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Western cities have only themselves to blame for turning housing into an appreciating asset. Housing is not supposed to appreciate and if it does not then nobod
by ebikelaw 8y ago
Western cities have only themselves to blame for turning housing into an appreciating asset. Housing is not supposed to appreciate and if it does not then nobody would speculate in it. In cities where they just build housing, like Vienna (typical rent ~1000 Euros/mo), they don’t have a need of these kinds of laws.
- davidw 8y agoDing ding ding, we have a winnner! Housing can't both be affordable and an 'investment' that always appreciates in value. Focusing on 'the foreigners' is not addressing the root cause of the problem.
- aero142 8y agoAnd what would address the root of the problem?
- Apocryphon 8y agoIn the long-term, building more housing. In the short-term, cracking on speculators seems sensible.
- dllthomas 8y agoWouldn't a credible commitment to rapidly building more housing itself crack down on speculators?
- ebikelaw 8y agoThe problem is that in many places it is quite unlawful to build housing. The legal regimes exist to protect incumbent land owners. That’s an open invitation to speculators.
- dllthomas 8y agoIn one sense that's not a problem - in most cases the same body passing these laws could make new construction entirely lawful. But it does point at a root problem - that there's a meaningful chunk of the population that more-or-less wants things overpriced.
- stale2002 8y agoWell the solution would be to reject the idea that housing is an investment, and do whatever we can to crash the housing market. For example, by building a whole lot of houses.
- munificent 8y agoI don't think it's fair to blame cities for what is a nationwide problem. The entire economy is shifting from farming and production to a service economy. The former provided incentives for people to be widely distributed across a number of small cities and town. The latter does not, so there is a mass migration to cities. It's happening faster than the infrastructure, zoning, and physical layout of the cities can adapt to accommodate. This is a hard problem, and isn't made easier by moralizing, which seems to happen heavily on both sides. Personally, in the US, I think we'd be better off trying to make our mid-sized cities more desirable than turning our handful of large cities into giant skyscraper-filled concrete grids. We have plenty of space for everyone in the US. The problem is people all want to live in an increasingly small fraction of it. Increasing the density of that tiny fraction while the rest of the country empties out doesn't seem great to me.
- ebikelaw 8y agoAmerican big cities are not that dense. 80% of San Francisco is detached single-family housing.
- dragonwriter 8y agoSan Francisco is not an American big city. It's American, and it's a city (and county!). But it's not particularly big.
- ebikelaw 8y agoIt is the most-dense city save for NYC, which is ten times larger. Which is my point: people think of it as dense but in reality most of it is suburban in character. There’s no need for skyscrapers to change this. A handful of 5-story buildings on major intersections would do the job.
- vorg 8y agoLook beyond arbitrary administrative divisions at what actually exists on the ground. Of course, many cities are spirals rather than circles so it can be difficult decide where to draw the line. Oakland and Silicon Valley, and even San Jose are also part of "Greater San Francisco", which is a very spread out city because of the geographical imposition of the bay.