5 ms·

Which policies do you propose to protect lower/middle incomes from getting priced out of their cities?

barry-cotter 8y ago
Build more housing, lots and lots more housing. Central Paris is beautiful and it’s almost uniformly dense eight story walk ups. Build new cities. It’s not like the Dutch haven’t built commuter cities around Amsterdam before. Do it again, taking account of the lessons learned from places like Almere.
- somecallitblues 8y ago
  Sydney is a great example of where that doesn’t work. There’s a crane every 100 meters here and everyone but people with loads of money or rich foreigners is priced out.
- maxsilver 8y ago
  > Build more housing, lots and lots more housing. We've already tried this, it doesn't work. Housing is valued exclusively by the value of the housing around it. Building more housing raises the value (and therefore the cost) of all nearby housing, and does so continuously until the economy resets. So, if you are a private equity firm, you love this, because it's a guaranteed safe place to park tons and tons of money. But if you are a human who needs to buy housing to survive, more housing hurts you, because it drives the "fair-market value" for all nearby housing higher, making any specific unit less affordable to you personally. Paradoxically, the more housing construction happens, the less likely a person can actually get housing. --- There isn't a "just supply vs demand" on housing, because supply isn't fungible, and (with the exception of perhaps California), the demand is not primarily driven by people, but by private equity. You can't out-build private equity, no matter how many cranes hit the sky, because (currently) the act of taking the loan to begin construction generates more of the private equity that you are trying to outbuild. To fix housing, you have to fix equity first, because (in most but not all cities) the finances are the problem, not some huge influx of new residents. "We'll just out-build these high prices" is the housing equivalent of "we'll lose money on each transaction, but make up for it in volume".
  - mft_ 8y ago
    > We've already tried this, it doesn't work. Housing is valued exclusively by the value of the housing around it. Building more housing raises the value (and therefore the cost) of all nearby housing, and does so continuously until the economy resets. Really? Maybe I'm being overly simplistic, but surely building enough dwellings to exceed the immediate demand would lead to prices dropping? Could you point towards some links to learn more about this?
    - jpetso 8y ago
      > Maybe I'm being overly simplistic, but surely building enough dwellings to exceed the immediate demand would lead to prices dropping? I thought Toronto was doing a good enough job at building lots of housing, and it still hasn't worked. The issue is that in order to actually have prices dropping, you need to overbuild by a bit. But prices dropping is an undesirable outcome for real estate developers, who are almost exclusively responsible for building new housing in a city. Naturally they don't want to shoot themselves in the foot, so they will only ever build as much as to satisfy the current demand, but not quite, and try hard not to exceed it. Even with government-issued social housing, there's no way to solve this: as long as there's any space for developers in a market, their new supply is going to adapt elastically to just underserve current demand. The only thing that has practically lead to supply-related price drops is an irrational boom followed by a realization that developers have actually (unintentionally!) overbuilt this time. Unfortunately, irrational booms are also accompanied by prior fast price increases and a lot of pain on all sides, so we probably shouldn't advocate for one. So, I'm not sure what a good solution is to actually provide more supply than needed and have prices dropping, but the free market is not it. Especially as real estate developers get better with forecasting demand. Maybe demographics will help a bit in 20 years or so.
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    Instead of building more housing, build more narrow-gauge electrified commuter railway lines and stations--with large multistory parking garages adjacent in the US, and maybe bike lockers attached in the EU. If you make everywhere effectively closer to everywhere else, there is more competition for "good location", and landowners can't charge as much for any specific spot. Or at least they can't until demand goes up again.

Build more housing, lots and lots more housing. Central Paris is beautiful and it’s almost uniformly dense eight story walk ups. Build new cities. It’s not like the Dutch haven’t built commuter cities around Amsterdam before. Do it again, taking account of the lessons learned from places like Almere.

somecallitblues 8y ago
Sydney is a great example of where that doesn’t work. There’s a crane every 100 meters here and everyone but people with loads of money or rich foreigners is priced out.
maxsilver 8y ago
> Build more housing, lots and lots more housing. We've already tried this, it doesn't work. Housing is valued exclusively by the value of the housing around it. Building more housing raises the value (and therefore the cost) of all nearby housing, and does so continuously until the economy resets. So, if you are a private equity firm, you love this, because it's a guaranteed safe place to park tons and tons of money. But if you are a human who needs to buy housing to survive, more housing hurts you, because it drives the "fair-market value" for all nearby housing higher, making any specific unit less affordable to you personally. Paradoxically, the more housing construction happens, the less likely a person can actually get housing. --- There isn't a "just supply vs demand" on housing, because supply isn't fungible, and (with the exception of perhaps California), the demand is not primarily driven by people, but by private equity. You can't out-build private equity, no matter how many cranes hit the sky, because (currently) the act of taking the loan to begin construction generates more of the private equity that you are trying to outbuild. To fix housing, you have to fix equity first, because (in most but not all cities) the finances are the problem, not some huge influx of new residents. "We'll just out-build these high prices" is the housing equivalent of "we'll lose money on each transaction, but make up for it in volume".
- mft_ 8y ago
  > We've already tried this, it doesn't work. Housing is valued exclusively by the value of the housing around it. Building more housing raises the value (and therefore the cost) of all nearby housing, and does so continuously until the economy resets. Really? Maybe I'm being overly simplistic, but surely building enough dwellings to exceed the immediate demand would lead to prices dropping? Could you point towards some links to learn more about this?
  - jpetso 8y ago
    > Maybe I'm being overly simplistic, but surely building enough dwellings to exceed the immediate demand would lead to prices dropping? I thought Toronto was doing a good enough job at building lots of housing, and it still hasn't worked. The issue is that in order to actually have prices dropping, you need to overbuild by a bit. But prices dropping is an undesirable outcome for real estate developers, who are almost exclusively responsible for building new housing in a city. Naturally they don't want to shoot themselves in the foot, so they will only ever build as much as to satisfy the current demand, but not quite, and try hard not to exceed it. Even with government-issued social housing, there's no way to solve this: as long as there's any space for developers in a market, their new supply is going to adapt elastically to just underserve current demand. The only thing that has practically lead to supply-related price drops is an irrational boom followed by a realization that developers have actually (unintentionally!) overbuilt this time. Unfortunately, irrational booms are also accompanied by prior fast price increases and a lot of pain on all sides, so we probably shouldn't advocate for one. So, I'm not sure what a good solution is to actually provide more supply than needed and have prices dropping, but the free market is not it. Especially as real estate developers get better with forecasting demand. Maybe demographics will help a bit in 20 years or so.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  Instead of building more housing, build more narrow-gauge electrified commuter railway lines and stations--with large multistory parking garages adjacent in the US, and maybe bike lockers attached in the EU. If you make everywhere effectively closer to everywhere else, there is more competition for "good location", and landowners can't charge as much for any specific spot. Or at least they can't until demand goes up again.