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Rents increased because people can afford it, at the expense of everything else in their budget. If it was "too much", they wouldn't pay it-- the sacrifices wou

Rents increased because people can afford it, at the expense of everything else in their budget. If it was "too much", they wouldn't pay it-- the sacrifices would become too big, to the point where living on the street or sleeping in their car would look like a better option. For that to happen, rents would have to be so high you might be deciding between food and a place to a sleep. We're far from that.

asdff 7y ago
We aren't in LA which has 60k people living on the streets and many more on the brink. What happens when rents get too high is that you ultimately grind your city to a halt because you start making the apartment disproportionately available to certain occupations. Sure, the software engineers move into the apartment and the janitors move out, but you still need janitors, you still need service workers, you still need these low wage jobs to actually make a city function. So now the janitor moves to a place that's 2 hours away and still needs that job where he used to live, so he buys a dirt cheap car and commutes from where it is affordable (which doesn't have any jobs for him) to where he works. Roads get clogged, road maintenance costs increase, pollution increases, the costs to repair things increases because you gotta pay people more to spend more time getting to the job site, services are hindered, goods deliveries are hindered because now everyone is spread out across a 500mi suburban area instead of being close together in a dense and sustainable urban area, and we end up with the LA we see today: a hellhole for the working class, but a boon for the few people with capital to grow. There is a limit for lateral growth and it's already been reached in LA in the 40s. They built highways which were a temporary reprieve for the traffic, but now those are clogged as badly as the avenues were in the 40s (and still are today). It's been time for vertical growth and transit, which is how much of the city was originally planned, with a vast interurban rail network spanning the entire basin and the valleys that made the NYC subway seem paltry.

asdff 7y ago

We aren't in LA which has 60k people living on the streets and many more on the brink. What happens when rents get too high is that you ultimately grind your city to a halt because you start making the apartment disproportionately available to certain occupations. Sure, the software engineers move into the apartment and the janitors move out, but you still need janitors, you still need service workers, you still need these low wage jobs to actually make a city function. So now the janitor moves to a place that's 2 hours away and still needs that job where he used to live, so he buys a dirt cheap car and commutes from where it is affordable (which doesn't have any jobs for him) to where he works. Roads get clogged, road maintenance costs increase, pollution increases, the costs to repair things increases because you gotta pay people more to spend more time getting to the job site, services are hindered, goods deliveries are hindered because now everyone is spread out across a 500mi suburban area instead of being close together in a dense and sustainable urban area, and we end up with the LA we see today: a hellhole for the working class, but a boon for the few people with capital to grow. There is a limit for lateral growth and it's already been reached in LA in the 40s. They built highways which were a temporary reprieve for the traffic, but now those are clogged as badly as the avenues were in the 40s (and still are today). It's been time for vertical growth and transit, which is how much of the city was originally planned, with a vast interurban rail network spanning the entire basin and the valleys that made the NYC subway seem paltry.