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

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

#561

Post by jethro_tell »

voakbasda wrote: post #500
ryandrake wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What specific government policy is causing developers to only build $2k+/mo rentals? You can't just vaguely say "government" is at fault without connecting the dots. This seems more like the market's fault. If homes in a particular area are going for $2k/mo, then that's what they are going for. If this is the government's fault, are you proposing price controls?

Zoning and building codes drive up the cost of new construction. The inventory of buildable properties in cities is artificially scarce due to zoning restrictions, and that scarcity drives up the base cost per square foot. Even with land in hand, you can’t build just anything without meeting an insane number of code requirements, all of which add real costs that drive up the minimum rent amount necessary to provide a…

It's not entirely that it's illegal to build cheaper stuff, it's also that there is no incentive when zoning artificially limits the amount of the market you can serve.

Zoning laws like single family zoning, requiring parking spots for every unit or even every bedroom, disallowing zero lot lines on lots that allow multiple units. All of these things add cost that may not pass along any value to people in the market.

Aside from the engineering complexities of modern buildings, we've also limited ourselves to building either single family or 200 unit apartments when most cities have a ton of space for 3/4 unit homes which are considerably cheaper to construct. We built our zoning laws on the idea that we could just always expand outward into suburbs forever. But that approach is broken as people start to move back into cities.

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

#562

Post by hotnfresh »

Oh boy. Just wait for Gen X. It’ll be a retirement crisis. At-same-age savings levels for generations after the boomers start at “catastrophic” for X and are markedly worse for each generation after them.

This’ll hit around the same time as we can no longer pretend our healthcare system isn’t a total disaster (keeps increasing in price faster than the rate of inflation—there exists a point at which it becomes a crisis), and probably not long after it becomes common knowledge that you need private tutors or your kids aren’t gonna get into any but a very low-tier university, if they go to public k-12 schools (we’re easing into that problem now—give it five years, the trend will be clear by then, and beyond obvious in 10, I doubt any of the things that might avert this new state of affairs are gonna happen)

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

#563

Post by NoZebra120vClip »

bandyaboot wrote: post #251
NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Affordable housing is defined by the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as housing that does not require a household to spend more than 30 percent of its gross monthly income on housing costs. For rental housing, these costs include monthly rent and utility payments; for owner-occupied housing, these costs include mortgage payments and additional expenses associated with homeownership. A household…

That definition really has no value outside the context of analyzing a given household’s situation. In the context of housing regulation, zoning, etc it really isn’t helpful since all housing is both affordable and unaffordable. Schrödinger’s housing.

> all housing is both affordable and unaffordable. Schrödinger’s housing.

Ah, more pithy, meaningless slogans.

Surely municipalities and landlords know the median gross incomes of households in the areas they serve. Surely there are bands of income where certain types of housing are classified as "affordable" and then "cost-burden", and the quantity of households which fall into these bands are well-known to those who serve them. Landlords set the market rent based on what the market will bear. HUD sets the allowances according to market rent as well.

Yes, to a homeless bum, all housing is unaffordable. To George Soros, it's all affordable housing. But you need to remember that the definition is proffered by Housing And Urban Development, a US Government agency which does things like subsidize rent and help people purchase homes, so I doubt that the state of feline vitality is entirely unknown to them.

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

#564

Post by tomjakubowski »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #228
TjZkxkxeky wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that why Japan's elderly are all homeless?

Japan has an over-abundance of housing.

Given the declining population predicted by OP, US housing stock will also grow in abundance by the time young people hit retirement age.

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

#565

Post by cogman10 »

rmk wrote: post #545
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…

Didn't Boise, ID have an influx of better-off people from the coasts during the Pandemic? If plenty of luxury housing is being built it was likely in response to that. Ultimately those houses will get rented or otherwise occupied, which should free up housing at the lower end. Compare this to places in the Bay Area, where it's not practical to spread out any farther (no good public transport because of a dozen or mor…

> Didn't Boise, ID have an influx of better-off people from the coasts during the Pandemic?

Yup

> What's better? Some housing being built or none at all?

Loads of housing is getting built but what we've not seen is subsequent drops in housing prices (the opposite in fact). This speaks to problems beyond a housing shortage.

Who knows, maybe in 10 years that will reverse and the market will correct back to pre-pandemic levels. Doesn't look like it, however.

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

#566

Post by strongpigeon »

ryandrake wrote: post #440
spir wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What specific government policy is causing developers to only build $2k+/mo rentals? You can't just vaguely say "government" is at fault without connecting the dots. This seems more like the market's fault. If homes in a particular area are going for $2k/mo, then that's what they are going for. If this is the government's fault, are you proposing price controls?

I mostly know about Seattle, but a lot of these are nationwide too:

Parking minimums, minimum unit sizes, long and costly “environmental review” (a classic in Seattle, where it’s sadly almost never used for environmental purpose), lengthy “community design review” (another classic for Seattle, which typically has the effect of allowing only extremely conservative design), zoning restricting how much can be built (Seattle is famous for having the highest percentage of land zoned SFH of any major city).

Seattle rental prices increase over the past 10 years is extremely correlated to the housing deficit (population growth minus housing built). It’s not just a matter of “homes going for $2k/mo”, it’s why they’re going for $2k/mo.

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

#567

Post by [deleted] »

lm28469 wrote: post #115
loup-vaillant wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be very careful how you frame things. Here’s another framing: 1. Migrants and their descendants are poorer than average. 2. Social spending is higher among poor people, because that’s the whole point. 3. Disproportionately poor people represent a disproportionate amount of social spending, duh .

Sure, but we're a far cry from most migrants being "job creators and entrepreneurs" The reality is that a lot of them struggle to find jobs, and a lot of them end up working illegally for unscrupulous bosses. And yes there are a whole lot of reasons for that, but at the end of the day it's the reality we have to deal with

[deleted]

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

#568

Post by jethro_tell »

kurthr wrote: post #551
spir wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

or, and hear me out here, parking spaces are $400/mo because that's what people are willing to pay in a sparsely populated autocentric living environment.

We don't have to take things like "the cost of a parking space in the system we've created" as a fact, we can change the value of the parking space.

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

#569

Post by ryukafalz »

HelloMcFly wrote: post #476
ryukafalz wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But other than zoning it seems it would help more if the government would step in to disallow large leasing companies buying up giant swathes of the housing stock just to flip into rentals. There was a timely video about this yesterday from Oh the Urbanity: https://youtu.be/BRqZBuu_Ers?si=NlavrFpm8sNTUcYp Summary is that Rotterdam did just this, and the effect was that the price to purchase a house did not measurab…

I think a tax on vacant properties is potentially a better way to go, though checking and enforcement could be the issue (exempting one's primary and maybe secondary homes); multi-unit housing would also be exempt. This would place more downward pressure on rents and decrease the investment upside on buying. I'm sure this is a bad idea in a number of ways I haven't considered.

Don't have sources offhand but my recollection is that vacancy taxes have also been tried before and, while they do have some effect, the vacancy rates in most locales with high costs of living are already low enough that it doesn't help that much.

Vacancy rate statistics include things that are pretty natural and you wouldn't really want to penalize, like an apartment being briefly vacant after the previous tenant moves out and before the next tenant moves in. So you can't just look at the rental vacancy rate in a city being (say) 3% and conclude that those 3% of units in the city are being held vacant and off-market. There may be some of those, but it's a far lower percentage.

Which is to say, institute a vacancy tax if you like (it won't really hurt if done sanely), but realize that it won't be a silver bullet here.

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

#570

Post by postalrat »

antisthenes wrote: post #535
ryandrake wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can’t built a “$2k rental”. You can only build a rental that someone will pay for. Landlords are building luxury housing because it’s the only thing that’s profitable right now due to the immensely ridiculous laws that don’t help people. That's what I'm asking: Exactly which laws? Nobody seems to be specific.

The combination of: 1. Land costs 2. Labor costs 3. Material costs 4. Zoning laws 5. Building codes For example some zoning laws have a height restrictions, which limits my development to 3-story buildings, when I would actually want to build a 5-story building For building codes, some would require me to put in $100 breakers, when I could do with simpler $20 breakers, etc. etc. for a LOT of items, which also feeds i…

You're wrong. Not going to do the legwork to show you how.
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