6 ms·

There is an answer to this problem, and it's public housing. Not the designed-to-fail model that the US has historically implemented, however. There are other,

There is an answer to this problem, and it's public housing. Not the designed-to-fail model that the US has historically implemented, however. There are other, very successful, public housing systems that show how it can be done successfully. We can basically copy Singapore and Vienna's homework.

mattnewton 3y ago
I think the answer is to stop forbidding the kinds of housing that would increase supply. But higher density housing is illegal and disliked by current residents who fear their property values decreasing as supply increases and poor people move in, so they fight tooth and nail to keep supply restricted in areas that would most benefit from density.
- bradleyjg 3y ago
  I don’t think higher density decreases prices. On the contrary a plot of land that previously could only have a single family home but now can have a six story apartment building is more valuable. The homeowners just don’t want to live next to the apartment building or move.
  - hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
    But a six story apartment can now house six families. If a city has 10,000 families and 10,000 single family houses, and just 1,000 of those single family houses become 6 story apartments, there are now 15,000 living places people can choose between. That is called "an increase in quantity supplied", and the supply curve slopes downward. You see where I'm going with this.
    - Spivak 3y ago
      It's less rosy than this because those 6 story apartments are built on credit where the valuation of the building is based off the market rents. If rent goes down the bank comes-a-calling telling you that your LTV dropped and you have to put up more collateral. The building owners just straight up can't afford to do this so they're stuck between keeping rents high and accepting vacancies which limits their revenue and foreclosure. The spice must flow, property valuations must go up or the whole thing collapses. It's why non-SF-esque cities only allow expansion in-line with population growth or a little less because they will immediately be tarred and feathered if they make everyone's mortgage underwater. To be clear this isn't a good thing, but no one wants to blink first and start another 2008.
      - hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
        I'm not sure I follow. If the building owner lowered their rent, wouldn't they find it easier to fill that vacancy? Or if you're saying the bank decides to take one of the units as extra collateral, why wouldn't the bank then rent out the unit?
        rokkitmensch 3y ago
        Owners frequently have loan covenants that mandate bank approval for rents below a threshold. You've securitized the cashflow from the property, so if that cashflow dips, the lender has an assurance they can reprice the security in line with your new cashflow story. Even if you cover the shortfall in cashflow out of pocket, this is better for both you and the bank because you don't have to admit that the market rates at which you got your loan have changed.
        hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
        Oh, okay. So you've been offered a loan partly _on the basis_ of that future cashflow, and probably wouldn't have been able to get one on equally good terms if it was "just" to build a building? Yeah. I can see how that would create perverse incentives downstream.
        rokkitmensch 3y ago
        Same reason no working schmucks go to their mortgage servicer when they lose a job. They don't even want to know!
      - NeuNeurosis 3y ago
        Thanks for the extra context from the credit holders. It seems that this is completely overlooked in the solutions proposed to solve the housing crisis. Seems like there is an argument to be made that we need new policies to change this calculation at either the state or federal level. Wouldn't public private partnership funding help with this?
  - ryukafalz 3y ago
    Sibling comment covers this, but to expand: it decreases the overall price of units of housing, not of land. Which is ultimately what matters here, because we live in houses or apartments or condos, not in square feet of land. I could not have afforded the plot of land my first city apartment was on, but I could afford an apartment in the building!
    - bradleyjg 3y ago
      But the incumbent single family homeowners that are so opposed to upzoning currently own both land and a housing unit. While upzoning might make the value of their housing unit go down the value of their land will go up.
      - hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
        For this reason it would be best to allow single family homeowners to be able to vote on the zoning policies of whichever side of the city is exactly opposite and ideally non-adjacent to them. Single family homes for me, affordable high rises for thee. (The dead center can be rezoned to high scale commercial as a kind of urban Switzerland.)
  - Izikiel43 3y ago
    > I don’t think higher density decreases prices. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/law-of-supply-demand.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/law-of-supply-demand.as...
- happytiger 3y ago
  California has done this with recently passed SB9 and its aggressive ADU laws allowing them by default. Can’t wait to see whether and how well it works, or where it evolves, but some places are trying!
  - Izikiel43 3y ago
    Repeat after me, apartment buildings.
    - happytiger 3y ago
      This builds a monoculture of housing and ignores the fact that the housing crisis isn’t just about not having enough housing, but that what's available is exorbitant in rent and the low-income people that need housing can't afford it. We need a mix of housing, including multiple classes of housing that more reflects the diversity of incomes, not more gigantic corporate owned apartment blocks. There is no simply sound byte answer.
      - Izikiel43 3y ago
        > gigantic corporate owned Well, there is your problem. The lack of housing gets solved by, gasp, adding more housing. A house in a city is luxury, the only way to keep rents down is by adding more to the offer, and guess what, apartment buildings add a lot of housing in a small surface. Corporations are bound by economics, they can't charge out of bounds rents if the average rent price is much lower, and you get that by, you guessed it, building more. > We need a mix of housing No, you need a ton more housing, not a mix, you have to aim for efficiency here, specially in cities. Having a SFH in a city is a luxury, townhome I would say is above average, and everyone else should be in apartments. Apartments don't have to be ugly, if I could I would buy a 2/3 bedroom apartment, however there isn't much offer, and everything is from ages ago because the USA doesn't build.
        happytiger 3y ago
        I’m down for a ton more housing in any form so I won’t disagree with you. I want to see better lives for people in whatever capacity they want to make it honestly. I don’t think it’s an OR situation but I don’t think counterpointing is going to help the conversation any. You’re not wrong. I just think we also need to do things like actually build new cities instead of just adding more and more to existing ones. That’s a formula that we used to have that has just stopped completely happening and now it actually worked. But more housing and better lives for people is the point so I’ll leave it there.
closeparen 3y ago
The American people are already passionate about preventing other people from building housing near them. Now you expect them to not only tolerate new buildings and neighbors, but also pay taxes to fund those buildings and subsidize those neighbors? We don’t have to speculate about how civic control over housing development works or what kind of decisions our communities will make. They are the problem, not the solution.
spacephysics 3y ago
I think the answer is fixing our financial system by not having crazily-low interest rates. This then drives asking prices down. Additionally as other comments also suggest, resolving the various supply problems. I will say however we are hitting record number of new apartment buildings being built, so that’s a good sign for renters.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
Singapore's housing system works because their government is a benevolent dictatorship. Special interests aren't able to shut things down like they are in the US.
- jimz 3y ago
  You forgot the quotes around "benevolent". It's "benevolent" to those who conform to what the state wishes to present as their archetype. Meanwhile, migrant workers are effectively indentured servants and prop up, mostly out of sight, the country in a manner not dissimilar to Qatar or Bahrain or certain sectors of the US. If public housing needs second class citizens in order for it to work, it's not worth it. One might as well as cite the excise-farming era of Singapore between Raffles and Clementi Smith as the actual golden age upon which the modern prosperity was founded, but it doesn't fit the official narrative of course. During this time, there was "public housing", but not run by the de jure government but the de facto native-place associations that the administrators, who had next to no knowledge of the local languages, called secret societies. They are in fact akin to Landsmanshaft in the Yiddish tradition. Everything since then requires a lot of qualification just to peel back the revisionism and certainly does not serve as a good example unless one thinks second class citizenship is worth the perceived order and functionality the nation projects to the world.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    The PAP has a 70% approval rating which is what I think makes it a "benevolent dictatorship". Semantics can get tricky though. They're definitely not benevolent to minorities.
toomuchtodo 3y ago
Vienna is a great example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY (Youtube: Vienna's Radical Idea? Affordable Housing For All) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6DBKoWbtjE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6DBKoWbtjE (Youtube: Does Vienna Have the World's Best Council Housing?)
Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
The US is culturally incapable of implementing effective public housing. Any attempt would very quickly be co-opted by people trying juice money out of it, or sabotage it for ideological reasons.
readthenotes1 3y ago
You are obviously not steeped in the history of US governance. Even if someone somewhere else did it well, the odds of anyone in the US doing it well are nearly nil.
orwin 3y ago
Develop non-market housing in general. It can be public, but it does not has to be.
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
Singapore works because it is a city state. Here..it would have to be federal, and everyone couldn't just decide to get their public housing in the hottest most popular cities, they would have to be distributed across the country. Someone has to live in Jackson Mississippi and Shreveport Louisiana. Some sort of residency system would be needed.
john_b 3y ago
Public housing has income restrictions associated with it. This article talks about how even people with stable, well-paying jobs struggle to find housing. Public housing isn't the solution for these people. What we should copy from Vienna is mixed use development. A huge portion of American suburbs are zoned as single family only and you end up with a housing shortage, horrible traffic, and pollution. Mixed use development allows density to increase while reducing traffic and encouraging people to be more fit (by walking or biking more). It's such a no-brainer from a whole-system perspective. The problem is that NIMBYs and existing regulations exist to preserve the status quo and protect the equity long-term homeowners have accumulated. In places like CA there are additional disincentives to reform like Proposition 13 that favor long term owners at the expense of new homebuyers. Obviously a tax-advantaged asset is going to have a higher price than an equivalent non-tax-advantaged asset. And significant property tax revenue that could otherwise fund public transit and additional construction isn't collected as a result. Eventually enough boomers will die and the demographic forces will shift and create the opportunity for reform, but this will be too little too late for a whole generation. I'd love for a concerted national effort to tackle this problem and reduce barriers to building the kind of housing America needs, but it's hard to see that happening anytime soon.
- theluketaylor 3y ago
  Public housing doesn't fundamentally require income restrictions. Most locations place limits on eligibility for public housing, but that's simply because there isn't that much public housing so it's prioritized for those most in need. Part of Vienna's success is building so much public housing there is plenty to go around, so all sorts of people live in public housing. There isn't a stigma associated with public housing since using it doesn't imply any specific trait. I'm a big fan of building all sorts of non-market housing all over cities to avoid the slum problem. Charge means-tested rent, so someone will low income pays very little rent. Someone with a good job pays closer to market rent (and that extra revenue helps pay for the overall housing program). One of the huge successes of Vienna's public housing model is mixing people of different socioeconomic backgrounds. People connect with people with all sorts of different backgrounds and experiences resulting in much strong social cohesion.
ksenzee 3y ago
Public housing can work in places where people consider themselves part of a society. A lot of Americans don’t. They see any kind of collective societal effort as a negative—something you might have to tolerate, but that you certainly don’t want to encourage. We collected every individualist outlier from all over Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, everyone who wanted to escape from society and strike out on their own. We’re reaping the cultural rewards of that now.
- mullingitover 3y ago
  You can achieve the result without necessarily labeling things as 'public housing,' though. California already has something like this: it's determining the state's housing needs at the state level. If regions don't realistically create plans for hitting their allotted target, a 'builder's remedy' is triggered. Developments which check certain boxes, and one of them is a percentage of affordable housing, override local zoning blockades. All you really need to do is go a step further and offer developers subsidies to increase their percentages of affordable housing in their plan. The thing that makes other countries' public housing succeed is that it's not a monolith of low income residents - the mixed incomes in the development create a more cohesive community that makes them successful. No reason we can't do it here, and no reason it has to be overtly labeled as public housing.
  - ksenzee 3y ago
    I truly love the idea of single-development mixed-income housing, but I just don’t see it working in the US. Either the subsidized units are poor quality, leading to the same stigma as our current public housing, or they’re the same as the unsubsidized units but only a few lucky people can get them, which would really not fly here.
    - mullingitover 3y ago
      > I truly love the idea of single-development mixed-income housing, but I just don’t see it working in the US. It's already working[1] in California. This is happening through the California Housing Finance Agency[2]: > The CalHFA Mixed-Income Program (MIP) provides long-term subordinate financing for the new construction of affordable multifamily developments throughout California that provide housing with units restricted at all income levels between 30% and 120% of the Area Median Income of the county in which the development will be located. So while it's not outright subsidized, the state is providing the financing for these projects. [1] https://www.calhfa.ca.gov/multifamily/mixedincome/approved/index.htm https://www.calhfa.ca.gov/multifamily/mixedincome/approved/i... [2] https://www.calhfa.ca.gov/multifamily/mixedincome/index.htm https://www.calhfa.ca.gov/multifamily/mixedincome/index.htm
zdragnar 3y ago
It is also a cultural problem. To use an anecdote, my mother in law has lived, for many years, on a peaceful dead-end street. Last year, an apartment building was put up at the end of the street more than quadrupling the number of families that lived there. Since then, there are cars driving by on a regular (many times a day) blaring loud music. Her neighbor's big window in her living room has had rocks thrown through it on several occasions in the first months. My mother in law feels less safe going for walks, because she no longer knows most of her neighbors and this area of the city was already not exactly low crime. Her perception of her new neighbors, and their behavior (both criminal and otherwise) have completely devalued her experience of living at her house. Does that make her a NIMBY? Yup. Is her quality of life now lower? Yup. Is it the fault of higher density? No. It is the fault of a culture that tolerates disruptive behavior. Higher density has only brought more of it to her doorstep.
- firejake308 3y ago
  You see, if Americans had the same value for "not being a nuisance" as the Japanese, then you could pack us like sardines in a can, and we'd all get along fine. "Changing the character of the neighborhood" is an actual concern that real people have, and trucking over them to build more housing will probably just cause another wave of white flight. Ideally, Americans would value respect over freedom, but I think the right to do whatever you want is too deeply ingrained in our culture at this point.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    The problem is "be more like the Japanese" isn't actionable advice. Americans don't have uniform values; most Americans are already respectful neighbors (yes, even the "freedom loving" ones) so telling them to be more like the Japanese is pointless because they aren't the problem. The problem is the small portion of Americans who are deliberately antisocial. If even 10% of Americans are antisocial neighbors, then 100 Americans moving into your neighborhood will mean you have 10 awful people making the neighborhood hell. And what can the quiet 90% do about it? Socially pressure the anti-social people? This provokes even more disruption in retaliation and stands a non-negligible chance of getting you stabbed. Calling the police with noise complaints is ineffectual, as soon as the police leave the disruption will become even worse just to spite everybody else. NIMBYism is the most proximate and pragmatic solution; stop the problem from occurring in the first place.
swalling 3y ago
Deregulation to allow building more of all housing types is the only answer. Funding more public housing will just add a trickle of liquidity to a market that has been in drought for decades. Take San Francisco. A huge proportion of the housing stock is rent-controlled (everything pre 1979) to try and make it accessible price-wise to low income renters, effectively forcing a ton of housing stock to lock in artificially low prices the same as public housing. This hasn't fixed it, and may have made it worse due to perverse incentives for landlords / building owners. Meanwhile it remains arguably the most difficult major city in North America to build new housing in, especially infill on existing residential properties. I moved back to Portland, OR the last few years, and the pace of housing development and policy is dramatically better. Single family zoning is illegal. You have people in rich neighborhoods adding ADUs like crazy, and developers knocking down outdated single family homes to increase density in desirable neighborhoods. New mixed use buildings are springing up all along major transit corridors in walkable/bikeable neighborhoods. Prices for new homes and luxury apartments are inaccessibly high, but all of this takes pressure off the low end of rental stock. There is also public housing being built, but it is monumentally dwarfed by private development.
MilStdJunkie 3y ago
"Public" doesn't exist in a country where half the people don't think other people are people. Our masters had an easy time here getting underlings to thunderdome themselves to death.
xnx 3y ago
"Imagine a Renters’ Utopia. It Might Look Like Vienna." https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/magazine/vienna-social-housing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/magazine/vienna-social-ho...

mattnewton 3y ago

I think the answer is to stop forbidding the kinds of housing that would increase supply. But higher density housing is illegal and disliked by current residents who fear their property values decreasing as supply increases and poor people move in, so they fight tooth and nail to keep supply restricted in areas that would most benefit from density.

bradleyjg 3y ago
I don’t think higher density decreases prices. On the contrary a plot of land that previously could only have a single family home but now can have a six story apartment building is more valuable. The homeowners just don’t want to live next to the apartment building or move.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
  But a six story apartment can now house six families. If a city has 10,000 families and 10,000 single family houses, and just 1,000 of those single family houses become 6 story apartments, there are now 15,000 living places people can choose between. That is called "an increase in quantity supplied", and the supply curve slopes downward. You see where I'm going with this.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    It's less rosy than this because those 6 story apartments are built on credit where the valuation of the building is based off the market rents. If rent goes down the bank comes-a-calling telling you that your LTV dropped and you have to put up more collateral. The building owners just straight up can't afford to do this so they're stuck between keeping rents high and accepting vacancies which limits their revenue and foreclosure. The spice must flow, property valuations must go up or the whole thing collapses. It's why non-SF-esque cities only allow expansion in-line with population growth or a little less because they will immediately be tarred and feathered if they make everyone's mortgage underwater. To be clear this isn't a good thing, but no one wants to blink first and start another 2008.
    - hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
      I'm not sure I follow. If the building owner lowered their rent, wouldn't they find it easier to fill that vacancy? Or if you're saying the bank decides to take one of the units as extra collateral, why wouldn't the bank then rent out the unit?
      - rokkitmensch 3y ago
        Owners frequently have loan covenants that mandate bank approval for rents below a threshold. You've securitized the cashflow from the property, so if that cashflow dips, the lender has an assurance they can reprice the security in line with your new cashflow story. Even if you cover the shortfall in cashflow out of pocket, this is better for both you and the bank because you don't have to admit that the market rates at which you got your loan have changed.
        hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
        Oh, okay. So you've been offered a loan partly _on the basis_ of that future cashflow, and probably wouldn't have been able to get one on equally good terms if it was "just" to build a building? Yeah. I can see how that would create perverse incentives downstream.
        rokkitmensch 3y ago
        Same reason no working schmucks go to their mortgage servicer when they lose a job. They don't even want to know!
    - NeuNeurosis 3y ago
      Thanks for the extra context from the credit holders. It seems that this is completely overlooked in the solutions proposed to solve the housing crisis. Seems like there is an argument to be made that we need new policies to change this calculation at either the state or federal level. Wouldn't public private partnership funding help with this?
- ryukafalz 3y ago
  Sibling comment covers this, but to expand: it decreases the overall price of units of housing, not of land. Which is ultimately what matters here, because we live in houses or apartments or condos, not in square feet of land. I could not have afforded the plot of land my first city apartment was on, but I could afford an apartment in the building!
  - bradleyjg 3y ago
    But the incumbent single family homeowners that are so opposed to upzoning currently own both land and a housing unit. While upzoning might make the value of their housing unit go down the value of their land will go up.
    - hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
      For this reason it would be best to allow single family homeowners to be able to vote on the zoning policies of whichever side of the city is exactly opposite and ideally non-adjacent to them. Single family homes for me, affordable high rises for thee. (The dead center can be rezoned to high scale commercial as a kind of urban Switzerland.)
- Izikiel43 3y ago
  > I don’t think higher density decreases prices. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/law-of-supply-demand.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/law-of-supply-demand.as...
happytiger 3y ago
California has done this with recently passed SB9 and its aggressive ADU laws allowing them by default. Can’t wait to see whether and how well it works, or where it evolves, but some places are trying!
- Izikiel43 3y ago
  Repeat after me, apartment buildings.
  - happytiger 3y ago
    This builds a monoculture of housing and ignores the fact that the housing crisis isn’t just about not having enough housing, but that what's available is exorbitant in rent and the low-income people that need housing can't afford it. We need a mix of housing, including multiple classes of housing that more reflects the diversity of incomes, not more gigantic corporate owned apartment blocks. There is no simply sound byte answer.
    - Izikiel43 3y ago
      > gigantic corporate owned Well, there is your problem. The lack of housing gets solved by, gasp, adding more housing. A house in a city is luxury, the only way to keep rents down is by adding more to the offer, and guess what, apartment buildings add a lot of housing in a small surface. Corporations are bound by economics, they can't charge out of bounds rents if the average rent price is much lower, and you get that by, you guessed it, building more. > We need a mix of housing No, you need a ton more housing, not a mix, you have to aim for efficiency here, specially in cities. Having a SFH in a city is a luxury, townhome I would say is above average, and everyone else should be in apartments. Apartments don't have to be ugly, if I could I would buy a 2/3 bedroom apartment, however there isn't much offer, and everything is from ages ago because the USA doesn't build.
      - happytiger 3y ago
        I’m down for a ton more housing in any form so I won’t disagree with you. I want to see better lives for people in whatever capacity they want to make it honestly. I don’t think it’s an OR situation but I don’t think counterpointing is going to help the conversation any. You’re not wrong. I just think we also need to do things like actually build new cities instead of just adding more and more to existing ones. That’s a formula that we used to have that has just stopped completely happening and now it actually worked. But more housing and better lives for people is the point so I’ll leave it there.

closeparen 3y ago

The American people are already passionate about preventing other people from building housing near them. Now you expect them to not only tolerate new buildings and neighbors, but also pay taxes to fund those buildings and subsidize those neighbors? We don’t have to speculate about how civic control over housing development works or what kind of decisions our communities will make. They are the problem, not the solution.

spacephysics 3y ago

I think the answer is fixing our financial system by not having crazily-low interest rates. This then drives asking prices down. Additionally as other comments also suggest, resolving the various supply problems. I will say however we are hitting record number of new apartment buildings being built, so that’s a good sign for renters.

HDThoreaun 3y ago

Singapore's housing system works because their government is a benevolent dictatorship. Special interests aren't able to shut things down like they are in the US.

jimz 3y ago
You forgot the quotes around "benevolent". It's "benevolent" to those who conform to what the state wishes to present as their archetype. Meanwhile, migrant workers are effectively indentured servants and prop up, mostly out of sight, the country in a manner not dissimilar to Qatar or Bahrain or certain sectors of the US. If public housing needs second class citizens in order for it to work, it's not worth it. One might as well as cite the excise-farming era of Singapore between Raffles and Clementi Smith as the actual golden age upon which the modern prosperity was founded, but it doesn't fit the official narrative of course. During this time, there was "public housing", but not run by the de jure government but the de facto native-place associations that the administrators, who had next to no knowledge of the local languages, called secret societies. They are in fact akin to Landsmanshaft in the Yiddish tradition. Everything since then requires a lot of qualification just to peel back the revisionism and certainly does not serve as a good example unless one thinks second class citizenship is worth the perceived order and functionality the nation projects to the world.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  The PAP has a 70% approval rating which is what I think makes it a "benevolent dictatorship". Semantics can get tricky though. They're definitely not benevolent to minorities.

toomuchtodo 3y ago

Vienna is a great example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY (Youtube: Vienna's Radical Idea? Affordable Housing For All) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6DBKoWbtjE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6DBKoWbtjE (Youtube: Does Vienna Have the World's Best Council Housing?)

Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago

The US is culturally incapable of implementing effective public housing. Any attempt would very quickly be co-opted by people trying juice money out of it, or sabotage it for ideological reasons.

readthenotes1 3y ago

You are obviously not steeped in the history of US governance. Even if someone somewhere else did it well, the odds of anyone in the US doing it well are nearly nil.

orwin 3y ago

Develop non-market housing in general. It can be public, but it does not has to be.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

Singapore works because it is a city state. Here..it would have to be federal, and everyone couldn't just decide to get their public housing in the hottest most popular cities, they would have to be distributed across the country. Someone has to live in Jackson Mississippi and Shreveport Louisiana. Some sort of residency system would be needed.

john_b 3y ago

Public housing has income restrictions associated with it. This article talks about how even people with stable, well-paying jobs struggle to find housing. Public housing isn't the solution for these people. What we should copy from Vienna is mixed use development. A huge portion of American suburbs are zoned as single family only and you end up with a housing shortage, horrible traffic, and pollution. Mixed use development allows density to increase while reducing traffic and encouraging people to be more fit (by walking or biking more). It's such a no-brainer from a whole-system perspective. The problem is that NIMBYs and existing regulations exist to preserve the status quo and protect the equity long-term homeowners have accumulated. In places like CA there are additional disincentives to reform like Proposition 13 that favor long term owners at the expense of new homebuyers. Obviously a tax-advantaged asset is going to have a higher price than an equivalent non-tax-advantaged asset. And significant property tax revenue that could otherwise fund public transit and additional construction isn't collected as a result. Eventually enough boomers will die and the demographic forces will shift and create the opportunity for reform, but this will be too little too late for a whole generation. I'd love for a concerted national effort to tackle this problem and reduce barriers to building the kind of housing America needs, but it's hard to see that happening anytime soon.

theluketaylor 3y ago
Public housing doesn't fundamentally require income restrictions. Most locations place limits on eligibility for public housing, but that's simply because there isn't that much public housing so it's prioritized for those most in need. Part of Vienna's success is building so much public housing there is plenty to go around, so all sorts of people live in public housing. There isn't a stigma associated with public housing since using it doesn't imply any specific trait. I'm a big fan of building all sorts of non-market housing all over cities to avoid the slum problem. Charge means-tested rent, so someone will low income pays very little rent. Someone with a good job pays closer to market rent (and that extra revenue helps pay for the overall housing program). One of the huge successes of Vienna's public housing model is mixing people of different socioeconomic backgrounds. People connect with people with all sorts of different backgrounds and experiences resulting in much strong social cohesion.

ksenzee 3y ago

Public housing can work in places where people consider themselves part of a society. A lot of Americans don’t. They see any kind of collective societal effort as a negative—something you might have to tolerate, but that you certainly don’t want to encourage. We collected every individualist outlier from all over Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, everyone who wanted to escape from society and strike out on their own. We’re reaping the cultural rewards of that now.

mullingitover 3y ago
You can achieve the result without necessarily labeling things as 'public housing,' though. California already has something like this: it's determining the state's housing needs at the state level. If regions don't realistically create plans for hitting their allotted target, a 'builder's remedy' is triggered. Developments which check certain boxes, and one of them is a percentage of affordable housing, override local zoning blockades. All you really need to do is go a step further and offer developers subsidies to increase their percentages of affordable housing in their plan. The thing that makes other countries' public housing succeed is that it's not a monolith of low income residents - the mixed incomes in the development create a more cohesive community that makes them successful. No reason we can't do it here, and no reason it has to be overtly labeled as public housing.
- ksenzee 3y ago
  I truly love the idea of single-development mixed-income housing, but I just don’t see it working in the US. Either the subsidized units are poor quality, leading to the same stigma as our current public housing, or they’re the same as the unsubsidized units but only a few lucky people can get them, which would really not fly here.
  - mullingitover 3y ago
    > I truly love the idea of single-development mixed-income housing, but I just don’t see it working in the US. It's already working[1] in California. This is happening through the California Housing Finance Agency[2]: > The CalHFA Mixed-Income Program (MIP) provides long-term subordinate financing for the new construction of affordable multifamily developments throughout California that provide housing with units restricted at all income levels between 30% and 120% of the Area Median Income of the county in which the development will be located. So while it's not outright subsidized, the state is providing the financing for these projects. [1] https://www.calhfa.ca.gov/multifamily/mixedincome/approved/index.htm https://www.calhfa.ca.gov/multifamily/mixedincome/approved/i... [2] https://www.calhfa.ca.gov/multifamily/mixedincome/index.htm https://www.calhfa.ca.gov/multifamily/mixedincome/index.htm

zdragnar 3y ago

It is also a cultural problem. To use an anecdote, my mother in law has lived, for many years, on a peaceful dead-end street. Last year, an apartment building was put up at the end of the street more than quadrupling the number of families that lived there. Since then, there are cars driving by on a regular (many times a day) blaring loud music. Her neighbor's big window in her living room has had rocks thrown through it on several occasions in the first months. My mother in law feels less safe going for walks, because she no longer knows most of her neighbors and this area of the city was already not exactly low crime. Her perception of her new neighbors, and their behavior (both criminal and otherwise) have completely devalued her experience of living at her house. Does that make her a NIMBY? Yup. Is her quality of life now lower? Yup. Is it the fault of higher density? No. It is the fault of a culture that tolerates disruptive behavior. Higher density has only brought more of it to her doorstep.

firejake308 3y ago
You see, if Americans had the same value for "not being a nuisance" as the Japanese, then you could pack us like sardines in a can, and we'd all get along fine. "Changing the character of the neighborhood" is an actual concern that real people have, and trucking over them to build more housing will probably just cause another wave of white flight. Ideally, Americans would value respect over freedom, but I think the right to do whatever you want is too deeply ingrained in our culture at this point.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  The problem is "be more like the Japanese" isn't actionable advice. Americans don't have uniform values; most Americans are already respectful neighbors (yes, even the "freedom loving" ones) so telling them to be more like the Japanese is pointless because they aren't the problem. The problem is the small portion of Americans who are deliberately antisocial. If even 10% of Americans are antisocial neighbors, then 100 Americans moving into your neighborhood will mean you have 10 awful people making the neighborhood hell. And what can the quiet 90% do about it? Socially pressure the anti-social people? This provokes even more disruption in retaliation and stands a non-negligible chance of getting you stabbed. Calling the police with noise complaints is ineffectual, as soon as the police leave the disruption will become even worse just to spite everybody else. NIMBYism is the most proximate and pragmatic solution; stop the problem from occurring in the first place.

swalling 3y ago

Deregulation to allow building more of all housing types is the only answer. Funding more public housing will just add a trickle of liquidity to a market that has been in drought for decades. Take San Francisco. A huge proportion of the housing stock is rent-controlled (everything pre 1979) to try and make it accessible price-wise to low income renters, effectively forcing a ton of housing stock to lock in artificially low prices the same as public housing. This hasn't fixed it, and may have made it worse due to perverse incentives for landlords / building owners. Meanwhile it remains arguably the most difficult major city in North America to build new housing in, especially infill on existing residential properties. I moved back to Portland, OR the last few years, and the pace of housing development and policy is dramatically better. Single family zoning is illegal. You have people in rich neighborhoods adding ADUs like crazy, and developers knocking down outdated single family homes to increase density in desirable neighborhoods. New mixed use buildings are springing up all along major transit corridors in walkable/bikeable neighborhoods. Prices for new homes and luxury apartments are inaccessibly high, but all of this takes pressure off the low end of rental stock. There is also public housing being built, but it is monumentally dwarfed by private development.

MilStdJunkie 3y ago

"Public" doesn't exist in a country where half the people don't think other people are people. Our masters had an easy time here getting underlings to thunderdome themselves to death.

xnx 3y ago

"Imagine a Renters’ Utopia. It Might Look Like Vienna." https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/magazine/vienna-social-housing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/magazine/vienna-social-ho...