8 ms·

It's the Housing, Stupid

67 points by throw0101c 1y ago

softwaredoug 1y ago
Sadly structurally the system favors housing incumbents. And it doesn’t take a lot to derail efforts to create more supply. In my town we spent 8 years of public involvement in rezoning to increase supply and density. Including several city council elections of pro-housing council members elected over more NIMBY ones. Only to have it all screwed up by 2-3 households that sued, pausing the zoning and throwing a wrench into a lot of new housing construction. I feel like there has to be an effort at all layers of government to solve this structural problem where a few homes can derail a democratic process.
- grafmax 1y ago
  And yet zoning is just one factor in housing supply. Even successfully implementing upzoning laws can find markets with higher prices, rates of homelessness, and investor ownership of housing - because many factors influence these outcomes not just zoning laws.
  - LastTrain 1y ago
    Is there an example where upzoning has resulted in reduced housing prices?
    - softwaredoug 1y ago
      Yes there is. It’s one of many factors. I did a deep dive years ago before wanting to support the issue locally IE: The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability https://www.nber.org/papers/w8835 https://www.nber.org/papers/w8835 > we argue that high prices have little to do with conventional models with a free market for land. Instead, our evidence suggests that zoning and other land use controls, play the dominant role in making housing expensive.
      - grafmax 1y ago
        > an example where upzoning has resulted in reduced housing prices I found an argument in your paper but no such examples.
        LastTrain 1y ago
        I’ve not been able to find any, which is not to say there aren’t any, but when you have these conversations the inevitable result is getting called a NIMBY so I tend to abandon them early.
    - pgwhalen 1y ago
      Yes, here's an episode of a podcast with the authors of such a paper. https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/2024/12/11/83-local-effects-of-upzoning-with-elena-lutz-and-simon-buchler/ https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/2024/12/11/83-local-effects-of-up...
      - LastTrain 1y ago
        Thanks. Zurich. I don’t think even the authors would call this a slam dunk, and they cite it as the best available example. I do appreciate that they rightly call out that upzoning will cause movements in the population and the potential benefits will take decades to materialize.
        pgwhalen 1y ago
        I’m not sure what “slam dunk” means in this context, but they do note how clear the effect is, even if it does unfortunately take 5-10 years before it shows.
      - grafmax 1y ago
        It looks like rent stayed the same there. It didn’t decrease.
  - softwaredoug 1y ago
    Yes I agree it’s just one factor. It’s necessary but not sufficient. I think I another huge constraint is construction labor. Which is very tight right now. I’m reminded we built the Empire State Building in 9 months. I see delays for single family homes causing it to take years.
    - lotsofpulp 1y ago
      Those aren’t comparable. A delay in a standard stick built home would be due to legal issues. Otherwise, tract homebuilders in the US have metrics of building a brand new house within 100 days. The labor costs are high, but not that high that construction is delayed due to lack of labor. Land prices and clearing legal hurdles are the bigger problem.
    - Bjartr 1y ago
      An important consideration for the Empire State Building is that it was not built by the lowest bidder. It was built by those who were considered most likely to be successful at the endeavor.
- CGMthrowaway 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - mothballed 1y ago
    Yes but the unique piece here is ratcheting up of ever increasing codes, zoning, regulations while grandfathering in the old housing. The people voting made their own houses illegal but then said their own houses were exempt. They've created an effect where the incumbents own housing that would be illegal for anyone else to create, which helps prop up their home value massively since it artificially raises the price of the substitutive option of building a house.
    - PessimalDecimal 1y ago
      Solution: no more codes, zoning or regulations?
      - mothballed 1y ago
        Or just apply the law equally? If you want to vote to increase regulation you agree it applies to your own house. If you're going to impose some $10,000 sprinkler system on the new guy you better be willing to renovate your house too.
        andsoitis 1y ago
        > Or just apply the law equally? Laws generally don’t apply retroactively; they don’t affect actions or events that occurred before the law was enacted due to principles rooted in fairness, legal stability, and practical governance. Non-retroactivity protects individuals from arbitrary government power, ensures trust in legal systems, and promotes economic and social stability. Without this principle, people could be penalized for past decisions made in good faith, eroding confidence in governance. > If you're going to impose some $10,000 sprinkler system on the new guy you better be willing to renovate your house too. What about home building codes affecting structure, e.g. against earthquakes?
- enraged_camel 1y ago
  >> I feel like there has to be an effort at all layers of government to solve this structural problem where a few homes can derail a democratic process. What you describe is not a structural problem. On the contrary, it is precisely how a constitutional, rule-of-law system is meant to work. Democracy does not mean pure majority rule. Our system is a constitutional democracy. Majorities make policy, but minority rights and legal limits constrain how they do it. Courts are there to enforce these limits even when a policy is popular. Judicial review is part of the design. Reviewing legislative and administrative actions for legality is a built-in check and balance, not a veto by randos. The courts exist to ensure the other branches do not skip required steps or exceed their authorities. More specifically, the legal concept of "standing" prevents this from being arbitrary. In most contexts, you cannot sue just because you dislike a decision. You must show concrete injury, such as living next to an affected area. That's why a "few households" can file: they're the ones with legally cognizable stakes. Now, I will grant that in places like California with decades of existing laws, NIMBYs have done an excellent job figuring out exactly what buttons to press and what levers to pull to get their way. But this is not a flaw in the system. It just means that they have read all the manuals (because they are very strong incentivized, financially, to do so) and are now using it competently, even if it is self-serving and sometimes even in bad faith. But other locales have figured out the solutions to this problem. The article gives one such example: Austin, TX.
  - throw0101a 1y ago
    >> Only to have it all screwed up by 2-3 households that sued, pausing the zoning and throwing a wrench into a lot of new housing construction. > Democracy does not mean pure majority rule. Our system is a constitutional democracy. Majorities make policy, but minority rights and legal limits constrain how they do it. Courts are there to enforce these limits even when a policy is popular. When the minority is 20-30 percent you may have a point, when it's 2-3 people then that's just obstructionism.
    - enraged_camel 1y ago
      You should read the rest of my post. The reason it's "2-3 people" is because those 2-3 people are the ones who have legal standing to sue.
- _DeadFred_ 1y ago
  And in my neighborhood they wanted to rezone to allow an asphalt plant for highway construction, something that made all of our homes unfit for purpose but that the government really really wanted. The ability for 2-3 households to sue to stop something like that where the government just steamrolls over zoning/etc because it benefits the government is hugely important. A home is the biggest investment a person will make. It is also not easy to unwind from. Zoning is a promise by the government 'invest in this, we promise it will stay what you are purchasing'. A few home owners should definitely be able to force the government to keep that promise, and to keep their homes fit for purpose.
  - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
    I love downvotes for saying 'zoning laws that promise your home is habitable for human habitation should prevent adding toxic chemical factories to a neighborhood after the fact'. At least comment and justify your downvote.
globular-toast 1y ago
> My wife and I have been holding Treasury bills for the past few years waiting for mortgage rates or home prices to come down, but neither have. I wonder how long people remain in such states. I feel like for something as big as house ownership you need to decide if you really want it and if you do just go for it. How much of your life are you prepared to spend on "getting ahead"? They say "life is what happens to you while you're making other plans".
- mhogers 1y ago
  A 20-30 year long monthly reminder that your mortgage payments are significantly higher due to missing the boat. Ouch! Painful for people that do not expect significant further income increases.
  - tossandthrow 1y ago
    This is the current sentiment. But it is short sighted. The best recommendation is to _know_ the fundamentals of house prices. To know when buying is cheap and expensive. Eg. in relative terms: buying a house at 30 Price/Rent makes it more affordable to rent - in such an environment, just rent. If the P/R falls to 15-20, then buy. Housing can also be unaffordable in absolute terms such as wanting to live in down town San Fransisco. In this case people should strongly consider if they want to pay a premium for that locality. We don't have to go longer back than 2013 to when it made sense to buy over renting - and that will return at some point.
  - globular-toast 1y ago
    It's your choice to think about such things and therefore it's your choice to be unhappy about it. You can't change the past so you can either be unhappy about it, or not. It's your choice.
- immibis 1y ago
  The whole economy is gambling, and there is no way not to gamble. When you gamble, you can lose. These people gambled and lost. And the stakes are your life. Maybe we should invent a better system.
aurareturn 1y ago
It’s very interesting. Based on this theory, stock prices should decrease as interest rates lower. A massive number of people who are waiting for interest rates to drop will sell their equities to buy a house when it happens. IE, many couples are waiting for lower interest rates before buying a house. This runs counter to current equities markets where hints of rate drops from the Fed will increase stock price. It’s definitely an interesting theory.
- BoxFour 1y ago
  Equities markets are largely driven by institutional investors, save for some notable exceptions ("meme stocks"). Unless the theory is that institutional investors are doing the same, it's not that surprising.
greenie_beans 1y ago
rent is expensive too, but cheaper than buying rn. high rent and high purchase price has a second order effect that is relevant to this forum: makes it harder to bootstrap a business.
- nemomarx 1y ago
  it feels like every metro that has high innovation (lots of new businesses, creative art, etc) has had cheap housing first generally. SV is an interesting exception but a lot more money is pumped in to allow it?
  - api 1y ago
    SV had much cheaper housing until the 90s. Not super cheap but it wasn’t until dot.com and then the housing bubble that it got stupid. SF was more expensive, which is maybe why SV is the burbs. The cool hippie art scene in SF was in the cheaper higher crime areas, as it usually is. Maybe we need to get those crime rates up to drive down housing costs. It’s no longer really possible to bootstrap in the Bay Area unless you are doing something nuts like living on couches or cheap shitty boats. It’s too expensive even for modestly funded companies. It’s really just a place for big tech and lavishly funded ventures. If you don’t have a Saudi prince on the cap table your company is better off remote or in another city.
    - ericbarrett 1y ago
      SF had a ton of cheap, low-occupancy warehouses in Soma until the mid-late 2000s. Many have since been renovated into swanky offices.
  - greenie_beans 1y ago
    i don't need an expensive metro to bootstrap what i'm working on. but my partner does for her career. that's the main problem for my situation, at least.
- greenie_beans 1y ago
  artists struggling to afford rent is an even worse second order effect
sokoloff 1y ago
> My wife and I have been holding Treasury bills for the past few years waiting for mortgage rates or home prices to come down, but neither have. So, we keep rolling Treasuries until the right moment arrives. Ouch. Holding T-bills instead of equities for the last few years has been incredibly costly for this couple.
- bluGill 1y ago
  What you are not wrong, this is misleading. We can say on hindsight what happened, but there is no way to know in advance it would have happened that way. There have been many times when equities have done very poorly for a short period of time. Any money you plan to spend in the near future should not be in equities, it should be in lower return investments like treasury bills, money market funds, or other similar investments that while they don't offer as good a return on investment also don't suddenly crash losing significant value for a few years. Their real mistake was thinking the housing market would crash, which while not impossible seemed unlikely to most observers.
  - tossandthrow 1y ago
    The housing market has crashed 2 times within the past ~30 years (90 and 2007). Housing is so over financialized + demographic shifts that it might be merited to expect crashes. Regardless, one should not hold cash in anticipation of a housing crash but in the anticipation of a buying opportunity.
    - rkomorn 1y ago
      > Regardless, one should not hold cash in anticipation of a housing crash but in the anticipation of a buying opportunity. Isn't the housing crash in question also the buying opportunity in question, for many people who have been priced out of the market? Edit: I'm not implying this is a sound strategy. Just more of a reality.
      - tossandthrow 1y ago
mothballed 1y ago
Buy land. Save. Put RV on it. Save. Build utilities. Save. Build tiny house. Save. Expand house. This is what poor people do in latin america, sans the RV. They just buy blocks as they can and add on to it. This is also exactly what our family did, minus the 'expand' part. We could never afford to buy a house nor get access to credit but we could afford to build a tiny one on shithole land one brick at a time. The great thing is it also more or less works no matter how poor you are, if you die before it is complete your children can continue. Eventually after enough generations enough money is saved to have a house.
- tejohnso 1y ago
  Are you talking about buying remote, difficult to access land? For most people who want to live within reasonable distance to grocery or hospital, putting an RV or tiny house on a lot is not going to be permitted.
- LeifCarrotson 1y ago
  Unfortunately, a lot of the intermediate steps are prohibited by code in many locations. You'll get evicted from your own land if you try to live in an RV on it, you can't get a permit for a tiny house, you can't get utilities without a full site plan submitted.
  - mothballed 1y ago
    There are places that still allow it. Not enough for everybody to do it. But since there is no 'fad' of doing it right now, not much competition, anyone who might come across my comment and reasonably wishes to do this near a place with jobs can 100% do so.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      Most of those places are "middle on nowhere". Location matters in real estate, if I can't get to my job in a reasonable amount of time it doesn't matter what I can do. My job is in Des Moines, if you have me the largest mansion in SF for free (including taxes and utilities) I still couldn't afford to live there (plane tickets would cost me several hundred dollars/day and the flights are 5 hours each way by the time I get to the airport an hour early)
mjevans 1y ago
Lack of housing is most of what's wrong with __everything__ in the US right now.
- inglor_cz 1y ago
  Not just in the US. NIMBY looks almost exactly the same in the US, in New Zealand, in Israel, in Italy, in Czechia or in the UK. Basically, as long as you allow other people to veto new construction, it is almost guaranteed that a few bitter fighters will devote their lives to stopping anything to be ever built again. Roads, trams, housing, anything at all. A veritable vetocracy, not too dissimilar from the legendary Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where every noble could veto anything agreed upon by the Sejm by simply standing up and saying "I disagree". The "community participation" ideal which looked very positive once turned out to empower the worst reactionaries. The few countries that got this problem under control did so mostly by limiting the legal abilities of such people to throw wrenches into everything.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    Exactly. The problem with community participation is it can only work when significant numbers of people participate. Most people have too much in life as it is to get involved. On any given night there are 50 different events in my city I could go to - (knitting circle, bible studies, softball, DnD, book club, girl scouts, gymnastics...), plus I have my own hobbies at home I'm trying to work on: I don't have time to attend the community meetings as well - and neither does most people in my community. What is left with the "busy bodies" who decide to make time - but they don't represent the community and shouldn't get input (I went to one: Some women was asking a lot of questions on why the road department decided to not replace a road grader with 14900 hours on it even though the policy was replace it at 15000 hours - that is trying to micromanage the whole county as if the leaders are not competent to make decisions).
  - immibis 1y ago
    Don't forget they're saying these things for valid reasons, and a balance has to be struck. For example, (this is not a perfect rule, just a rough draft) if you can only build an apartment block next to another apartment block, high-density areas can exist radiating outwards from existing centers (where you'd want high density and where people who want to live in high density want to live). Or you can build one surrounded by farmland, probably. Apparently that's popular in America though I don't understand why.
LastTrain 1y ago
Lack of housing is not the primary issue. The problem is the mindset and various incentives to treat property as an investment vehicle.
- energy123 1y ago
  If investment was the only major issue, rental inflation would not be high. Rental inflation can only be explained by a lack of housing in areas people want to live.
  - LastTrain 1y ago
    I didn’t say it was the only factor, I’d never say that. But let’s say for the sake of argument that you are correct, supply is the one and only thing driving rent prices. What sorts of things cause supply shortages?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- whywhywhywhy 1y ago
  Once you understand fiat and feel inflation affect your buying power the fact property is an option as an investment at all to normal people is a Godsend. Like what asset could non-investment savvy people move their increasingly worthless savings into otherwise?
  - carlosjobim 1y ago
    > Like what asset could non-investment savvy people move their increasingly worthless savings into otherwise? Investing in businesses bringing jobs and prosperity to their community, their people, their nation. Or investing in their children to help them start out in life and not live as serfs. But no, better to lock up all the money into non-producing assets and completely destroy the economy, progress and the birth rate. There's a reason why during most of history, your welfare in age depended on your children or extending that to your community. Any other system simply eradicates the people participating in it, as we see right now with rapidly diminishing younger generations, to the benefit of the olds.
api 1y ago
I think if we could make housing affordable again the entire mood of the culture would change. A ton of nihilistic rage driven resentment politics on both sides of the political spectrum would ease up. Young people would no longer be doom spiraling. It would be like the fog lifted and the sun came out. I pretty firmly believe that high housing prices are destroying civilization. I don’t think that’s hyperbole. I’ve been fond of saying it’s the economic problem in much of the developed world. The, singular. Make housing inexpensive and most of the other stats look at least okay. We need to choose between real estate equity and literally all other things.
- bluGill 1y ago
  > Young people would no longer be doom spiraling False. Young people always find something to doom spiral about. They have been doing it all my life, and if you read old books you will see it go back much farther.
- jurking_hoff 1y ago
  [dead]
homelessNproud 1y ago
[flagged]
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  The alternative to police is not that you get to do what you want. The alternative is that people who have fewer rules than the police are the ones who throw you out.
  - immibis 1y ago
    No, the alternative is whatever we say it is. Presumably something better. You might even call them "police", but to make them better, they'd have to be a brand new system from the ground up with no overlap in personnel or plans.
    - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
      No, the alternative is whatever we do. We can say it will be unicorns and rainbows, but unless you have a unicorn-and-rainbow factory, saying that won't change the reality that it will be... something else. We might be able to abolish or defund the police. The result won't be paradise, though, it will be Vigilance Committees. (Even "abolish and replace" is, I think, too much of a reach to be actually implemented.)
      - immibis 1y ago
        So how do you know what that will be?
        AnimalMuppet 1y ago
        I don't. I just know that there's a lot more to making something actually better than just saying that it's going to be better. But, in fairness, I may have misread how you meant "whatever we say it is". If you meant that we get to make choices that determine the future, I agree. I would just caution that it takes far more effort, persistence, and political capital than you expect in order to make a positive change.
cjpearson 1y ago
There's a common view that home-ownership is important because a home is the most expensive asset most people will ever own and its increasing value is key to their comfortable retirement. But this view of a home as an appreciating asset is incompatible with increasing housing affordability. There are definitely downsides to renting such as landlord issues or missing out on mortgage subsidies, but maybe a higher proportion of renters could lead to improvements in affordability. And if the well-off are renting as well, there's also more hope for better legal protections for renters.
- RugnirViking 1y ago
  People don't say home ownership is important because it's an asset for retirement; if you sold it, you wouldn't have a home in retirement! They say that because owning a home allows you to reduce your bills, but also more crucially and viscerally because owning a home allows you to be free and have a place that is truly yours to do with what you will. You can paint the walls, have a pet, host a party, knock down a wall and build an extension, do whatever you like to make your mark on it and the world. It's yours and if you will it, it always will be. It's a level of peace and security that's almost incomparible. There's a reason in most of history there was a distinction drawn between bonded peasants and freeholders.
  - lazide 1y ago
    Also, it’s a risk hedge. In many very populous areas property tax increases are capped. This allows someone to quite concretely limit their housing costs in retirement (a large portion of anyone’s expenses!) in a way that is impossible in almost any other way. The only other similar types of deals are specific types of rent control in very limited metro areas. That is huge.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      Even if property tax increases are not capped, they are generally a fraction of what the house payment would be. (though after 30+ years of inflation the tax is what the original house payment was) Generally if you rent your share of property tax in the rent payment is higher than an equivalent house share would be Tenters don't see how property tax affects their rent and so they generally don't oppose property tax increases, if they even bother to vote which they are less likely to. To be fair, how tax affects tax is complex - rent is supply and demand first, things like taxes put a floor on prices and so affect supply but this means it is indirect and so hard to see even though it will catch up eventually.
mark-r 1y ago
My wife and I were remarking on this just yesterday. We were driving through a neighborhood of small starter homes, and noting that nobody builds anything like that anymore. A two bedroom one bathroom house is all anybody needs to start out and get into the homeownership game, but the only way to get one is from the constrained supply of old ones.
- jandrese 1y ago
  2br 1bath doesn’t make sense in single family homes. That’s a condo/apartment size residence. Maybe townhome if you live in a low density area. Condos should be a lot more popular, especially for the young and old, but the fees are pretty much always ridiculous. The whole point is to spread out the maintence costs among many residents so they are trivial, instead condo fees are usually in the hundreds or thousands per month per unit for no apparent reason other than the landlord wants a big payday. It doesn’t cost millions per year to maintain some parking spots, a small unstaffed pool, a front desk, and building maintenance. It’s like paying rent on top of your mortgage.
  - sethammons 1y ago
    Grew up in a three bed, one bath, with five people. Home ownership in the 1950s got you a shoebox. It was affordable. That's why so many got into the equity game. Larger expectations and larger returns have changed the landscape.
  - jwald33 1y ago
    2br 1bath is a fine entry point up until you're looking at a family of 4+ or when you're talking about teenage kids who would want their own rooms. Or retirees who want to downsize, no difference
    - jandrese 1y ago
      The idea is that you live there cheaply while building equity for 5 years or so and then trade up to a family house once you are married and looking to settle down.
presentation 1y ago
Ideally NIMBYs wouldn’t have an incentive to block housing construction because while the total number of houses goes up making the average house cheaper, the land itself gets more valuable due to the increased density/development/amenities; so those same homeowners can sell their lots for bug bucks. I guess this misalignment of incentives is a problem of zoning, permitting, and taxation distorting things?
- LastTrain 1y ago
  Some of us are old enough to remember upzoning by its old moniker urban renewal and the damage that was done in its name.
  - amanaplanacanal 1y ago
    Not exactly the same thing. Upzoning allows the owner to build more than one residence on what was a single family property. This might include removing an existing home to build a duplex or triplex, dividing a house into a duplex, or building an accessory dwelling unit on the property. Urban renewal was typically the government using eminent domain to raze whole neighborhoods to build low income apartment buildings or some such. This also might include using the "Tower in a park" architecture that was all the rage at the time, but a terrible urban form.
    - LastTrain 1y ago
      Sure, but by the time upzoning makes it through city council and all the compromises are made it looks a hell of a lot like urban renewal. What else do you call allowing the removal of two historic structures from a city block to make way for another five over two?
      - presentation 1y ago
        Another five over one (which is what I think you mean) is not the same as a whole neighborhood getting razed and replaced with towers in the park. By the way, the whole point of streamlining permitting and zoning processes are to get rid of the unreasonable watering down of every proposal because as you state the end result is worse for everyone, aesthetics included. Also it isn’t just about historic structures, there’s situation like that San Francisco Mission District strip-mall-esque laundromat steps from the BART station, that can’t be replaced because NIMBYs are afraid of “changing the neighborhood character.” If crap architecture like that ends up in the same historic bucket then whoever is declaring 80% of every city as being “historic” has done a disservice to anyone who wants to actually protect historic architecture by diluting the name for their anti-change cause.
mschuster91 1y ago
A side effect that is vastly underestimated in its impact is: the housing racket makes virtually all Western economies vastly more uncompetitive with Asian countries. With urban areas routinely approaching or, even worse, outright exceeding 50% of net income going away for housing, that's setting a pretty high floor on wages and salaries, and that in turn drives up the price for domestic Things and Services. And no, building housing will not solve the problem. At all. People keep whacking their cucumber over urbanisation because they deem it to be "cheaper" to provide essential utilities due to effects of scale/density - the problem is, space is still finite and denser housing costs more money to construct, especially once you build higher than the maximum usable height of a fire truck's ladder because now you need to invest into independent rescue/evacuation paths, and once you build above 10-ish (or less, depending on soil type and geological risks like earthquakes) stories you need to dig deep into the ground to build a foundation strong enough to keep the building from damaging during settling. Can't compromise on the fire safety regulations (otherwise all you get is a new Grenfell Tower style disaster), and you can't compromise with physics eithr. Western countries need to build out essential infrastructure like broadband Internet, mobile phone service and public transit in rural and suburban areas. That's the only path that doesn't rely on utterly insane investments.
carlosjobim 1y ago
If we all could agree that water, food and shelter are the essentials for human survival (which I know that most people here wouldn't agree on), then it's easy to see the absurdity of the so called "society" or "economy" or "system" that the younger generations have been born into. Because it would be the same thing as a person being forced to enter into life long debt in order to obtain drinking water. How can it be that people can enslave the young generation by the motivation that they were born first and therefore own all the land, but they can't do that with water? Ie: "We were born first and own all the water rights and you have to go into debt slavery the rest of your life if you want to drink water!" Makes just as much sense as the current situation.
thrance 1y ago
Why, after decades of failing against NYMBYs, are people so confident they can have any more success against NYMBYism as a whole? Homes are assets, and as such people and corporations who own homes really don't want them to depreciate, or even stop appreciating. Homeowners own the majority of this country's wealth, and since modern politics are entirely subservient to capital, the current situation makes perfect sense. Thinking it will only take a bit of deregulation to fix this mess seems foolish to me. Whatever the solution is, it will necessarily involve something more radical than tweaking a few numbers on a spreadsheet, and will require front-facing capital interests (something no political party is currently willing to engage in, not the democrats and certainly not the republicans).
- bluGill 1y ago
  NIMBY has proven the issues with it and so there are success. NIMBY started because people like Robert Moses proved what happens when you let some powerful person have too much power. If you (like me) are against NIMBY make sure you don't let things go too far that way - I don't know what is too far
_factor 1y ago
We need to be critically honest about how our system operates. Land is finite. As population grows, supply and demand dictate it will rise in value if you hold. If you rent property that someone else would prefer to buy for habitation if made available at market rate, you’re benefiting at overall society’s expense. Similarly if you take units off the market as investment vehicles. Productivity matters most in economics. Without it you’re just shifting money around. Owning as a middle man is essentially the opposite of productivity. As rentals become the only option and a small percentage of land owners become the only housing option, we’re going to see a rise in wealthy untethered types who rent and move at will. Similarly, we’ll start seeing ghettos form in the scant land remaining after this fully plays out. The problem is that you can’t tell an individual who had to go through hell to own a place, on the verge of a second home, not to rent instead of sell. This society is a hammer taking a chip out of every successful shoulder. “Why should I do society a favor when society did me none?” Is a common mindset that just exacerbates the issue. We’re creating a resentful generation who feel disenfranchised and taken advantage of, and it’s only going to get worse. I fear for uprisings and surveillance states incoming. For real solutions, bring back work from home. No need for dense housing when you’re not forced to live in a particular area.
- Balgair 1y ago
  > Land is finite. As population grows, supply and demand dictate it will rise in value if you hold. Nitpick: There is a lot of land. We're not going to run out of it anytime soon. What we are consuming is 'good' land. That definition will depend on a lot of things, of course. For instance, in Denver, there is a lot of land. It's just that all the land to the west is rugged mountains. Great, so all the land to the east then, plains, right? You can build houses all the way to Kansas! Yes, but all that land is filled with bentonite clay which expands 4x with water (yes really!). You can't build cheap and safe houses on it. So, land values increase as more people move to Denver, simple supply and demand. This kind of thing is all over the world. You can build more houses just about anywhere, but making these houses safe, cheap, and where you actually want to live, that is the problem.
  - tossandthrow 1y ago
haizhung 1y ago
Curious to see that no one mentions the drastically rising inequality in western society as the root cause of the housing crises. What we are seeing to date is a transfer of wealth from the working class, the middle class, and the government to rich people at a rate that is unprecedented in human history. The rich are getting richer at an extremely high rate, and barely any country taxes wealth. So what you get is multimillionaires and billionaires who get passive income of several million dollars per month. What are they going to do with that money? There is a rule that you should let your money work for you, and so rich people buy: assets, stock, shares. That’s why the prices of all of these things go up despite living standards falling and falling for ordinary people. We have an asset price inflation, due to the enormous amount of money given to the ultra rich. Housing prices will never go down unless you tax the rich. Regardless of zoning laws or what not.
- PleasureBot 1y ago
  This is the most worrying aspect of it to me. It is hard to imagine an economy or society in general to continue functioning indefinitely with such an extreme difference in outcomes between different groups. As far as I know there is no historical example of a society that allowed inequality to grow at the level ours is that did not ultimately face massive socio-political upheaval. Needless to say it would not be pleasant to live through those times Seems to me that capitalism, especially when unregulated as has been in the US since the late 70's/early 80's ultimately results in wealth concentrated somewhat in the top 10%, but especially the top 1%, while the bottom 90% sees their share of national wealth drop every lower. It feels like we are entering a second guilded age, just like the late 1800's. Maybe a few world wars and a global depression will reset the board and we can start again.
- HDThoreaun 1y ago
  Because rising in equality is not the root cause of the housing crises. Middle class people who ban new housing from being constructed are the root cause. When housing can be freely built housing prices dont increase faster than inflation.
  - tossandthrow 1y ago

67 points by throw0101c 1y ago

Sadly structurally the system favors housing incumbents. And it doesn’t take a lot to derail efforts to create more supply. In my town we spent 8 years of public involvement in rezoning to increase supply and density. Including several city council elections of pro-housing council members elected over more NIMBY ones. Only to have it all screwed up by 2-3 households that sued, pausing the zoning and throwing a wrench into a lot of new housing construction. I feel like there has to be an effort at all layers of government to solve this structural problem where a few homes can derail a democratic process.

grafmax 1y ago
And yet zoning is just one factor in housing supply. Even successfully implementing upzoning laws can find markets with higher prices, rates of homelessness, and investor ownership of housing - because many factors influence these outcomes not just zoning laws.
- LastTrain 1y ago
  Is there an example where upzoning has resulted in reduced housing prices?
  - softwaredoug 1y ago
    Yes there is. It’s one of many factors. I did a deep dive years ago before wanting to support the issue locally IE: The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability https://www.nber.org/papers/w8835 https://www.nber.org/papers/w8835 > we argue that high prices have little to do with conventional models with a free market for land. Instead, our evidence suggests that zoning and other land use controls, play the dominant role in making housing expensive.
    - grafmax 1y ago
      > an example where upzoning has resulted in reduced housing prices I found an argument in your paper but no such examples.
      - LastTrain 1y ago
        I’ve not been able to find any, which is not to say there aren’t any, but when you have these conversations the inevitable result is getting called a NIMBY so I tend to abandon them early.
  - pgwhalen 1y ago
    Yes, here's an episode of a podcast with the authors of such a paper. https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/2024/12/11/83-local-effects-of-upzoning-with-elena-lutz-and-simon-buchler/ https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/2024/12/11/83-local-effects-of-up...
    - LastTrain 1y ago
      Thanks. Zurich. I don’t think even the authors would call this a slam dunk, and they cite it as the best available example. I do appreciate that they rightly call out that upzoning will cause movements in the population and the potential benefits will take decades to materialize.
      - pgwhalen 1y ago
        I’m not sure what “slam dunk” means in this context, but they do note how clear the effect is, even if it does unfortunately take 5-10 years before it shows.
    - grafmax 1y ago
      It looks like rent stayed the same there. It didn’t decrease.
- softwaredoug 1y ago
  Yes I agree it’s just one factor. It’s necessary but not sufficient. I think I another huge constraint is construction labor. Which is very tight right now. I’m reminded we built the Empire State Building in 9 months. I see delays for single family homes causing it to take years.
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    Those aren’t comparable. A delay in a standard stick built home would be due to legal issues. Otherwise, tract homebuilders in the US have metrics of building a brand new house within 100 days. The labor costs are high, but not that high that construction is delayed due to lack of labor. Land prices and clearing legal hurdles are the bigger problem.
  - Bjartr 1y ago
    An important consideration for the Empire State Building is that it was not built by the lowest bidder. It was built by those who were considered most likely to be successful at the endeavor.
CGMthrowaway 1y ago
[flagged]
- mothballed 1y ago
  Yes but the unique piece here is ratcheting up of ever increasing codes, zoning, regulations while grandfathering in the old housing. The people voting made their own houses illegal but then said their own houses were exempt. They've created an effect where the incumbents own housing that would be illegal for anyone else to create, which helps prop up their home value massively since it artificially raises the price of the substitutive option of building a house.
  - PessimalDecimal 1y ago
    Solution: no more codes, zoning or regulations?
    - mothballed 1y ago
      Or just apply the law equally? If you want to vote to increase regulation you agree it applies to your own house. If you're going to impose some $10,000 sprinkler system on the new guy you better be willing to renovate your house too.
      - andsoitis 1y ago
        > Or just apply the law equally? Laws generally don’t apply retroactively; they don’t affect actions or events that occurred before the law was enacted due to principles rooted in fairness, legal stability, and practical governance. Non-retroactivity protects individuals from arbitrary government power, ensures trust in legal systems, and promotes economic and social stability. Without this principle, people could be penalized for past decisions made in good faith, eroding confidence in governance. > If you're going to impose some $10,000 sprinkler system on the new guy you better be willing to renovate your house too. What about home building codes affecting structure, e.g. against earthquakes?
enraged_camel 1y ago
>> I feel like there has to be an effort at all layers of government to solve this structural problem where a few homes can derail a democratic process. What you describe is not a structural problem. On the contrary, it is precisely how a constitutional, rule-of-law system is meant to work. Democracy does not mean pure majority rule. Our system is a constitutional democracy. Majorities make policy, but minority rights and legal limits constrain how they do it. Courts are there to enforce these limits even when a policy is popular. Judicial review is part of the design. Reviewing legislative and administrative actions for legality is a built-in check and balance, not a veto by randos. The courts exist to ensure the other branches do not skip required steps or exceed their authorities. More specifically, the legal concept of "standing" prevents this from being arbitrary. In most contexts, you cannot sue just because you dislike a decision. You must show concrete injury, such as living next to an affected area. That's why a "few households" can file: they're the ones with legally cognizable stakes. Now, I will grant that in places like California with decades of existing laws, NIMBYs have done an excellent job figuring out exactly what buttons to press and what levers to pull to get their way. But this is not a flaw in the system. It just means that they have read all the manuals (because they are very strong incentivized, financially, to do so) and are now using it competently, even if it is self-serving and sometimes even in bad faith. But other locales have figured out the solutions to this problem. The article gives one such example: Austin, TX.
- throw0101a 1y ago
  >> Only to have it all screwed up by 2-3 households that sued, pausing the zoning and throwing a wrench into a lot of new housing construction. > Democracy does not mean pure majority rule. Our system is a constitutional democracy. Majorities make policy, but minority rights and legal limits constrain how they do it. Courts are there to enforce these limits even when a policy is popular. When the minority is 20-30 percent you may have a point, when it's 2-3 people then that's just obstructionism.
  - enraged_camel 1y ago
    You should read the rest of my post. The reason it's "2-3 people" is because those 2-3 people are the ones who have legal standing to sue.
_DeadFred_ 1y ago
And in my neighborhood they wanted to rezone to allow an asphalt plant for highway construction, something that made all of our homes unfit for purpose but that the government really really wanted. The ability for 2-3 households to sue to stop something like that where the government just steamrolls over zoning/etc because it benefits the government is hugely important. A home is the biggest investment a person will make. It is also not easy to unwind from. Zoning is a promise by the government 'invest in this, we promise it will stay what you are purchasing'. A few home owners should definitely be able to force the government to keep that promise, and to keep their homes fit for purpose.
- _DeadFred_ 1y ago
  I love downvotes for saying 'zoning laws that promise your home is habitable for human habitation should prevent adding toxic chemical factories to a neighborhood after the fact'. At least comment and justify your downvote.

globular-toast 1y ago

> My wife and I have been holding Treasury bills for the past few years waiting for mortgage rates or home prices to come down, but neither have. I wonder how long people remain in such states. I feel like for something as big as house ownership you need to decide if you really want it and if you do just go for it. How much of your life are you prepared to spend on "getting ahead"? They say "life is what happens to you while you're making other plans".

mhogers 1y ago
A 20-30 year long monthly reminder that your mortgage payments are significantly higher due to missing the boat. Ouch! Painful for people that do not expect significant further income increases.
- tossandthrow 1y ago
  This is the current sentiment. But it is short sighted. The best recommendation is to _know_ the fundamentals of house prices. To know when buying is cheap and expensive. Eg. in relative terms: buying a house at 30 Price/Rent makes it more affordable to rent - in such an environment, just rent. If the P/R falls to 15-20, then buy. Housing can also be unaffordable in absolute terms such as wanting to live in down town San Fransisco. In this case people should strongly consider if they want to pay a premium for that locality. We don't have to go longer back than 2013 to when it made sense to buy over renting - and that will return at some point.
- globular-toast 1y ago
  It's your choice to think about such things and therefore it's your choice to be unhappy about it. You can't change the past so you can either be unhappy about it, or not. It's your choice.
immibis 1y ago
The whole economy is gambling, and there is no way not to gamble. When you gamble, you can lose. These people gambled and lost. And the stakes are your life. Maybe we should invent a better system.

aurareturn 1y ago

It’s very interesting. Based on this theory, stock prices should decrease as interest rates lower. A massive number of people who are waiting for interest rates to drop will sell their equities to buy a house when it happens. IE, many couples are waiting for lower interest rates before buying a house. This runs counter to current equities markets where hints of rate drops from the Fed will increase stock price. It’s definitely an interesting theory.

BoxFour 1y ago
Equities markets are largely driven by institutional investors, save for some notable exceptions ("meme stocks"). Unless the theory is that institutional investors are doing the same, it's not that surprising.

greenie_beans 1y ago

rent is expensive too, but cheaper than buying rn. high rent and high purchase price has a second order effect that is relevant to this forum: makes it harder to bootstrap a business.

nemomarx 1y ago
it feels like every metro that has high innovation (lots of new businesses, creative art, etc) has had cheap housing first generally. SV is an interesting exception but a lot more money is pumped in to allow it?
- api 1y ago
  SV had much cheaper housing until the 90s. Not super cheap but it wasn’t until dot.com and then the housing bubble that it got stupid. SF was more expensive, which is maybe why SV is the burbs. The cool hippie art scene in SF was in the cheaper higher crime areas, as it usually is. Maybe we need to get those crime rates up to drive down housing costs. It’s no longer really possible to bootstrap in the Bay Area unless you are doing something nuts like living on couches or cheap shitty boats. It’s too expensive even for modestly funded companies. It’s really just a place for big tech and lavishly funded ventures. If you don’t have a Saudi prince on the cap table your company is better off remote or in another city.
  - ericbarrett 1y ago
    SF had a ton of cheap, low-occupancy warehouses in Soma until the mid-late 2000s. Many have since been renovated into swanky offices.
- greenie_beans 1y ago
  i don't need an expensive metro to bootstrap what i'm working on. but my partner does for her career. that's the main problem for my situation, at least.
greenie_beans 1y ago
artists struggling to afford rent is an even worse second order effect

sokoloff 1y ago

> My wife and I have been holding Treasury bills for the past few years waiting for mortgage rates or home prices to come down, but neither have. So, we keep rolling Treasuries until the right moment arrives. Ouch. Holding T-bills instead of equities for the last few years has been incredibly costly for this couple.

bluGill 1y ago
What you are not wrong, this is misleading. We can say on hindsight what happened, but there is no way to know in advance it would have happened that way. There have been many times when equities have done very poorly for a short period of time. Any money you plan to spend in the near future should not be in equities, it should be in lower return investments like treasury bills, money market funds, or other similar investments that while they don't offer as good a return on investment also don't suddenly crash losing significant value for a few years. Their real mistake was thinking the housing market would crash, which while not impossible seemed unlikely to most observers.
- tossandthrow 1y ago
  The housing market has crashed 2 times within the past ~30 years (90 and 2007). Housing is so over financialized + demographic shifts that it might be merited to expect crashes. Regardless, one should not hold cash in anticipation of a housing crash but in the anticipation of a buying opportunity.
  - rkomorn 1y ago
    > Regardless, one should not hold cash in anticipation of a housing crash but in the anticipation of a buying opportunity. Isn't the housing crash in question also the buying opportunity in question, for many people who have been priced out of the market? Edit: I'm not implying this is a sound strategy. Just more of a reality.
    - tossandthrow 1y ago

mothballed 1y ago

Buy land. Save. Put RV on it. Save. Build utilities. Save. Build tiny house. Save. Expand house. This is what poor people do in latin america, sans the RV. They just buy blocks as they can and add on to it. This is also exactly what our family did, minus the 'expand' part. We could never afford to buy a house nor get access to credit but we could afford to build a tiny one on shithole land one brick at a time. The great thing is it also more or less works no matter how poor you are, if you die before it is complete your children can continue. Eventually after enough generations enough money is saved to have a house.

tejohnso 1y ago
Are you talking about buying remote, difficult to access land? For most people who want to live within reasonable distance to grocery or hospital, putting an RV or tiny house on a lot is not going to be permitted.
LeifCarrotson 1y ago
Unfortunately, a lot of the intermediate steps are prohibited by code in many locations. You'll get evicted from your own land if you try to live in an RV on it, you can't get a permit for a tiny house, you can't get utilities without a full site plan submitted.
- mothballed 1y ago
  There are places that still allow it. Not enough for everybody to do it. But since there is no 'fad' of doing it right now, not much competition, anyone who might come across my comment and reasonably wishes to do this near a place with jobs can 100% do so.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    Most of those places are "middle on nowhere". Location matters in real estate, if I can't get to my job in a reasonable amount of time it doesn't matter what I can do. My job is in Des Moines, if you have me the largest mansion in SF for free (including taxes and utilities) I still couldn't afford to live there (plane tickets would cost me several hundred dollars/day and the flights are 5 hours each way by the time I get to the airport an hour early)

mjevans 1y ago

Lack of housing is most of what's wrong with __everything__ in the US right now.

inglor_cz 1y ago
Not just in the US. NIMBY looks almost exactly the same in the US, in New Zealand, in Israel, in Italy, in Czechia or in the UK. Basically, as long as you allow other people to veto new construction, it is almost guaranteed that a few bitter fighters will devote their lives to stopping anything to be ever built again. Roads, trams, housing, anything at all. A veritable vetocracy, not too dissimilar from the legendary Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where every noble could veto anything agreed upon by the Sejm by simply standing up and saying "I disagree". The "community participation" ideal which looked very positive once turned out to empower the worst reactionaries. The few countries that got this problem under control did so mostly by limiting the legal abilities of such people to throw wrenches into everything.
- bluGill 1y ago
  Exactly. The problem with community participation is it can only work when significant numbers of people participate. Most people have too much in life as it is to get involved. On any given night there are 50 different events in my city I could go to - (knitting circle, bible studies, softball, DnD, book club, girl scouts, gymnastics...), plus I have my own hobbies at home I'm trying to work on: I don't have time to attend the community meetings as well - and neither does most people in my community. What is left with the "busy bodies" who decide to make time - but they don't represent the community and shouldn't get input (I went to one: Some women was asking a lot of questions on why the road department decided to not replace a road grader with 14900 hours on it even though the policy was replace it at 15000 hours - that is trying to micromanage the whole county as if the leaders are not competent to make decisions).
- immibis 1y ago
  Don't forget they're saying these things for valid reasons, and a balance has to be struck. For example, (this is not a perfect rule, just a rough draft) if you can only build an apartment block next to another apartment block, high-density areas can exist radiating outwards from existing centers (where you'd want high density and where people who want to live in high density want to live). Or you can build one surrounded by farmland, probably. Apparently that's popular in America though I don't understand why.

LastTrain 1y ago

Lack of housing is not the primary issue. The problem is the mindset and various incentives to treat property as an investment vehicle.

energy123 1y ago
If investment was the only major issue, rental inflation would not be high. Rental inflation can only be explained by a lack of housing in areas people want to live.
- LastTrain 1y ago
  I didn’t say it was the only factor, I’d never say that. But let’s say for the sake of argument that you are correct, supply is the one and only thing driving rent prices. What sorts of things cause supply shortages?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
whywhywhywhy 1y ago
Once you understand fiat and feel inflation affect your buying power the fact property is an option as an investment at all to normal people is a Godsend. Like what asset could non-investment savvy people move their increasingly worthless savings into otherwise?
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  > Like what asset could non-investment savvy people move their increasingly worthless savings into otherwise? Investing in businesses bringing jobs and prosperity to their community, their people, their nation. Or investing in their children to help them start out in life and not live as serfs. But no, better to lock up all the money into non-producing assets and completely destroy the economy, progress and the birth rate. There's a reason why during most of history, your welfare in age depended on your children or extending that to your community. Any other system simply eradicates the people participating in it, as we see right now with rapidly diminishing younger generations, to the benefit of the olds.

api 1y ago

I think if we could make housing affordable again the entire mood of the culture would change. A ton of nihilistic rage driven resentment politics on both sides of the political spectrum would ease up. Young people would no longer be doom spiraling. It would be like the fog lifted and the sun came out. I pretty firmly believe that high housing prices are destroying civilization. I don’t think that’s hyperbole. I’ve been fond of saying it’s the economic problem in much of the developed world. The, singular. Make housing inexpensive and most of the other stats look at least okay. We need to choose between real estate equity and literally all other things.

bluGill 1y ago
> Young people would no longer be doom spiraling False. Young people always find something to doom spiral about. They have been doing it all my life, and if you read old books you will see it go back much farther.
jurking_hoff 1y ago
[dead]

homelessNproud 1y ago

[flagged]

AnimalMuppet 1y ago
The alternative to police is not that you get to do what you want. The alternative is that people who have fewer rules than the police are the ones who throw you out.
- immibis 1y ago
  No, the alternative is whatever we say it is. Presumably something better. You might even call them "police", but to make them better, they'd have to be a brand new system from the ground up with no overlap in personnel or plans.
  - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
    No, the alternative is whatever we do. We can say it will be unicorns and rainbows, but unless you have a unicorn-and-rainbow factory, saying that won't change the reality that it will be... something else. We might be able to abolish or defund the police. The result won't be paradise, though, it will be Vigilance Committees. (Even "abolish and replace" is, I think, too much of a reach to be actually implemented.)
    - immibis 1y ago
      So how do you know what that will be?
      - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
        I don't. I just know that there's a lot more to making something actually better than just saying that it's going to be better. But, in fairness, I may have misread how you meant "whatever we say it is". If you meant that we get to make choices that determine the future, I agree. I would just caution that it takes far more effort, persistence, and political capital than you expect in order to make a positive change.

cjpearson 1y ago

There's a common view that home-ownership is important because a home is the most expensive asset most people will ever own and its increasing value is key to their comfortable retirement. But this view of a home as an appreciating asset is incompatible with increasing housing affordability. There are definitely downsides to renting such as landlord issues or missing out on mortgage subsidies, but maybe a higher proportion of renters could lead to improvements in affordability. And if the well-off are renting as well, there's also more hope for better legal protections for renters.

RugnirViking 1y ago
People don't say home ownership is important because it's an asset for retirement; if you sold it, you wouldn't have a home in retirement! They say that because owning a home allows you to reduce your bills, but also more crucially and viscerally because owning a home allows you to be free and have a place that is truly yours to do with what you will. You can paint the walls, have a pet, host a party, knock down a wall and build an extension, do whatever you like to make your mark on it and the world. It's yours and if you will it, it always will be. It's a level of peace and security that's almost incomparible. There's a reason in most of history there was a distinction drawn between bonded peasants and freeholders.
- lazide 1y ago
  Also, it’s a risk hedge. In many very populous areas property tax increases are capped. This allows someone to quite concretely limit their housing costs in retirement (a large portion of anyone’s expenses!) in a way that is impossible in almost any other way. The only other similar types of deals are specific types of rent control in very limited metro areas. That is huge.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    Even if property tax increases are not capped, they are generally a fraction of what the house payment would be. (though after 30+ years of inflation the tax is what the original house payment was) Generally if you rent your share of property tax in the rent payment is higher than an equivalent house share would be Tenters don't see how property tax affects their rent and so they generally don't oppose property tax increases, if they even bother to vote which they are less likely to. To be fair, how tax affects tax is complex - rent is supply and demand first, things like taxes put a floor on prices and so affect supply but this means it is indirect and so hard to see even though it will catch up eventually.

mark-r 1y ago

My wife and I were remarking on this just yesterday. We were driving through a neighborhood of small starter homes, and noting that nobody builds anything like that anymore. A two bedroom one bathroom house is all anybody needs to start out and get into the homeownership game, but the only way to get one is from the constrained supply of old ones.

jandrese 1y ago
2br 1bath doesn’t make sense in single family homes. That’s a condo/apartment size residence. Maybe townhome if you live in a low density area. Condos should be a lot more popular, especially for the young and old, but the fees are pretty much always ridiculous. The whole point is to spread out the maintence costs among many residents so they are trivial, instead condo fees are usually in the hundreds or thousands per month per unit for no apparent reason other than the landlord wants a big payday. It doesn’t cost millions per year to maintain some parking spots, a small unstaffed pool, a front desk, and building maintenance. It’s like paying rent on top of your mortgage.
- sethammons 1y ago
  Grew up in a three bed, one bath, with five people. Home ownership in the 1950s got you a shoebox. It was affordable. That's why so many got into the equity game. Larger expectations and larger returns have changed the landscape.
- jwald33 1y ago
  2br 1bath is a fine entry point up until you're looking at a family of 4+ or when you're talking about teenage kids who would want their own rooms. Or retirees who want to downsize, no difference
  - jandrese 1y ago
    The idea is that you live there cheaply while building equity for 5 years or so and then trade up to a family house once you are married and looking to settle down.

presentation 1y ago

Ideally NIMBYs wouldn’t have an incentive to block housing construction because while the total number of houses goes up making the average house cheaper, the land itself gets more valuable due to the increased density/development/amenities; so those same homeowners can sell their lots for bug bucks. I guess this misalignment of incentives is a problem of zoning, permitting, and taxation distorting things?

LastTrain 1y ago
Some of us are old enough to remember upzoning by its old moniker urban renewal and the damage that was done in its name.
- amanaplanacanal 1y ago
  Not exactly the same thing. Upzoning allows the owner to build more than one residence on what was a single family property. This might include removing an existing home to build a duplex or triplex, dividing a house into a duplex, or building an accessory dwelling unit on the property. Urban renewal was typically the government using eminent domain to raze whole neighborhoods to build low income apartment buildings or some such. This also might include using the "Tower in a park" architecture that was all the rage at the time, but a terrible urban form.
  - LastTrain 1y ago
    Sure, but by the time upzoning makes it through city council and all the compromises are made it looks a hell of a lot like urban renewal. What else do you call allowing the removal of two historic structures from a city block to make way for another five over two?
    - presentation 1y ago
      Another five over one (which is what I think you mean) is not the same as a whole neighborhood getting razed and replaced with towers in the park. By the way, the whole point of streamlining permitting and zoning processes are to get rid of the unreasonable watering down of every proposal because as you state the end result is worse for everyone, aesthetics included. Also it isn’t just about historic structures, there’s situation like that San Francisco Mission District strip-mall-esque laundromat steps from the BART station, that can’t be replaced because NIMBYs are afraid of “changing the neighborhood character.” If crap architecture like that ends up in the same historic bucket then whoever is declaring 80% of every city as being “historic” has done a disservice to anyone who wants to actually protect historic architecture by diluting the name for their anti-change cause.

mschuster91 1y ago

A side effect that is vastly underestimated in its impact is: the housing racket makes virtually all Western economies vastly more uncompetitive with Asian countries. With urban areas routinely approaching or, even worse, outright exceeding 50% of net income going away for housing, that's setting a pretty high floor on wages and salaries, and that in turn drives up the price for domestic Things and Services. And no, building housing will not solve the problem. At all. People keep whacking their cucumber over urbanisation because they deem it to be "cheaper" to provide essential utilities due to effects of scale/density - the problem is, space is still finite and denser housing costs more money to construct, especially once you build higher than the maximum usable height of a fire truck's ladder because now you need to invest into independent rescue/evacuation paths, and once you build above 10-ish (or less, depending on soil type and geological risks like earthquakes) stories you need to dig deep into the ground to build a foundation strong enough to keep the building from damaging during settling. Can't compromise on the fire safety regulations (otherwise all you get is a new Grenfell Tower style disaster), and you can't compromise with physics eithr. Western countries need to build out essential infrastructure like broadband Internet, mobile phone service and public transit in rural and suburban areas. That's the only path that doesn't rely on utterly insane investments.

carlosjobim 1y ago

If we all could agree that water, food and shelter are the essentials for human survival (which I know that most people here wouldn't agree on), then it's easy to see the absurdity of the so called "society" or "economy" or "system" that the younger generations have been born into. Because it would be the same thing as a person being forced to enter into life long debt in order to obtain drinking water. How can it be that people can enslave the young generation by the motivation that they were born first and therefore own all the land, but they can't do that with water? Ie: "We were born first and own all the water rights and you have to go into debt slavery the rest of your life if you want to drink water!" Makes just as much sense as the current situation.

thrance 1y ago

Why, after decades of failing against NYMBYs, are people so confident they can have any more success against NYMBYism as a whole? Homes are assets, and as such people and corporations who own homes really don't want them to depreciate, or even stop appreciating. Homeowners own the majority of this country's wealth, and since modern politics are entirely subservient to capital, the current situation makes perfect sense. Thinking it will only take a bit of deregulation to fix this mess seems foolish to me. Whatever the solution is, it will necessarily involve something more radical than tweaking a few numbers on a spreadsheet, and will require front-facing capital interests (something no political party is currently willing to engage in, not the democrats and certainly not the republicans).

bluGill 1y ago
NIMBY has proven the issues with it and so there are success. NIMBY started because people like Robert Moses proved what happens when you let some powerful person have too much power. If you (like me) are against NIMBY make sure you don't let things go too far that way - I don't know what is too far

_factor 1y ago

We need to be critically honest about how our system operates. Land is finite. As population grows, supply and demand dictate it will rise in value if you hold. If you rent property that someone else would prefer to buy for habitation if made available at market rate, you’re benefiting at overall society’s expense. Similarly if you take units off the market as investment vehicles. Productivity matters most in economics. Without it you’re just shifting money around. Owning as a middle man is essentially the opposite of productivity. As rentals become the only option and a small percentage of land owners become the only housing option, we’re going to see a rise in wealthy untethered types who rent and move at will. Similarly, we’ll start seeing ghettos form in the scant land remaining after this fully plays out. The problem is that you can’t tell an individual who had to go through hell to own a place, on the verge of a second home, not to rent instead of sell. This society is a hammer taking a chip out of every successful shoulder. “Why should I do society a favor when society did me none?” Is a common mindset that just exacerbates the issue. We’re creating a resentful generation who feel disenfranchised and taken advantage of, and it’s only going to get worse. I fear for uprisings and surveillance states incoming. For real solutions, bring back work from home. No need for dense housing when you’re not forced to live in a particular area.

Balgair 1y ago
> Land is finite. As population grows, supply and demand dictate it will rise in value if you hold. Nitpick: There is a lot of land. We're not going to run out of it anytime soon. What we are consuming is 'good' land. That definition will depend on a lot of things, of course. For instance, in Denver, there is a lot of land. It's just that all the land to the west is rugged mountains. Great, so all the land to the east then, plains, right? You can build houses all the way to Kansas! Yes, but all that land is filled with bentonite clay which expands 4x with water (yes really!). You can't build cheap and safe houses on it. So, land values increase as more people move to Denver, simple supply and demand. This kind of thing is all over the world. You can build more houses just about anywhere, but making these houses safe, cheap, and where you actually want to live, that is the problem.
- tossandthrow 1y ago

haizhung 1y ago

Curious to see that no one mentions the drastically rising inequality in western society as the root cause of the housing crises. What we are seeing to date is a transfer of wealth from the working class, the middle class, and the government to rich people at a rate that is unprecedented in human history. The rich are getting richer at an extremely high rate, and barely any country taxes wealth. So what you get is multimillionaires and billionaires who get passive income of several million dollars per month. What are they going to do with that money? There is a rule that you should let your money work for you, and so rich people buy: assets, stock, shares. That’s why the prices of all of these things go up despite living standards falling and falling for ordinary people. We have an asset price inflation, due to the enormous amount of money given to the ultra rich. Housing prices will never go down unless you tax the rich. Regardless of zoning laws or what not.

PleasureBot 1y ago
This is the most worrying aspect of it to me. It is hard to imagine an economy or society in general to continue functioning indefinitely with such an extreme difference in outcomes between different groups. As far as I know there is no historical example of a society that allowed inequality to grow at the level ours is that did not ultimately face massive socio-political upheaval. Needless to say it would not be pleasant to live through those times Seems to me that capitalism, especially when unregulated as has been in the US since the late 70's/early 80's ultimately results in wealth concentrated somewhat in the top 10%, but especially the top 1%, while the bottom 90% sees their share of national wealth drop every lower. It feels like we are entering a second guilded age, just like the late 1800's. Maybe a few world wars and a global depression will reset the board and we can start again.
HDThoreaun 1y ago
Because rising in equality is not the root cause of the housing crises. Middle class people who ban new housing from being constructed are the root cause. When housing can be freely built housing prices dont increase faster than inflation.
- tossandthrow 1y ago