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The inevitable outcome of housing inflation and elimination of the middle class is slums: illegal housing. People will have to live somewhere. And when that bec

The inevitable outcome of housing inflation and elimination of the middle class is slums: illegal housing. People will have to live somewhere. And when that becomes unaffordable they'll just improvise. This is not a technical problem but a policy problem. The solution is changing the policy. The current policy is to drive up housing prices by creating completely artificial scarcity. All the land is owned and earmarked. Just not for housing. This problem exists in most wealthy nations. There is no shortage of space. Just of access to that space. Mostly that's completely intentional and reinforced by generations of politicians acting on the will of the people they represent to ensure that can never change. You have NIMBYs and vested financial interests basically. Nobody wants their property devalued. So, social housing always is unpopular with the locals. Places like San Francisco where the homeless take dumps on Market Street are of course a bit extreme. But same principle. No shortage of space there. But it's all reserved and off limits. So, the homeless are camping out there. In the middle of a city full of some of the richest NIMBYs on this planet. That's not a temporary solution. That's a slum and it is growing. Complete with people just shitting all over the place. Slums are what happens when you let things escalate.

southerntofu 5y ago
> The current policy is to drive up housing prices by creating completely artificial scarcity. This is true but not in the way that you mean. As you said there is no shortage of space. But it's important to point out that on a global scale there is no housing shortage either. Vacant dwellings outnumber homeless people by far in most industrialized countries where homelessness is rampant (for example: 3 million empty dwellings here in France). You seem to imply the problem is housing regulations and NIMBY preventing new constructions, but who cares when the houses are already there. I agree with you the problem is that of policy, but i would say the policy responsible for that immense suffering is "private property", the religious belief that land should be owned and that a piece of paper should dictate whether you can sleep under a roof or not and/or have access to food/healthcare/education. We can eradicate homelessness in under 48h: it's just that no politician cares at all about poverty from their ivory tower! Just give the police instruction not to intervene for "breaking and entering" in *vacant* housing (or even better, abolish police entirely) and we can rehouse every homeless person in the next two days. Of course it would take a few weeks to rehabilitate some of the housing unit and make them real decent, but even in the meantime old housing would be much better than no housing.
- kapuasuite 5y ago
  The problem is, one, that those vacant homes are not necessarily in places people live or want to live (unless we’re shipping homeless people off to empty homes), and two, that homeless people aren’t the only ones in need of housing - there are far more people living in overcrowded housing, or who are unable to move out of their parents’ house, or can’t afford to live without roommates, than there are vacant homes. That’s to say nothing of the people who are overpaying for housing today, whether in rent or mortgage, reducing their overall standard of living. There’s a massive housing shortage in the United States and it’s acting like a vacuum, sucking up wealth and diverting it to landowners.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    > those vacant homes are not necessarily in places people live or want to live Good point, although i would like data to back that claim. For example in France, 200k empty dwellings are in Paris alone: this does not account for vacant industrial/office space which could also be converted to housing. In all cases, *proposing* (without coercion) homeless people a house somewhere does not sound inhumane at all. > there are far more people living in overcrowded housing Good point, too. Although as i said i would like to see data suggesting that the current real estate market (accounting for all vacant units) can't house everyone decently. > There’s a massive housing shortage in the United States and it’s acting like a vacuum, sucking up wealth and diverting it to landowners. To be clear, i'm not saying we should stop building houses entirely. But as long as you allow housing to remain vacant, prices are driven by speculation not by actual supply. I believe we should both rehouse homeless people immediately and keep investing in eco-friendly collective, affordable housing.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >For example in France, 200k empty dwellings are in Paris alone Source? A quick search only turns a figure half of that: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290578/number-homes-paris-category/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290578/number-homes-par... Also, just because it's "vacant" doesn't mean it can actually be used to house homeless people. It could be undergoing renovations, or on the rental market.
mschuster91 5y ago
> The current policy is to drive up housing prices by creating completely artificial scarcity. All the land is owned and earmarked. Just not for housing. That's not the problem either, the scarcity is (with the exception of foreign - i.e. Chinese and Russian - money laundering) natural and not artificial. The true problem is that following mechanization in agriculture many people emigrated from rural areas, resulting in a lack of infrastructure because it was unsustainably expensive for the low population density - particularly high speed internet and accessible (=walkable or within reach with a bicycle) basic infrastructure such as a grocery store, a GP and pharmacy and schools. That lack drives more people away, it's a vicious cycle that will need enormous amounts of money to break through. If you want to work a modern service-oriented job or even a manufacturing/industry type job, you have to move to an urban or suburban area, and even if you have money and want to provide gainful employment you simply can't because there is no high-speed Internet for your business. What needs to be done is that the government aggressively invests into "flyover" states to provide perspectives for the people living there and considering moving to a better place - but unfortunately I don't see that happening, not in the US and not in Europe where we have similar problems.
- mmarq 5y ago
  > The true problem is that following mechanization in agriculture many people emigrated from rural areas That happened at the latest 40 years ago (in fact it happened more than a century ago), while house prices went crazy roughly after 2000.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    > while house prices went crazy roughly after 2000. It began earlier, the problem (why the situation in urban areas exploded) was that after ~2000-2005 it simply became apparent that the future was the Internet and there was no way government or much less the private companies would ever put up the money to provide actual high speed Internet to rural areas - and so all the new "digital" companies set up shop in urban areas, and people flocked to where the new jobs were. Had the US government taken care to make sure that the companies not pocket literal billions of funds without providing the service that the government funded [1] you would not be in the mess you are now. [1] https://eu.jsonline.com/in-depth/news/2021/07/14/weve-spent-billions-provide-broadband-rural-areas-what-failed-wisconsin/7145014002/ https://eu.jsonline.com/in-depth/news/2021/07/14/weve-spent-...
ehnto 5y ago
The saying used to be that many think they are Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaires, but I think at this point it's fair to say that many people think they are middle class when in fact, the middle class has been swept from underneath them and they are now more or less comfortably-poor. Public services, housing affordability, food availability, product quality, fair pay and benefits. Previously middle class people are struggling to mesh it all together into a middle-class life, the money isn't there and the availability and quality of products and services isn't there either. I think that in order to protect it's ability to offer a first world living by it's communities, the US needs to fatten up it's middle class with better wages. There could be a number of ways to do that, but the basic goal is to get more money into the hands of the average American so they can spend it in the community and make the whole country better.
- newbamboo 5y ago
  You should read about inflation. Efforts to fatten up the middle class with free giveaways to certain voting blocks has and will continue to spur inflation and make those same voters ever less wealthy. But voters are myopic, so they’ll vote for free money every time. Eventually you get Venezuela. A better way would be to protect people by not making policy decisions that reward bad behavior and punish those who avoid debt and save. Rewarding terrible behavior may get you elected but it’s bad for society. Like giving candy to pacify a cranky baby. But such opinions have become verboten now, and actually censored.
  - ehnto 5y ago
    I wasn't suggesting a handout though I can see how that's easy to read. I don't have the answers on how to achieve it, but policy changes to shift more people up the class chain rather than pushing them down is what I was thinking. Raising minimum wage, reducing service burdens on the individual, reducing the cost of housing, adjusting taxes perhaps. Generally freeing up money to be available and spent in the community and not caught up in financial instruments and real estate.
nradov 5y ago
In the SF Bay Area there is a lot of vacant land set aside as parks and open space. Should we develop that land for housing?
- jacobr1 5y ago
  No need, the problem in the bay area is density.
rmbyrro 5y ago
I think a real issue is the cost of infrastructure and network effects. Essentially, a big corporation could buy cheap rural land close to a big city, develop a small city there and reap the "overpricing" benefits. But it's very expensive to build the basic infra. And even more expensive to convince enough people to move there and create minimum network effects for it to become a "real" community and livable space.

southerntofu 5y ago

> The current policy is to drive up housing prices by creating completely artificial scarcity. This is true but not in the way that you mean. As you said there is no shortage of space. But it's important to point out that on a global scale there is no housing shortage either. Vacant dwellings outnumber homeless people by far in most industrialized countries where homelessness is rampant (for example: 3 million empty dwellings here in France). You seem to imply the problem is housing regulations and NIMBY preventing new constructions, but who cares when the houses are already there. I agree with you the problem is that of policy, but i would say the policy responsible for that immense suffering is "private property", the religious belief that land should be owned and that a piece of paper should dictate whether you can sleep under a roof or not and/or have access to food/healthcare/education. We can eradicate homelessness in under 48h: it's just that no politician cares at all about poverty from their ivory tower! Just give the police instruction not to intervene for "breaking and entering" in *vacant* housing (or even better, abolish police entirely) and we can rehouse every homeless person in the next two days. Of course it would take a few weeks to rehabilitate some of the housing unit and make them real decent, but even in the meantime old housing would be much better than no housing.

kapuasuite 5y ago
The problem is, one, that those vacant homes are not necessarily in places people live or want to live (unless we’re shipping homeless people off to empty homes), and two, that homeless people aren’t the only ones in need of housing - there are far more people living in overcrowded housing, or who are unable to move out of their parents’ house, or can’t afford to live without roommates, than there are vacant homes. That’s to say nothing of the people who are overpaying for housing today, whether in rent or mortgage, reducing their overall standard of living. There’s a massive housing shortage in the United States and it’s acting like a vacuum, sucking up wealth and diverting it to landowners.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > those vacant homes are not necessarily in places people live or want to live Good point, although i would like data to back that claim. For example in France, 200k empty dwellings are in Paris alone: this does not account for vacant industrial/office space which could also be converted to housing. In all cases, *proposing* (without coercion) homeless people a house somewhere does not sound inhumane at all. > there are far more people living in overcrowded housing Good point, too. Although as i said i would like to see data suggesting that the current real estate market (accounting for all vacant units) can't house everyone decently. > There’s a massive housing shortage in the United States and it’s acting like a vacuum, sucking up wealth and diverting it to landowners. To be clear, i'm not saying we should stop building houses entirely. But as long as you allow housing to remain vacant, prices are driven by speculation not by actual supply. I believe we should both rehouse homeless people immediately and keep investing in eco-friendly collective, affordable housing.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >For example in France, 200k empty dwellings are in Paris alone Source? A quick search only turns a figure half of that: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290578/number-homes-paris-category/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290578/number-homes-par... Also, just because it's "vacant" doesn't mean it can actually be used to house homeless people. It could be undergoing renovations, or on the rental market.

mschuster91 5y ago

> The current policy is to drive up housing prices by creating completely artificial scarcity. All the land is owned and earmarked. Just not for housing. That's not the problem either, the scarcity is (with the exception of foreign - i.e. Chinese and Russian - money laundering) natural and not artificial. The true problem is that following mechanization in agriculture many people emigrated from rural areas, resulting in a lack of infrastructure because it was unsustainably expensive for the low population density - particularly high speed internet and accessible (=walkable or within reach with a bicycle) basic infrastructure such as a grocery store, a GP and pharmacy and schools. That lack drives more people away, it's a vicious cycle that will need enormous amounts of money to break through. If you want to work a modern service-oriented job or even a manufacturing/industry type job, you have to move to an urban or suburban area, and even if you have money and want to provide gainful employment you simply can't because there is no high-speed Internet for your business. What needs to be done is that the government aggressively invests into "flyover" states to provide perspectives for the people living there and considering moving to a better place - but unfortunately I don't see that happening, not in the US and not in Europe where we have similar problems.

mmarq 5y ago
> The true problem is that following mechanization in agriculture many people emigrated from rural areas That happened at the latest 40 years ago (in fact it happened more than a century ago), while house prices went crazy roughly after 2000.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > while house prices went crazy roughly after 2000. It began earlier, the problem (why the situation in urban areas exploded) was that after ~2000-2005 it simply became apparent that the future was the Internet and there was no way government or much less the private companies would ever put up the money to provide actual high speed Internet to rural areas - and so all the new "digital" companies set up shop in urban areas, and people flocked to where the new jobs were. Had the US government taken care to make sure that the companies not pocket literal billions of funds without providing the service that the government funded [1] you would not be in the mess you are now. [1] https://eu.jsonline.com/in-depth/news/2021/07/14/weve-spent-billions-provide-broadband-rural-areas-what-failed-wisconsin/7145014002/ https://eu.jsonline.com/in-depth/news/2021/07/14/weve-spent-...

ehnto 5y ago

The saying used to be that many think they are Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaires, but I think at this point it's fair to say that many people think they are middle class when in fact, the middle class has been swept from underneath them and they are now more or less comfortably-poor. Public services, housing affordability, food availability, product quality, fair pay and benefits. Previously middle class people are struggling to mesh it all together into a middle-class life, the money isn't there and the availability and quality of products and services isn't there either. I think that in order to protect it's ability to offer a first world living by it's communities, the US needs to fatten up it's middle class with better wages. There could be a number of ways to do that, but the basic goal is to get more money into the hands of the average American so they can spend it in the community and make the whole country better.

newbamboo 5y ago
You should read about inflation. Efforts to fatten up the middle class with free giveaways to certain voting blocks has and will continue to spur inflation and make those same voters ever less wealthy. But voters are myopic, so they’ll vote for free money every time. Eventually you get Venezuela. A better way would be to protect people by not making policy decisions that reward bad behavior and punish those who avoid debt and save. Rewarding terrible behavior may get you elected but it’s bad for society. Like giving candy to pacify a cranky baby. But such opinions have become verboten now, and actually censored.
- ehnto 5y ago
  I wasn't suggesting a handout though I can see how that's easy to read. I don't have the answers on how to achieve it, but policy changes to shift more people up the class chain rather than pushing them down is what I was thinking. Raising minimum wage, reducing service burdens on the individual, reducing the cost of housing, adjusting taxes perhaps. Generally freeing up money to be available and spent in the community and not caught up in financial instruments and real estate.

nradov 5y ago

In the SF Bay Area there is a lot of vacant land set aside as parks and open space. Should we develop that land for housing?

jacobr1 5y ago
No need, the problem in the bay area is density.

rmbyrro 5y ago

I think a real issue is the cost of infrastructure and network effects. Essentially, a big corporation could buy cheap rural land close to a big city, develop a small city there and reap the "overpricing" benefits. But it's very expensive to build the basic infra. And even more expensive to convince enough people to move there and create minimum network effects for it to become a "real" community and livable space.