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Ironically, the Argument just a few months ago ran a long and well-researched piece on how the housing market isn't for parents --- in many rental markets, ther
by tptacek 10mo ago
Ironically, the Argument just a few months ago ran a long and well-researched piece on how the housing market isn't for parents --- in many rental markets, there are policies that lock out parents, particularly through permitting processes that favor developments for seniors while icing out any other developments.
https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/no-country-for-young-families https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/no-country-for-young-famili...
Meanwhile, a really important dynamic to keep in mind is that in most inner-ring suburbs in the US, the primary driver of home values (and of property taxes) are school systems. If you don't actively enact policies that work against the dynamic, you get trapped in a spiral of increasing prices, in part because parents can bid up prices and suffer them only for the span of time their kids are in school --- "renting the schools".
- knallfrosch 10mo agoWhen people pay higher rent while their kids are in school and compete with FAANG software engineers, isn't that the market working? Both groups could live somewhere else, but don't.
- tptacek 10mo agoIt's not a free market, so it's hard to appeal to market purity arguments. The market is deeply distorted by zoning rules. Most popular/expensive locales would look differently if the market was actually allowed to function.
- bombcar 10mo agoEven more so it’s distorted by people only moving every seven years or longer. But when they do move, they take all changes into account; not just recent ones. So it can be hard to determine causal trends.
- Multicomp 10mo agoSounds like a school choice policy would help decouple property tax zones / addresses to particular schools.
- tptacek 10mo agoSchool choice works within municipalities. A huge part of the point of modern inner-ring suburbs is to allow wealthier people to exempt themselves from that system.