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The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

moneywise.com

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Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#551

Post by kurthr »

spir wrote: post #234
escapedmoose wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among my friends seeking to buy houses, the greater problem is the ability of large companies to buy up whatever is on the market, which they then immediately turn into a rental. It’s nearly impossible to compete with a company who will pay $50k over asking price, in cash, for the house you’re trying to get. Comparatively, immigrants don’t have the purchasing power to compete, so saying they’re the problem is a weird…

You only perceive corporate landlords as the greater problem because we're not living in the counterfactual reality where there are millions of new apartments that are inexpensive, tiny, safe, quiet, modern, clean, dignified, and well-located. In pretty much every major city in North America, it is illegal or there is too much red tape to build the affordable housing people actually want. Why is it that living in a t…

If parking spaces are $400/mo, you're going to be hard pressed to have power, water, and heating for $500. The reason a tent in the city is $0 is because that is an externality that is allowed... you can't even stay for free in a campground, because water, trash, and toilets cost money.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#552

Post by giantrobot »

alexb_ wrote: post #262
mcv wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Part of the problem is government regulation. And not just too much regulation, but the wrong kind of regulation, and a lack of regulation in areas that need it. Someone in the article was forced out of her home because her landlord suddenly raised her rent by $500. That shouldn't be legal. Corporations buying up homes in order to drive up prices shouldn't be allowed. Lots of things are allowed that shouldn't be. A…

> Someone in the article was forced out of her home because her landlord suddenly raised her rent by $500. That shouldn't be legal. Rent gets raised by $500 because someone else would actually pay that much. Rent control is the ultimate "I got mine" - it rewards people who got in early while making it impossible for anyone else to have housing. The reason rent could go up that much is because supply is so artificiall…

> Rent control is the ultimate "I got mine" - it rewards people who got in early while making it impossible for anyone else to have housing.

Where the fuck is the priced out person supposed to go? They need to uproot their life because a wealthier person came along?

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#553

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #414
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say this like every developer would be rushing out to build low-income housing if only they could. Developers build expensive luxury units because they can rent them for $2k a month by scalping tenants from nearby buildings who are currently paying $2.1k per month, because the buildings really don't cost that much more to build, the higher forecasted income from said renting makes it easier to sell to banks and g…

> housing the middle class is always going to be more profitable than housing the poor You could make this argument for any product. Of course it’s more profitable to cook steaks for the rich. That doesn’t mean nobody poor has ever eaten. About one percent of Americans are poor on a global scale [1]. Unaffordability of housing is a political choice. It is driven by an alliance between cynical and ignorant interests.…

> Of course it’s more profitable to cook steaks for the rich.

It's equally as profitable to cook steaks for the poor. The margin on the steak is the same, regardless of the wealth of the buyer.

This is not true for apartments. The renter holds the apartment hostage for the length of the lease, so the behavior of the renter determines the margin. Someone who leaves the apartment as it was is high margin, someone who trashes the apartment can leave you with negative margin. Even for the entire apartment building.

Reality is that people who are rich are often required to be functional, you don't get to keep the $400k/year job if your suit smells like cat urine from the 19 cats in the apartment whose litter box you never change. If you slam back 5 or 6 cases of beer every weekend starting Thursday at 3pm, and toss the empty cans and boxes in the living room until they pile to the ceiling such that you can't get to the bathroom and so you just start shitting in the corner or the kitchen sink... likewise, you tend not to remain wealthy.

Renting to a poor person allows for alot more dysfunction, and it can cost you. You can't discriminate blatantly though, but raising the price filters them out pretty well.

Poor people who don't trash apartments must not only be the majority, but a gigantic majority, of course. But there's no way to tell one of those from the assholes who do trash apartments. And landlords aren't in the fairness business anyway, so they don't care.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#554

Post by vel0city »

jessfyi wrote: post #489
max47 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as they don’t leave it empty, they are not limiting the stock. Changing the name on a piece of paper doesn’t magically creates new houses out of thin air.

Well they are leaving them vacant. Both rentals and houses across the country are sitting unfilled. NYC has anywhere from 13-26k rent controlled apartments vacant. As of last year ~16 million homes were estimated to be vacant overall and increasing interest rates have likely increased that. Why? Because these large orgs have purchased them via debt and it's just a line-item on a spreadsheet to them. Just build might…

Vacancy rates aren't generally increasing though. Vacancy rates are lower now than in 2003 by a good bit.

https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/current/index.html

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#555

Post by coding123 »

This is the kind of news that's been suppressed by the administration(s). Until we have a government that's willing to admit there's a problem, we're never going to have a fix. All we hear from both R and D is that the economy is doing great, never better, maximum employment.

I blame the suffering on the internet - which has hyper focused the "mob" to blame something immediately when something sounds horrible. For some reason our "fix" is to group people into camps that forever have 50% of the population that can blame the other 50%. This way, no one ever feels at fault - they simply "switch sides" as soon as they perceive a bit more blame on them.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#556

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

martin_a wrote: post #412
Ajedi32 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So apartments shouldn't exist? Or...? I understand your perspective; there's a reason the term "rent-seeking" has a negative connotation. But I don't really see an alternative that wouldn't be worse. Different tax rates for primary residences sounds like a potentially okay compromise (though it would make renting more expensive, by design).

> So apartments shouldn't exist? Or...? The state/county/city/whatever entity could provide those and make it a +/-0 thing for their books. They don't need to make money by doing that. "Social housing" is a concept that has been pretty much lost, I think.

It hasn't been lost. Some of us are just old enough to remember what the projects were like, and we're glad they're gone.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#557

Post by incahoots »

2devnull wrote: post #301
alexb_ wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone in the article was forced out of her home because her landlord suddenly raised her rent by $500. That shouldn't be legal. Rent gets raised by $500 because someone else would actually pay that much. Rent control is the ultimate "I got mine" - it rewards people who got in early while making it impossible for anyone else to have housing. The reason rent could go up that much is because supply is so artificiall…

Supply and demand go together. To talk about one and not the other is simply wrong. If demand was constant or only slightly increasing we wouldn’t have a shortage. The shortage is more demand driven than people want to acknowledge and so we can’t even begin to solve the problem since it’s not accurately defined. It’s a demand issue, so the solution has become price increases. There will never be enough houses in Mali…

> It’s a demand issue, so the solution has become price increases

That’s more of a capitalist solution than a real solution. Instead of building additional housing we just move the access from millions via price increases.

We can resolve it by creating more supply, we already do by way of copious amounts of cheap plastic home goods that flood the purchasing landscape.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#558

Post by rmk »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #371
zb1plus wrote: post #134

In places like the bay area with a housing crisis and limited space to expand, the state should seize office buildings (remote work is the future and would help alleviate the shortage while new housing is developed) by eminent domain and set up a scheme like Singapore's HDB system [1] to develop affordable housing. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_and_Development_Board

> places like the bay area with a housing crisis and limited space to expand This is the most Californian response to the problem I’ve seen. Limited space? Even San Francisco has 190 acres of vacant land [1]. You want to emulate Singapore? Consider its relative lack of single-story structures. The Bay Area’s housing crisis is a political choice made by its voters. [1] https://escholarship.org/content/qt5gc6w0vd/qt5gc…

America is not Singapore. We have higher expectations around the amount of space than pretty much the whole rest of the world. And that's okay: we are also the world's wealthiest country.

I agree though, that the current housing crisis is entirely the work of people who own influencing city governments much much more than renters (who have no choice but to move out of expensive locales).

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#559

Post by cogman10 »

NathanKP wrote: post #510
cogman10 wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What government policy would allow for a 2k apartment building and not a $500 apartment building? I just don't buy this argument. The reason there's not a $500 apartments being built is because by expanding the residence out just a tiny bit you can charge $2000 for the same space that 2 $500 apartments would occupy. I'm seeing this play out where I live that has practically no zoning laws or regulations (LOTS of buil…

I have an external garage building that I'd love to turn into a small ADU, but it's not allowed in my area. Additionally, if you look at historical cheap rentals of the past, you see things like tenement buildings, which were arguably horrible, but provided a cheap alternate to homelessness. You can also see examples of what low rent places look like today in Asian countries, such as Hong Kong tiny apartments. Many o…

In 2010, I had a $600/month rental with a kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom, in apartment washing machine/dryer and a fairly large walk-in closet.

With 13 years of inflation, that'd be $850/month. That apartment now goes for over $1200/month (Almost certainly hasn't been renovated). [1]

The issue is oligopolies. Few large businesses that own the majority of available rentals and thus can set prices to whatever they like to rake in the profits.

And the way you can tell it's not government policy driving up prices is this trend has been seen across states. There's no federal zoning laws, so why would everywhere from California to Idaho see the same drastic spikes in home prices? Why are existing units that have existed since at least 2010 (and I believe back to 2005) commanding $400 premiums over what inflation would dictate? Do you think back in 2010 they were losing money renting to me?

[1] https://www.camdenliving.com/apartments/irving-tx/camden-val...

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#560

Post by toomuchtodo »

jeffbee wrote: post #544
toomuchtodo wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Boomers share a lot of blame for where we're at, policy wise, but also not everyone who is a Boomer had a say in poor housing policy (ie NIMBYs keeping us short millions of housing units over decades), the deprecation of pensions for 401ks that no one could afford to fund (due to globalization and stagnant incomes), an employment environment where you could become unemployed in your 50s or early 60s with no c…

> we can work towards fixing it with policy that benefits the Boomers who are left As a member of Walk Bike Berkeley and Berkeley Neighbors for Housing and Climate Action I go to war every week, against Boomers, for the exact policies that will benefit them: more housing, better transit and walking facilities. And every week they show up to denounce those policies using their tired Boomer memes. Building housing is "…

I similarly show up at local community meetings where I'm a stakeholder in order to strongly urge YIMBY policies and weigh towards walkable/pedestrian friendly communities, volunteer and financially contribute to non profits mitigating homelessness [1] to try to understand what doesn't scale to figure out how to scale it, etc. I get it, it's exhausting, but that is the schelp, constant vigilance to continually apply pressure in the right direction while sucking more young people into the effort so they can keep on applying effort after we're tired and/or gone.

I'm also way past the point where I will tolerate someone saying, "I feel ..." in these discussions. Here is the data, own your own feelings, we're moving on. Appreciate your efforts where you are with what you have. We just need more of us.

[1] https://www.atinyhomeforgood.org/

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