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> While it's true that increasing supply would help relieve some of the pressure, it would have to skyrocket to keep up with the meteoric rise in income of the

> While it's true that increasing supply would help relieve some of the pressure, it would have to skyrocket to keep up with the meteoric rise in income of the top 10% of the population How many % of available units do you think the top 10% of the population reside in? I’d be surprised if the average member of the 10% had more than two or at most three homes (e.g. city home, country home, vacation home). For reference, the 95th percentile household income in the USA is $250k a year, you will struggle to afford even two homes on that type of salary. If you had, say, 600 million homes available in a country of 300 million people, you aren’t going to run out of homes... the rich may have a lot of money but they can only be in one place at once.

lucas_membrane 7y ago
Between vacant homes and second homes, there is enough vacant space in USA to home all the homeless multiple times over. If Americans had no brains, this would be done.
vannevar 7y ago
>How many % of available units do you think the top 10% of the population reside in? In urban areas, where the housing crisis is, a disproportionate share. Imagine a topographic map where housing prices are the relief. Thirty years ago, say the highest point in a given city was at $1M. Over time, as the top end income increases, that peak will steadily rise, pulling up all the prices around it. The problem is that to earn income (to be able to afford rising housing costs), people need to be close to the city center. So people with lower incomes "buy up" out of necessity, driving up the percentage of their income they spend on housing, because their income didn't rise as rapidly as the income of the next topographical "ring" in. Basically, there is a mismatch: there's a growing disparity in wealth between classes, but the need for proximity to cities in order to make money has remained largely constant for lower incomes, particularly for service workers who cannot adapt to work remotely, like middle class tech workers can.
- javagram 7y ago
  Over the past few decades there has been a period of re-urbanization and migration from rural to urban areas due to changes in the job market. For instance, Washington DC had 802,000 residents in 1950. Later the population dropped to 572,000 residents in 2000. The population has now increased to 705,000. However, over the last 70 years, living standards have changed and some dwellings have either been demolished or made illegal (e.g. in 1950 it’s likely many people lived in Single Room Occupancy boarding houses more like a college dorm, or crowded into what we’d now consider slums, or so on) As a result there’s a mismatch in supply and demand, and Econ 101 is occurring: price of housing goes up until the supply and demand curves match. Solving inequality isn’t needed to solve this problem, any more than inequality was solved in 1950 when more people were living in poverty than today. We need to make more housing available and fix the supply/demand imbalance. When there aren’t enough units available, it’s impossible to solve the problem and allow everyone to live where they want. Even if everyone had the same salary or rents were arbitrarily fixed at a low rate, then the system of distribution would just change to something else, e.g. a ticket lottery.
  - vannevar 7y ago
    Solving inequality isn’t needed to solve this problem, any more than inequality was solved in 1950... It may not have been 'solved', but inequality was much lower in the 1950s than it is today. When there aren’t enough units available, it’s impossible to solve the problem and allow everyone to live where they want. In an elastic market, it is possible. The problem is that housing is inelastic, because people have job and family ties that effectively keep them from simply moving away to where housing is cheaper. And in an inelastic market, inequality dramatically exacerbates the problem in high demand areas. For a related article and discussion, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22088466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22088466.

lucas_membrane 7y ago

Between vacant homes and second homes, there is enough vacant space in USA to home all the homeless multiple times over. If Americans had no brains, this would be done.

vannevar 7y ago

>How many % of available units do you think the top 10% of the population reside in? In urban areas, where the housing crisis is, a disproportionate share. Imagine a topographic map where housing prices are the relief. Thirty years ago, say the highest point in a given city was at $1M. Over time, as the top end income increases, that peak will steadily rise, pulling up all the prices around it. The problem is that to earn income (to be able to afford rising housing costs), people need to be close to the city center. So people with lower incomes "buy up" out of necessity, driving up the percentage of their income they spend on housing, because their income didn't rise as rapidly as the income of the next topographical "ring" in. Basically, there is a mismatch: there's a growing disparity in wealth between classes, but the need for proximity to cities in order to make money has remained largely constant for lower incomes, particularly for service workers who cannot adapt to work remotely, like middle class tech workers can.

javagram 7y ago
Over the past few decades there has been a period of re-urbanization and migration from rural to urban areas due to changes in the job market. For instance, Washington DC had 802,000 residents in 1950. Later the population dropped to 572,000 residents in 2000. The population has now increased to 705,000. However, over the last 70 years, living standards have changed and some dwellings have either been demolished or made illegal (e.g. in 1950 it’s likely many people lived in Single Room Occupancy boarding houses more like a college dorm, or crowded into what we’d now consider slums, or so on) As a result there’s a mismatch in supply and demand, and Econ 101 is occurring: price of housing goes up until the supply and demand curves match. Solving inequality isn’t needed to solve this problem, any more than inequality was solved in 1950 when more people were living in poverty than today. We need to make more housing available and fix the supply/demand imbalance. When there aren’t enough units available, it’s impossible to solve the problem and allow everyone to live where they want. Even if everyone had the same salary or rents were arbitrarily fixed at a low rate, then the system of distribution would just change to something else, e.g. a ticket lottery.
- vannevar 7y ago
  Solving inequality isn’t needed to solve this problem, any more than inequality was solved in 1950... It may not have been 'solved', but inequality was much lower in the 1950s than it is today. When there aren’t enough units available, it’s impossible to solve the problem and allow everyone to live where they want. In an elastic market, it is possible. The problem is that housing is inelastic, because people have job and family ties that effectively keep them from simply moving away to where housing is cheaper. And in an inelastic market, inequality dramatically exacerbates the problem in high demand areas. For a related article and discussion, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22088466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22088466.