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Honestly have no clue how humanity expects to tackle this. We're essentially operating an eternal monopoly game (someone got there before you, sorry future kid

• uoaei 4y ago
  Remember when everyone was ragging on China for building "ghost cities" and "subways to nowhere"? You look at those locations today and they are bustling metropolises, engines of innovation and prosperity, a huge boon for the urbanizing middle class of China. The answer is just to build more housing.
• coding123 4y ago
  there are 16 million empty homes in the us. start there. Someone owns them, raise the taxes on them until someone lives in them.
  • oneoff786 4y ago
    Are they near jobs
    • coding123 4y ago
      at least 54k of them are in the bay area
      • jpatt 4y ago
        Because nothing in life is allowed to be simple, "vacant" in this context can actually mean a lot of things. Here's a break down of the 2020 figure of 34k +/- 1.6k: > - 6,694 of those vacancies were units currently listed for rent that hadn’t yet found tenants. Another 1,031 were homes for sale that didn’t yet have buyers. > - 6,294 were homes with either current owners or renters that were just not living there. This can happen for any number of reasons: hospital stays, long trips out of town, delayed move-ins, even cases of homeowners who have died but are still technically counted as the resident. > - 8,523 were “occasional use” homes—i.e., these were second homes, vacation homes, some types of short-term rentals, or just any unit that was accounted for but not lived in most of the year. (The Mercury-News references these but classifies them separately from vacant homes, whereas the census considers these vacancies in themselves.) > - Finally, the census designated 11,760 homes in the catch-all category of “other vacant.” "Other vacant." Is a hodge-podge of condemned units, units in foreclosure, units in renovation or seismic retrofitting, a plethora of other corner cases and odds and ends, and homes actually just sitting empty doing not much. (source: https://sf.curbed.com/2020/2/24/21149381/san-francisco-vacant-homes-census-five-year-2020 https://sf.curbed.com/2020/2/24/21149381/san-francisco-vacan...)
        • coding123 4y ago
          It just seems crazy to me that we have a home for every homeless person but because of book keeping we can't do it. We seem to have an excuse for everything.
  • khuey 4y ago
    An empty home in rural Iowa is not a substitute for a home in a thriving urban area.
    • kelseyfrog 4y ago
      This rebuttal would be easier to accept if it was paired with a population & vacancy density map to back it up. There surely exist rural vacancies, but am I to understand that you believe most vacancies are rural?
      • khuey 4y ago
        The states with the highest vacancy rates are pretty rural (and Florida, which likely has lots of vacation homes). https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/vacancy-rates-study/ https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/vacancy-rates-stud...
        • kelseyfrog 4y ago
          Thank you. My search yielded similar results[1]. I'm a bit stuck on exactly how to parse this. Vacancy rates, while a fine metric for answering some questions, don't seem to be well suited to this one. Vacancies per capita might be more along the lines of what I'm interested in. 1. https://landgeist.com/2021/08/03/vacancy-rate-in-the-us/ https://landgeist.com/2021/08/03/vacancy-rate-in-the-us/
  • welshwelsh 4y ago
    Many of those houses are simply between owners, in need of repairs, in abandoned towns nobody wants to live in etc I'd prefer if we focus on simply increasing the supply. Ban single family house zoning. Encourage more high density apartment buildings. Build more cities.
• oneoff786 4y ago
  Land value taxes. Wean people off real estate as an investment into real estate as a liability.
  • hanniabu 4y ago
    That's pretty hostile against conservationists that own property to save habitats rather than churn a profit. This will inevitably lead to this land winding up in the hands of a capitalist that will destroy it in order to make money on it.
    • metacritic12 4y ago
      Let the people through governments declare property as parks or preserves. This "conversationalist" approach is what NIMBYs hide behind. We can't build in Las Vegas because of a tortoise species. We can't go beyond N levels due to "conserving" the history of a district. Let the public (ideally across a broad area like a state or country) decide what areas need to be conserved for habitats. Don't let private land trusts / conservationlists be the mask that NIMBYs hide behind.
    • kec 4y ago
      If something is truly valuable to protect it should be done by the government (who can simply nope out of LVT for the plot) rather than some random jerk (or who's kids) that might change their mind.
      • shswkna 4y ago
        Your argument doesn’t hold up. A government can change its mind and priorities too. The diversity of right holders (private, government etc) over land ensures some good prevails through various political, social or economic circumstances.
        • kec 4y ago
          Well, it's held up for ~150 years in the form of our national parks just fine. That aside, the point here is that if something is being held for the common good, it should be held in common. "The Government" isn't a perfect check or steward, but there's actual accountably there, something which does not exist at all in the case of private ownership.
• zaptheimpaler 4y ago
  Build enough housing for everyone. Build more than necessary so that there's slack and flexibility to move. There's no similar monopoly dynamic with cars or phones or thousands of other goods. We just make a lot of them. Oversupply will take care of the downstream issues. They will cease to be good investments and become commodities. Rents will have to come down in a competitive market. Oversupply will have to be on a regional level. A vacant house in a small town doesn't compensate for an occupied house in a city 100km away. Zoning laws prevent this in the US/Canada in many places. Existing homeowners don't want to change. More houses means more crowding, higher traffic, construction noise, obstructed skylines, more pressure on schools, police etc. We can't accept that argument when weighed against homelessness or poverty anymore. Fuck their skylines, shelter is a basic necessity and it often has to be close to work, shopping, school etc. Living in the middle of nowhere is not an option.
  • pydry 4y ago
    Land needs to be legally switched from an asset into a liability before the market will build housing supply with the same enthusiasm it builds phones. Land redistribution (which is structurally similar) only really tends to happen after a revolution and that tends to be bloody. Landowners throw resources at violent and politically extreme reactionaries to send off the threat of their rent entitlements being democratically revoked. So, it's unlikely to happen soon and if it does happen it'll probably get pretty ugly first. The path of least resistance will be a gradual slide into a kind of neofeudalism.
  • toomuchtodo 4y ago
    Now convince capital to do it (because most governments won't) with very low potential returns due to oversupply. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1510262323176374278.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1510262323176374278.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30891217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30891217 Great comment from the above thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30897398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30897398
    • Ancalagon 4y ago
• jon_adler 4y ago
  Targeted taxes. Higher income taxes on rent deriving from residential property, higher capital gains taxes on residential property and higher inheritance taxes on secondary homes. This would of course require political will. What it would do is make residential property a much less attractive financial investment. The other recent phenomenon/issue is loose monetary policy. When interest rates are too low, asset values increase. We have just had a period of very low rates for an extended period of time. As interest rates rise, prices should level out or drop off.
  • gedy 4y ago
    > What it would do is make residential property a much less attractive financial investment. While I agree with this, bear in mind that for some people, housing is the only "investment"/inflation hedge available to them. Without public pensions, lower to middle class people need something to fund retirement and we should be careful that " make residential property a much less attractive financial investment" doesn't just hurt those people vs the REIC, Berkshire Hathaways, etc.
  • mym1990 4y ago
    Wouldn't the higher taxes just be passed off to the renter?
    • slt2021 4y ago
      rent is always priced to maximum of purchasing power. If there was any more leeway to raise rent and keep renters, it would have been raised already by landlord
      • mym1990 4y ago
        This seems to be a textbook answer, but in reality we live in a world where people(renters and homeowners) have imperfect information. There is no renter out there that knows exactly how much they can get to the dollar. They have to compare with market prices and make a reasonable guess.
    • 4y ago
• jollybean 4y ago
  ??? There is plenty of land in most places, and notably, people die. 'lack of space' is not the issue for the most part.
  • stevenhuang 4y ago
    There is not enough land where it matters, in city metros, where most people live.
    • jollybean 4y ago
      Yeah, no, those areas only 'matter' because people want to live there. It's largely a choice, not a need. You don't get to live in the choicest places in the country, that's not part of the equality deal.
• Victerius 4y ago
  By national governments asserting themselves and: - Overriding local governments and HOAs and loosening zoning regulations. Let developers build almost any kind of housing almost anywhere they want. - Banning or severely restricting the sale of residential units to companies, LLCs, and corporations. - Using taxpayer money to train more construction workers and building more houses, then selling them on the open market - Banning the sale of land and housing to non citizens or non residents
  • lodovic 4y ago
    Letting "developers build almost any kind of housing almost anywhere they want" leads to Belgium, famous for its ugly houses, and high on the list in the article. It creates horrible infrastructure problems, and is terrible if you also value nature.
• wollsmoth 4y ago
  Well, I live in a city that has designated many buildings as historic for one reason or another, and seems kinda slow to approve new buildings. There is some interest in building affordable housing, and making new developments include affordable housing. That's all great, but I think we really just need more units, and maybe not every building that's 100 years old needs to be preserved for eternity.
  • rootusrootus 4y ago
    As someone who lives in an area with similar problems, I agree. We need to quit designating buildings as historical based on their age. Unless something actually notable happened there, it should not be considered historic. Bulldoze it and build something more efficient. Society moves forward.
    • wizofaus 4y ago
      At least where I live it's the historic houses that are worth more than the newer ones, partly because there's a limited supply of them, but partly because the desirability of a house often has little to do with what's "efficent". Further limiting the supply by reducing the number of them is only going drive such house prices up. I'd also note there are plenty of cities with massive housing affordability problems but little in the way of historic buildings (Hong Kong, San Jose & much of SV etc.). Even in my own city (which often rates as one of the least affordable for housing), historic buildings make up a small percentage of total housing.
  • dexwiz 4y ago
    I think we will see a reckoning of this in USA in the next few decades. "Classic" houses like colonial or victorian style houses are venerated and preserved, but live on mostly due to survivorship biases. These were the houses of the elite, and they could afford better building materials or adornments deemed historically valuable. Most houses built since 1920 don't have the same value. But the meme of "old=worth preserving" still lingers on. In San Francisco there are old row homes built as temporary housing after the 1906 Earthquake. They are preserved only due to their age, not any intrinsic value. Houses built in first half and mid century are developing major structural issues. Their foundations may be cracking beyond repair. Their plumbing and electrical are several generations beyond current standard. They may have been built in a more temperate climate and lack central heating/cooling. Their layout may not make sense for a modern lifestyle. These houses should be torn down, and new ones built in their place. But this is really difficult to do in some areas due to preservation committees holding on to every scrap of history. Instead you get completely insane practices like gutting a house except for 4 posts and rebuilding a new house within it. Or building a new houses around an old one. The lot next to my apartment was like that. Instead of razing the structure and building a new one, they had to engineer a way to build a new house around what was a literal rotting shack. The new structure retains almost 0 of the original framing, and definitely retains none of its architectural features. So the project cost probably hundred of thousands more, and took months longer, just to satisfy some petty council's need to never tear down an old building. As the oldest generation dies off, I would hope to see these attitudes change, and the USA open to more rebuilding. But unfortunately these rules will remain on the books. The capital class has no incentive to change it, because it would disrupt their control over the housing supply.
• ParksNet 4y ago
  Deport all illegal immigrants across the West, and increase standards for legal immigration. Aim for steady-state population levels, and immigration exchange only with similarly-developed nations. Right now we are trading housing (and food, water, government services) for cheap labor in many countries.
  • kelseyfrog 4y ago
    Which policies, if implemented, would aim for steady-state population levels?
  • MrMan 4y ago
    This is exactly the wrong approach. The only growth most developed nations can expect is going to come from immigrants.
    • HWR_14 4y ago
      Why would countries need to keep growing in population?
      • jon_adler 4y ago
        Because most western economies face an age related economic time bomb. The “locals” are all getting older. The immigrants are usually young, productive and bear more children.
        • notch656a 4y ago
          More capital per productive worker isn't really a bad thing for the individual worker, IMO. Most of the 'time bomb' is the liablities time bomb for social security / medicare and other entitlements to the elderly. They expect the young to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and voted for policies to destroy the young, so you could say it would be fair play to vote to cut off social security and medicare to the elderly and let them pick themselves up by their own bootstraps so we can avoid the liabilities time bomb.
• dv_dt 4y ago
  Ban commercial ownership of residential properties. That's the headline, but more complex to implement than the headline. To be able to fund and build large residential apartment or condo complexes, you need cities to be able to charter projects and hand them off to tenant ownership or renters associations.
  • kansface 4y ago
    Who puts up the money to do the projects? Which party eats the losses? How would this actually result in more housing?
    • kelseyfrog 4y ago
      > Who puts up the money to do the projects? Individuals, or lenders through financing. > Which party eats the losses? Lenders > How would this actually result in more housing? Really interesting in how this would be modeled.
  • rootusrootus 4y ago
    What about folks who don't want to own? Renting has upsides and some people actually prefer it.
    • kitsunesoba 4y ago
      Small time (e.g. 1-2 extra properties) landlords would still exist.
    • dv_dt 4y ago
      The city could own housing managed by renters associations
• Ekaros 4y ago
  Build a lot. And I mean a lot. We should go back to post war levels in Europe. Also make a system that forces replacement of low density housing near cities where there is suitable public transit available.
  • jbay808 4y ago
    China has been building a lot, and I mean a lot. But their housing market is perhaps the most broken of all, and it hasn't done wonders for affordability. Or not yet anyway; if we see the bubble pop it perhaps will, but that's far from a clean solution. The crux is how do you incentivize building a lot, and I mean a lot, without expectations of appreciating property values? And yet if you have expectations of appreciating property values, how do you prevent speculators from driving up prices and making things unaffordable?
• gadders 4y ago
  Reducing immigration would help. You're never going to lower prices whilst increasing demand.
  • rhexs 4y ago
    How are people going to find someone to mow their lawn at 40$ a month or raise their children with under-the-table tax free payments without immigration? How do we drive down tech salaries without immigration? How do we subsidize fast food and farmers without immigration? No thank you.
    • gadders 4y ago
      Got to keep those profits high for the global elites.
• allendoerfer 4y ago
  Historically you just do debt reliefs every few hundred years and start fresh. Worked out pretty well so far (I would rather live now than any time before).
• rapind 4y ago
  Pretty sure this is going to solve itself due to a lack of population (workers) in the near future, unless your country is mass immigrating to keep up with the decline. There aren’t enough future kids for this scenario.
• ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Land value tax and a basic understanding in society that if house prices go up its a transfer of wealth from non-owners to owners, but not actually making the country richer, quite the opposite, it's just a type of inflation.
  • newaccount2021 4y ago
• vannevar 4y ago
  Turn the rental market on its head and cap enforceable rent at 20% of the renters household income at the time of signing the lease. Landlords would compete for higher-income renters, but there are only so many of those to go around. They would also probably offer under-the-table deals to renters who want to live in a more desirable area and don't have the income, but that's ok, they wouldn't be able to evict someone if their circumstances changed and they were unable to pay the extra. An interesting thought experiment, in any event.
  • ars 4y ago
    That's a great way of generating tremendous numbers of utter slums. Landlords would subdivide houses into individual rooms and rent them out. > they wouldn't be able to evict someone if their circumstances changed and they were unable to pay the extra. Maybe not via the courts, but they would just shot off the water, and the heat, and then invite unwanted guests to live in the "unoccupied" apartment, until the non-paying tenant left.
    • vannevar 4y ago
      >Landlords would subdivide houses into individual rooms and rent them out. Isn't our current crisis primarily a shortage of low income housing? Is all low income housing a "slum"? Landlords would be competing for good renters, so they would be incentivized to offer good living environments. >Maybe not via the courts, but they would just shot off the water, and the heat, and then invite unwanted guests to live in the "unoccupied" apartment, until the non-paying tenant left. They couldn't do so legally as long as the tenant continued to pay the official rent amount, any more than any landlord can currently shut off utilities to a tenant who is paid up on their rent.
• xdennis 4y ago
  Ban renting. You buy a house to live in it. If you don't want to live in it then sell it. Renting houses is literally rent-seeking. Additionally, remove all zoning laws. The free market will handle zoning. In the West in the 20th century governments implemented some common sense policies to keep socialism at bay. Countries that didn't, like Russia, were engulfed by socialists. Look at how many young people openly admit to being communists. If this rent-seeking is sustained we'll eventually get the Khmer Rouge.
  • GordonS 4y ago
    > Additionally, remove all zoning laws. The free market will handle zoning. Woah there, let's not throw the baby out with the bath water! Zoning laws in the US seem very broken, but they are much more sensible in much of the world. A free-for-all seems like a bad idea - would you really want to live next door to a knackers yard, an abattoir, a tannery, a coal power plant, a chemical plant, a fish processing factory etc, a rubbish dump, a night club?
    • CogitoCogito 4y ago
      > would you really want to live next door to a knackers yard, an abattoir, a tannery, a coal power plant, a chemical plant, a fish processing factory etc, a rubbish dump, a night club? I'm not sure about all of that, but I think having bars, restaurants, stores, etc. intermingled within short walking distance of houses in suburbs would certainly be great.
      • GordonS 4y ago
        Me too, and that's often how things work in countries other than the US - rationale zoning laws, not no zoning laws.
• sleepdreamy 4y ago
  This is the rule of the game for anything involving Capitol. If you didn't get there first/pioneer/inherit wealth then you are usually fucked in comparison to well-off parts of the population.
• infamouscow 4y ago
  All non-violent means of addressing this problem have been kicked down the road for decades precisely because it's too hard a pill to swallow. Consequently, the pill that everyone is going to swallow will be much worse. If you frame history through the lens of kicking problems down the road until enough people have nothing left to lose, history makes perfect sense.