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Americans can barely afford homes

56 points by jseliger 3y ago

droopyEyelids 3y ago
There's a simple material angle that people aren't talking about enough with all these discussions: Population growth has outpaced home construction (in the USA) for the past 20 years https://usafacts.org/articles/population-growth-has-outpaced-home-construction-for-20-years/ https://usafacts.org/articles/population-growth-has-outpaced...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bugglebeetle 3y ago
  …because housing has turned into a highly-financialized, speculative asset, whose value you drive up by limiting supply and through rentiering. When you can make more money from buying up homes and blocking construction than you can from building new ones, what results is the crisis we have. It’s the same in many countries (e.g. Canada).
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    If nothing changes I think the endgame is increasing ownership of housing by investment firms. As prices increase, they will be the only actors with consistent access to the kind of capital needed to buy real estate.
- mo1ok 3y ago
  No one wants to say it, but immigration is a huge driver of housing un-affordability. Skilled H1b immigration and/or foreign buyers drives up home prices, and unskilled illegal immigration drives up rents.
  - FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
    It's a mixed bag. Immigrant labor (sometimes illegal) also builds the houses. Second, while you're distracted worrying about who gets to come in to the US, you're going to ignore an equally important question: How can you get out?
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      Yep The 'Right' is a mix of strange bed fellows. The Right -> Support Business which desires immigrants, they need cheap workers and to keep wages down. The Right -> The people displaced by immigrants that want to ban them. The Right is a bit schizophrenic.
      - fragmede 3y ago
        It's almost as if collapsing personal beliefs into a two dimensional scale doesn't work!
        FrustratedMonky 3y ago
        Well, there are only two parties. It is just a curiosity how the 'business' side with money, has convinced the poor Christians that Jesus was for free-markets and guns. How do they do it? Is it all marketing and posturing? Why are US Christians so un-Christian and so easily fooled?
        junofan 3y ago
        Not sure about free markets, but the Bible literally has Jesus telling poor people to sell their stuff until they can buy a sword for self-defense: https://www.bibleref.com/Luke/22/Luke-22-36.html https://www.bibleref.com/Luke/22/Luke-22-36.html
        FrustratedMonky 3y ago
        Was not aware of that one. Seems that even among Christians that passage is a little in debate. Was it a metaphor for spiritual sword? Was it just for show? or Real defense? "the sword that Jesus commands His disciples to acquire is not an iron sword but the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God." https://www.christianity.com/wiki/jesus-christ/what-did-jesus-mean-when-he-said-sell-your-cloak-and-buy-a-sword.html https://www.christianity.com/wiki/jesus-christ/what-did-jesu... "Maybe this explains why Jesus replied with “that is enough” in Luke 22:38 upon hearing that the disciples already possessed two swords: their purpose was for show, not for action. (Alternatively, He may have been frustrated with their resolute tendency to accept His teachings literally)." However, instead of thanking Peter for protecting Him, Jesus gives His disciple His own earful — of chastisement! “‘Put your sword back in its place,’ Jesus said to him, ‘for all who draw the sword will die by the sword” (Matthew 26:52). Additionally, He heals Malchus’ ear.
- quacked 3y ago
  Most people who talk about the housing shortage using the term "housing shortage" find it unethical to suggest restricting the rate at which new people are allowed to settle in the United States.
ecshafer 3y ago
Get rid of zoning, stop financializing homes as a financial asset, and this problem will go away. The market is actually pretty good at solving this issue. If homes get expensive, they'll replace houses with apartments and condos, or build more homes. This will increase supply to keep up with demand.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  Exactly. Housing shortages are a policy choice made by local and state voters. This is not a natural crisis.
  - pierat 3y ago
    Definitely. I tried to find a house in our nearby bigger city. The prices were 100k higher than I was planning on spending, and also had upwards of a 1 year wait to close because they were being used as a rental property. Instead, I was able to find a house in the nearby smaller town's outskirts. However that means that I live in the county, as I did before. It also means I have no say in the town's elections, nor do I have any say in the city's elections. And I'm 2000 feet away from the town, yet cant vote there. And I even worked in person in the bigger city, and lived in a trailer park 3 miles away from the city square, yet 1/3 of a mile away from the city. I spent 40 hours a week there, and no voting rights. I deserve a quarter of a vote given my taxes went there, and I was there quarter of my living hours. The ones who can afford to live there are the ones enforcing terrible laws, and are gatekeeping the rest of us out.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > I deserve a quarter of a vote given my taxes went there The City of London does this. It doesn’t work in America: you can easily defuse it by claiming they’re votes for corporations or point to a random wealthy person in the suburbs.
- starik36 3y ago
  I was about to call bullshit on your assertion about removing zoning. I did a quick look comparing Houston, which has no zoning laws at all, vs Dallas. https://www.bestplaces.net/compare-cities/houston_tx/dallas_tx/housing https://www.bestplaces.net/compare-cities/houston_tx/dallas_... It appears (without me knowing anything else about the area conditions), that prices in Dallas rise faster. On the other hand, I don't want my quiet neighborhood to explode with dense high rise apartments. I appreciate the peace and quiet.
pierat 3y ago
Well, yeah. That's what we collectively get when we turn a place to live into a for-profit hellhole where 'Money' (read: asset companies, landlords, flippers, AirBNB scalpers) keep the supply so the rest of us can't actually live. You all want to see the reality we have now? Go no further than "Married with Children", where a sole earner as a retail shoe salesman could have a 2 story house in a suburb with a car garage. Now, they'd be lucky for a 1 bedroom in a bad part of town. And this show wasn't about opulence - far from it. It was showing trashy white people and how "those" people live. And even they had a fucking house. Same with The Simpsons. It was "normal" to have a 2 story house with a garage, in a suburb with 1 parent working out of the house, and 1 parent stay-at-home. This normal left us in the late 90's and went BOOM with the 2000 .com-bomb . And you're getting squeezed HARD if you're in an apartment, trailer park, or trying to buy a house. Its not a place to live - it's a place to be a landlord and generate continual rent on those you're extorting. And with 40 years of deregulation and pro-capitalist pro-landlord actions and laws, this will only get worse and worse. Biden is only the scapegoat for 40 years of terrible policy, that both the R's and D's both engaged in. Both parties extensively are part and engage in the landlord class. In fact, the constitution only initially allowed the landlord (land-owner) class to vote.
- ojbyrne 3y ago
  I’m not sure basing an argument on houses in television shows is useful.
  - pierat 3y ago
    It's not an argument on houses in TV - it's showing that it was normalized enough that popular culture considered this normal. But whatever. Shits fucked, and you're arguing over what I said was a depiction of the time? Of course it was a TV show. It was also believable in those days, even for lower class people. What's worse is now, we look at them and we can't even see us owning a house, like a lousy shoe salesman could. Seriously - can you imagine ANYONE surviving in a house or even an apartment on retail? That used to be true. No longer.
    - 3y ago
mcntsh 3y ago
Online discourse really centers around American home affordability, but the sad truth is that the situation is worse in much of the world.
- achrono 3y ago
  cough O, Canada! cough
- cpursley 3y ago
  It’s actually not. Much of the rest of the world has plenty of housing. And lunch better land planning.
  - ayakang31415 3y ago
    Hong Kong and South Korea disagrees with you
  - mcntsh 3y ago
    In which countries specifically? If you're European the situation is completely hopeless.
  - simonsarris 3y ago
    No, he's right. Compare price:income ratio, or mortage as % of income, of countries: https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_country.jsp https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_count... The US has it better than almost anywhere.
    - adaml_623 3y ago
      Can you explain to me what "Mortgage as a percentage of income" means when it's over 100%?
      - mcntsh 3y ago
        It means the median mortgage cost per month is higher than the median income per month.
endisneigh 3y ago
as long as Americans generally hate each other, they will never make housing accessible as it invites the supposed riff-raff. sad, but true. fun fact - you as an individual have disproportionate ability to block construction in your municipality. in any case, despite all its problems, housing per sqft in America is still among the cheapest in the western hemisphere, let alone the world. expect things to get much worse. good luck.
- astrange 3y ago
  > in any case, despite all its problems, housing per sqft in America is still among the cheapest in the western hemisphere, let alone the world. expect things to get much worse. good luck. That's true because we just have so much land, so there's still empty space, but it's not true of areas where the good jobs are. Having said that, it is worse in every other Anglo country (especially Ireland and the UK) because at least our zoning allows some by-right development, but they instead banned development entiely.
demizer 3y ago
The American idea of a single family home with a lawn and lot size needs to change. And the people that have these don't want new construction in the neighborhood that is dense. Homeowners are fighting back against multiplexes and apartment buildings, and especially against low-income housing.
- kderbyma 3y ago
  it worked for decades....wow such progress...we live like shit....ummm no...how about we stop moving the goal posts into the ground....
- justrealist 3y ago
  > The American idea of a single family home with a lawn and lot size needs to change There's nothing wrong with this vision, in fact allowing infill in certain neighborhoods will make it cheaper and easier to have large yards elsewhere. There aren't infinite people to fill infinite apartments!
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    There's not infinite land within commuting distance to the job centers. In the large metro areas almost all available land has been turned into single family homes. If we want to expand housing some people will need to live in multifamily.
thamer 3y ago
http://archive.is/06Gsa http://archive.is/06Gsa
- devin 3y ago
  These links no longer work for me. Anyone have a hint?
  - bombcar 3y ago
    You're using cloud flare DNS, switch DNS providers. The fight is boring, the fix is easy.
    - devin 3y ago
      Thanks. Suggestions?
      - bombcar 3y ago
        Anything else works, google at 8.8.8.8 for example. If you're fancy and footloose you can set a specific DNS destination for those domains. Or you could use mulvad or something: https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls/ https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls/
      - MrDrMcCoy 3y ago
        NextDNS lets you set up profiles with adblocking and overrides, and is free.
  - artificial 3y ago
    Which DNS provider is performing the lookups?
  - tick_tock_tick 3y ago
    archive.is Blocks some DNS resolvers. The person running it has some weird bone to pick he doesn't like that Cloudflare doesn't forward the requests subnet but only blocks Cloudflare not the dozens of other DNS resolvers that don't support it. They actually don't even block they intentionally give bad ips back.
bfrog 3y ago
One aspect of the Philippines that amazed me was that you need to be Filipino to own land. Why this concept is so difficult to realize in the USA is baffling.
- triyambakam 3y ago
  This would help Hawaii a lot. Lots of Chinese and other foreign investment.
starik36 3y ago
The big elephant in the room is that the amount of people in the market has greatly increased because the population in this country exploded. For instance, California population almost doubled since 1980 (25m to nearly 40m). And some cities have been built out in the 90s to the point where there is no more space (pretty much any city in Southern California comes to mind). So yeah, given the smaller amount of inventory and more buyers, the basic economics state that the prices will rise.
- astrange 3y ago
  > And some cities have been built out in the 90s to the point where there is no more space (pretty much any city in Southern California comes to mind). The more space can be found in: - any lot zoned R-1 that could be a duplex or better. - the air above any single story building. It's not difficult; just compare your city to somewhere like Tokyo or Barcelona, which are both much nicer.
  - strangattractor 3y ago
    In California building up requires earthquake consideration making the building more expensive.
    - astrange 3y ago
      It's not much different up to 4-5 stories and it's not a problem in Japan. Also, you should assume that anything Californians say is a lie and they just don't want to do it. NIMBYs are very, very advanced at this.
      - strangattractor 3y ago
        Wow first time I have been called liar by anyone. My only point was that as you increase the size and height of homes/structures in an earthquake zone it becomes more expensive due to earthquakes mitigations. You may be able to build less expensive structures in other places. Simply changing the Zoning does not necessarily automagically make the homes less expensive. Comparing Apple to Oranges IMO: In 2020, forest land covered about 66.2 percent of the land in Japan. While cultivated land accounted for around 11.6 percent, only just over three percent of the land was used for housing. Due to its mountainous geography, only a small part of Japan's 37.8 million hectares of land is habitable.Jun 28, 2023 https://www.statista.com/statistics/1276355/japan-land-use-distribution-by-category/#:~:text=In%202020%2C%20forest%20land%20covered,hectares%20of%20land%20is%20habitable https://www.statista.com/statistics/1276355/japan-land-use-d....
Workaccount2 3y ago
This really isn't going to change, because it requires people with control to voluntarily sabotage their personal investments. Liberal or conservative, it doesn't matter. All groups of people like to preserve and grow their own wealth. Even worse is the absolute fuckery from the fed*, which has now created a "Have and Have Not" home owner situation. Where those who are blessed have insanely valuable 3% mortgages on pre-inflation home purchases, and the Have Nots are stuck looking at high rates on heavily appreciated home values. If they can even find a home - you'd have to be forced or brain damaged to give up your juicy 3% mortgage. So what is the solution? There really isn't one. The government will do the same old trick of passing "feel good affordable home" legislation, that ultimately does noting, because you cannot make housing affordable without lowering the value of your voters homes. *This is in reference to the fed being the entity that makes fixed rate mortgages possible. That cost must be borne somewhere, and it is now being carried by non-homeowners. Banks sure as shit wouldn't give out fixed low rates if they couldn't dump them on the fed's balance sheet.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  The Fed's mandates are full employment and price stability. The benchmark rate and their ability to buy various flavors of securities (bonds, etc) are the only tools at their disposal. The US economy is at full employment and almost back to the 2% inflation target ("soft landing"). If there was more supply of housing, higher mortgage rates would drive down asset values, but there isn't enough supply (for various; reasons the country has underbuilt for two decades, people tied to their low rate mortgages who won't move now, etc). If you can coax new supply on the market at sufficient quantity, those transactions at these money rates will drag down comparables via lower price transactions over time. How quickly is a function of new supply velocity.
- astrange 3y ago
  It is possible and voters do support it. Nobody has lost an election for being a YIMBY yet. But the trick is that it has to be done by legislation at non-local levels, because voters only try to restrict competition at local levels. > because you cannot make housing affordable without lowering the value of your voters homes. That would be deflation, but we can still have disinflation. If housing prices stop increasing, then they'll increase by less than wage growth, making them more affordable. Also, voters may realize that increasing the value of their homes doesn't make them richer if it also increases the price of other homes they want/need to move to.
Overtonwindow 3y ago
"Americans can barely afford homes.. where they want to live." There, fixed it. America is full of affordable homes but they're not in cute little walkable communities. Zoning, demand, and density has driven up the price of homes in cities. People can afford homes, they just don't want to live in those places.
- vonwoodson 3y ago
  Agreed! Not everyone gets to live in a place with 10/10 schools, within 20 minutes of their work, and next to a "World-class Shopping Resort". Meanwhile small towns across America are shrinking into oblivion because they are "boring". If we were to put just a hint of "Go West Young Man" spirit into the youth, in 20 years we would have thousands more beautiful, livable cities across America. Did you know that, when the rail roads were built that there were hundreds of railway towns built. Many of which have high-speed internet (backbones laid in trans-continental railway easements in the 90's) and affordable homes. And, get this, have access to The Railway to ship goods to and from town. I feel like this is completely untapped potential in America today. Also, did you know that, the population growth of every city in the world was negative until the 20th century (meaning people would die faster in the cities than the rate they were being born). America has only been an "Urban" collection of nations since the 1920's, meaning we are only now re-discovering how awful cities really are. We definitely should spread---out.
  - Izikiel43 3y ago
    > Go West Young Man California is probably the most populous state of the usa, so young men have been going west for a long while now.
    - vonwoodson 3y ago
      ok.. ok.. If you're already in California, go back east.
- beej71 3y ago
  It also has to be affordable to live in those places where houses are cheap. If there are no nearby jobs, for example, it's just not viable even if the house is free.
vonwoodson 3y ago
If you're a young person who is hell-bent on owning a home, you should consider military service. The VA Loan is the easiest way into a mortgage with no money down, with location-specific terms to help you land a place to live in your hometown. Myself and my veteran friends (or their spouses) are the only people I "went to HS with" who are home owners today (now in our late 30's early 40's). You can wish in one hand, or you can actually do something to help yourself achieve your dreams. Just don't do anything stupid, like get shot.
runako 3y ago
Browsing realtor.com makes it looks like a strange choice to set this article in Milwaukee. I'm looking at listings for habitable houses well under $100k, some below $50k. There's a $44k listing that is not quite 20 blocks from the neighborhood where one couple stretched to buy. I would have loved for the author to write more about why a budget-conscious couple opted not to look at homes that could be purchased for under $350/mo, even at today's interest rates.
- WkndTriathlete 3y ago
  At those prices in Milwaukee those houses are in neighborhoods where the houses are constantly robbed. They may be cheap but they certainly are not conducive to raising a growing young family.
  - runako 3y ago
    It’s literally affordable housing, in a neighborhood where people live. Lots of folks want to live in houses their income won’t support.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    Tons of people live in those neighborhoods
jscipione 3y ago
Remember kids, when you can't afford a home know that it is all Democrats fault for destroying the economy through inflation by printing money to bail out their friends and to pay for vaccines and war.
- pauldenton 3y ago
  It has to do more with regulatory burdens in Democrat strongholds https://youtu.be/ExgxwKnH8y4 https://youtu.be/ExgxwKnH8y4 Can't have your building cast a shadow on a school playground (you haven't paid bribes to the right city officials to get rid of their roadblocks)
iteratethis 3y ago
Here in the Netherlands we've had a supply shortage since WW2, which makes a supply shortage the status quo. There's no hidden conspiracy or grand government policy that causes it. There's multiple root causes but an overlooked one is the delayed supply shock effect of an economic downturn. During the crash years of 2008-2014, we pretty much stopped building. Because nobody was buying. This has created a backlog of a few 100K homes never built compared to what population growth would normally require. It is this backlog that creates a boom 10 years later where for a few years in a row homes appreciate by 15-20% per year. They always appreciate a little, but it is mostly these price spike events that makes homes unaffordable. So ideally, you keep building even during a downturn, but nobody can subsidize that. The budget would be eye-watering and would be coming at the time of budget cuts, not increases. We're already working on a new deficit. A lot of projects are stopped because due to the high interest rates, demand has crashed. Similarly, a lot of well intended policies have the exact opposite effect. We're more heavily taxing citizens renting out their second homes. As it then becomes barely profitable, they just sell it. Even less rental homes. We're heavily constraining investors that do big projects. Fair enough, we'll just not do the project then. We even went as far as to mandate some new homes to be exclusively built for particular professions, say a teacher. They need affordable homes close to the city. A builder looks at this and will simply build the same home elsewhere, and sell it for a 100K more. You can tweak taxes for newcomers on the market, giving them more budget to buy their first home. This makes houses more expensive, not cheaper. And I'm not even addressing the political realities of government and municipality budgets depending on tax revenue based on current valuations (or at least high valuations), or the fact that the voter majority is aging and this being part of their retirement. You can take somebody from GenZ and give them dictator powers and they still can't solve it, without the "solution" being worse than the problem. You can't fix this. You can tweak and improve, but you cannot truly move the needle.
- fragmede 3y ago
  > A builder looks at this and will simply build the same home elsewhere, and sell it for a 100K more. The obvious solution is for the government to subsidize housing. If the government puts 100K in towards the cost of building a house, then that developer can walk away with the same amount of money because it cost them 100k less to build.
rich_sasha 3y ago
It struck me recently that this may be because people are flocking to cities - and the same cities that existed 100 years ago. I don't have any statistics, but city dwelling must have exploded over the past 50 years or so. Economies used to be so much more based around agriculture and industry, even around WWII. Agriculture was less mechanized, needing more people, factories are often based away from big cities. With these branches of economy in decline, more and more people are competing for the limited space in cities. And this surplus in demand doesn't easily lead to an increase of supply, as economics would dictate, because that would necessitate new cities. We used to found new cities. Car makers in the US and Europe (Volkswagen for example), Milton Keynes in the UK is founded from scratch in 1950s. But no longer, and so "knowledge economy" workers, numbers ever increasing, will compete for proximity to the same few city centres as before. Perhaps this is one advantage SV had in the early days (I've never been so might be very wrong here), but in the early days of SV, there was a lot of cities/towns to support a significant body of "knowledge economy workers". SV seems quite diversified, it's not like it is all based in SF, but there's lots of smaller towns that are sufficiently city-like. But of course that has a limit too, so it would seem like SV is past that saturation point too and in the same point as other urban areas. To change this situation, we either need more remote work, or new cities. It'll be very interesting to see how the new Californian city fares. I won't hold my breath for the Saudi one - but of course you never know.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  There are several factors in play in the US that put pressure on existing long-term residents. - Rural/suburban -> city migration - Immigration of wealthy people from all over the world to the US. California is an obvious and frequent destination for Pacific Rim peoples. - REITs and other large investors snapping-up real estate only to idle it or rent it out at a premium. - Zoning restrictions - Massive open space preserves immediately adjacent to suburban and residential areas, blocking usable land for growth - Lack of efficient, convenient, high speed public transit: CalTrain and VTA Light Rail are largely inconvenient for all but a small fraction of people. Faster, more efficient public transit allows housing to be more spread out. California has been promising high speed rail about as long as the flying car and fusion power have been "just around the corner". There is another factor for older residents in California dissuading them from moving: losing Prop 13. Another worrisome trend in US is the numbers of giant SUVs replacing mid-sized passenger cars. Vehicles that are heavier, less safe to pedestrians, less safe to drive, and less safe for occupants in a collision because they don't have to meet passenger car standards.
vaadu 3y ago
Afford what kind of home? Too many people want far more than they need or can afford. Giving up the beach vacation and the latest iphone would help.

56 points by jseliger 3y ago

There's a simple material angle that people aren't talking about enough with all these discussions: Population growth has outpaced home construction (in the USA) for the past 20 years https://usafacts.org/articles/population-growth-has-outpaced-home-construction-for-20-years/ https://usafacts.org/articles/population-growth-has-outpaced...

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bugglebeetle 3y ago
…because housing has turned into a highly-financialized, speculative asset, whose value you drive up by limiting supply and through rentiering. When you can make more money from buying up homes and blocking construction than you can from building new ones, what results is the crisis we have. It’s the same in many countries (e.g. Canada).
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  If nothing changes I think the endgame is increasing ownership of housing by investment firms. As prices increase, they will be the only actors with consistent access to the kind of capital needed to buy real estate.
mo1ok 3y ago
No one wants to say it, but immigration is a huge driver of housing un-affordability. Skilled H1b immigration and/or foreign buyers drives up home prices, and unskilled illegal immigration drives up rents.
- FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
  It's a mixed bag. Immigrant labor (sometimes illegal) also builds the houses. Second, while you're distracted worrying about who gets to come in to the US, you're going to ignore an equally important question: How can you get out?
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Yep The 'Right' is a mix of strange bed fellows. The Right -> Support Business which desires immigrants, they need cheap workers and to keep wages down. The Right -> The people displaced by immigrants that want to ban them. The Right is a bit schizophrenic.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      It's almost as if collapsing personal beliefs into a two dimensional scale doesn't work!
      - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
        Well, there are only two parties. It is just a curiosity how the 'business' side with money, has convinced the poor Christians that Jesus was for free-markets and guns. How do they do it? Is it all marketing and posturing? Why are US Christians so un-Christian and so easily fooled?
        junofan 3y ago
        Not sure about free markets, but the Bible literally has Jesus telling poor people to sell their stuff until they can buy a sword for self-defense: https://www.bibleref.com/Luke/22/Luke-22-36.html https://www.bibleref.com/Luke/22/Luke-22-36.html
        FrustratedMonky 3y ago
        Was not aware of that one. Seems that even among Christians that passage is a little in debate. Was it a metaphor for spiritual sword? Was it just for show? or Real defense? "the sword that Jesus commands His disciples to acquire is not an iron sword but the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God." https://www.christianity.com/wiki/jesus-christ/what-did-jesus-mean-when-he-said-sell-your-cloak-and-buy-a-sword.html https://www.christianity.com/wiki/jesus-christ/what-did-jesu... "Maybe this explains why Jesus replied with “that is enough” in Luke 22:38 upon hearing that the disciples already possessed two swords: their purpose was for show, not for action. (Alternatively, He may have been frustrated with their resolute tendency to accept His teachings literally)." However, instead of thanking Peter for protecting Him, Jesus gives His disciple His own earful — of chastisement! “‘Put your sword back in its place,’ Jesus said to him, ‘for all who draw the sword will die by the sword” (Matthew 26:52). Additionally, He heals Malchus’ ear.
quacked 3y ago
Most people who talk about the housing shortage using the term "housing shortage" find it unethical to suggest restricting the rate at which new people are allowed to settle in the United States.

ecshafer 3y ago

Get rid of zoning, stop financializing homes as a financial asset, and this problem will go away. The market is actually pretty good at solving this issue. If homes get expensive, they'll replace houses with apartments and condos, or build more homes. This will increase supply to keep up with demand.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
Exactly. Housing shortages are a policy choice made by local and state voters. This is not a natural crisis.
- pierat 3y ago
  Definitely. I tried to find a house in our nearby bigger city. The prices were 100k higher than I was planning on spending, and also had upwards of a 1 year wait to close because they were being used as a rental property. Instead, I was able to find a house in the nearby smaller town's outskirts. However that means that I live in the county, as I did before. It also means I have no say in the town's elections, nor do I have any say in the city's elections. And I'm 2000 feet away from the town, yet cant vote there. And I even worked in person in the bigger city, and lived in a trailer park 3 miles away from the city square, yet 1/3 of a mile away from the city. I spent 40 hours a week there, and no voting rights. I deserve a quarter of a vote given my taxes went there, and I was there quarter of my living hours. The ones who can afford to live there are the ones enforcing terrible laws, and are gatekeeping the rest of us out.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > I deserve a quarter of a vote given my taxes went there The City of London does this. It doesn’t work in America: you can easily defuse it by claiming they’re votes for corporations or point to a random wealthy person in the suburbs.
starik36 3y ago
I was about to call bullshit on your assertion about removing zoning. I did a quick look comparing Houston, which has no zoning laws at all, vs Dallas. https://www.bestplaces.net/compare-cities/houston_tx/dallas_tx/housing https://www.bestplaces.net/compare-cities/houston_tx/dallas_... It appears (without me knowing anything else about the area conditions), that prices in Dallas rise faster. On the other hand, I don't want my quiet neighborhood to explode with dense high rise apartments. I appreciate the peace and quiet.

pierat 3y ago

Well, yeah. That's what we collectively get when we turn a place to live into a for-profit hellhole where 'Money' (read: asset companies, landlords, flippers, AirBNB scalpers) keep the supply so the rest of us can't actually live. You all want to see the reality we have now? Go no further than "Married with Children", where a sole earner as a retail shoe salesman could have a 2 story house in a suburb with a car garage. Now, they'd be lucky for a 1 bedroom in a bad part of town. And this show wasn't about opulence - far from it. It was showing trashy white people and how "those" people live. And even they had a fucking house. Same with The Simpsons. It was "normal" to have a 2 story house with a garage, in a suburb with 1 parent working out of the house, and 1 parent stay-at-home. This normal left us in the late 90's and went BOOM with the 2000 .com-bomb . And you're getting squeezed HARD if you're in an apartment, trailer park, or trying to buy a house. Its not a place to live - it's a place to be a landlord and generate continual rent on those you're extorting. And with 40 years of deregulation and pro-capitalist pro-landlord actions and laws, this will only get worse and worse. Biden is only the scapegoat for 40 years of terrible policy, that both the R's and D's both engaged in. Both parties extensively are part and engage in the landlord class. In fact, the constitution only initially allowed the landlord (land-owner) class to vote.

ojbyrne 3y ago
I’m not sure basing an argument on houses in television shows is useful.
- pierat 3y ago
  It's not an argument on houses in TV - it's showing that it was normalized enough that popular culture considered this normal. But whatever. Shits fucked, and you're arguing over what I said was a depiction of the time? Of course it was a TV show. It was also believable in those days, even for lower class people. What's worse is now, we look at them and we can't even see us owning a house, like a lousy shoe salesman could. Seriously - can you imagine ANYONE surviving in a house or even an apartment on retail? That used to be true. No longer.
  - 3y ago

mcntsh 3y ago

Online discourse really centers around American home affordability, but the sad truth is that the situation is worse in much of the world.

achrono 3y ago
cough O, Canada! cough
cpursley 3y ago
It’s actually not. Much of the rest of the world has plenty of housing. And lunch better land planning.
- ayakang31415 3y ago
  Hong Kong and South Korea disagrees with you
- mcntsh 3y ago
  In which countries specifically? If you're European the situation is completely hopeless.
- simonsarris 3y ago
  No, he's right. Compare price:income ratio, or mortage as % of income, of countries: https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_country.jsp https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_count... The US has it better than almost anywhere.
  - adaml_623 3y ago
    Can you explain to me what "Mortgage as a percentage of income" means when it's over 100%?
    - mcntsh 3y ago
      It means the median mortgage cost per month is higher than the median income per month.

endisneigh 3y ago

as long as Americans generally hate each other, they will never make housing accessible as it invites the supposed riff-raff. sad, but true. fun fact - you as an individual have disproportionate ability to block construction in your municipality. in any case, despite all its problems, housing per sqft in America is still among the cheapest in the western hemisphere, let alone the world. expect things to get much worse. good luck.

astrange 3y ago
> in any case, despite all its problems, housing per sqft in America is still among the cheapest in the western hemisphere, let alone the world. expect things to get much worse. good luck. That's true because we just have so much land, so there's still empty space, but it's not true of areas where the good jobs are. Having said that, it is worse in every other Anglo country (especially Ireland and the UK) because at least our zoning allows some by-right development, but they instead banned development entiely.

demizer 3y ago

The American idea of a single family home with a lawn and lot size needs to change. And the people that have these don't want new construction in the neighborhood that is dense. Homeowners are fighting back against multiplexes and apartment buildings, and especially against low-income housing.

kderbyma 3y ago
it worked for decades....wow such progress...we live like shit....ummm no...how about we stop moving the goal posts into the ground....
justrealist 3y ago
> The American idea of a single family home with a lawn and lot size needs to change There's nothing wrong with this vision, in fact allowing infill in certain neighborhoods will make it cheaper and easier to have large yards elsewhere. There aren't infinite people to fill infinite apartments!
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  There's not infinite land within commuting distance to the job centers. In the large metro areas almost all available land has been turned into single family homes. If we want to expand housing some people will need to live in multifamily.

thamer 3y ago

http://archive.is/06Gsa http://archive.is/06Gsa

devin 3y ago
These links no longer work for me. Anyone have a hint?
- bombcar 3y ago
  You're using cloud flare DNS, switch DNS providers. The fight is boring, the fix is easy.
  - devin 3y ago
    Thanks. Suggestions?
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Anything else works, google at 8.8.8.8 for example. If you're fancy and footloose you can set a specific DNS destination for those domains. Or you could use mulvad or something: https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls/ https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls/
    - MrDrMcCoy 3y ago
      NextDNS lets you set up profiles with adblocking and overrides, and is free.
- artificial 3y ago
  Which DNS provider is performing the lookups?
- tick_tock_tick 3y ago
  archive.is Blocks some DNS resolvers. The person running it has some weird bone to pick he doesn't like that Cloudflare doesn't forward the requests subnet but only blocks Cloudflare not the dozens of other DNS resolvers that don't support it. They actually don't even block they intentionally give bad ips back.

bfrog 3y ago

One aspect of the Philippines that amazed me was that you need to be Filipino to own land. Why this concept is so difficult to realize in the USA is baffling.

triyambakam 3y ago
This would help Hawaii a lot. Lots of Chinese and other foreign investment.

starik36 3y ago

The big elephant in the room is that the amount of people in the market has greatly increased because the population in this country exploded. For instance, California population almost doubled since 1980 (25m to nearly 40m). And some cities have been built out in the 90s to the point where there is no more space (pretty much any city in Southern California comes to mind). So yeah, given the smaller amount of inventory and more buyers, the basic economics state that the prices will rise.

astrange 3y ago
> And some cities have been built out in the 90s to the point where there is no more space (pretty much any city in Southern California comes to mind). The more space can be found in: - any lot zoned R-1 that could be a duplex or better. - the air above any single story building. It's not difficult; just compare your city to somewhere like Tokyo or Barcelona, which are both much nicer.
- strangattractor 3y ago
  In California building up requires earthquake consideration making the building more expensive.
  - astrange 3y ago
    It's not much different up to 4-5 stories and it's not a problem in Japan. Also, you should assume that anything Californians say is a lie and they just don't want to do it. NIMBYs are very, very advanced at this.
    - strangattractor 3y ago
      Wow first time I have been called liar by anyone. My only point was that as you increase the size and height of homes/structures in an earthquake zone it becomes more expensive due to earthquakes mitigations. You may be able to build less expensive structures in other places. Simply changing the Zoning does not necessarily automagically make the homes less expensive. Comparing Apple to Oranges IMO: In 2020, forest land covered about 66.2 percent of the land in Japan. While cultivated land accounted for around 11.6 percent, only just over three percent of the land was used for housing. Due to its mountainous geography, only a small part of Japan's 37.8 million hectares of land is habitable.Jun 28, 2023 https://www.statista.com/statistics/1276355/japan-land-use-distribution-by-category/#:~:text=In%202020%2C%20forest%20land%20covered,hectares%20of%20land%20is%20habitable https://www.statista.com/statistics/1276355/japan-land-use-d....

Workaccount2 3y ago

This really isn't going to change, because it requires people with control to voluntarily sabotage their personal investments. Liberal or conservative, it doesn't matter. All groups of people like to preserve and grow their own wealth. Even worse is the absolute fuckery from the fed*, which has now created a "Have and Have Not" home owner situation. Where those who are blessed have insanely valuable 3% mortgages on pre-inflation home purchases, and the Have Nots are stuck looking at high rates on heavily appreciated home values. If they can even find a home - you'd have to be forced or brain damaged to give up your juicy 3% mortgage. So what is the solution? There really isn't one. The government will do the same old trick of passing "feel good affordable home" legislation, that ultimately does noting, because you cannot make housing affordable without lowering the value of your voters homes. *This is in reference to the fed being the entity that makes fixed rate mortgages possible. That cost must be borne somewhere, and it is now being carried by non-homeowners. Banks sure as shit wouldn't give out fixed low rates if they couldn't dump them on the fed's balance sheet.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
The Fed's mandates are full employment and price stability. The benchmark rate and their ability to buy various flavors of securities (bonds, etc) are the only tools at their disposal. The US economy is at full employment and almost back to the 2% inflation target ("soft landing"). If there was more supply of housing, higher mortgage rates would drive down asset values, but there isn't enough supply (for various; reasons the country has underbuilt for two decades, people tied to their low rate mortgages who won't move now, etc). If you can coax new supply on the market at sufficient quantity, those transactions at these money rates will drag down comparables via lower price transactions over time. How quickly is a function of new supply velocity.
astrange 3y ago
It is possible and voters do support it. Nobody has lost an election for being a YIMBY yet. But the trick is that it has to be done by legislation at non-local levels, because voters only try to restrict competition at local levels. > because you cannot make housing affordable without lowering the value of your voters homes. That would be deflation, but we can still have disinflation. If housing prices stop increasing, then they'll increase by less than wage growth, making them more affordable. Also, voters may realize that increasing the value of their homes doesn't make them richer if it also increases the price of other homes they want/need to move to.

Overtonwindow 3y ago

"Americans can barely afford homes.. where they want to live." There, fixed it. America is full of affordable homes but they're not in cute little walkable communities. Zoning, demand, and density has driven up the price of homes in cities. People can afford homes, they just don't want to live in those places.

vonwoodson 3y ago
Agreed! Not everyone gets to live in a place with 10/10 schools, within 20 minutes of their work, and next to a "World-class Shopping Resort". Meanwhile small towns across America are shrinking into oblivion because they are "boring". If we were to put just a hint of "Go West Young Man" spirit into the youth, in 20 years we would have thousands more beautiful, livable cities across America. Did you know that, when the rail roads were built that there were hundreds of railway towns built. Many of which have high-speed internet (backbones laid in trans-continental railway easements in the 90's) and affordable homes. And, get this, have access to The Railway to ship goods to and from town. I feel like this is completely untapped potential in America today. Also, did you know that, the population growth of every city in the world was negative until the 20th century (meaning people would die faster in the cities than the rate they were being born). America has only been an "Urban" collection of nations since the 1920's, meaning we are only now re-discovering how awful cities really are. We definitely should spread---out.
- Izikiel43 3y ago
  > Go West Young Man California is probably the most populous state of the usa, so young men have been going west for a long while now.
  - vonwoodson 3y ago
    ok.. ok.. If you're already in California, go back east.
beej71 3y ago
It also has to be affordable to live in those places where houses are cheap. If there are no nearby jobs, for example, it's just not viable even if the house is free.

vonwoodson 3y ago

If you're a young person who is hell-bent on owning a home, you should consider military service. The VA Loan is the easiest way into a mortgage with no money down, with location-specific terms to help you land a place to live in your hometown. Myself and my veteran friends (or their spouses) are the only people I "went to HS with" who are home owners today (now in our late 30's early 40's). You can wish in one hand, or you can actually do something to help yourself achieve your dreams. Just don't do anything stupid, like get shot.

runako 3y ago

Browsing realtor.com makes it looks like a strange choice to set this article in Milwaukee. I'm looking at listings for habitable houses well under $100k, some below $50k. There's a $44k listing that is not quite 20 blocks from the neighborhood where one couple stretched to buy. I would have loved for the author to write more about why a budget-conscious couple opted not to look at homes that could be purchased for under $350/mo, even at today's interest rates.

WkndTriathlete 3y ago
At those prices in Milwaukee those houses are in neighborhoods where the houses are constantly robbed. They may be cheap but they certainly are not conducive to raising a growing young family.
- runako 3y ago
  It’s literally affordable housing, in a neighborhood where people live. Lots of folks want to live in houses their income won’t support.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Tons of people live in those neighborhoods

jscipione 3y ago

Remember kids, when you can't afford a home know that it is all Democrats fault for destroying the economy through inflation by printing money to bail out their friends and to pay for vaccines and war.

pauldenton 3y ago
It has to do more with regulatory burdens in Democrat strongholds https://youtu.be/ExgxwKnH8y4 https://youtu.be/ExgxwKnH8y4 Can't have your building cast a shadow on a school playground (you haven't paid bribes to the right city officials to get rid of their roadblocks)

iteratethis 3y ago

Here in the Netherlands we've had a supply shortage since WW2, which makes a supply shortage the status quo. There's no hidden conspiracy or grand government policy that causes it. There's multiple root causes but an overlooked one is the delayed supply shock effect of an economic downturn. During the crash years of 2008-2014, we pretty much stopped building. Because nobody was buying. This has created a backlog of a few 100K homes never built compared to what population growth would normally require. It is this backlog that creates a boom 10 years later where for a few years in a row homes appreciate by 15-20% per year. They always appreciate a little, but it is mostly these price spike events that makes homes unaffordable. So ideally, you keep building even during a downturn, but nobody can subsidize that. The budget would be eye-watering and would be coming at the time of budget cuts, not increases. We're already working on a new deficit. A lot of projects are stopped because due to the high interest rates, demand has crashed. Similarly, a lot of well intended policies have the exact opposite effect. We're more heavily taxing citizens renting out their second homes. As it then becomes barely profitable, they just sell it. Even less rental homes. We're heavily constraining investors that do big projects. Fair enough, we'll just not do the project then. We even went as far as to mandate some new homes to be exclusively built for particular professions, say a teacher. They need affordable homes close to the city. A builder looks at this and will simply build the same home elsewhere, and sell it for a 100K more. You can tweak taxes for newcomers on the market, giving them more budget to buy their first home. This makes houses more expensive, not cheaper. And I'm not even addressing the political realities of government and municipality budgets depending on tax revenue based on current valuations (or at least high valuations), or the fact that the voter majority is aging and this being part of their retirement. You can take somebody from GenZ and give them dictator powers and they still can't solve it, without the "solution" being worse than the problem. You can't fix this. You can tweak and improve, but you cannot truly move the needle.

fragmede 3y ago
> A builder looks at this and will simply build the same home elsewhere, and sell it for a 100K more. The obvious solution is for the government to subsidize housing. If the government puts 100K in towards the cost of building a house, then that developer can walk away with the same amount of money because it cost them 100k less to build.

rich_sasha 3y ago

It struck me recently that this may be because people are flocking to cities - and the same cities that existed 100 years ago. I don't have any statistics, but city dwelling must have exploded over the past 50 years or so. Economies used to be so much more based around agriculture and industry, even around WWII. Agriculture was less mechanized, needing more people, factories are often based away from big cities. With these branches of economy in decline, more and more people are competing for the limited space in cities. And this surplus in demand doesn't easily lead to an increase of supply, as economics would dictate, because that would necessitate new cities. We used to found new cities. Car makers in the US and Europe (Volkswagen for example), Milton Keynes in the UK is founded from scratch in 1950s. But no longer, and so "knowledge economy" workers, numbers ever increasing, will compete for proximity to the same few city centres as before. Perhaps this is one advantage SV had in the early days (I've never been so might be very wrong here), but in the early days of SV, there was a lot of cities/towns to support a significant body of "knowledge economy workers". SV seems quite diversified, it's not like it is all based in SF, but there's lots of smaller towns that are sufficiently city-like. But of course that has a limit too, so it would seem like SV is past that saturation point too and in the same point as other urban areas. To change this situation, we either need more remote work, or new cities. It'll be very interesting to see how the new Californian city fares. I won't hold my breath for the Saudi one - but of course you never know.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
1letterunixname 3y ago
There are several factors in play in the US that put pressure on existing long-term residents. - Rural/suburban -> city migration - Immigration of wealthy people from all over the world to the US. California is an obvious and frequent destination for Pacific Rim peoples. - REITs and other large investors snapping-up real estate only to idle it or rent it out at a premium. - Zoning restrictions - Massive open space preserves immediately adjacent to suburban and residential areas, blocking usable land for growth - Lack of efficient, convenient, high speed public transit: CalTrain and VTA Light Rail are largely inconvenient for all but a small fraction of people. Faster, more efficient public transit allows housing to be more spread out. California has been promising high speed rail about as long as the flying car and fusion power have been "just around the corner". There is another factor for older residents in California dissuading them from moving: losing Prop 13. Another worrisome trend in US is the numbers of giant SUVs replacing mid-sized passenger cars. Vehicles that are heavier, less safe to pedestrians, less safe to drive, and less safe for occupants in a collision because they don't have to meet passenger car standards.

vaadu 3y ago

Afford what kind of home? Too many people want far more than they need or can afford. Giving up the beach vacation and the latest iphone would help.