14 ms·

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 apartm

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.
  - mdorazio 5y ago
    No, you are talking about apartments. We are talking about units of housing built on property that various interested parties want. It could be used for apartments, but it could also be used by wealthy people to build single family homes or to build completely unaffordable condos. That's kind of the whole point here - the market demand is increasingly opposed to new affordable construction because so many people want to build low-density housing that they can make money on instead of higher-density housing that they can't. That then gets reflected in the onerous processes and paperwork that the author is talking about.

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.
- mdorazio 5y ago
  No, you are talking about apartments. We are talking about units of housing built on property that various interested parties want. It could be used for apartments, but it could also be used by wealthy people to build single family homes or to build completely unaffordable condos. That's kind of the whole point here - the market demand is increasingly opposed to new affordable construction because so many people want to build low-density housing that they can make money on instead of higher-density housing that they can't. That then gets reflected in the onerous processes and paperwork that the author is talking about.