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> One of the unfortunate realities about the housing crisis is that you need crappy shitholes if you want complete housing coverage A more unfortunate reality

> One of the unfortunate realities about the housing crisis is that you need crappy shitholes if you want complete housing coverage A more unfortunate reality about the housing crisis is the idea that we need crappy shitholes because wealthy elite want their own home prices ever higher out of reach from normal people.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago
That seems a non-sequitur. In a free market, the price isn't driven by what the owner 'wants'. Throwing 'wealthy elite' in there seems like snobbery. That sentence doesn't mean anything. A more interesting observation is, as population grows yet city infrastructure stagnates, housing prices go up. Something like that, that has actual logic behind it.
- maxerickson 7y ago
  Housing isn't a free market, it's heavily regulated, with a healthy amount of influence from wealthy interests going into that regulation. Like, how do you observe the stagnation and not connect it to regulation?
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    That was just an example, meant to foster meaningful commentary. But let me give it a try: Limited tax income (we all vote on that), geometric expansion of infrastructure cost as city radius grows, 'bow wave' of old insufficient infrastructure buried under the old city that cost bundles to remediate...you can go on and on. I know its fun to pretend conspiracies are everywhere, and the man is keeping you down. But there are real reasons for things, and its more helpful to know them. Especially if you plan on voting.
    - mindslight 7y ago
      On the supply side, building height and density are directly regulated by local politics. On the demand side, the asset price trend of housing / land is directly chosen by the central government when it picks interest rates. It's foolish to say that the housing market is anything resembling a free market. And brushing off discussion of specific mechanisms of causality as "conspiracy" is just intellectual laziness.
      - maxerickson 7y ago
        It isn't even a conspiracy. Lots of people loudly and overtly oppose policies that might lower housing costs (or even just increase supply enough to reduce the rate of increase).
        mindslight 7y ago
        The word "conspiracy" is often used to avoid talking about general motives of individual actors that lead to some emergent behavior. It's basically a combination of an ad-hominem (claiming unreasonable paranoia) and straw man (the high bar of some secretive cabal meeting). Even before rising to the level of explicit policy, existing residents are generally against new development because it will eg take away open space they've come to take for granted. I actually just had the pleasure of observing a town meeting over environmental concerns for a new development, and one abutter shamelessly asserted the area would be better kept as park (completely out of the scope of this commission). Of course the real answer for how to control adjacent land is to buy it (possibly communally), and then enact your will, but a whole host of issues makes this unwieldy in the US.
      - mcguire 7y ago
        "On the supply side, building height and density are directly regulated by local politics." Would you prefer that the residents have no input into local conditions? In most cities I've lived, developers had all of the power in local politics because they had the money. That didn't go well either. "On the demand side, the asset price trend of housing / land is directly chosen by the central government when it picks interest rates." Hoards of people moving into a constrained area with a shit ton of money clearly have no effects. And how is "the central government" not a conspiracy theory?
    - maxerickson 7y ago
      Yes, I consistently vote in favor of local tax increases.
  - mikepurvis 7y ago
    Just blaming "regulation" without qualification is a little vague for my tastes. There are important reasons why we don't just allow anyone to come along and build anything anywhere. Some of those reasons are really good— neighbourhood character, height limits, flood/ecology/watershed management, traffic management, etc. And some are bad or over-used, like parking minimums, and the various barriers that prevent density and walkability upgrades (low-rises, multi-unit conversions, mixed use development).
    - maxerickson 7y ago
      Neighborhood character and height restrictions aren't "really good", they are maybe okay sometimes. Traffic management is a planning problem, but it isn't a reason to not build things (for instance, if you refuse to build things for traffic management and limit density, you probably just end up with more traffic anyway...).
    - rayiner 7y ago
      Only watershed management is a legitimate reason for regulation out of your list.
      - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
        And even then it's not a hard limit. You can always pull a Boston and get the state to let you take the water from a poorer area with plenty of water.
        mcguire 7y ago
        As an aside, Georgia periodically tries to claim a chunk of Tennessee to get access to the Tennessee River. "“I just want to threaten them and then stick a straw into the Tennessee River,” state Senate President Pro Tempore Butch Miller, R-Gainesville, said during a hearing..." (2018) If you have been through north Georgia recently, you probably noticed that all of the lake levels are very low. Atlanta takes a lot of water.
    - jandrese 7y ago
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - mc32 7y ago
    Regulation means you don’t get half-arsed made houses that have no fire alarms or come down in the middle of the night, have no running water or have dangerous electrical work and follow no building codes... the kind of housing we used to see in pre-WWII shanty-town housing. That’s the other extreme to government only-housing (i.e. socialist economy housing). We’re in the middle somewhere and sometimes NIMBYism gets the best of us, but Houston is a decent counterexample.
    - 8ytecoder 7y ago
      I think the OP is referring to zoning regulation and not housing regulation. Zoning in the Bay Area is truly horrendous. There's vast swaths of land that's mandatory detached single home only. Some cities in the Bay Area, for example, even ban a second storey.
      - maxerickson 7y ago
        I wasn't really being specific, I was simply addressing the statement that housing prices are a 'free' market, which they aren't. There are probably good zoning type regulations (things like controls on industrial activities) and there are certainly excessive building regulations. The classic problem of regulation is doing it right, not the question of doing it vs not doing it.
- grawprog 7y ago
  Well housing prices were driven up here by foreign investors and gangsters using property to launder money. https://globalnews.ca/news/5259196/home-prices-in-metro-vancouver-increased-by-5-due-to-money-laundering-report/ https://globalnews.ca/news/5259196/home-prices-in-metro-vanc... That is not at all a natural spike in housing prices and it's pretty much made housing unaffordable here.
- matthewrobertso 7y ago
  What the owners want (in terms of $ for their house) impacts the supply of houses, which impacts the price of houses. It is further impacted by city councils restricting building new housing (city council is composed of home owners) who have an incentive to raise the value of their house to what they want.
- FussyZeus 7y ago
  Real estate prices are inextricably linked to the wealthy, even just the upper-middle and middle classes. With the stagnation of wages and the limiting of the workforce, one of the only remaining routes to long term prosperity and social mobility is property ownership. This, if you're interested, is also why despite being emancipated for decades, African Americans are still insanely poor compared to whites; they can't afford property, which is the primary mechanism for enriching subsequent generations. They rent all their lives because it's all they can afford, and they have nothing to give their children when they die. Sorry for the bunny trail. Anyway, the problem is that everybody is always saying "we need more low cost housing" but what they tend to mean is "we need more low cost housing away from me", the good old NIMBY. Because property ownership is the only steady mechanism for upward social mobility, home prices must rise. Because home prices must rise, low cost housing must be away from you, because if it isn't it lowers the value of your home by virtue of being next door. I experienced this personally; when a foreclosed home in my neighborood sold for way under market value, the value of my home at its next assessment dropped by about $3k. So again; because home ownership is the only reliable path to long term wealth, people are very defensive (rightfully so) about keeping their property value up. This is where you get into how markets are always the best mechanism for generating wealth, but the tradeoff to that is they're terrible at allocating resources efficiently.
madengr 7y ago
Maybe just live in an affordable area.
- jandrese 7y ago
  And be self employed because there are no jobs in the area.
  - madengr 7y ago
    The jobs will follow when employers can’t hire anyone. If one wants to live in a urban dump to have a certain job, that’s fine, but don’t expect government intervention if they employer does not pay a living wage.
    - jandrese 7y ago
      So the plan is to move somewhere with no jobs and wait for the opportunities to materialize?
      - madengr 7y ago
        It’s not binary. Move somewhere with some jobs, maybe for lesser pay with better cost of living. Then other (higher paying) jobs may follow, which will raise the pay for everyone.
        learc83 7y ago
        >maybe for lesser pay with better cost of living. That's almost never a good economic decision. In reality what people tend to do is move far outside of the city and commute an hour or more each way into the city. And this is only a feasible because the negative externalities of car ownership are heavily subsidized.
  - mcguire 7y ago
    You could be a programmer and work remotely. <Chortling with unholy glee>
xamuel 7y ago
Rather than just wish rich people would change, it's worth considering why they want home prices out of reach. One possible answer: they want to limit who they live nextdoor to. This sounds dickish, but, overall, on average, it serves as a rough proxy for "not living next to hillbillies who shoot fireworks all night", etc. As a thought experiment, imagine that as part of the housing solution, your kitchen and one of your closets are going to be converted into extremely cheap housing for new neighbors. You don't get a say in who moves in. You might luck out and get instant friends. Or you might get neighbors from vastly different walks of life and, because you're such an open-minded and enlightened person, you will become good friends with them, maybe even live some sort of hilarious good-natured "opposites meet" sitcom life with them. But, since you won't have any option to kick these neighbors out, also think: are there any ways this scenario could possibly go wrong? For example, say one of your new neighbors is an outspoken homosexual, and the other is an intolerant redneck. Then, despite yourself being perfectly tolerant and reasonable, trouble is inevitable. And you're going to be right there in the middle of it. Assuming you absolutely want to avoid a scenario like the latter, how can you accomplish it? One option would be to outlaw such extreme people as in that example, but that's obviously a no-go. Or people could be segregated based on various criteria, but that's pretty much a no-go too. So it's a real head-scratcher. It's currently 'solved' (poorly) by using housing prices as a proxy for class. This is a lousy solution, but if you're going to get rid of it, you need to be conscious that it is a solution to something, and you need to replace it with some other solution.
- inetknght 7y ago
  > One possible answer: they want to limit who they live nextdoor to. This sounds dickish, but, overall, on average, it serves as a rough proxy for "not living next to hillbillies who shoot fireworks all night", etc. That's a possible answer, sure. But I find that "the merely poor" and "hillbillies" often don't really overlap much. The merely poor can't afford their own home. "Hillbillies" generally live in the middle of nowhere and generally don't want to live in the city anyway. There's far too many people who'd try to hell "hillbillies" how they can and can't live. > For example, say one of your new neighbors is an outspoken homosexual, and the other is an intolerant redneck. Then, despite yourself being perfectly tolerant and reasonable, trouble is inevitable. And you're going to be right there in the middle of it. I don't see the problem. Outspoken homosexual can do what they want as long as it doesn't involve me. Intolerant redneck can do and say what they want as long as it doesn't involve me. > Assuming you absolutely want to avoid a scenario like the latter, how can you accomplish it? Here's a thought: why should I be permitted to hate my lawful neighbors? If I don't like what they do, then use the force of law to force them to change. If the force of law doesn't exist for the change I want, then perhaps I am in the wrong.
anm89 7y ago
This conspiracy driven mode of thinking is so detached from reality, I seriously wonder how people with this attitude manage to interact in society.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago

That seems a non-sequitur. In a free market, the price isn't driven by what the owner 'wants'. Throwing 'wealthy elite' in there seems like snobbery. That sentence doesn't mean anything. A more interesting observation is, as population grows yet city infrastructure stagnates, housing prices go up. Something like that, that has actual logic behind it.

maxerickson 7y ago
Housing isn't a free market, it's heavily regulated, with a healthy amount of influence from wealthy interests going into that regulation. Like, how do you observe the stagnation and not connect it to regulation?
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  That was just an example, meant to foster meaningful commentary. But let me give it a try: Limited tax income (we all vote on that), geometric expansion of infrastructure cost as city radius grows, 'bow wave' of old insufficient infrastructure buried under the old city that cost bundles to remediate...you can go on and on. I know its fun to pretend conspiracies are everywhere, and the man is keeping you down. But there are real reasons for things, and its more helpful to know them. Especially if you plan on voting.
  - mindslight 7y ago
    On the supply side, building height and density are directly regulated by local politics. On the demand side, the asset price trend of housing / land is directly chosen by the central government when it picks interest rates. It's foolish to say that the housing market is anything resembling a free market. And brushing off discussion of specific mechanisms of causality as "conspiracy" is just intellectual laziness.
    - maxerickson 7y ago
      It isn't even a conspiracy. Lots of people loudly and overtly oppose policies that might lower housing costs (or even just increase supply enough to reduce the rate of increase).
      - mindslight 7y ago
        The word "conspiracy" is often used to avoid talking about general motives of individual actors that lead to some emergent behavior. It's basically a combination of an ad-hominem (claiming unreasonable paranoia) and straw man (the high bar of some secretive cabal meeting). Even before rising to the level of explicit policy, existing residents are generally against new development because it will eg take away open space they've come to take for granted. I actually just had the pleasure of observing a town meeting over environmental concerns for a new development, and one abutter shamelessly asserted the area would be better kept as park (completely out of the scope of this commission). Of course the real answer for how to control adjacent land is to buy it (possibly communally), and then enact your will, but a whole host of issues makes this unwieldy in the US.
    - mcguire 7y ago
      "On the supply side, building height and density are directly regulated by local politics." Would you prefer that the residents have no input into local conditions? In most cities I've lived, developers had all of the power in local politics because they had the money. That didn't go well either. "On the demand side, the asset price trend of housing / land is directly chosen by the central government when it picks interest rates." Hoards of people moving into a constrained area with a shit ton of money clearly have no effects. And how is "the central government" not a conspiracy theory?
  - maxerickson 7y ago
    Yes, I consistently vote in favor of local tax increases.
- mikepurvis 7y ago
  Just blaming "regulation" without qualification is a little vague for my tastes. There are important reasons why we don't just allow anyone to come along and build anything anywhere. Some of those reasons are really good— neighbourhood character, height limits, flood/ecology/watershed management, traffic management, etc. And some are bad or over-used, like parking minimums, and the various barriers that prevent density and walkability upgrades (low-rises, multi-unit conversions, mixed use development).
  - maxerickson 7y ago
    Neighborhood character and height restrictions aren't "really good", they are maybe okay sometimes. Traffic management is a planning problem, but it isn't a reason to not build things (for instance, if you refuse to build things for traffic management and limit density, you probably just end up with more traffic anyway...).
  - rayiner 7y ago
    Only watershed management is a legitimate reason for regulation out of your list.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      And even then it's not a hard limit. You can always pull a Boston and get the state to let you take the water from a poorer area with plenty of water.
      - mcguire 7y ago
        As an aside, Georgia periodically tries to claim a chunk of Tennessee to get access to the Tennessee River. "“I just want to threaten them and then stick a straw into the Tennessee River,” state Senate President Pro Tempore Butch Miller, R-Gainesville, said during a hearing..." (2018) If you have been through north Georgia recently, you probably noticed that all of the lake levels are very low. Atlanta takes a lot of water.
  - jandrese 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mc32 7y ago
  Regulation means you don’t get half-arsed made houses that have no fire alarms or come down in the middle of the night, have no running water or have dangerous electrical work and follow no building codes... the kind of housing we used to see in pre-WWII shanty-town housing. That’s the other extreme to government only-housing (i.e. socialist economy housing). We’re in the middle somewhere and sometimes NIMBYism gets the best of us, but Houston is a decent counterexample.
  - 8ytecoder 7y ago
    I think the OP is referring to zoning regulation and not housing regulation. Zoning in the Bay Area is truly horrendous. There's vast swaths of land that's mandatory detached single home only. Some cities in the Bay Area, for example, even ban a second storey.
    - maxerickson 7y ago
      I wasn't really being specific, I was simply addressing the statement that housing prices are a 'free' market, which they aren't. There are probably good zoning type regulations (things like controls on industrial activities) and there are certainly excessive building regulations. The classic problem of regulation is doing it right, not the question of doing it vs not doing it.
grawprog 7y ago
Well housing prices were driven up here by foreign investors and gangsters using property to launder money. https://globalnews.ca/news/5259196/home-prices-in-metro-vancouver-increased-by-5-due-to-money-laundering-report/ https://globalnews.ca/news/5259196/home-prices-in-metro-vanc... That is not at all a natural spike in housing prices and it's pretty much made housing unaffordable here.
matthewrobertso 7y ago
What the owners want (in terms of $ for their house) impacts the supply of houses, which impacts the price of houses. It is further impacted by city councils restricting building new housing (city council is composed of home owners) who have an incentive to raise the value of their house to what they want.
FussyZeus 7y ago
Real estate prices are inextricably linked to the wealthy, even just the upper-middle and middle classes. With the stagnation of wages and the limiting of the workforce, one of the only remaining routes to long term prosperity and social mobility is property ownership. This, if you're interested, is also why despite being emancipated for decades, African Americans are still insanely poor compared to whites; they can't afford property, which is the primary mechanism for enriching subsequent generations. They rent all their lives because it's all they can afford, and they have nothing to give their children when they die. Sorry for the bunny trail. Anyway, the problem is that everybody is always saying "we need more low cost housing" but what they tend to mean is "we need more low cost housing away from me", the good old NIMBY. Because property ownership is the only steady mechanism for upward social mobility, home prices must rise. Because home prices must rise, low cost housing must be away from you, because if it isn't it lowers the value of your home by virtue of being next door. I experienced this personally; when a foreclosed home in my neighborood sold for way under market value, the value of my home at its next assessment dropped by about $3k. So again; because home ownership is the only reliable path to long term wealth, people are very defensive (rightfully so) about keeping their property value up. This is where you get into how markets are always the best mechanism for generating wealth, but the tradeoff to that is they're terrible at allocating resources efficiently.

madengr 7y ago

Maybe just live in an affordable area.

jandrese 7y ago
And be self employed because there are no jobs in the area.
- madengr 7y ago
  The jobs will follow when employers can’t hire anyone. If one wants to live in a urban dump to have a certain job, that’s fine, but don’t expect government intervention if they employer does not pay a living wage.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    So the plan is to move somewhere with no jobs and wait for the opportunities to materialize?
    - madengr 7y ago
      It’s not binary. Move somewhere with some jobs, maybe for lesser pay with better cost of living. Then other (higher paying) jobs may follow, which will raise the pay for everyone.
      - learc83 7y ago
        >maybe for lesser pay with better cost of living. That's almost never a good economic decision. In reality what people tend to do is move far outside of the city and commute an hour or more each way into the city. And this is only a feasible because the negative externalities of car ownership are heavily subsidized.
- mcguire 7y ago
  You could be a programmer and work remotely. <Chortling with unholy glee>

xamuel 7y ago

Rather than just wish rich people would change, it's worth considering why they want home prices out of reach. One possible answer: they want to limit who they live nextdoor to. This sounds dickish, but, overall, on average, it serves as a rough proxy for "not living next to hillbillies who shoot fireworks all night", etc. As a thought experiment, imagine that as part of the housing solution, your kitchen and one of your closets are going to be converted into extremely cheap housing for new neighbors. You don't get a say in who moves in. You might luck out and get instant friends. Or you might get neighbors from vastly different walks of life and, because you're such an open-minded and enlightened person, you will become good friends with them, maybe even live some sort of hilarious good-natured "opposites meet" sitcom life with them. But, since you won't have any option to kick these neighbors out, also think: are there any ways this scenario could possibly go wrong? For example, say one of your new neighbors is an outspoken homosexual, and the other is an intolerant redneck. Then, despite yourself being perfectly tolerant and reasonable, trouble is inevitable. And you're going to be right there in the middle of it. Assuming you absolutely want to avoid a scenario like the latter, how can you accomplish it? One option would be to outlaw such extreme people as in that example, but that's obviously a no-go. Or people could be segregated based on various criteria, but that's pretty much a no-go too. So it's a real head-scratcher. It's currently 'solved' (poorly) by using housing prices as a proxy for class. This is a lousy solution, but if you're going to get rid of it, you need to be conscious that it is a solution to something, and you need to replace it with some other solution.

inetknght 7y ago
> One possible answer: they want to limit who they live nextdoor to. This sounds dickish, but, overall, on average, it serves as a rough proxy for "not living next to hillbillies who shoot fireworks all night", etc. That's a possible answer, sure. But I find that "the merely poor" and "hillbillies" often don't really overlap much. The merely poor can't afford their own home. "Hillbillies" generally live in the middle of nowhere and generally don't want to live in the city anyway. There's far too many people who'd try to hell "hillbillies" how they can and can't live. > For example, say one of your new neighbors is an outspoken homosexual, and the other is an intolerant redneck. Then, despite yourself being perfectly tolerant and reasonable, trouble is inevitable. And you're going to be right there in the middle of it. I don't see the problem. Outspoken homosexual can do what they want as long as it doesn't involve me. Intolerant redneck can do and say what they want as long as it doesn't involve me. > Assuming you absolutely want to avoid a scenario like the latter, how can you accomplish it? Here's a thought: why should I be permitted to hate my lawful neighbors? If I don't like what they do, then use the force of law to force them to change. If the force of law doesn't exist for the change I want, then perhaps I am in the wrong.

anm89 7y ago

This conspiracy driven mode of thinking is so detached from reality, I seriously wonder how people with this attitude manage to interact in society.