

#54

Post by ghaff »

jeffbee wrote: post #36
alistairSH wrote: post #13

The apartment building they highlight (in Montgomery County,MD) might be a good start, but it’s also missing larger floor for families. By sqft, two plans are planet big (1100, 1200sqft) but only 2 bedroom (using space for large open plan living space). I would like to see apartments more suitable for families. 3 bedrooms.

Loads of families only want 2 bedrooms. While I tend to agree that it would be nice to have more 3-4 bedroom homes, I think it is a larger acute problem to build more 0-2 bedroom homes first. That relieves the over-housing problem of seniors living alone in large houses. Only < 30% of US households have children present. The majority of households will be satisfied with 2 bedrooms or less.

A fairly typical pattern over the past few decades in the US, at least for professionals, is that they'd live in or near a city after graduation and then move out to suburbs/exurbs when they got married and started a family. There's been an influx (reversing an outflux) to certain cities over the past couple of decades. Of course, there's no law of nature that will continue.

Re: What if public housing were for everyone?

#55

Post by piva00 »

earthwalker99 wrote: post #31
CommieBobDole wrote: post #16

I think one of the big problems with public housing in the US is that we had a big push for it in the past but went about it in the wrong way and managed it poorly, and had very notoriously terrible results. Now the idea of building any at all for any reason is basically radioactive in most of the country and no politician wants to touch it.

[flagged]

Sweden built a million public housing homes (Miljonprogrammet) in a decade back in the 60s-70s, it has a freer market than the USA.

Communism red scare was also from the 60s-70s, please change your worldview for the reality of the 2020s, not a boogeyman invented during the Cold War.

Re: What if public housing were for everyone?

#56

Post by ejb999 »

pydry wrote: post #8
Aurornis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In order to win elections, you almost need those investors on your side more than the actual public …because those few elite investors outnumber the voting public at the voting booth? This claim doesn’t make any sense. It’s weird conspiratorial thinking. EDIT: Yes, people. I’m familiar with Fox News and the concept of campaign donations. However, Fox News’ prime time viewership is around 0.5% of the US population a…

Have you heard of Fox News? It's a TV channel that runs completely fair and balanced news. Anybody who says otherwise is a weird conspiracy theorist. /s Those elite investors can run large scale propaganda campaigns via the media that they own to sway voters from candidate A to candidate B. Their preference is to cut candidate C (the kind that likes stuff like public housing, single payer healthcare, reducing militar…

what is california's excuse for not solving the problem? non-republicans control everything and have for decades - and yet the problem remains.

I guess it is much easier to just blame 'someone else', rather than solve the problem?

Re: What if public housing were for everyone?

#57

Post by ghaff »

kiba wrote: post #50
ghaff wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing prices are mostly insane in some places because a lot of people have decided they want to live in the same places because of jobs/culture/etc. There's at least some evidence that areas where a fair bit of development has happened over the past couple of decades because of demand still can have very expensive housing.

Cities are economically advantageous for a reason. I don't think people are suggesting we make cities less appealing. Rather, people are advocating for measures that make cities more livable, such as investing in mass transit and reducing the amount of space inefficient car infrastructure and usage.

And yet a lot of major US cities were losing population into the late 90s. And some (like Detroit) never really recovered. Even if there are various reasons to live in an economically prosperous region, lots of people have no interest in actually living directly in a city.

Re: What if public housing were for everyone?

#58

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

jonfw wrote: post #14

public housing doesn't address the root of the problem. Housing prices are insane because it's expensive and difficult to acquire and develop land. There's two primary reasons- zoning, and speculative investment that keeps good land off of the market. This make land very expensive to developers and limits competition. Developing, rezoning, acquiring land can take expertise and political capital. Small developers have…

There are more people in the United States than there used to be. When I was in grade school, I learned as a child that our population was just a bit over 250 million. Google's claiming that it is 335 million right now.

Wikipedia says in the early 2000s we were at about 1 million illegal immigrants, and about another 1 million legal. I am unable to find reliable numbers for more recent years, but can it actually have gone down?

The nation could be building a million new housing units each year, and the pressure on supply wouldn't lessen. Maybe the problem isn't zoning or nimbyism or speculative investment.

Re: What if public housing were for everyone?

#59

Post by silvestrov »

jonfw wrote: post #14

public housing doesn't address the root of the problem. Housing prices are insane because it's expensive and difficult to acquire and develop land. There's two primary reasons- zoning, and speculative investment that keeps good land off of the market. This make land very expensive to developers and limits competition. Developing, rezoning, acquiring land can take expertise and political capital. Small developers have…

There is a 3rd reason: not (fast) enough transportation infrastructure.

If you don't provide good transport infrastructure, then people must live close to work which will increase housing demand close to work, which then increase prices.

You need to plan for high speed trains, subways and metros to provide enough transportation capacity, so people can live "far away, but short travel time".

Cars are really bad at this as they take up an enormous amount of space for parking and for roads. You also cannot get much stuff done while driving a car, much easier to do work in a Japanese high speed train.

Imagine there was multiple high speed rails lines going out from Silicon Valley: how far from SF can you get in 25 minutes using 300 km/h train versus how far can you get using a car in rush hour? Housing prices in SV would be much much lower if you could get from Stockton to Mountain View in 25 minutes with reliable service and a lot of metro for "last mile" transportation.

Re: What if public housing were for everyone?

#60

Post by nradov »

CivBase wrote: post #32

What problem is public housing supposed to solve? The current housing crisis is a supply problem. We aren't building enough housing in places with high demand, so prices are going up. Even if public housing was subsidized to be cheaper than the market rate, it doesn't matter because the public housing will just fill up right away and then we're back to square one. Is there something about public housing that would al…

Public housing would likely be even more difficult to build. If you think that NIMBYs created obstacles before just wait until a politician proposes building "housing projects" in their neighborhood.
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