51–60 of 115 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, the biggest boom towns have been in the South where restrictions are low and profits high, leaving some really ugly suburbs.
But they have cheap housing. I'll take ugly suburbs over people sleeping on the street.
Is gentrification a bad thing? Neighbourhoods change, some get richer and some get poorer. That is the way of things. Both poor and rich alike need somewhere to live.
Huge fan of zoning reform, however I'd love to see equal effort in lending reform. The availability of multi-million dollar mortgages on 30 year terms means that we all get poorer. Getting people into owned homes is a dream left over from the Clinton era that has warped into an ever expanding pool of debt and over sized buildings. Developers will build to the limit of what people can afford (and slightly beyond), and…
How would you do this?
> and bring the sale value of property down
Can't happen without causing a lot of pain. In large part due to the debt. Holding prices flat in nominal terms is the best-case outcome; holding them flat in real terms the most likely one. Either, however, beats real appreciation.
(For what it's worth, I'm a homeowner with a jumbo mortgage.)
The answer is "no". That's because WE DO NOT HAVE a housing crisis. And yes, I'm not crazy. We have 1.1 housing units per family right _now_. We likely will have the record number of housing units per capita within about 2 years just due to the current pipeline of new housing. These numbers are easy to verify. Why are we talking about housing then? That's because we have a JOBS crisis. The only available good jobs ar…
Why?
There are millions of homes that are super cheap and no one wants to live there. I think we missed a real opportunity for WFH to allow people to move where things are more affordable, rather than having everyone live in mega cities and complain of high prices.
If you're curious, why this scenario hasn't panned out. I'd highly recommend you read: The Triumph of the City https://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Healt...
I'm glad I'm living on my 10,000 ft² lot with multiple fruit trees, multiple vegetable gardens, berry gardens, bird-friendly bushes, and neighbors who are a good distance away from me. The only thing I would change is to reduce the light pollution so you can see six-magnitude stars from the backyard.
Now, if somebody wants to buy the property and convert it to a dense housing space, after I'm dead, great, I won't be in a position to care. But right now, I very much care about getting rid of lawns, building bird-friendly habitats, and growing plants you can eat.
Is gentrification a bad thing? Neighbourhoods change, some get richer and some get poorer. That is the way of things. Both poor and rich alike need somewhere to live.
Is gentrification a bad thing? Neighbourhoods change, some get richer and some get poorer. That is the way of things. Both poor and rich alike need somewhere to live.
I guess I haven't seen neighborhoods get particularly poorer for some time, unless we're counting the tent cities.
The answer is "no". That's because WE DO NOT HAVE a housing crisis. And yes, I'm not crazy. We have 1.1 housing units per family right _now_. We likely will have the record number of housing units per capita within about 2 years just due to the current pipeline of new housing. These numbers are easy to verify. Why are we talking about housing then? That's because we have a JOBS crisis. The only available good jobs ar…
> making it easier to build makes the jobs crisis even worse Why?
"ideally, a property owner should be able to walk into city hall and leave with a permit the same day if they’re building the kind of housing that the city explicitly wants to see built." Hear, hear! Finally someone gets it. Same day permits for all high density housing projects. BTW, the NIMBYs are definitely going to fight the cottage homes tooth and nail otherwise. "Where will all the new cars go???"
The answer is "no". That's because WE DO NOT HAVE a housing crisis. And yes, I'm not crazy. We have 1.1 housing units per family right _now_. We likely will have the record number of housing units per capita within about 2 years just due to the current pipeline of new housing. These numbers are easy to verify. Why are we talking about housing then? That's because we have a JOBS crisis. The only available good jobs ar…
This is the first time I've heard of this locational jobs crisis. Where did you learn about this? I would like to read more about it
I'm not saying anything even remotely factually controversial. Housing units per household: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=15tRv
It's also not controversial that major job density increases are happening in a few select metros: https://www.route-fifty.com/workforce/2019/06/job-density-re... or if you look more broadly, that smaller cities in the US are dying out.
I simply arrived at a different conclusion: we don't need to continue deepening this death spiral by "building more".