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There are two problems with this idea. The first is that the existing housing stock is already occupied, and the people who occupy it don't have much incentive

• zozbot234 5y ago
  > There's an argument to be made that it's in the public interest to allow for at least some units to be made available that are affordable to someone on a teacher's salary. There's an easy way to do that - raise teachers' salaries, and let them choose whatever housing they want, not what you've arbitrarily designated as "affordable" (via a political process). This raises observable costs, but has plenty of less obviohs benefits.
  • deepakhj 5y ago
    If we want to fix teacher's salaries, we need to reform prop 13. The OUSD funding issues could have been solved if prop 15 was passed.
    • rahimnathwani 5y ago
      OUSD spends over $20k per student per year. ($746MM for 36k students.) That's $480k per class per year. OUSD owns its buildings, so none of that money needs to go to rent. Why isn't $480k per class per year enough?
    • bradleyjg 5y ago
      I think prop 13 should be fixed because it distorts the housing market but why is it necessary to pay teachers more. The state legislature can supplement school funding with income tax money. No referendum needed.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • ZoomerCretin 5y ago
    Ok, but what about raising the salaries of people in the other 10+ essential occupations? Housing should be affordable for all, not just teachers.
    • foogazi 5y ago
      > Housing should be affordable for all, not just teachers. There is affordable housing - just not where people want to live https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1128-Outwoods-Cir-Birmingham-AL-35235/968792_zpid https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1128-Outwoods-Cir-Birming...
      • ZoomerCretin 5y ago
        You mean where there are not any good jobs?
        • foogazi 5y ago
          But the housing is cheap, right - the Twitter thread was about housing for seniors Also, if it’s cheap because there are no good jobs - then where there are good jobs it will be expensive Throw in good weather, nice views, goods school- all of a sudden it’s really expensive Note there is nothing in the twitter thread about jobs or amenities- it’s all about land and density
  • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    "There's an easy way to do that - raise teachers' salaries" Thats like saying we should solve shortage of food by raising salaries. Some people are so lost in wcobomic theory, sometimes they forget thw physical world exists.
    • andrewjl 5y ago
      Teachers salaries are set by government policy. Market forces play less of a role than politics do. Not sure what economic theories are lost here.
      • datavirtue 5y ago
        Their pay is actually quite high. They get a scaled pension that lasts for all of retirement after 20 years of service. How many millions do you need in the market to generate that level of income in retirement? [Breaks out the world's smallest violin]
• nicoburns 5y ago
  > There's an argument to be made that it's in the public interest to allow for at least some units to be made available that are affordable to someone on a teacher's salary. I think there’s a good argument to be made that we shouldn’t do that: as it amounts to a government subsidy for that particular family or individual without solving the overall problem. I think it makes much more sense for the government to build high quality housing, not sell it at all but rent it out, and use the income stream to fund further house building.
  • lupire 5y ago
    > rent it out, and use the income stream to fund further house building. How about they outsource that to private industry professionals on an open, competitive basis, in exchange for a profit sharing arrangement? Hmm...
    • ajmurmann 5y ago
      And make it much easier to build. But that so conflicts with hyper-local (perceived, short-term) interests of the type of people who show up to community meetings who are concerned their home values will go down.
  • rdtwo 5y ago
    I think the real argument is that we need to pay teachers enough to afford housing
• kortilla 5y ago
  That doesn’t make sense, if there is a supply hole you need to fill it to give houses to the people that want them. Anything else is leaving homeless people.
• vinyl7 5y ago
  > There's an argument to be made that it's in the public interest to allow for at least some units to be made available that are affordable to someone on a teacher's salary. Gotta pass some laws to prevent investors from snatching them up to resell at a higher price like what's happening now. Or prevent them from just turning into AirBNBs
  • aperson_hello 5y ago
    If you make enough of them to go around, neither of those is a problem. The core issue is lack of supply of housing of all sorts.
    • quickthrower2 5y ago
      Yeah you just use AirBnb as your landlord. Until the host says fuck it Ill just rent it out normally.
    • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
      That’s the Chinese method and it doesn’t work. Investors just hold on to empty apartments as a way to capture and retain weld that in the face of other worse options. You’ve got whole districts with sold out apartments and almost no one living in any of them (to the point that the city doesn’t bother building any services near them). The lack of property taxes makes letting investment properties remain empty much more viable than in the states.
      • presentation 5y ago
        Well in Japan it just ends up that housing isn’t generally a good investment so you don’t typically park your money there, and then this is a non-issue. If everyone expects their housing to appreciate forever it’s no surprise that their appreciated homes will become unaffordable to most people. Housing ought to be a utility not an investment IMO. A Georgist-style land tax would probably do a lot to tip the balance.
        • 5y ago
• nostrademons 5y ago
  Existing housing won't be occupied if lots of shiny new housing gets built, such that for a small premium you can have a swanky new apartment. People in apartments - particularly the yuppie demographic that can afford luxury new apartments - move around all the time, either because they got a raise or they're moving in with a romantic partner or they just broke up with a romantic partner or they took a new job around town. It's that normal lease/move-out/move-in cycle that provides the liquidity: you don't need to entice people to leave, because people are already continually leaving, you just need to give them somewhere better to go so they don't take up the older affordable housing that lower/middle-income people need to live.
  • mdorazio 5y ago
    I think you should take a look at [1] and also consider that most people are homeowners, not renters. California is especially egregious because of its asinine property tax laws - an increasingly large portion of people buy a home and never sell it, opting to rent it instead and this permanently remove it from the available home ownership stock. [1] https://www.ocregister.com/2019/10/23/nobodys-moving-california-metros-top-u-s-growth-in-length-of-homeownership/amp/ https://www.ocregister.com/2019/10/23/nobodys-moving-califor...
    • nostrademons 5y ago
      But we're talking apartments in this thread, not SFHs. Places where a single developer comes in and upzones a parcel to create affordable rental units. The context of this thread does not seem to refer to buying a large multi-acre tract of suburban undeveloped land and then building a bunch of individual homes; it seems more to be buying an individual parcel of in-fill development and then turning it into an apartment building or complex. Long-term, the trend in most built-out metro areas is that SFHs are going to become a luxury good for the well-to-do, and most of the general population will live in apartments or condos. This is simply because of land availability: if it's built-out, there's no more land available for new SFHs, so future population growth will depend upon suburban tracts getting converted to denser multi-family dwellings.
• asdff 5y ago
  The problem with this argument is that it assumes the problem exists and isn't getting any worse. It is in fact getting worse. The crux of the problem is not necessarily the current steady state imbalance, but the continuous imbalance that results from metropolitan areas adding jobs faster than they can add units of housing. As long as these high cost of living areas continue adding jobs, particularly high income jobs, you continue to have a growing pool of knowledge workers who can afford these market rates that are unaffordable to the working class pool. Give this pool of workers a big enough carrot, maybe its a fitness center or a pool or some astroturf for the dog, and they will gladly move out of that 50 year old dingbat and into this new construction with the golf simulator in the basement and a garage parkng space, freeing up that 50 year old apartment (which in its time may have even been a luxury building in its own right) for someone who can't afford the above amenities. To this end its essential to build housing as fast as possible and to create as many units as possible. When you mandate things like x% of units as 'affordable,' often times that leads to developers going back to the drawing board and chopping off entire stories from the build, and fewer units of housing being added to the local area than there would have been had the developer been allowed to build full bore and actually cover costs on a larger build. This ironically hurts the very class of people who would have benefited from those affordable units in the first place.
  • wan23 5y ago
    > Give this pool of workers a big enough carrot, maybe its a fitness center or a pool or some astroturf for the dog, and they will gladly move out of that 50 year old dingbat and into this new construction This is only partially true though. What you mean is some percentage of people will move into the new construction. But of course, some people will see that the unit they live in is becoming more affordable and decide that they would like to take advantage of relatively lower rent. Over time and on average you are correct - that building nice new homes will relieve pressure on somewhat less nice older ones, but it will take time. Also, we aren't talking about mandating affordable units, which is a thing in some places, but rather a developer trying to apply for subsidies for building affordable units. I totally agree that we should not put up barriers to building market rate units, but it's also worthwhile to incentivize some artificially low cost units as well to help solve the problem for some people today instead of 10 years from now.