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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

#661

Post by frozenport »

GenerocUsername wrote: post #600
gavin_gee wrote: post #594

Some good commentary in this thread, however one topic thats never raised in the topic of affordable housing is fast cheap public transit. I could never imagine being able to buy a house in London. but the train network makes it possible to live in a more affordable neighbourhood and commute as needed. In the US we seem to think that cities can continue to have affordable housing in the most desireable areas. this is…

Available transit needs to include safe transit. The current bus and light rail situation has turned off swaths of the working class to support the dredges of the drug-addict class by their lack of fare-enforcement and other low-end enabling schemes that sound great on paper, but lead to complicated downstream chilling effects on the entire region.

SF problems

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

#662

Post by digging »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #556
martin_a wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Nope, you're just old enough to remember the propaganda. Social housing (in the US) has always been underfunded to make it look bad. It was a worst-of-both-worlds compromise which served to undermine confidence in government and promote racism.

There is literally no reason a municipal government can't run high quality social housing. That's why it happens, outside of the US.

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

#663

Post by georgeburdell »

A distant family member, 80 years old, long-widowed and without children, almost became homeless in Florida due to rapidly rising rents in the town she has lived in since the ‘80s. She never bought a house or condo, and the company where she worked part time as an admin assistant folded last year.

The landlord gave her six months’ notice, which I thought was generous, but she ultimately did not secure alternate housing there within per price range of $1,300/mo. She has moved to senior housing near her older brother in the midwest, but where she otherwise has no connections. It’s a sad final chapter.

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

#664

Post by csomar »

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.

That's interesting given that land is very scarce in Japan. Suddenly, they decided to all squeeze together, make it clean and also be patient with one another. Something tells me this is about societal culture more than anything else.

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

#665

Post by ZoomerCretin »

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.

This is so difficult to enforce. You're going to have people go door-to-door checking if houses are vacant? What if someone goes on vacation? States require legibility. The simplest way to enforce high land and property utilization is to tax all property.

In California, for example, you have reports of people who move and use their old home in the Bay Area for storage because they're paying the same nominal property tax rate from 40 years ago. If they were paying a yearly 1% tax on the value of their property (instead of Same deal in China, except more extreme. Property _is not taxed_, so there are/were a lot of people building apartments and leaving them vacant, waiting for prices to rise over time.

Neither of these situations serve the material needs of people today who need cheap, high-quality, and abundant shelter.

Plus, your vacant property tax proposal excludes the (500k+?) many empty bedrooms in occupied homes. If someone's kids have grown and moved out, their old rooms are now vacant. How many people simply leave these rooms vacant for years and decades? A blanket property tax increase would strongly incentivize the renting of these rooms.

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

#666

Post by carom »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #418
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…

I think I agree with you in principle. I don’t understand how the consolidation of the housing market doesn’t create a feedback loop that prevents that counterfactual reality? A few asset management companies have been purchasing the entire supply chain. From land to homes, from builders to agents. These companies have a large amount of capital to deploy to make sure their assets go up and to the right. It also seems…

From two different articles. It is less than you think.

>Large institutions owned roughly 5% of the 14 million single-family rentals nationally in early 2022

>Institutional investors, referring to entities that purchase 100 or more properties, accounted for under 3 percent of home sales in 2021 and 2022, according to Freddie Mac. So-called “mom-and-pop” investors, who own fewer properties, are growing at faster rates, and according to the National Rental Home Council, only 1.16 percent of single-family rental homes were owned by rental companies. Americans for Financial Reform estimated that as of June 2022, private equity firms owned about 3.6 percent of apartments and 1.6 percent of rental homes.

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

#668

Post by throwaway5959 »

DontchaKnowit wrote: post #447
momirlan wrote: post #91

this is the generation that had it best: jobs for life, good benefits, cheap houses, etc. they also destroyed the planet with their "American dream" style consumption. what's coming for the new generations if these are suffering ?

I see this perspective a lot, and I really don't understand it. Millennials have it pretty damn good as well. And everyone wants to ignore how difficult the 80s were as far as jobs, housing, etc. Boomers got bumblefucked in the 80s. Interest rates for home loans were abysmal, small banks failed all over the place, business loans got called, etc etc. I think the only thing gen z or millennials really have to complain…

Home prices were a fraction (like, 1/10th in some cases) of what they are now in the 80s. I’d gladly take a 10% mortgage at 1/10th the price I could refinance at half that rate in the 90s.

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

#669

Post by rcarr »

hotnfresh wrote: post #562

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 crisi…

I still hold out hope that Silicon Valley will take over the education system before then. I've recently started Math Academy and I'm quite impressed with it. Duolingo still needs work but it's improving. I think (hope?) tools like this will eventually take over - they're certainly better than the dire excuse for an education I received.

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

#670

Post by carom »

svnt wrote: post #499
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…

It is counterfactual in the literal sense. It is entirely possible that there are no real prices below $2k in urban centers because of demand and constrained supply. It is entirely possible that getting below this would result in a return to conditions where people were regularly dying in fires and building collapse. We have plenty of examples of what happens in your fantasy land, you just choose to reason from ideol…

Maybe we keep the fire codes but eliminate parking minimums and lot setbacks. Just a thought.
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