61–70 of 176 posts
If the rich have their way we’re all going to be living like this within a few decades. Probably even worse.
You'd think developers would be the most powerful lobby in terms of local politics. But the collective defense of housing value inflation is almost stronger than social security in terms of uniting boomers
Ghettos.
Housing first does not work.
Tiny homes reduce housing density and effectively necessitate car usage to connect people to services which is already unaffordable and will only become more unaffordable. Electric golf carts and public transit do not solve this problem. Sounds like an awful plan to me. Increasing energy costs mean we need to densify instead of sprawl. I’d be thinking apartments, townhouses, vertical mixed use developments. Things wh…
Compared to what? Most of the USA, and ESPECIALLY Texas, is full of single-family homes at 4-7 per acre. Tiny homes can easily be 20-24 per acre. Zoning and banking prevents building tiny home communities. We are awash in suburbia and you claim tiny homes reduce housing density?!?
Definitely not against this, since any housing is good, and I hate letting perfect be the enemy of good, but not sure why we are so intent on scaling the concept of a single family home down to 200sqft. Townhouses in NYC have existed for over a hundred years, and generally across the world are an extremely viable concept for dense and cheap housing. It's perfectly possible to build cheap townhomes that can house 6 or…
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“Housing First” is such a bit like communism - perfect in theory. The problem is you need “second” and “third” things too, and the political will often just doesn’t exist. I lived near a “housing first” facility that was no better than a homeless encampment.
It's just like communism in that it entirely ignores the needs and capacity of an individual and makes them slaves to the idealism of the state. They're no better than a homeless encampment because you can't give people a house and then expect them to act like a homeowner overnight. It was the wrong problem to solve, and I think people rush to solve it out of self conscious guilt and a desire to quickly make the _app…
Do you have any real-world basis for that? Have you heard unhoused people express that?
Reality is the other way: Research, and people with expertise that I read and talk to, say that what people need first is stable housing. When they have that, they can work on their other problems.
Imagine life is overwhelming for you, for whatever reason - so overwhelming that you haven't managed to hold a job, relationships, stay sober, etc. for many years. That's a pretty scary hole to find yourself in.
Then you lose your home. You have no shelter - you need to find some every day. You don't get sleep, you freeze, you overheat, you get drenched. You have no safety and no personal space. You already have problems in life, and now you have that burden.
Again, the research says so, but I also completely buy that without steady shelter, even healthy people will be under so much stress that they aren't going to straighten out their deep, long-term problems.
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Research indicates that expensive housing makes homelessness much worse. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-... Indeed, it's the primary driver of homelessness. Things like drugs and mental health make things worse, but "at the margin" as economists say, if your housing is cheap, you might be able to hold on to it even if you have some problems with an addiction. There are plenty of wealthy p…
That’s only relevant if you’re trying to prevent homelessness. The article is about people who are already homeless. They may not have had these problems when the became homeless, but being homeless ain’t easy. That’s not to say housing costs aren’t a problem, they are but they have to be prepared for other problems as well.
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It's just like communism in that it entirely ignores the needs and capacity of an individual and makes them slaves to the idealism of the state. They're no better than a homeless encampment because you can't give people a house and then expect them to act like a homeowner overnight. It was the wrong problem to solve, and I think people rush to solve it out of self conscious guilt and a desire to quickly make the _app…
I have found that many people who receive housing benefits are very poor stewards of their personal resources. The first thing someone does when they get housed is to invite all their homeless friends over, to shower, to eat, to crash, to do drugs, to play games, whatever. So your typical Section 8 housing recipient is not just a single person/family benefiting from housing, they're dragging in their entire circle of…
I also know people who work for urban housing authorities that administer it, and I've never heard them describe that problem (most problems seem to be with landlords).
IIRC, Section 8 has requirements for conduct (that is, as a tenant), but I'm not sure.
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This is a funny thing. I recently looked into living in a central location downtown, and all the rents are far beyond my means as a Section 8 participant. But if you put "affordable housing" way out in the boonies, then how do residents access any services at a reasonable price? If we need to run all over town for stuff, why live in a God-forsaken location like that? Downtown in my metro area is not only a transit hu…
I'm just not sure how you get these problems unironically. What's so hard about having a grocery store and reliable transit to downtown? The notorious St. Petersburg's Murino district is located outside city's boundary but it has a metro station, several grocery stores, bakeries, bars and other shops. It's not like US poor have no disposable income at all. Kudrovo has worse transit options but features an absolutely…
Well, yes, you answered your own question right there.
The US has a massive shortage of housing in desireable areas. Because of that, as soon as an area is at least a little desireable, people will start moving there in droves, driving the prices up and pricing out any attempts to put cost-efficient housing there. You can see exactly the same pattern in small towns that suddenly become popular for one reason or another and go through massive increases in pricing.
The only really practical solutions here at this point would take state- or national-level action to override the decades of municipality-level bullshit that's kept enough housing from actually being built to meet demand.
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The reason you don't see those is that middle-density housing is indirectly or directly illegal in almost every major US metro area. Developers would love to build that kind of thing because it gets snapped up immediately wherever it's available, but they're not allowed to do so.
This rings false. Townhomes are seen in large numbers in almost all suburbs and I don’t think they inspire the same NIMBY fury that apartments do.
Any "large" numbers you see are still decades behind the amount of construction needed to actually meet demand (https://www.fanniemae.com/research-and-insights/perspectives...).