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This is why luxury housing and condos is actually helpful for lower-income housing - the luxury housing of 60 years ago becomes the affordable housing as the to
by seibelj 5y ago
This is why luxury housing and condos is actually helpful for lower-income housing - the luxury housing of 60 years ago becomes the affordable housing as the top of the market continues moving into better places.
Basically all housing whatsoever is helpful. But the optics of it makes it difficult to understand.
- dv_dt 5y agoUnless of course the luxury housing gets periodically torn down and rebuilt or remodeled making it even higher end housing. If the core neighborhood is already high-rent and or desirable real estate, why would high cost real estate buildings somehow allow themselves become low rent?
- seibelj 5y agoIf you don’t build new luxury housing, then the top end goes to the next best thing, and the next to the next best, and so on. Building more helps increase total supply which alleviates pressure everywhere.
- dv_dt 5y agoThat step down doesn't necessarily happen at all - old luxury housing may get upgraded in place, or upgraded to higher luxury housing which then becomes less efficient at serving many. The total supply may shrink from serving the luxury market.
- seibelj 5y agoMy larger point is that knee-jerk opposition to luxury housing isn’t helpful, and actually damaging to the cause of increased affordable housing. In the OP you can see how uneconomic building affordable housing is - so build luxury if that’s all that can be done.
- crooked-v 5y agoHow is that "shrinking"? If new luxury housing gets built now and refurbed later, the additional unit count is still there.
- dv_dt 5y agoUpgraded luxury housing often reduces the unit count as well as the number of people housed.
- dzhiurgis 5y agoSomewhat. A lot of that old housing goes to rentals.
- heavyset_go 5y agoThe luxury housing around here goes to high earners from cities that are far away, and then wealthy people's adult children from all over the world move into the homes in the city after they leave. Housing here and in the cities has only gotten more expensive.
- lupire 5y agoThat's fine. Tax that property and build more market rate housing. Repeat.
- newsclues 5y agoIn reality older housing gets bought renovated and marketed as luxury housing, so the affordable housing is lost to the higher profit market.
- dylan604 5y agoPlease, I've never seen this in my day to day personal experience. Do you have examples of this. It sounds very suspicious to me.
- digisign 5y agoJust drive to the nearest new luxury condo and count how many low-income folks just moved in. If you don't build these things, you'll have to compete in a bidding war with rich people to rent an old, renovated shitbox. Guess who will win?
- dylan604 5y agoI think might have misunderstood. I know low income people are not moving into fancy new condos. I'm just not familiar with older fancy condos being opened up to low income residents. They just stay high rent, but with "charm" since they are older.
- digisign 5y agoThat's because extreme scarcity distorts the market to the point that old housing never gets to its natural cheap point. If they stopped building but only a few cars, a pimped out Datsun 240Z from the 70s would still look a lot better than walking, and fetch a lot better than 70s prices. In fact you could raise them with impunity. Didn't something similar happen in Cuba?
- bombcar 5y agoIt’s not instantaneous but it does happen - go look at some of the random lower price housing in a big city - it’s often in older neighborhoods that have “fallen on hard times”.
- pertymcpert 5y agoHow would you know? Compare original 30 year old apartments to new builds and see the rent difference. There is one.