9 ms·

Great, you can work from. So you take your California money to middle of nowhere and buy a home for cheap. Renovate it and now it’s awesome. However, that loca

• Swizec 6y ago
  1. Housing cannot be both affordable and a good investment. 2. This is how gentrification works. Many of these folks are coming because they’ve been priced out of wherever they’re coming from. 3. Housing can’t be both a right and subject to free-ish market mechanisms.
  • adventured 6y ago
    > 1. Housing cannot be both affordable and a good investment. One is technically wrong. It can't be both a good investment and remain affordable. It can be both affordable and a good investment in the present, with prices rising over time generating a good return and making it increasingly unaffordable.
    • Swizec 6y ago
      Sure. But that was 70 years ago in USA. The affordable housing ship has all but sailed for our generation. Except apparently in tiny towns where we’re now ruining it for the locals.
      • Ericson2314 6y ago
        In fairness, These aren't really tiny towns and haven't been for a generation. It's classic sunbelt boom-sprawl-puke. (Never mind Colorado isn't actually sunny at all.)
        • Jtsummers 6y ago
          Colorado is reasonably sunny, just not in the winter when the sun sets before you've finished your first cup of coffee (I kid, it's at 4:30-5pm in the winter). At least here in Colorado Springs the sun set at 7:40pm today with our latest sunset being around 8:30pm in a couple months.
    • Ericson2314 6y ago
      "... Over time" is usually implied in most policy proposals.
  • Ericson2314 6y ago
    Thanks, can be repeated enough. Cars and single family home sububanization are perhaps America's greatest 20th century self-inflicted wound.
    • geodel 6y ago
      I guess so. All time greatest will be Columbus's discovery of America.
      • blackshaw 6y ago
        That one wasn't "self-inflicted".
  • koboll 6y ago
    >2. This is how gentrification works. Many of these folks are coming because they’ve been priced out of wherever they’re coming from. Yep. If you want to blame someone, blame local governments in California and their chronic refusal to build adequate housing, citing dubious progressive buzzwords to push policies whose outcomes always curiously seem to further enrich property owners and screw over everyone else.
    • seanmcdirmid 6y ago
      This isn’t really the root of the problem through. The government can’t get more housing through because the voters don’t want it, the voters don’t want it because the traffic is already bad enough and there is nowhere to build more roads, and they don’t consider taking the bus or funding more public transit. And even if you climb that hump you become New York City or Shanghai, both of which are plenty dense with public transit but still not affordable at all. Seriously, without Singapore-style public housing, you just aren’t going to solve this problem in any reasonable way. But that would ruin housing as a good investment outside of a small niche market at the super high end.
      • bobthepanda 6y ago
        Californians did themselves no favors by shooting themselves in the foot with Prop 13. Normally localities would fund more services for growing populations by reaping the benefits of higher assessments.
    • georgeecollins 6y ago
      California had a population of 10m in 1950, and 40m today. So presumably some housing was built. In that period California added the GDP of a mid sized European economy. Such a disaster.
      • davidw 6y ago
        Here's a chart showing California housing production. It's a pretty big failure over the past 15 years or so: https://bendyimby.com/2018/11/03/california/ https://bendyimby.com/2018/11/03/california/
  • bsder 6y ago
    > Housing cannot be both affordable and a good investment. It certainly can be. However, the combination of 0% Fed Interest Rate and low property tax rates kills the "affordable" side of that equation. The 0% Fed Interest Rate means people can go way higher in mortgaging the hell out of themselves than if the rate was say 5%. As for the property tax, raising the property tax rate limits the price of a home because even if someone could swing the down payment on a McMansion, the annual property tax payment would start biting into how good an investment it is. So, the developers would start building houses that assess at where the majority of buyers sit. Of course, the same people who complain about getting gentrified also generally oppose raising property taxes even slightly. Oh well.
  • IkmoIkmo 6y ago
    1. What's your point? 3. Sure it can. You can have a market governed by supply and demand. Lots of demand? Price increases. Price increases? Incentivises supply. More supply? That's great, it addresses the scarcity and prices will follow-suit. Poor people priced out who have a right to housing? A rental cap is an intervention that directly impedes the free movement of the price up to a hard cap. But a housing subsidy for low-income individuals, i.e. more money to spend on housing, does not change the fact that the market is still governed by supply and demand. Housing prices with rent subsidies can still go up and down depending on demand. But the government taxes the rich, and redistributes money to the poor, allowing their purchasing power in the housing marketplace to be more equal than solely based on their own income. This, combined with proper zoning laws (set more at a federal level to override local NIMBY powers) and limited red-tape, to allow construction levels to respond to increased prices and actually generate adequate supply, is a market-based system where the poor are getting their right to housing. What's the alternative? Besides, there's more housing than ever. The right to housing cannot be spoken about without also saying 'in particular places'. The average household size (people per house) has dropped every decade for a century, and the average home size has increased every decade for a century. The square foot per person has been growing and growing. Whatever housing crisis people talk about, they tend to completely ignore location. Yet you'll find plenty of people who speak about a right to affordable housing in NY or SV when it's a place where incomes are at the top 0.1% worldwide and there's easily 10x as many people (in the country, and 1000x worldwide) who want to live in such cities at an affordable price than there are homes to live. It's impossible to provide a right to housing to all in those locations with any policy anyone on any part of the political spectrum can think of.
• creddit 6y ago
  > However, that local, who isn’t making California money, that is working a local job and making local money and is hoping to move up in housing for their family is priced out because housing pricing has doubled or even tripled. Wouldn't be remotely a problem if they just built housing to meet the demand. Go take a look at property values in Bozeman and then look at the empty land all around it. There's plenty of room, but the zoning laws destroy supply and enrich current home owners.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• johnohara 6y ago
  Greg Brown sang about it in 1995: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO2EuOLGJKM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO2EuOLGJKM
• sien 6y ago
  That local may well have a better paying job because more people are moving into the area. Also, it's the US mountain west. There is a lot of space there to build more houses. Housing isn't a zero sum game unless you have poor zoning.
  • seanmcdirmid 6y ago
    Is there though? Arable land is at a premium in the mountain west, because of all those mountains. And it’s not just land, but water is lacking...build a bunch of houses and then what will they drink? And infrastructure, if you build without building roads and schools...well, they do that in China and Russia and it doesn’t always come eventually. It is easy to say the problem is that we just aren’t building enough in those places, but it really isn’t that simple.
    • creddit 6y ago
      Let's check in on the Bozeman population density: 2,448.94 people per square mile Let's check on how San Francisco is doing: 18,790.74 people per square mile. Okay, no worries, Bozeman can keep its current foot print and 8X its population comfortably.
      • seanmcdirmid 6y ago
        It’s like my entire comment was ignored :). You need more than just density to increase the size of a community. My mom and step dad built a house in Helena, which isn’t that far away. Pretty expensive place to live, infrastructure wasn’t great, housing was expensive (this is back in the 90s). The house turned out to be economically non viable for reasons unrelated to demand.
        • creddit 6y ago
          It's like your comment was completely void of any kind of validity and it was easy to immediately look for evidence to the contrary of one of your major points. I'm sure it would be trivial to counter the point around water. Just consider any of the metropolises in the Middle East. In terms of infrastructure, that can be built as well. See literally any other city larger than Bozeman.
• tayo42 6y ago
  So you can stay in California and hear the same complaints. Where am I allowed to live everyone? Lol
• refurb 6y ago
  What is your solution? Have internal passports? Government owned housing? Price controls?
  • knolax 6y ago
    Yes.
  • bushbaba 6y ago
    Raise interest rates and kill federal backed mortgages except for low income. Limit fed backed loans to 1 per household. Tax housing income as normal income. Remove 1031b exchange. Remove depreciation of homes. Tax all housing sale gains. Housing would then be affordable.
    • calvano915 6y ago
      What do you mean!? The status quo is profitable, for the already or soon to be landlords.
    • refurb 6y ago
      I upvoted you because while I might not agree with all of them, they are ideas that would certainly lower prices.
    • Gustomaximus 6y ago
      A simple option, most countries already have land tax. Just make this proportional and federal. And by proportional I mean like income tax, so the first $1m is 0%, $1m - $3m is 1%, etc Not sure the best numbers but should be something were most people dont pay, even can have an investment property to cover need for a rental market, but if you have significant holdings it kicks in, and people with residential empires should basically be untenable unless it is short term holding to renovate etc. Also could apply top rates to residential property with corporate or foreign ownership so residential is for people to live in.
    • almost_usual 6y ago
      Still wouldn’t fix the housing problem in desirable places.
• diamondhandle 6y ago
  America isn’t even 250 years old. That’s, what, five generations? Do remember that most American “settlement” of these areas was specifically designed to drive out the real locals, whose basic planning took on a seven-generation timescale. With a lot of problems of this nature, especially social issues, the key is to “zoom out” to get a clearer, more sane picture of what’s going on. Humans were made to migrate, and these “locals” can adjust.
  • gkop 6y ago
    A generation is "generally considered to be about 20–30 years" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation
• stouset 6y ago
  I used to believe this “wealthy Californians fleeing” narrative and… I’m just not sure I buy it any more. 135,000 more people left California than moved in last year. Even if they overwhelmingly moved to only ten other states, that’s just 13,500 extra ex-Californians in each one of those unlucky states. And not all of them are going to be wealthy, surely some non-negligible portion will be less well off. Maybe they’ll be wealthier on average, but it’s not 100% tech millionaires. Somehow this is supposed to be responsible for skyrocketing prices in Austin, Portland, Atlanta, Denver, Boulder, Seattle, Aspen, Jackson, Tahoe, and hundreds of other cities, towns, and locales across the country. All the while the price of housing in California suburbs is going up too! At the same time, interest rates are plummeting. For a given house sale price, this can dramatically affect the affordability of monthly payments: refinancing last year from 4.325% to 3.375% cut my payment by a full 20%. Sub-3% loans aren’t too hard to find right now. In a competitive market like housing, this has the extremely well-known effect of causing sticker prices to rise. Put another way, if you can afford $1,500/mo payments and the rate drops such that you would only need to pay $1,150/mo, the market will quickly react to increase prices to keep the overall monthly payment the same. This isn’t a novel mechanism. It’s part of the reason housing has been such a wildly successful Investment vehicle over the last few decades. Interest rates fell, prices went up accordingly. Are emigrating Californians responsible for some of these price increases? Sure, both generally and probably in some specific markets, I totally buy it. But everywhere simultaneously? I’m skeptical it’s responsible for as much of an effect size as people appear to believe.
  • ralfd 6y ago
    > 135,000 more people left California than moved in last year. If two rich Californians move out of the state and one poor starry-eyed college graduate moves in, the view that only one net-person moved out is too simplified.
  • sneak 6y ago
    Once again we see narratives handily out-competing actual facts and real figures for mindshare. Never underestimate the power of a good narrative.
  • twobitshifter 6y ago
• mavelikara 6y ago
  > However, that local, who isn’t making California money, that is working a local job and making local money and is hoping to move up in housing for their family is priced out because housing pricing has doubled or even tripled. In your story you missed to mention the local homeowner who unexpectedly got a California price for her old house, the proceeds from which she can now use to send her grandchild to college and pay her medical bills.
• renewiltord 6y ago
  It's always some rich fellow from these towns or some crunchy dude from the coastal towns who has this opinion. Dude, there are a plethora of non-descript towns in America. My friend got married in one. They don't have cell reception. They talk on walkie talkies. If you take the California money for your house, you can just retire there by buying and building enough homes for you and your friends. This is always some imaginary pipe dream from the coastal elites. Life in the middle isn't idyllic. You guys always put up some imaginary plinth and then build this massive statue representing The Country Life So Beautiful and put a plaque on it and worship it like it was handed down by Moses. But seriously. Life suuuuuucks there. These people will make it better.
• dcolkitt 6y ago
  The flipside is that while you’re “taking” a house in Colorado, you’re also “freeing up” a house in California. You’re only looking at the displaced resident being priced out. But there are many people who desperately want to move to coastal California and currently can’t because of housing costs. The migration is balanced by someone new being “priced in” to San Francisco or Los Angeles. Maybe even someone who wants to get out of their small Rocky Mountain town.
  • almost_usual 6y ago
    Coastal California prices have gone up 20-30% in the past few months. These are people who were priced out of home buying there and renting, mountain towns are cheaper. Every IPO and stock vest causes home prices to go higher in the Bay Area, there’s been a lot lately.
    • dcolkitt 6y ago
      My understanding is that rents in San Francisco are down 20%+. LA is not as large a drop, but still down. While the cost of home ownership may be up (most likely as you identify due to the wealth effect of equity grants), the actual cost to live in coastal California is sharply down.
      • almost_usual 6y ago
        Yeah this is true, it’s a good time to lock in rent control if you don’t want to own.
• almost_usual 6y ago
  Grew up in rural nowhere Midwest. Home prices are still cheap. Desirable places are expensive and will only get more expensive.