5 ms·

For those looking for the actual data. It's from 2024 - says nothing about the current situation. * ~37K affordable housing units (baseline) across ~400 projec

For those looking for the actual data. It's from 2024 - says nothing about the current situation. * ~37K affordable housing units (baseline) across ~400 projects * 89% rent collection rate (down from 90.6% in 2023) * That's 600 units that went 'delinquent' in 2024 - assuming a $24K 'base' rent (just a guess) that's $15M in lost rent. * Deeply troubled projects (that can't survive without this rent) are at 11% - seems like the inverse. * Cumulative arrears (unpaid rent) of $500M Here's the problem: * If no one had to pay, no one would. * We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons. Not paying means no ownership means subjugation to the worst actions of the worst members of society. * The projects fall into disrepair, there's no way to bring them back, because they won't be maintained. Landlords aren't a great solution to the problem to be sure. They can be greedy and heartless. The bigger problem is the bid up of asset prices - aka private equity and class warfare. As soon as you switch (from renting to owning) your incentives immediately shift. There doesn't actually seem to be a way around this. Taxing to spend on rent ironically makes the problem worse because you just transfer the money into the cash flows of the owners. Anyone thinking there's a simple solution to this problem hasn't spent enough time with the problem.

throwaway27448 4mo ago
I don't understand why we can't just copy another country's housing strategy. There are many countries in the world where housing is affordable, relatively high quality, and the homelessness rate is low. What are we doing that makes this problem so seemingly intractable? Why is our approach to public housing seemingly worse than any other approach in history?
- epsteingpt 4mo ago
  A bit of a misnomer. Housing is, actually, extremely affordable across the US - just not in major cities. You can plunk $10-$20K and get land and a homestead in dozens of states. Agree with the other comment that overbuilding is a reasonable strategy, but if you look at Detroit downtown (mid 2010s) having an overbuilt downtown is bad too. It's a hard problem.
  - throwaway27448 4mo ago
    Well we didn't exactly divvy up either housing or employment rationally, so looking through history without state subsidies and development, we're going to see slums pop up where the jobs are. Or just massive homeless populations I guess. China managed this quite well with the hukou system, which allegedly is going to be loosened over time, but that seems distinctly unlikely to be understood by the powers that be here in the US.
  - supertroop 4mo ago
    10k??? Yes because I want to live in east bumfuck in a food desert and drive 40 minutes to the one megamart and where the services barely work and my police/fire/usps is on the next town over 20 miles away. Did I mention the legions of uneducated anti-Christians who would probably kill me for being queer?
  - rob74 4mo ago
    That's actually the same in most countries: the cities where everyone wants to move to (examples from Germany: Berlin, Hamburg, Munich) become unaffordable, and at the same time smaller cities and villages in less desirable areas (e.g. in East Germany, but also in more remote areas of Bavaria) are depopulated - there you can buy a cheap house, but you can't get a job. Remote working would have helped to somewhat alleviate this, but no, now we all have to go back to the office so we can sit there and spend the whole day in Zoom/Slack/Teams calls instead of doing the exact same thing from home...
  - pjc50 4mo ago
    Similar things in lots of countries. There are villages in Italy and Spain with near-zero housing prices. The qualifier that needs added is "housing in commute range of jobs". Stoke on Trent was selling houses for £1 with improvement grants attached! https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/stoke-shows-why-selling-homes-1-gives-councils-power-revive-deprived-communities-3550/?cf-view https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/stoke-shows-why-selling-...
    - Applejinx 4mo ago
      And of course if 'jobs' becomes 'there is nothing a person can do that can't be more efficiently done by hiring AI more cheaply, plus you get to treat AI completely differently because AI is not a person' that complicates matters very much.
- throe939448 4mo ago
  You mean like in Sweeden, where you have to wait 20 years for assigned flat? Europe has no homelesness, because migrants are housed at hotels at great expense!
  - elktown 4mo ago
    That's due to moving away from the government ensuring an adequate supply of rental units over the last decades. Intentional free market style policies.
  - throwaway27448 4mo ago
    I mean better than having no assigned flat at all....
    - lifestyleguru 4mo ago
      Waiting time can last longer than your ability to rent housing on a market regulated by supply and demand.
  - Hikikomori 4mo ago
    You mean Stockholm. You can buy, wait 20 years, or find a private building owner. But same problem, not building enough.
- raybb 4mo ago
  What makes the problem intractable is that we have a system where for a huge chuck of the country your retirement is based on housing prices appreciating. It's clear if you directly own a home but even if you don't lots of the places you park your money to watch it grow are ultimately investing/speculating on real estate. Some might call it housing asset based welfare. Even if you don't like that mouthful another simple example is the University of California putting 4 billion into Blackstone's REIT with "a minimum 11.25% annualized net return through January 2028." That REIT is 90% rentals. So probably at least a few people will feel the squeeze from it. https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/university-california-invest-4-bln-blackstones-reit-2023-01-03/ https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/university-californ... https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10901-009-9177-6 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10901-009-9177-6
- th0raway 4mo ago
  Far fewer than you'd think: The vast majority of Europe is in the same boat as the US. Whenever there's value in agglomeration (ie, all the time), the value of well placed properties just skyrockets, because growth is only going to make that land better. That's why a common recommendation is to up the tax of land as to make speculation with valuable property a bad investment: It's already price like an auction, so higher taxes cannot increase rent prices. The problem is political, as countries with housing problems have a whole lot of individuals have a big percentage of their net worth in housing. Big tax increases would make their property values drop, and they'd be quite upset. So it solves the problem while losing elections. Instead, governments are happy providing tax advantages to existing residents, in practice making prices go up even faster.
- lifestyleguru 4mo ago
  It's the other way round:) Europe is salivating at the American real estate market. Some European countries don't have capital gains tax on real estate and real estate is the only investment vehicle without this tax. The only country where real estate prices haven't skyrocket looks to be Finland but their general situation is very specific and it's hard to say whether it's by design or by accident. Social housing in Europe while exists, distribution of it is extremely corrupted process. Applying and waiting will give you something in 5 years or never, you'll know in 5 years. You have to be young couple both employed with perfect portfolio, or whatever the role model in that time and location is. Young couples both employed in desirable city basically don't exist anymore, even if you are after two rounds of waiting suddenly you are not a young couple anymore:) Usually you have to know someone and give a bribe.
digitaltrees 4mo ago
The solution is pretty simple: build and unreasonable amount of housing. And entirely new cities. America has enough land. We could build new infrastructure, give people lots of land or build houses like we did in the 40s and 50s. Of the price of a house was brought down to 1x the annual salary of the median individual income some of these problems wouldn’t exist. We need to flood the system with investment and inventory.
- epsteingpt 4mo ago
  See Detroit mid-2010s for why massive overbuilding isn't a good strategy here.
  - knowaveragejoe 4mo ago
    Can you explain more? What happened in Detroit in the mid 2010s, how did itreverse course after that?
    - epsteingpt 4mo ago
      Detroit was the hub of the auto industry. Outsourcing and foreign competition hollowed out the central city (which deliberately didn't have public transit) and left gigantic abandoned houses and skyscrapers throughout. There has been massive public investment and popular support to cause a revival of sorts in the city and is a success story. Go look at some photos from like 2010-2014.
      - Retric 4mo ago
        Such short term issues from massive economic collapse suggests building more housing works.
      - digitaltrees 4mo ago
        This happened throughout North Carolina where I live when textiles and furniture manufacturing was off shored. I assure you it wasn’t over building that caused the same outcome. It’s almost like the is an alternate explanation that is the common thread. What could it be?
mullingitover 4mo ago
> We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons. Not paying means no ownership means subjugation to the worst actions of the worst members of society We tried cramming people from generational poverty into one place and it didn't go super great, therefore public housing as a concept must be the failure, and not our hilariously bad implementation? Singapore, Austria, Finland, and even a number of mixed income public housing projects in the US have actually done quite well. The narrative that it's all inevitably going to turn into the worst examples is pretty worn out. > The bigger problem is the bid up of asset prices - aka private equity and class warfare. This is definitely true: housing can either be affordable or it can be a safe investment, never both. Really private equity moving in on the safe investment is a symptom of the problem: regulatory capture by the landed gentry resulting in strangulation of production which benefits a small group at the expense of the greater public.
- epsteingpt 4mo ago
  You're seeing the next version of this - cooked up by the smartest public policy people - fail in real time. That's what this article is about. 89% of these projects are - in fact - doing well. But that number is decreasing. The net result is less supply of public housing in one of the richest states in the entire world. I'm not sure what your proposal is?
- youre-wrong3 4mo ago
  Singapore doesn’t have crime like the U.S. There is also no free public housing. You still must work and the housing is subsidised. But not free.
  - ptsneves 4mo ago
    Why bother with such details? Class warfare is right, and details are details. /sarcasm For example mixed income housing is really nice for “us” that have been in generational poverty. For “them” it is just living with signals of alcohol abuse, domestic abuse and more. All while their children get a good front seat into “empowerment”. With sarcasm over, details matter, complexity matters, social assistance matters, a contingency plan for total failure to rehabilitate some people matters. Many people would benefit from the Northern European style of institutionalisation where if incarcerated people would need to go to isolated communities and learn to buy groceries, cook a meal take care of personal hygiene (in Sweden they literally have prison islands where inmates have houses and must live as they would in the outside world. Then progressively move to temporary shelters to get their footing and then be released. If need be put those people in the countryside. As a personal experience: Many German youths get sent to the middle of Portugal when their environment leads them astray. In the countryside there is a publicly funded host family or community to receive them and they have to learn trade jobs like being a painter or a plumber and get pushed into an normalised environment. There is no access to drugs as well in the middle of nowhere. There is alcohol but in the next morning there is work to do and people who are waiting for you. I met some of those youths when I was young and it always struck me that a good solution for failed communities in urban environments was to break them apart and scatter them into other more rural communities in such small units (family at most) that their habits would not impact the locals and that the habits could not be fulfilled as a matter of fact. Where are you going to hang out at night in a village of 1k? There is housing but you likely need to repair it; the locals will lend you a hand but they will exert peer pressure for you to normalise. There is no need for class warfare. But there needs to be a warfare against antisocial self destruction behaviours.
PeterStuer 4mo ago
Run it down, swoop in low, build it up, sell out high, repeat. NY is back in the first phase of a realestate cycle. As the wheel turns ...
musha68k 4mo ago
Cities have to truly compete with private rent-seekers for it to work. In Vienna they are still building state of the art for that reason: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-social-housing-secret-how-vienna-became-the-worlds-most-livable-city https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-soc...
energy123 4mo ago
Rents are going down in Austin, Texas despite an increasing population and lots of landlords.
Iulioh 4mo ago
Is charging just enough rent to reasonably mantain the building such a strange prospect?
mapt 4mo ago
Tax property values. We could talk about the merits of Georgeism but honestly let's set that aside - conventional property taxes are sufficient here. Most of Manhattan apparently has <1% annual property tax, and the eclectic sometimes regressive way it's calculated in NYC is suggestive of corruption. These asset bubbles can only inflate because the owners make nearly as much money sitting on a vacant property as they make with tenants, so they borrow approximately All The Money to dump it into real estate. Property taxes are not just a necessary evil to keep the schools running and the garbage collected (cough), they're a tiny fractional "decommodification" of property as asset, because the money collected from the owners is spent on the residents. Most of this money passes through directly into higher rents, and we shouldn't care about that, because it's spent on the residents (if the residents don't want good public services, literally hand them a check, direct redistribution). This punishes vacant properties appreciably, and pushes them back into the market. The ecosystem of debt and bank collateral that has grown around near-zero property taxes has strongly encouraged high vacancy rates, because the banks directly demand that what rents be collected, are high enough to justify the collateral valuation, but don't actually demand that rents be collected. Set property values to the rate of inflation (depending on your preferences, CPI or local COL or local selling prices or S&P), and you have fully "decommodified" housing without lining the landlords up against the wall and shooting them, an option that is increasingly popular.
- bell-cot 4mo ago
  > Most of Manhattan apparently has <1% annual property tax, and the eclectic sometimes regressive way it's calculated in NYC is suggestive of corruption. While NYC has never lacked for rot and corruption, those really aren't needed - or even particularly useful - for something like this. As soon as you've got any sort of law / regulation / status quo that benefits a class of well-to-do people, there will be intense pressure to maintain that situation. Vs. the opposition - honest reformers, idealists, the poor, whoever - even if they're far more numerous, just never seem to have the zeal / focus / attention span / whatever to correct the problem.
  - gjsman-1000 4mo ago
    > just never seem to have the zeal / focus / attention span / whatever to correct the problem Mainly because, bluntly, the people who have the most zeal, attention span, talent, and focus... aren't in the group.
jmyeet 4mo ago
> Here's the problem: * If no one had to pay, no one would. * We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons Here's the actual problem. You've based your argument on a debunked economic theory ie the tragedy of the commons. You may as well argue trickle down economics. Garrett Hardin wrote an essay called The Tragedy of the Commons in 1968 [1] and it became all the rage in neoliberal circles to justify wealth transfer to private hands (ie privatization) [2]. It never fit experimental data. Ultimately, Elinor Ostrom debunked it entirely using empircal data from the world over, work for which she won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics [3]. Whatever your arguments against free housing might be, the tragedy of the commons ain't it. [1]: https://math.uchicago.edu/~shmuel/Modeling/Hardin,%20Tragedy%20of%20the%20Commons.pdf https://math.uchicago.edu/~shmuel/Modeling/Hardin,%20Tragedy... [2]: https://socialistproject.ca/2008/08/b133/ https://socialistproject.ca/2008/08/b133/ [3]: https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false-and-dangerous-myth https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false...
malfist 4mo ago
> We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons. Not paying means no ownership means subjugation to the worst actions of the worst members of society. I tried free housing for the first 18 years of my life and it worked out fine
- JackFr 4mo ago
  Why aren’t you still there?
  - malfist 4mo ago
    Because I'm 37 now. Be awkward to stay there.
postflopclarity 4mo ago
> Anyone thinking there's a simple solution to this problem hasn't spent enough time with the problem. I've spent a lot of time with the problem. and there is a simple solution: relax zoning restrictions and various lot requirements to allow private developers to build more housing. the market incentives are already there, they're just blocked by NIMBY's and stupid city councils, etc.
rayiner 4mo ago
I suspect the answer is two-fold: 1) Pass legislation to ban the fed from pulling interest rates below 2%. The unprecedented ZIRP completely fucked up asset values and it will take decades to unwind it. 2) In cities, the government should own all the land and owners of properties should hold only a long-term lease. This will allow the government to control land use and upzone density while ensuring private building owners have skin in the game to actually build and maintain dwellings.
littlexsparkee 4mo ago
the main reasons for public housing failing (see Cabrini Greene, Pruitt Igoe) in the US are concentrated poverty, rents not covering maintenance/capital expenses, lack of good jobs (too far to access on transit, companies relocated to suburbs), high youth to adult ratios. it's too reductive to say lack of ownership when tenants formed unions to get thing fixed but management didn't have funds, threat to maintenance workers (needing police escort to do work), organizational issues with mgmt (patronage system for jobs in public housing, lack of accountability).

throwaway27448 4mo ago

I don't understand why we can't just copy another country's housing strategy. There are many countries in the world where housing is affordable, relatively high quality, and the homelessness rate is low. What are we doing that makes this problem so seemingly intractable? Why is our approach to public housing seemingly worse than any other approach in history?

epsteingpt 4mo ago
A bit of a misnomer. Housing is, actually, extremely affordable across the US - just not in major cities. You can plunk $10-$20K and get land and a homestead in dozens of states. Agree with the other comment that overbuilding is a reasonable strategy, but if you look at Detroit downtown (mid 2010s) having an overbuilt downtown is bad too. It's a hard problem.
- throwaway27448 4mo ago
  Well we didn't exactly divvy up either housing or employment rationally, so looking through history without state subsidies and development, we're going to see slums pop up where the jobs are. Or just massive homeless populations I guess. China managed this quite well with the hukou system, which allegedly is going to be loosened over time, but that seems distinctly unlikely to be understood by the powers that be here in the US.
- supertroop 4mo ago
  10k??? Yes because I want to live in east bumfuck in a food desert and drive 40 minutes to the one megamart and where the services barely work and my police/fire/usps is on the next town over 20 miles away. Did I mention the legions of uneducated anti-Christians who would probably kill me for being queer?
- rob74 4mo ago
  That's actually the same in most countries: the cities where everyone wants to move to (examples from Germany: Berlin, Hamburg, Munich) become unaffordable, and at the same time smaller cities and villages in less desirable areas (e.g. in East Germany, but also in more remote areas of Bavaria) are depopulated - there you can buy a cheap house, but you can't get a job. Remote working would have helped to somewhat alleviate this, but no, now we all have to go back to the office so we can sit there and spend the whole day in Zoom/Slack/Teams calls instead of doing the exact same thing from home...
- pjc50 4mo ago
  Similar things in lots of countries. There are villages in Italy and Spain with near-zero housing prices. The qualifier that needs added is "housing in commute range of jobs". Stoke on Trent was selling houses for £1 with improvement grants attached! https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/stoke-shows-why-selling-homes-1-gives-councils-power-revive-deprived-communities-3550/?cf-view https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/stoke-shows-why-selling-...
  - Applejinx 4mo ago
    And of course if 'jobs' becomes 'there is nothing a person can do that can't be more efficiently done by hiring AI more cheaply, plus you get to treat AI completely differently because AI is not a person' that complicates matters very much.
throe939448 4mo ago
You mean like in Sweeden, where you have to wait 20 years for assigned flat? Europe has no homelesness, because migrants are housed at hotels at great expense!
- elktown 4mo ago
  That's due to moving away from the government ensuring an adequate supply of rental units over the last decades. Intentional free market style policies.
- throwaway27448 4mo ago
  I mean better than having no assigned flat at all....
  - lifestyleguru 4mo ago
    Waiting time can last longer than your ability to rent housing on a market regulated by supply and demand.
- Hikikomori 4mo ago
  You mean Stockholm. You can buy, wait 20 years, or find a private building owner. But same problem, not building enough.
raybb 4mo ago
What makes the problem intractable is that we have a system where for a huge chuck of the country your retirement is based on housing prices appreciating. It's clear if you directly own a home but even if you don't lots of the places you park your money to watch it grow are ultimately investing/speculating on real estate. Some might call it housing asset based welfare. Even if you don't like that mouthful another simple example is the University of California putting 4 billion into Blackstone's REIT with "a minimum 11.25% annualized net return through January 2028." That REIT is 90% rentals. So probably at least a few people will feel the squeeze from it. https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/university-california-invest-4-bln-blackstones-reit-2023-01-03/ https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/university-californ... https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10901-009-9177-6 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10901-009-9177-6
th0raway 4mo ago
Far fewer than you'd think: The vast majority of Europe is in the same boat as the US. Whenever there's value in agglomeration (ie, all the time), the value of well placed properties just skyrockets, because growth is only going to make that land better. That's why a common recommendation is to up the tax of land as to make speculation with valuable property a bad investment: It's already price like an auction, so higher taxes cannot increase rent prices. The problem is political, as countries with housing problems have a whole lot of individuals have a big percentage of their net worth in housing. Big tax increases would make their property values drop, and they'd be quite upset. So it solves the problem while losing elections. Instead, governments are happy providing tax advantages to existing residents, in practice making prices go up even faster.
lifestyleguru 4mo ago
It's the other way round:) Europe is salivating at the American real estate market. Some European countries don't have capital gains tax on real estate and real estate is the only investment vehicle without this tax. The only country where real estate prices haven't skyrocket looks to be Finland but their general situation is very specific and it's hard to say whether it's by design or by accident. Social housing in Europe while exists, distribution of it is extremely corrupted process. Applying and waiting will give you something in 5 years or never, you'll know in 5 years. You have to be young couple both employed with perfect portfolio, or whatever the role model in that time and location is. Young couples both employed in desirable city basically don't exist anymore, even if you are after two rounds of waiting suddenly you are not a young couple anymore:) Usually you have to know someone and give a bribe.

digitaltrees 4mo ago

The solution is pretty simple: build and unreasonable amount of housing. And entirely new cities. America has enough land. We could build new infrastructure, give people lots of land or build houses like we did in the 40s and 50s. Of the price of a house was brought down to 1x the annual salary of the median individual income some of these problems wouldn’t exist. We need to flood the system with investment and inventory.

epsteingpt 4mo ago
See Detroit mid-2010s for why massive overbuilding isn't a good strategy here.
- knowaveragejoe 4mo ago
  Can you explain more? What happened in Detroit in the mid 2010s, how did itreverse course after that?
  - epsteingpt 4mo ago
    Detroit was the hub of the auto industry. Outsourcing and foreign competition hollowed out the central city (which deliberately didn't have public transit) and left gigantic abandoned houses and skyscrapers throughout. There has been massive public investment and popular support to cause a revival of sorts in the city and is a success story. Go look at some photos from like 2010-2014.
    - Retric 4mo ago
      Such short term issues from massive economic collapse suggests building more housing works.
    - digitaltrees 4mo ago
      This happened throughout North Carolina where I live when textiles and furniture manufacturing was off shored. I assure you it wasn’t over building that caused the same outcome. It’s almost like the is an alternate explanation that is the common thread. What could it be?

mullingitover 4mo ago

> We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons. Not paying means no ownership means subjugation to the worst actions of the worst members of society We tried cramming people from generational poverty into one place and it didn't go super great, therefore public housing as a concept must be the failure, and not our hilariously bad implementation? Singapore, Austria, Finland, and even a number of mixed income public housing projects in the US have actually done quite well. The narrative that it's all inevitably going to turn into the worst examples is pretty worn out. > The bigger problem is the bid up of asset prices - aka private equity and class warfare. This is definitely true: housing can either be affordable or it can be a safe investment, never both. Really private equity moving in on the safe investment is a symptom of the problem: regulatory capture by the landed gentry resulting in strangulation of production which benefits a small group at the expense of the greater public.

epsteingpt 4mo ago
You're seeing the next version of this - cooked up by the smartest public policy people - fail in real time. That's what this article is about. 89% of these projects are - in fact - doing well. But that number is decreasing. The net result is less supply of public housing in one of the richest states in the entire world. I'm not sure what your proposal is?
youre-wrong3 4mo ago
Singapore doesn’t have crime like the U.S. There is also no free public housing. You still must work and the housing is subsidised. But not free.
- ptsneves 4mo ago
  Why bother with such details? Class warfare is right, and details are details. /sarcasm For example mixed income housing is really nice for “us” that have been in generational poverty. For “them” it is just living with signals of alcohol abuse, domestic abuse and more. All while their children get a good front seat into “empowerment”. With sarcasm over, details matter, complexity matters, social assistance matters, a contingency plan for total failure to rehabilitate some people matters. Many people would benefit from the Northern European style of institutionalisation where if incarcerated people would need to go to isolated communities and learn to buy groceries, cook a meal take care of personal hygiene (in Sweden they literally have prison islands where inmates have houses and must live as they would in the outside world. Then progressively move to temporary shelters to get their footing and then be released. If need be put those people in the countryside. As a personal experience: Many German youths get sent to the middle of Portugal when their environment leads them astray. In the countryside there is a publicly funded host family or community to receive them and they have to learn trade jobs like being a painter or a plumber and get pushed into an normalised environment. There is no access to drugs as well in the middle of nowhere. There is alcohol but in the next morning there is work to do and people who are waiting for you. I met some of those youths when I was young and it always struck me that a good solution for failed communities in urban environments was to break them apart and scatter them into other more rural communities in such small units (family at most) that their habits would not impact the locals and that the habits could not be fulfilled as a matter of fact. Where are you going to hang out at night in a village of 1k? There is housing but you likely need to repair it; the locals will lend you a hand but they will exert peer pressure for you to normalise. There is no need for class warfare. But there needs to be a warfare against antisocial self destruction behaviours.

PeterStuer 4mo ago

Run it down, swoop in low, build it up, sell out high, repeat. NY is back in the first phase of a realestate cycle. As the wheel turns ...

musha68k 4mo ago

Cities have to truly compete with private rent-seekers for it to work. In Vienna they are still building state of the art for that reason: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-social-housing-secret-how-vienna-became-the-worlds-most-livable-city https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-soc...

energy123 4mo ago

Rents are going down in Austin, Texas despite an increasing population and lots of landlords.

Iulioh 4mo ago

Is charging just enough rent to reasonably mantain the building such a strange prospect?

mapt 4mo ago

Tax property values. We could talk about the merits of Georgeism but honestly let's set that aside - conventional property taxes are sufficient here. Most of Manhattan apparently has <1% annual property tax, and the eclectic sometimes regressive way it's calculated in NYC is suggestive of corruption. These asset bubbles can only inflate because the owners make nearly as much money sitting on a vacant property as they make with tenants, so they borrow approximately All The Money to dump it into real estate. Property taxes are not just a necessary evil to keep the schools running and the garbage collected (cough), they're a tiny fractional "decommodification" of property as asset, because the money collected from the owners is spent on the residents. Most of this money passes through directly into higher rents, and we shouldn't care about that, because it's spent on the residents (if the residents don't want good public services, literally hand them a check, direct redistribution). This punishes vacant properties appreciably, and pushes them back into the market. The ecosystem of debt and bank collateral that has grown around near-zero property taxes has strongly encouraged high vacancy rates, because the banks directly demand that what rents be collected, are high enough to justify the collateral valuation, but don't actually demand that rents be collected. Set property values to the rate of inflation (depending on your preferences, CPI or local COL or local selling prices or S&P), and you have fully "decommodified" housing without lining the landlords up against the wall and shooting them, an option that is increasingly popular.

bell-cot 4mo ago
> Most of Manhattan apparently has <1% annual property tax, and the eclectic sometimes regressive way it's calculated in NYC is suggestive of corruption. While NYC has never lacked for rot and corruption, those really aren't needed - or even particularly useful - for something like this. As soon as you've got any sort of law / regulation / status quo that benefits a class of well-to-do people, there will be intense pressure to maintain that situation. Vs. the opposition - honest reformers, idealists, the poor, whoever - even if they're far more numerous, just never seem to have the zeal / focus / attention span / whatever to correct the problem.
- gjsman-1000 4mo ago
  > just never seem to have the zeal / focus / attention span / whatever to correct the problem Mainly because, bluntly, the people who have the most zeal, attention span, talent, and focus... aren't in the group.

jmyeet 4mo ago

> Here's the problem: * If no one had to pay, no one would. * We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons Here's the actual problem. You've based your argument on a debunked economic theory ie the tragedy of the commons. You may as well argue trickle down economics. Garrett Hardin wrote an essay called The Tragedy of the Commons in 1968 [1] and it became all the rage in neoliberal circles to justify wealth transfer to private hands (ie privatization) [2]. It never fit experimental data. Ultimately, Elinor Ostrom debunked it entirely using empircal data from the world over, work for which she won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics [3]. Whatever your arguments against free housing might be, the tragedy of the commons ain't it. [1]: https://math.uchicago.edu/~shmuel/Modeling/Hardin,%20Tragedy%20of%20the%20Commons.pdf https://math.uchicago.edu/~shmuel/Modeling/Hardin,%20Tragedy... [2]: https://socialistproject.ca/2008/08/b133/ https://socialistproject.ca/2008/08/b133/ [3]: https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false-and-dangerous-myth https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false...

malfist 4mo ago

> We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons. Not paying means no ownership means subjugation to the worst actions of the worst members of society. I tried free housing for the first 18 years of my life and it worked out fine

JackFr 4mo ago
Why aren’t you still there?
- malfist 4mo ago
  Because I'm 37 now. Be awkward to stay there.

postflopclarity 4mo ago

> Anyone thinking there's a simple solution to this problem hasn't spent enough time with the problem. I've spent a lot of time with the problem. and there is a simple solution: relax zoning restrictions and various lot requirements to allow private developers to build more housing. the market incentives are already there, they're just blocked by NIMBY's and stupid city councils, etc.

rayiner 4mo ago

I suspect the answer is two-fold: 1) Pass legislation to ban the fed from pulling interest rates below 2%. The unprecedented ZIRP completely fucked up asset values and it will take decades to unwind it. 2) In cities, the government should own all the land and owners of properties should hold only a long-term lease. This will allow the government to control land use and upzone density while ensuring private building owners have skin in the game to actually build and maintain dwellings.

littlexsparkee 4mo ago

the main reasons for public housing failing (see Cabrini Greene, Pruitt Igoe) in the US are concentrated poverty, rents not covering maintenance/capital expenses, lack of good jobs (too far to access on transit, companies relocated to suburbs), high youth to adult ratios. it's too reductive to say lack of ownership when tenants formed unions to get thing fixed but management didn't have funds, threat to maintenance workers (needing police escort to do work), organizational issues with mgmt (patronage system for jobs in public housing, lack of accountability).