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"In a 2020 journal article for the American Society on Aging, Kushel wrote that of all the homeless single adults in the early 1990s, 11% were aged 50 and older

"In a 2020 journal article for the American Society on Aging, Kushel wrote that of all the homeless single adults in the early 1990s, 11% were aged 50 and older. By 2003, she says that percentage grew to 37%." Society has been built for couples. With the major societal changes in the last 2 decades, we had an explosion of single people wanting to live alone, and the infrastructure is simply not prepared for it. My parents were born poor (poor in a way you simply have no idea in the US) and were able to afford to buy a house (after a lot of work) because they were two working for a common goal. It's a very complex problem. Most discussion around it is: look at what the investment funds are doing to housing, but, in reality, almost no new houses are being built (I'm speaking about my country here, but I suspect it's similar in a lot of places), and people aren't getting/staying married enough time to buy a house and build a family (which will also cause major problems down the line due to rapidly declining birthrates).

cyanydeez 3y ago
In America, it looks like real estate is becoming a victim of capitalism: companies buy properties, convert them to rentals, the collude with each other to "maximize" the value of those rentals. Then they claim the real problem is zoning codes so they can buy up more property just to expand their monopoly. Homelessness is the a low water effect caused by inflation.
- epistasis 3y ago
  This is not caused by companies. This is caused by individual homeowners exerting local control over the amount of housing in their small local area. The few companies making money off this are just piggy-backing on the homeowners who drive the political process. Private equity saw what homeowners have done in the US and thought "hey we can benefit from this regulatory capture without even having to do any of the work of capture," and even with that they are a tiny minority of housing. Let's correctly place the blame so that we can fix the problem. Even banning all corporate ownership of homes does nothing to house these homeless folks, only building more home will get people into them and break the sell-side power.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    Private equity may own a fairly small amount of the total housing stock, but there are metros where 20+% of home sales over the last year or two were to investors. That's surely enough to distort the market.
    - epistasis 3y ago
      Not really, it's only a tiny fraction of purchasers. Their market power during purchase time is not enough to drive down prices and benefit them, and post purchase they do not own enough fraction of existing homes to help drive up sale prices. Unless they are systematically paying above market, which is what Zillow did (for a tiny tiny number of homes, relative to supply). Which would be a transfer of wealth from Private Equity to individual home buyers. Housing is one of the least centralized markets that we have, and even when ownership is highly concentrated in a market, it's very rare that pricing can be controlled by an entity. Even the widely publicized "pricing software" for rentals was just better at showing comparable apartments with less work, enabling price discovery. It didn't enable price collusion. The shortage of housing and resulting high prices are best understood (IMHO) through class politics, where class is defined as already owning a housing asset or not.
      - someguydave 3y ago
        The centralisation in real estate is on the gov-backed mortgage side. We should end the thirty year mortgage and require home owners to purchase debt in the private market.
        epistasis 3y ago
        I am so glad to hear somebody proposing this! I support these ideas 100%, though I had not been bold enough to say it before. Ending the mortgage interest tax deduction would also be a good move. It does nothing but subsidize larger mortgages and asset price inflation.
        3y ago
- delfinom 3y ago
  Pretty much, here in NY, they tried to forced villages to suspend zoning for apartments. Except, these villages here are already being heavily developed, by nothing but luxury apartment buildings. (There are in fact 4 going up next to me right now). The real estate mafia controls NY and they wanted the inconvenience of building codes suspended so they could build more luxury units faster. Also, what keeps happening is the developers cheat, don't offer affordable units in the end, and the villages get sued for displacing low income individuals which violates some HUD rules and suddenly the remaining village taxpayers are subsidizing the rents of people in these luxury apartments by federal order. (Because my village currently is doing this). You know, instead of the luxury apartment apartment building that caused the displacement.
peoplefromibiza 3y ago
> because they were two working for a common goal. Same here, in a different Country, in a different Continent, on the other side of the Ocean. As you correctly point out, society was built for couples, not necessarily to build families, but sure enough not to live alone, or to use the modern periphrasis "as a single". The entire rhetoric "ok boomer" is missing the point entirely, boomers were obviously the first generation in human history to benefit from an age of relative peace that lasted 70 years, but they were all "working for a common goal" and building society anew from the ashes that WWII left everywhere. It's hard to admit for my generation that we performed a lot worse than our parents in terms of political participation, rights movements and class struggle to extract from capital the necessary means to have a fulfilling life, we were enchanted by the song of the sirens, but unlike Ulysses, we did not tie ourselves to the mast and fell for it. I know my generation failed in a lot of ways, but my generation also had children that are a lot dumber than we were, through no fault of their own, but because they were not given the means to understand their past and the will to work hard, because for a parent saying "yes" is always easier than saying "no", so they probably won't be able to prevent the mistakes previous generations made, while also making completely new mistakes, that previous generations could not anticipate. One simple example: if you ask who invented the electric car most probably they will say Elon Musk at Tesla, while Elon Musk had no role in it and electric car predates ICE cars by 50 years.
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  If the purpose of society is not for propagation into the future, I’m not sure what is.
  - peoplefromibiza 3y ago
    > If the purpose of society is not for propagation into the future, I’m not sure what is. that doesn't involve living together in a million dollar house and it hasn't happened for 99% of the time humans have been on this planet. mating and living under the same roof are two different concepts. you're conflating two concepts that are completely orthogonal. Anyway: society is the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community. In no way society means "propagation into the future" and "propagation into the future" in no way means "housing should be affordable only if you are married and live together with children". It would also otherwise mean that society in the past focused on the "mating thing" while it is clear they did not, priests, priestess, warriors, chastity rules embedded into religious or social norms, it looks to me that the most important trait of the society was to make it prosper, protect it from outside and share the labour that needed to be done in the most productive or the most "please the gods" way on the inside. Moreover since people living alone or not in a commitment are nowadays the relative majority, it's nearly 30% in the US and in my country is an overwhelming 33.2%, there are more singles than couples here, maybe it's time society adapts to the new paradigm, society wasn't invented by some superior entity that set the rules on how we should live, comply or die style, society reflects the way people already live, unless you live in Afghanistan under the rules of the Talibans. It means we are living in societies whose mechanics don't align with how people live, that's why it is not working for the people living in it and people cannot afford or are unhappy living in it.
Tade0 3y ago
In my country the number of apartments being built grew along with the prices - just before the pandemic it even beat a 50-year-old record. It's a textbook case of induced demand(for investment properties) and how construction cannot hope to keep up with it. It took a war in a neighbouring country for the madness to slow down(but not stop).

cyanydeez 3y ago

In America, it looks like real estate is becoming a victim of capitalism: companies buy properties, convert them to rentals, the collude with each other to "maximize" the value of those rentals. Then they claim the real problem is zoning codes so they can buy up more property just to expand their monopoly. Homelessness is the a low water effect caused by inflation.

epistasis 3y ago
This is not caused by companies. This is caused by individual homeowners exerting local control over the amount of housing in their small local area. The few companies making money off this are just piggy-backing on the homeowners who drive the political process. Private equity saw what homeowners have done in the US and thought "hey we can benefit from this regulatory capture without even having to do any of the work of capture," and even with that they are a tiny minority of housing. Let's correctly place the blame so that we can fix the problem. Even banning all corporate ownership of homes does nothing to house these homeless folks, only building more home will get people into them and break the sell-side power.
- thfuran 3y ago
  Private equity may own a fairly small amount of the total housing stock, but there are metros where 20+% of home sales over the last year or two were to investors. That's surely enough to distort the market.
  - epistasis 3y ago
    Not really, it's only a tiny fraction of purchasers. Their market power during purchase time is not enough to drive down prices and benefit them, and post purchase they do not own enough fraction of existing homes to help drive up sale prices. Unless they are systematically paying above market, which is what Zillow did (for a tiny tiny number of homes, relative to supply). Which would be a transfer of wealth from Private Equity to individual home buyers. Housing is one of the least centralized markets that we have, and even when ownership is highly concentrated in a market, it's very rare that pricing can be controlled by an entity. Even the widely publicized "pricing software" for rentals was just better at showing comparable apartments with less work, enabling price discovery. It didn't enable price collusion. The shortage of housing and resulting high prices are best understood (IMHO) through class politics, where class is defined as already owning a housing asset or not.
    - someguydave 3y ago
      The centralisation in real estate is on the gov-backed mortgage side. We should end the thirty year mortgage and require home owners to purchase debt in the private market.
      - epistasis 3y ago
        I am so glad to hear somebody proposing this! I support these ideas 100%, though I had not been bold enough to say it before. Ending the mortgage interest tax deduction would also be a good move. It does nothing but subsidize larger mortgages and asset price inflation.
        3y ago
delfinom 3y ago
Pretty much, here in NY, they tried to forced villages to suspend zoning for apartments. Except, these villages here are already being heavily developed, by nothing but luxury apartment buildings. (There are in fact 4 going up next to me right now). The real estate mafia controls NY and they wanted the inconvenience of building codes suspended so they could build more luxury units faster. Also, what keeps happening is the developers cheat, don't offer affordable units in the end, and the villages get sued for displacing low income individuals which violates some HUD rules and suddenly the remaining village taxpayers are subsidizing the rents of people in these luxury apartments by federal order. (Because my village currently is doing this). You know, instead of the luxury apartment apartment building that caused the displacement.

peoplefromibiza 3y ago

> because they were two working for a common goal. Same here, in a different Country, in a different Continent, on the other side of the Ocean. As you correctly point out, society was built for couples, not necessarily to build families, but sure enough not to live alone, or to use the modern periphrasis "as a single". The entire rhetoric "ok boomer" is missing the point entirely, boomers were obviously the first generation in human history to benefit from an age of relative peace that lasted 70 years, but they were all "working for a common goal" and building society anew from the ashes that WWII left everywhere. It's hard to admit for my generation that we performed a lot worse than our parents in terms of political participation, rights movements and class struggle to extract from capital the necessary means to have a fulfilling life, we were enchanted by the song of the sirens, but unlike Ulysses, we did not tie ourselves to the mast and fell for it. I know my generation failed in a lot of ways, but my generation also had children that are a lot dumber than we were, through no fault of their own, but because they were not given the means to understand their past and the will to work hard, because for a parent saying "yes" is always easier than saying "no", so they probably won't be able to prevent the mistakes previous generations made, while also making completely new mistakes, that previous generations could not anticipate. One simple example: if you ask who invented the electric car most probably they will say Elon Musk at Tesla, while Elon Musk had no role in it and electric car predates ICE cars by 50 years.

mensetmanusman 3y ago
If the purpose of society is not for propagation into the future, I’m not sure what is.
- peoplefromibiza 3y ago
  > If the purpose of society is not for propagation into the future, I’m not sure what is. that doesn't involve living together in a million dollar house and it hasn't happened for 99% of the time humans have been on this planet. mating and living under the same roof are two different concepts. you're conflating two concepts that are completely orthogonal. Anyway: society is the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community. In no way society means "propagation into the future" and "propagation into the future" in no way means "housing should be affordable only if you are married and live together with children". It would also otherwise mean that society in the past focused on the "mating thing" while it is clear they did not, priests, priestess, warriors, chastity rules embedded into religious or social norms, it looks to me that the most important trait of the society was to make it prosper, protect it from outside and share the labour that needed to be done in the most productive or the most "please the gods" way on the inside. Moreover since people living alone or not in a commitment are nowadays the relative majority, it's nearly 30% in the US and in my country is an overwhelming 33.2%, there are more singles than couples here, maybe it's time society adapts to the new paradigm, society wasn't invented by some superior entity that set the rules on how we should live, comply or die style, society reflects the way people already live, unless you live in Afghanistan under the rules of the Talibans. It means we are living in societies whose mechanics don't align with how people live, that's why it is not working for the people living in it and people cannot afford or are unhappy living in it.

Tade0 3y ago

In my country the number of apartments being built grew along with the prices - just before the pandemic it even beat a 50-year-old record. It's a textbook case of induced demand(for investment properties) and how construction cannot hope to keep up with it. It took a war in a neighbouring country for the madness to slow down(but not stop).