911–920 of 1001 posts
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> Parking for one. Are you saying it’s too many or too few?
He/She is implying that it's below what's typical for a suburban home. Here are the houses in question: https://twitter.com/WallStreetSilv/status/169231004512229387... ?
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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?
There are a ton of requirements placed on what can even qualify as housing. To stick close to the example, rooming houses (SROs) are effectively illegal in most cities these days. You simply can't have a commercial venture that rents out cheap barebones bedrooms with shared bathrooms. That's due to regulations that were designed to get rid of rooming houses. Bedrooms are also required by law to have a window and clos…
Windows are required for fire escape, there are good reasons for that.
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Corruption happens under any form of government, it doesn't require democracy. The risk for corruption is always there when power is centralized, the more you centralize the more incentive there is. If anything democracy has only shown that it isn't a magic bullet for corruption. Part of the goal is that oversight by the voting public will eventually weed out the corrupt, that works somewhat and should certainly be b…
I do not disagree with your first part. The second part, I would argue has been proven false. Voting changes nothing, and I dare say that were voting capable of changing anything, it'd be illegal. Obama and Trump both said they were antiwar and would end war, neither did. All of the Presidents of my life time have spoken against large deficit spending except for Clinton and Biden, and hilariously, only Clinton ever m…
I'd argue that I've never truly lived in a democracy, but I hope to one day. It's a system I would fight for if there were actually a semblance of a movement willing to stand up and say enough is enough. So far though I've been a bit sad, or maybe just disappointed, to see that the vast majority of our people don't seem interested in democracy, liberty, or individual freedoms.
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Maybe? Or how about they are in no-way comparable.Unless you are talking mass subsidization there is an absolute floor for providing housing, not to mention finite capacity for both tent cities and affordable apartments.
The absolute floor is pretty low, and the market will provide these solutions if they're not regulated out of existence. My first "apartment" was a 100 square foot bedroom rented in a 4 bed / 2 bath unit with 3 other residents. At the time I moved in, it was only $350/month plus utilities, in a market where the median rent for a studio was $1750/month. That room would have been affordable for a single person working…
That's called having roommates, why do call it not code compliant? It's done all the time.
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That's explicitly the problem with the definition. You can "solve" the equation by reducing housing costs, but it is also possible that the "problem" isn't housing costs per se but wage depression, and that the "real" solution is to fix the gross monthly income.
> the gross monthly income "The" gross monthly income, as if there is one blob of income that we could turn a knob and increase, by say, 10%? Are we doing this across the board, from migrant farmworkers to the Fortune 500 C-levels? Does this dovetail with UBI so that people who earned $0 + entitlements, lose their entitlements and begin receiving cash instead? If rental housing is the #1 monthly expense for the worki…
Property taxes are a huge and growing problem.
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> 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.…
> You could make this argument for any product. Yeah you can, because the vast majority of products are built and priced for the middle class, including > Of course it’s more profitable to cook steaks for the rich Food, which is why we have vast areas in the USA where it is impossible to buy groceries without driving 40 minutes or more, which means fresh food is basically out of the question, which is fine anyway bec…
Can you name where these reasonably densely inhabited areas are? That's difficult to believe.
Sure, there are vast areas in the USA where grocery stores are far away, because vast areas of the USA are nearly empty from inhabitants. But can you name a few towns with reasonable population where they have to drive >40 minutes to the grocery store?
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>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 weir…
These companies hardly exist, "evil corporations" is just super memeable and denizens of the internet will accept it as the answer to anything bad. In reality, the economy has been booming for the "haves" and those people are the ones bidding up homes and pay $50k over asking with a 6.5% mortgage. Corporations don't care much for home rentals when treasuries are paying 5% with zero overhead and zero risk. Sucks to be…
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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?
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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…
This is a myth. Nobody is paying the same property tax from 40 years ago. Property taxes in California go up 2% every year under Prop 13.
It can be argued whether costs should increase faster or not, but in any case it is factually incorrect to say someone is paying the same as 40 years ago.