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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

#811

Post by oceanplexian »

cogman10 wrote: post #559
NathanKP wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Inflation isn't a single number that applies to all goods and services. The price of inputs to residential construction have practically doubled since 2018, nevermind 2010 (https://www.nahb.org/blog/2022/05/building-materials-up-more...).

If it costs twice as much to build a residential structure as it did 10 years ago, then rent will cost twice as much. There's no conspiracy, it's not Blackrock buying up all the houses, it's not the greedy politicians. It's caused by government spending beyond its means, expansion of the monetary supply, and the increased regulations that create more risk for investors and causes prices to go up.

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

#812

Post by mcv »

Zpalmtree wrote: post #595
cgio wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your argument is correct with the assumption that houses should be considered investment. I don't think they should, but realise that this statement is only articulated in principle rather than in practical and pragmatic terms. On the other hand, the practical and pragmatic treatment of houses as investment property has driven us to the precipice of one of the greatest potential societal crises at a broadly g…

If building houses isn't profitable, then who would do it?

How profitable are roads?

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

#813

Post by mcv »

bombcar wrote: post #522
mcv wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offer to sell it to the tenant then. That should be more common.

The tenant almost by definition can't afford (if they could afford to own where they rent, they'd likely own). (Sadly, when you see "rent to own" on houses, they're almost always a scam preying on poor people. The trick is to get them to pay MORE than fair market rent for an "option" to buy that you know they'll never be able to execute on, or if they can, said execution is in your favor. If you care for more details…

If they don't want to sell, and don't want to rent, what are they going to do with it then?

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

#815

Post by hotnfresh »

rcarr wrote: post #810
hotnfresh wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My expectation is that SV will siphon off quite a bit of money, but have little effect on outcomes. I expect it will be part of how some school districts try to deal with staffing shortages without significantly increasing wages—I think we’ll see several different tech-enabled attempts at fixes—but that all will basically fail. I do expect a few model schools will succeed with them, and be used to sell the rest, but…

But isn't the hope that if we get these apps right, then the competence of the leadership and the staff doesn't matter so much anymore, just the drive of the individual student?

We have tools that do awesome for driven individual students. We’ve had them since before computers.

The problem is we expect to have a fair amount of success educating students who are not driven, which is a large majority of students. Almost anything works with driven students.

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

#816

Post by oceanplexian »

monknomo wrote: post #697
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…

something I wonder about is that I'm pretty sure new builds target the more premium market. And I'm pretty sure that has mostly been true throughout history. But I wonder/think that in the past infill targeting $500 apartments would be an older house that gets subdivided. Like all those brownstones in NYC that were turned into SRO, or the mansions in Pittsburgh that were chopped into four-plexes, etc.

Because there is no such thing as a "new construction low end market". The finishings of a house or apartment aren't the expensive part of construction.

Look at the inputs to construction, there's no difference between low end and high end. Everything has to meet building code up to an extremely high standard due to modern building regulations. New laws mandate things like low-e glass, tougher insulation codes, solar panels (California requires them on new builds now), seismic, radon mitigation, AFCI, firewall requirements, etc. The average 50 to 100-year-old apartment has none of those things, and it would be illegal to build such a thing today.

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

#817

Post by jpadkins »

pierat wrote: post #709
jpadkins wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you at least try it locally on a small scale first? Also, what do you mean by de-profit-ize housing? Do plumbers and tradesmen no longer get to profit from building homes? Surveyors? Architects? Electricians? Financiers? How do you get homes built if no one is allowed to profit from their trade?

Since you have severe problems with "whataboutism" and scope creep to idiocy; my rates to answer your questions are $150/hr , payable as a donation to the EFF.

I'll take you up on that offer, since it's pretty clear you don't have any answers and I love donating to the EFF.

My terms are as follows:

- you must write a clear, concise policy proposal

- you must post the proposal on HN

- A randomly selected (my selection) HN reader of that post will grade if your proposal is clear, persuasive and well cited. If you fail to pass, then I owe you nothing. You may keep retrying as long as you wish.

- your total billable hours for this concise policy proposal should be no more than 4 hours.

Are these terms acceptable?

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

#818

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #287
voidwtf wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can’t be a real, thought out, response. I’m living in Florida. I will agree with you that rent-seeking and increasingly abusive landlords are a huge problem here. However, the largest drivers of pricing out retirees in my anecdotal observations is uncontrolled healthcare, insurance, and food costs. The electric companies have also increased their rates and been allowed to add insane flat infrastructure recovery…

Not disagreeing with your observations, but I'd like to add property taxes, and most specifically, the portion used to support public schools, to your list. Excluding the past year, this is where I've seen the greatest increases in my expenses. And since it's government creating most of this, it's hard to imagine that there's any relief to be found by looking towards government for a solution.

> property taxes

Anywhere that has property taxes really needs to have a clause similar to what Oregon has that states that the assessed value of your property cannot increase by more than 3% per year for property tax calculation purposes.

It's pretty bonkers that people can very quickly, over the course of less than 5 years, get priced out of a place that they own, just because the market became white hot.

I bought my house in 2015 for $340K. It's currently estimated to be $600K. Yet I'm paying taxes assuming a $250K value.

Granted, I think the 3% limit is too low. I think 4-5% is more reasonable.

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

#819

Post by adra »

coryrc wrote: post #487
adra wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come tell that to the residents of Vancouver. We've had countless luxury condos made year after year for two decades and we're at around 3k/mo for a 1br.. tell us more about how building units that "regular" people can never afford that it's always helping them.

Your population is booming. You're not building as much as you think you are.

A little bit dated (probably by a year) https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/230613/dq230...

The building of dwellings has outpaced immigration so that alone is unlikely a silver bullet.

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

#820

Post by latency-guy2 »

XTHK wrote: post #767
DontchaKnowit wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Labor rights degraded quite a bit between boomers and millennials. Hell, it has degraded between Millennials and gen z! Our current economic model is not sustainable. It is a cancer.

How have they degraded, exactly? Be extremely specific, I want to know what rights you have lost from, lets start with the one president you want to point to as the root of all evil at 1981, to now.
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