9 ms·

Dramatically increase the amount of housing in urban areas so more people can move there and away from the places without any industry left.

helthanatos 10y ago
There's a reason cities vote the way they do... Cities are terrible places of hate and murder and disenfranchisement...
- helthanatos 10y ago
  "Oh let's down vote him because I don't like what he says" It's the truth
  - CamperBob2 10y ago
    No, you're being downvoted because you're wrong. http://science.time.com/2013/07/23/in-town-versus-country-it-turns-out-that-cities-are-the-safest-places-to-live/ http://science.time.com/2013/07/23/in-town-versus-country-it...
    - helthanatos 10y ago
      That's using misguided statistics and cherry picking. Enlighten me with real information.
      - CamperBob2 10y ago
        Sorry, I'm afraid I'm not your own personal Google.
- helthanatos 10y ago
  "Oh let's down vote him because I don't like what he says" It's the truth
- ocschwar 10y ago
  Well, you're right they are places of disenfranchisement. We had one party this week work to make sure polling places in the city would have the longest waiting times they could get away with.
binaryorganic 10y ago
Unless you're in a flourishing coastal city (there are exceptions, sure), many cities in this country have huge housing surpluses.
- maxsilver 10y ago
  I'm not so sure. I'm in the Midwest, and housing shortages and gentrification are extremely prevalent problems here too, in almost every city with employers. It's a major problem even for some absolutely tiny towns - http://www.freep.com/story/money/real-estate/2015/12/21/housing-shortage-hurts-workforce-in-traverse-city-area/77688052/ http://www.freep.com/story/money/real-estate/2015/12/21/hous... Sure, the scale is way smaller than coastal cities. But if you adjust the prices to match the incomes, the unaffordability problem is roughly identical in terms of pain. A Michigan $300k urban condo is basically as unaffordable as a Seattle $600k condo, once you notice that Michigan incomes are roughly 50% lower than Seattle, on average. Sprawl is cheap, that's absolutely true. But it's also sprawl -- with all the problems that entails. The only cities I know of with "huge housing surpluses", are cities that have majorly failed in some way (like Flint).
SolaceQuantum 10y ago
That is only going to help more wealthy people move to the cities and take more housing on their own firstly, especially because they will be advertising "new" apartments and thus ask for higher price points. There isn't a very large city without some kind of housing shortage right now. Hacker news seems predominantly upper-class but many articles complain about housing in SF/SV. It seems to me that if housing was reduced, it would just be more upperclass moving to SF/SV instead of the lowerclass. So I don't see how more housing would ultimately fix the issue. Maybe it would help, but fix?
- eru 10y ago
  Land Value Tax is the answer. Incidentally, it's biggest proponent, Henry George, who kicked of the late 19th century wave of Progressives hailed from SF.
  - yourapostasy 10y ago
    Proponents of storing wealth in another mechanism other than basically land banking need to work out a more marketable and approachable explanation. I only found Georgism after a multi-decade circuitous, torturous inquiry into why the hell median income-based saving for a house was consistently outstripped by housing cost inflation in all top 50 US cities. In an era where economic value is increasingly defined by cognitive input per unit volume/mass (what I call "cognitive density"), it makes decreasing sense to imbue land with wealth store function.
    - eru 10y ago
      That's a pretty weak consideration. Even if `give people the ability to store wealth' was an overriding imperative, what's wrong with letting them buy a lump of gold or Google stock?
      - yourapostasy 10y ago
        I have nothing against vesting the wealth into gold. I'm not keen on relying upon secondary markets for wealth storage; bond markets for that purpose are more aligned to what I advocate. I'm on the fence with tying energy storage to wealth storage, still reading up on a thermodynamic basis of economic structures. I see lots of negative externalities to using preferential credit instruments in a debt-backed monetary system securing land as a store of wealth, especially for late-stage generations like the Millenials and later are experiencing first-hand. The process takes many generations to play out the stage we're at, so it builds up vested interests until some final set of bag holders gets the sucker punch. They (Millenials and later) are on the wrong side of an asset inflation to wage inflation ratio curve function that looks ugly and not resolvable without tremendous disruption to world asset markets. In an agrarian or even industrial development era, it makes sense that land is a large direct contributor to output profits, and to ascribe wealth storage to it as the improvements that sit on top are enhanced. To my unsophisticated and untrained layman's sense, this reasoning starts to fall apart as industrialization is increasingly mechanized and automated, but there is still a tiny shred of reasoning. I can't find even a slim reasoning for continuing the practice when the land itself doesn't contribute directly to the economic output, which I sense is the case when cognitive effort is the majority input to economic output. Land value then in a commercial real estate context starts to reflect a proximity to supply chain networks where the supply chain is for physically-located talent (SV). That makes sense, though I'm interested to see the impact if VR/AR matures and virtual offices with startlingly-realistic telepresence become feasible (I predict the first 3-6 generations of that tech won't have an impact, and only the later generations will). Where the reasoning really decouples for me however, is residential real estate. There, I would have expected pricing to essentially follow median wages. Effectively modeling median housing prices as a put option: term length the duration of the median mortgage, strike price the wage earner's expected career earnings over that duration lining up with the house price (or some appropriate fraction thereof). That didn't happen, so I'm misinterpreting something, or don't understand something about using real estate as a store of value, or the market is just staying irrational longer than I am expecting. I dunno, just rambling here, please correct what is certainly my poor interpretation of what's going on here. I'm just a layman trying to figure out why residential real estate prices seem decoupled from median local income in so many geographies at the same time. I started wandering down these ponderings when I realized that as a remote worker in the US, only some pretty far out places had escaped the residential real estate inflation, whereas in the 70's driving only an hour out of town led to a drastic 75%+ drop in per acre prices. I ended up staying pretty close to an urban area, and paying off my property as quickly as possible, but I feel terrible for the younger generations getting completely screwed.
lackbeard 10y ago
This is the insanely simple and insanely correct answer.
- blakeyrat 10y ago
  If I wanted to live in a city, I would have moved into one years ago. I don't. I like where I live. I just want a job within less than an hours' commute of me.
  - lackbeard 10y ago
    That's fine, you can live wherever you want, but jobs are moving to cities and if we want to make life better for the people working those jobs then we should build housing for them in supply adequate to make it affordable.
    - blakeyrat 10y ago
      You say "jobs are moving to cities" as if it's a law of nature. It's not.
      - moultano 10y ago
        It's happening in every country on earth, regardless of the policies of the respective governments.
      - antisthenes 10y ago
        Jobs have been moving to cities ever since the first city existed. It's a fact of physics and economics that cities simply have a higher density of jobs than rural areas - and that reduces costs of applying to jobs for people. You can stick fingers in your ears and shout it isn't so or a law of nature, but that's just being deliberately economically illiterate.
      - madamelic 10y ago
        Yes, let's decentralize our business. Scatter them throughout the country. Let's put some roadblocks on being able to co-mingle with other businesses --- I do semi-agree with you. I think remote work is the future but part of that equation is manufacturing jobs are gone. It doesn't matter if we shut down 100% of the jobs in China and Mexico and bring them here, manufacturing jobs are dying. Anyone in manufacturing needs a way out. Either they need to find it or we need to help them but twiddling our thumbs and pretending like automation isn't coming is short-sighted.
micaksica 10y ago
This will not help. You are supposing that the people who feel disenfranchised in the Rust Belt want to move to NYC where they can get cheap housing and work in the city. They don't want the China model of having a Foxconn that hires rural workers to work in the big city. What these people want isn't fully rational; it's highly emotional. They want their 1950s-style old way of life back. They want their jobs in their towns that they grew up in, that they have lived in or raised families in, where they have their church and their community. They want to live in their IL farm town and work at the local union plant and make a living to pay for pensions and healthcare. It is not realistic in a globalized economy and will be less so in a fully domesticated one, but the math is not what matters here. Urban areas in these places already have plenty of housing that nobody is in. See Detroit for example.
- _audakel 10y ago
  With this thought process it almost seems like you are saying we have to wait for a generation to die off before this problem is "fixed". Not saying that you are wrong, but it is a sad idea that we can't fix it. Maybe instead of giving out "gov't handouts" we just give out VR headsets and give pple a Matrix like existance who can no longer bare the thought of their current living conditions. Sad.
  - micaksica 10y ago
    I wish I could say it was this easy, but the problem isn't entirely generational. There are millions of young people out in these rural areas too. It's where they grew up, where they went to school, where their families are, where their churches are. If they went to college, they went to a minor in-state college/university and ended up not far from their original birthplace. What these people are seeking in Trump's "make america great again" is a return to 1950s-1960s America, not as it was, but idyllic as it seems in movies and rosy retrospection. What I see with the Trump win is that America is simply two Americas: the urban, cosmopolitan melting pot America that most of us here live in, where the wealth inequality problem is gentrification and housing supply is restricted. We are trying to get multitudes of races, religions, and socioeconomic backgrounds to be able to coexist in the cities. Many of us here are the "elites" even though none of us feel like it, and we take that for granted. That's the whole "white privilege" bit that we hear thrown about by SJWs, and to a large extent they are right in this regard. There is a marked lack of empathy for minorities and "poor" people in SF et al these days. People don't understand it, and it seems that when people go to "understand it" it's some type of socioeconomic tourism where you go hang out in Oakland with locked doors, or if you're in NYC you crawl up to Harlem for a chop cheese, because some rapper talked about it, and you wonder why the bodega has thick acrylic glass in front of the register. Trump's America is semirural/exurban "American dream" idealism, where people want to "make America great again" by making it great for them in the way it used to be, when America felt white and Christian - that is, not so much talk of gays and minorities and political correctness - you got married, got a nice middle-class job nearby your house, oh, and owned a house and a car and the wife could stay at home. This is what they want; it is what they seem to believe they are promised. It is emotional and has absolutely nothing to do with the status quo; they're hoping by isolating the US from the rest of the world ("like it used to be") they will see this way of life restored. What they don't understand is that the economics of this is not, and will never be, in their favor.
Qworg 10y ago
People _can't_ move away. A large portion of their net worth is tied up in their house. They don't have the cash they need to move. There's no way you can reduce prices of housing in urban areas to match what the empty suburbs are at already. Not to mention the psychological issues of telling people they won't have a lawn or a house any more.
- blocktuw 10y ago
  I don't think you're wrong. But this is the same situation that "millennials" have been facing. They have no cash to move from their family home to chase opportunity. I'm sure many would love to keep their standard of living as-is and have a good job, but most accept smaller and more expensive housing with problems like traffic, crime, pollution in urban areas in return for employment. The big difference I see is most millennials want to move to a big city and work hard at creating a new and better future.
- eru 10y ago
  Most of the worth of the house is actually in the land below it, not in the house on top. http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/land-value-tax http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/land-val...

helthanatos 10y ago

There's a reason cities vote the way they do... Cities are terrible places of hate and murder and disenfranchisement...

helthanatos 10y ago
"Oh let's down vote him because I don't like what he says" It's the truth
- CamperBob2 10y ago
  No, you're being downvoted because you're wrong. http://science.time.com/2013/07/23/in-town-versus-country-it-turns-out-that-cities-are-the-safest-places-to-live/ http://science.time.com/2013/07/23/in-town-versus-country-it...
  - helthanatos 10y ago
    That's using misguided statistics and cherry picking. Enlighten me with real information.
    - CamperBob2 10y ago
      Sorry, I'm afraid I'm not your own personal Google.
helthanatos 10y ago
"Oh let's down vote him because I don't like what he says" It's the truth
ocschwar 10y ago
Well, you're right they are places of disenfranchisement. We had one party this week work to make sure polling places in the city would have the longest waiting times they could get away with.

binaryorganic 10y ago

Unless you're in a flourishing coastal city (there are exceptions, sure), many cities in this country have huge housing surpluses.

maxsilver 10y ago
I'm not so sure. I'm in the Midwest, and housing shortages and gentrification are extremely prevalent problems here too, in almost every city with employers. It's a major problem even for some absolutely tiny towns - http://www.freep.com/story/money/real-estate/2015/12/21/housing-shortage-hurts-workforce-in-traverse-city-area/77688052/ http://www.freep.com/story/money/real-estate/2015/12/21/hous... Sure, the scale is way smaller than coastal cities. But if you adjust the prices to match the incomes, the unaffordability problem is roughly identical in terms of pain. A Michigan $300k urban condo is basically as unaffordable as a Seattle $600k condo, once you notice that Michigan incomes are roughly 50% lower than Seattle, on average. Sprawl is cheap, that's absolutely true. But it's also sprawl -- with all the problems that entails. The only cities I know of with "huge housing surpluses", are cities that have majorly failed in some way (like Flint).

SolaceQuantum 10y ago

That is only going to help more wealthy people move to the cities and take more housing on their own firstly, especially because they will be advertising "new" apartments and thus ask for higher price points. There isn't a very large city without some kind of housing shortage right now. Hacker news seems predominantly upper-class but many articles complain about housing in SF/SV. It seems to me that if housing was reduced, it would just be more upperclass moving to SF/SV instead of the lowerclass. So I don't see how more housing would ultimately fix the issue. Maybe it would help, but fix?

eru 10y ago
Land Value Tax is the answer. Incidentally, it's biggest proponent, Henry George, who kicked of the late 19th century wave of Progressives hailed from SF.
- yourapostasy 10y ago
  Proponents of storing wealth in another mechanism other than basically land banking need to work out a more marketable and approachable explanation. I only found Georgism after a multi-decade circuitous, torturous inquiry into why the hell median income-based saving for a house was consistently outstripped by housing cost inflation in all top 50 US cities. In an era where economic value is increasingly defined by cognitive input per unit volume/mass (what I call "cognitive density"), it makes decreasing sense to imbue land with wealth store function.
  - eru 10y ago
    That's a pretty weak consideration. Even if `give people the ability to store wealth' was an overriding imperative, what's wrong with letting them buy a lump of gold or Google stock?
    - yourapostasy 10y ago
      I have nothing against vesting the wealth into gold. I'm not keen on relying upon secondary markets for wealth storage; bond markets for that purpose are more aligned to what I advocate. I'm on the fence with tying energy storage to wealth storage, still reading up on a thermodynamic basis of economic structures. I see lots of negative externalities to using preferential credit instruments in a debt-backed monetary system securing land as a store of wealth, especially for late-stage generations like the Millenials and later are experiencing first-hand. The process takes many generations to play out the stage we're at, so it builds up vested interests until some final set of bag holders gets the sucker punch. They (Millenials and later) are on the wrong side of an asset inflation to wage inflation ratio curve function that looks ugly and not resolvable without tremendous disruption to world asset markets. In an agrarian or even industrial development era, it makes sense that land is a large direct contributor to output profits, and to ascribe wealth storage to it as the improvements that sit on top are enhanced. To my unsophisticated and untrained layman's sense, this reasoning starts to fall apart as industrialization is increasingly mechanized and automated, but there is still a tiny shred of reasoning. I can't find even a slim reasoning for continuing the practice when the land itself doesn't contribute directly to the economic output, which I sense is the case when cognitive effort is the majority input to economic output. Land value then in a commercial real estate context starts to reflect a proximity to supply chain networks where the supply chain is for physically-located talent (SV). That makes sense, though I'm interested to see the impact if VR/AR matures and virtual offices with startlingly-realistic telepresence become feasible (I predict the first 3-6 generations of that tech won't have an impact, and only the later generations will). Where the reasoning really decouples for me however, is residential real estate. There, I would have expected pricing to essentially follow median wages. Effectively modeling median housing prices as a put option: term length the duration of the median mortgage, strike price the wage earner's expected career earnings over that duration lining up with the house price (or some appropriate fraction thereof). That didn't happen, so I'm misinterpreting something, or don't understand something about using real estate as a store of value, or the market is just staying irrational longer than I am expecting. I dunno, just rambling here, please correct what is certainly my poor interpretation of what's going on here. I'm just a layman trying to figure out why residential real estate prices seem decoupled from median local income in so many geographies at the same time. I started wandering down these ponderings when I realized that as a remote worker in the US, only some pretty far out places had escaped the residential real estate inflation, whereas in the 70's driving only an hour out of town led to a drastic 75%+ drop in per acre prices. I ended up staying pretty close to an urban area, and paying off my property as quickly as possible, but I feel terrible for the younger generations getting completely screwed.

lackbeard 10y ago

This is the insanely simple and insanely correct answer.

blakeyrat 10y ago
If I wanted to live in a city, I would have moved into one years ago. I don't. I like where I live. I just want a job within less than an hours' commute of me.
- lackbeard 10y ago
  That's fine, you can live wherever you want, but jobs are moving to cities and if we want to make life better for the people working those jobs then we should build housing for them in supply adequate to make it affordable.
  - blakeyrat 10y ago
    You say "jobs are moving to cities" as if it's a law of nature. It's not.
    - moultano 10y ago
      It's happening in every country on earth, regardless of the policies of the respective governments.
    - antisthenes 10y ago
      Jobs have been moving to cities ever since the first city existed. It's a fact of physics and economics that cities simply have a higher density of jobs than rural areas - and that reduces costs of applying to jobs for people. You can stick fingers in your ears and shout it isn't so or a law of nature, but that's just being deliberately economically illiterate.
    - madamelic 10y ago
      Yes, let's decentralize our business. Scatter them throughout the country. Let's put some roadblocks on being able to co-mingle with other businesses --- I do semi-agree with you. I think remote work is the future but part of that equation is manufacturing jobs are gone. It doesn't matter if we shut down 100% of the jobs in China and Mexico and bring them here, manufacturing jobs are dying. Anyone in manufacturing needs a way out. Either they need to find it or we need to help them but twiddling our thumbs and pretending like automation isn't coming is short-sighted.

micaksica 10y ago

This will not help. You are supposing that the people who feel disenfranchised in the Rust Belt want to move to NYC where they can get cheap housing and work in the city. They don't want the China model of having a Foxconn that hires rural workers to work in the big city. What these people want isn't fully rational; it's highly emotional. They want their 1950s-style old way of life back. They want their jobs in their towns that they grew up in, that they have lived in or raised families in, where they have their church and their community. They want to live in their IL farm town and work at the local union plant and make a living to pay for pensions and healthcare. It is not realistic in a globalized economy and will be less so in a fully domesticated one, but the math is not what matters here. Urban areas in these places already have plenty of housing that nobody is in. See Detroit for example.

_audakel 10y ago
With this thought process it almost seems like you are saying we have to wait for a generation to die off before this problem is "fixed". Not saying that you are wrong, but it is a sad idea that we can't fix it. Maybe instead of giving out "gov't handouts" we just give out VR headsets and give pple a Matrix like existance who can no longer bare the thought of their current living conditions. Sad.
- micaksica 10y ago
  I wish I could say it was this easy, but the problem isn't entirely generational. There are millions of young people out in these rural areas too. It's where they grew up, where they went to school, where their families are, where their churches are. If they went to college, they went to a minor in-state college/university and ended up not far from their original birthplace. What these people are seeking in Trump's "make america great again" is a return to 1950s-1960s America, not as it was, but idyllic as it seems in movies and rosy retrospection. What I see with the Trump win is that America is simply two Americas: the urban, cosmopolitan melting pot America that most of us here live in, where the wealth inequality problem is gentrification and housing supply is restricted. We are trying to get multitudes of races, religions, and socioeconomic backgrounds to be able to coexist in the cities. Many of us here are the "elites" even though none of us feel like it, and we take that for granted. That's the whole "white privilege" bit that we hear thrown about by SJWs, and to a large extent they are right in this regard. There is a marked lack of empathy for minorities and "poor" people in SF et al these days. People don't understand it, and it seems that when people go to "understand it" it's some type of socioeconomic tourism where you go hang out in Oakland with locked doors, or if you're in NYC you crawl up to Harlem for a chop cheese, because some rapper talked about it, and you wonder why the bodega has thick acrylic glass in front of the register. Trump's America is semirural/exurban "American dream" idealism, where people want to "make America great again" by making it great for them in the way it used to be, when America felt white and Christian - that is, not so much talk of gays and minorities and political correctness - you got married, got a nice middle-class job nearby your house, oh, and owned a house and a car and the wife could stay at home. This is what they want; it is what they seem to believe they are promised. It is emotional and has absolutely nothing to do with the status quo; they're hoping by isolating the US from the rest of the world ("like it used to be") they will see this way of life restored. What they don't understand is that the economics of this is not, and will never be, in their favor.

Qworg 10y ago

People _can't_ move away. A large portion of their net worth is tied up in their house. They don't have the cash they need to move. There's no way you can reduce prices of housing in urban areas to match what the empty suburbs are at already. Not to mention the psychological issues of telling people they won't have a lawn or a house any more.

blocktuw 10y ago
I don't think you're wrong. But this is the same situation that "millennials" have been facing. They have no cash to move from their family home to chase opportunity. I'm sure many would love to keep their standard of living as-is and have a good job, but most accept smaller and more expensive housing with problems like traffic, crime, pollution in urban areas in return for employment. The big difference I see is most millennials want to move to a big city and work hard at creating a new and better future.
eru 10y ago
Most of the worth of the house is actually in the land below it, not in the house on top. http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/land-value-tax http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/land-val...