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Everywhere I look in my area we are building new housing. But more people keep moving to the desirable locations with jobs etc. EDIT: I live in one of the 10

Everywhere I look in my area we are building new housing. But more people keep moving to the desirable locations with jobs etc. EDIT: I live in one of the 10 fastest growing metro areas of the US. In the last 4 years my county added over 60,000 homes but about 130,000 new people moved here. I drive around and see new development after new development. But more people move here because of the good jobs, schools, etc. I can drive 2 hours away to some economically depressed areas. Houses are a lot cheaper because the population moves away to the bigger cities for jobs, education, etc. So sure you can have a cheap house in an undesirable location.

epistasis 4mo ago
There's a huge disconnect between perceived amount of building and actual need for housing, in my experience. People are used to seeing nothing, so when even a single building goes up they think it seems like a lot. In my downtown area, there has been a trickle of a new building with a few hundred apartments per year for the past four years, and people are freaked out at that tiny amount of new housing in a city of 50,000 people. in reality we need at least double that amount of housing per year, but that small amount has people shocked and thinking we're building way too much. It's been far too normalized that we shouldn't build housing, and it's hurting society at a very deep level and causing massive inequality while blocking access to opportunity.
- majormajor 4mo ago
  This is also the cause of the gentrification anger and resulting NIMBYism. If you build some, but not enough vs what's actually needed, you get both: - expensive new market-rate construction that most people can't afford - localized bumps in rent for increased relative desirability - overall prices that continue to rise across the city because the new construction was just a drop in the bucket compared to the need And then it's easy to point to "they built that building AND our rent went up!" as a reason to oppose construction, even though in the long run they'd go up even more if that building wasn't built.
- an0malous 4mo ago
  In a free market, the builders would just build to demand better because they’re incentivized to
jvanderbot 4mo ago
"We" in GP was the previous generation, not a nefarious evil cadre. The prior generations followed jobs to highly desireable areas, affordable only because they had the expertise and education to get the high paying job in the first place. Every person that moves there lifts the ladder a little higher behind them just due to market factors. I feel that only works so long. Without new emerging areas offering high wages and decent cost of living, the new grads look at the old areas like SF (no hate just e.g.) and see a financial bridge too far and a tight job market anyway.
- epistasis 4mo ago
  The only reason SF seems inaccessible is that the prior generation down zoned and said "no more housing here, we don't want growth." Which worked out well for them but robs young people and immigrants of climbing the same ladder they climbed. Building new clusters of expertise and economic opportunity is extremely hard, nearly impossible, everybody has been trying to replicate the Bay Area's tech success for decades and even with the housing problems it simply hasn't happened anywhere else. It's far easier to remove the law on the books banning housing than it is to build an ecosystem of any economy from scratch in a new area. We don't need any new cities, we need to allow existing areas to grow. If every city blocks housing, then even that new area is going to be blocked from growing as it grows. We must stop everybody in their tracks that thinks it says "I don't want new housing or neighbors near me" because that is the literally robbing of our young people and of society of opportunity.
  - cucumber3732842 4mo ago
    The problem (edit: "a problem") is that this down zoning is basically state and federally enforced. Temecula would happily grow but they can't just repeal their laws and say "go for it" because in order to get their citizens tax money back in the form of grant money (with strings of course, because that's how grants work) they have to have these laws because these "we will mandate parking, and then we will create beurocratic hell for anyone who wants to pave anything" in order to check some sort of "municipalities shall implement..." type law. And it's not just the clean this or that act, it's every goddamn issue and area of regulation. So basically SF not only gets to eat its cake, but it gets to prevent every other city in the state from doing something drastically different from what they're doing. And you can run this example in any state, just change the cities. And it happens federally too.
peab 4mo ago
Yeah.. In Texas, there is loads of housing, and loads of affordable housing. In Canada - not so much
hdgvhicv 4mo ago
So there’s tons of empty housing? Why are people building new housing then, is it just that much better quality that the empty housing is the old crap?
- ironman1478 4mo ago
  All the empty housing is not near where jobs are, you could make the houses dirt cheap and if there are few jobs then they're actually relatively expensive to the population. Also, yes lots of housing has unbelievably expensive deferred maintenance and many sellers are trying to act like their homes aren't huge money pits.
khuey 4mo ago
I don't know where you live but if you look at the statistics this is very clearly a regionalized problem in the US. Big coastal cities like SF, NYC, etc are building almost nothing but Texas is cranking out new suburbs by the square mile.
IAmBroom 4mo ago
Anecdata is a bad faith argument for intelligent posters.

epistasis 4mo ago

There's a huge disconnect between perceived amount of building and actual need for housing, in my experience. People are used to seeing nothing, so when even a single building goes up they think it seems like a lot. In my downtown area, there has been a trickle of a new building with a few hundred apartments per year for the past four years, and people are freaked out at that tiny amount of new housing in a city of 50,000 people. in reality we need at least double that amount of housing per year, but that small amount has people shocked and thinking we're building way too much. It's been far too normalized that we shouldn't build housing, and it's hurting society at a very deep level and causing massive inequality while blocking access to opportunity.

majormajor 4mo ago
This is also the cause of the gentrification anger and resulting NIMBYism. If you build some, but not enough vs what's actually needed, you get both: - expensive new market-rate construction that most people can't afford - localized bumps in rent for increased relative desirability - overall prices that continue to rise across the city because the new construction was just a drop in the bucket compared to the need And then it's easy to point to "they built that building AND our rent went up!" as a reason to oppose construction, even though in the long run they'd go up even more if that building wasn't built.
an0malous 4mo ago
In a free market, the builders would just build to demand better because they’re incentivized to

jvanderbot 4mo ago

"We" in GP was the previous generation, not a nefarious evil cadre. The prior generations followed jobs to highly desireable areas, affordable only because they had the expertise and education to get the high paying job in the first place. Every person that moves there lifts the ladder a little higher behind them just due to market factors. I feel that only works so long. Without new emerging areas offering high wages and decent cost of living, the new grads look at the old areas like SF (no hate just e.g.) and see a financial bridge too far and a tight job market anyway.

epistasis 4mo ago
The only reason SF seems inaccessible is that the prior generation down zoned and said "no more housing here, we don't want growth." Which worked out well for them but robs young people and immigrants of climbing the same ladder they climbed. Building new clusters of expertise and economic opportunity is extremely hard, nearly impossible, everybody has been trying to replicate the Bay Area's tech success for decades and even with the housing problems it simply hasn't happened anywhere else. It's far easier to remove the law on the books banning housing than it is to build an ecosystem of any economy from scratch in a new area. We don't need any new cities, we need to allow existing areas to grow. If every city blocks housing, then even that new area is going to be blocked from growing as it grows. We must stop everybody in their tracks that thinks it says "I don't want new housing or neighbors near me" because that is the literally robbing of our young people and of society of opportunity.
- cucumber3732842 4mo ago
  The problem (edit: "a problem") is that this down zoning is basically state and federally enforced. Temecula would happily grow but they can't just repeal their laws and say "go for it" because in order to get their citizens tax money back in the form of grant money (with strings of course, because that's how grants work) they have to have these laws because these "we will mandate parking, and then we will create beurocratic hell for anyone who wants to pave anything" in order to check some sort of "municipalities shall implement..." type law. And it's not just the clean this or that act, it's every goddamn issue and area of regulation. So basically SF not only gets to eat its cake, but it gets to prevent every other city in the state from doing something drastically different from what they're doing. And you can run this example in any state, just change the cities. And it happens federally too.

peab 4mo ago

Yeah.. In Texas, there is loads of housing, and loads of affordable housing. In Canada - not so much

hdgvhicv 4mo ago

So there’s tons of empty housing? Why are people building new housing then, is it just that much better quality that the empty housing is the old crap?

ironman1478 4mo ago
All the empty housing is not near where jobs are, you could make the houses dirt cheap and if there are few jobs then they're actually relatively expensive to the population. Also, yes lots of housing has unbelievably expensive deferred maintenance and many sellers are trying to act like their homes aren't huge money pits.

khuey 4mo ago

I don't know where you live but if you look at the statistics this is very clearly a regionalized problem in the US. Big coastal cities like SF, NYC, etc are building almost nothing but Texas is cranking out new suburbs by the square mile.

IAmBroom 4mo ago

Anecdata is a bad faith argument for intelligent posters.