I’ve said time and time again that “building more houses” is not the solution.
The problem is resource hoarding. Regulate the real estate monopolies. Stricter bans on AirBnBs and second vacation homes. Rent control properties. And renovate buildings that aren’t up to code.
Outside of extremely dense cities, it’s never, ever been a population issue. It’s a class issue.
I really don’t see how building more houses/units is not the solution, at least in some cases. I live in a VHCOL area and we straight up have a housing shortage for a variety of reasons.
Who needs a Bitcoin to live? Nobody. But the price of a Bitcoin is still 90,000 dollars. People aren’t living in their bitcoins, they want Bitcoins because other people want them. That’s why they’re expensive.
A house is like a Bitcoin that you need to live. Rich people are hoarding houses because other rich people want them, the same as Bitcoins. The problem is everyone needs a house. So we need to ban rich people from hoarding them somehow. Then the price will go down.
I’ve said time and time again that “building more houses” is not the solution.
I mean, it’s also been said that a lot of these empty houses are in rural/suburban neighborhoods outside of dying industrial centers. We’re effectively talking about “Ghost Towns”, with no social services and a deteriorating domestic infrastructure, that people are deliberately abandoning.
And we’re stacking that up against the homeless encampments that appear in large, dense, urban environments where social services are (relatively) robust and utilities operate at full capacity around the clock.
Picking people up from under the I-10 overpass and moving them to
doesn’t address homelessness as a structural problem. It just shuttles people around the state aimlessly and hopes you can squirrel them away where your voters won’t see them anymore.
At some point, you absolutely do need to build more apartment blocks and rail corridors and invest in local/state/federal public services again, such that you can gainfully employ (or at least comfortably retire) people with no future economic prospects. You can’t just take folks out to shacks in the boonies and say “Homelessness Resolved!”
You could give a bunch of homeless people housing, but there’s simply no structure around it. They have no money, and there’s no jobs. There’s no services around. They won’t be much better off than homeless in a big city tbh. Might be WORSE off.
There needs to be available housing near the places where there’s actually things to do, jobs to hold, services to use.
Worst part is, I bet a LOT of those ghots towns are suburban, not urban - so it makes it more difficult and expensive to build up a new community there. Everything is spaced out
Homeless people, on average, contribute less to society than housed people, on average. Generally multiple societal structural failures and bad luck are major contributions to a person ending up homeless, but their own genetic- and nuture-driven characteristics play a role, too, and having a higher physical and mental disability burden than the average human is common.
Also, living remotely often means subsistence is a major part of how people get on, and subsistence is an intensely knowledge- and skill-based task highly specific to locale. Hunting in rural Alaska is not immediately transferable to hunting in Greenland, and dumping someone in rural Montana is not going to poof make them an expert gatherer.
I’ve said the same thing. More housing will just be bought by more speculators. I also think a massive tax on owning more than 5 properties would be helpful as well. Put the revenue from that into affordable housing subsidies.
If you build enough housing it gets back into being economically competitive for the average person to own their home. Speculators can speculate until it doesn’t make sense any more.
We got into the current situation because we slowed way down on building homes.
It’s also the huge amount of housing that’s built that’s not affordable. We have had 5 neighborhoods built within 4 miles of my house over the past 5 years. Nothing is below 500k starting price.
They actually can build homes cheaper than that, there’s a certain price point where they feel they’re making the kind of profit they want which is basically the cost of a older home profit-wise. There’s a recent article that came out that I’m can’t find right now but I read it just a couple months ago that talked about the 400 to $500,000 price range is the profit margin that builders want to make. That means they’re probably making 20 to 30% profit. And while they can build cheaper homes they make less profit so they are not motivated to.
I know it’s not going to happen under this regime but it seems like the solution is to offer tax breaks, subsidies, or whatever we think might give the developers some incentive to build lower income housing.
I run a company, and it often is. Think about it this way. If you sell a 250k home,10% would be 25k. A developer often sells an entire neighborhood, so let’s say conservatively 30 homes. That’s 750,000$. If that’s not enough profit to keep building, well, you now know the problem with our society.
The land is expensive. Every time you buy and build or rebuild you want to make a profit off of your investment and effort so it goes up. Even if the structure is crap and you intend to tear it down and rebuild the seller still expects to be paid for the structure. The only way to make land more affordable is to build upwards and make condos/apts and increase the number of residents per unit area.
It doesn’t need to be an either-or situation. We can attack the problem from multiple sides, since there’s isn’t a silver bullet. New housing absolutely has to be part of it, but obviously it’s not super helpful if the new stock isn’t affordable or practical for average people.
Counterproductive regulations (restrictive zoning, vetocracy setups) have prevented environmentally sensible and affordable housing from being added in sufficient quantities in most of the US for a long time. We have more people living in smaller households than we used to; it just doesn’t math without adding new stock.
Fixing the supply problem fixes the hoarding problem. Housing is an attractive investment because it’s scarce. Once you build enough, investors will invest in something else.
Building more housing is the solution, even if those homes largely go to the upper middle class and wealthy. Building new homes primarily for well off people isn’t a historic anomaly, it’s the norm. If you’re already building a house, it doesn’t take that much more to add some luxury features to make it appeal to the high end of the market. This is how it’s always been. Historically, the affordable housing of today is the luxury housing of yesterday.
Preventing new home construction doesn’t prevent neighborhoods from gentrifying. You just end up with yuppies living in newly renovated former tenements.
seriously. poor people don’t buy new homes. rich people do. i grew up poor. every house we lived in was 30+ years old. poor people buy homes that are old.
the issue is there are no more old homes anymore because we don’t build enough new homes. so now rich people buy old homes and push our the poor people who can’t afford any home.
people like me, making 150K and now going into poor communities and buying up the homes for ourselves because we can’t afford anything newer. all the old homes in the richer towns are crazy expensive, and the new ones are 2x the cost of the old ones.
new constructed home in my city is about 2-3million. a 50 year old house is like 1-1.5 million. a newly constructed home in a poor shit down is 500K. a old home in a shit town is like 350K. I can afford a 350K house. i can’t afford one that’s 500K or more.
I didn’t say anything about empty houses. I just said houses. Fuck landlords. And if you can afford an extra house that you don’t live in all the time, you can afford extra taxes on that house.
Oh and yeah, we should absolutely lower the taxes on single occupancy homes. EAT THE FUCKING RICH
housing production has been below population growth for over two decades.
when covid happened rents in my city dropped 50% overnight. why? because nobody wanted to live there anymore.
demand is everything. prices are low where demand is low, and prices are high where demand is high.
renovation is often more expensive than new housing. what needs to happen is for all the SFH crap to be zoned to multi family and for 3-5 story condo buildings to replace them. boom housing crisis solved.
also you need a vacancy rate of 8% or greater or more to bring prices down. the vacancy rate in my city is like 1.3% only way to get a massive vacancy rate is a economic crisis or to build more housing than there is demand.
No, you’re just wrong. You can’t twist reality to fit some niche ideological fantasy that you find sexy.
The reality is that statistics show that if we took all the vacant houses including all those that are inhabitable, under renovations, all the second, third, whatever homes, and we took all the investment properties as well and made them all immediately available, there would still NOT be enough houses to meet the current demand.
The reality is that we have very nonsensical and outdated zoning as well as restrictive construction process that strangle output. We need to reform our zoning laws and expedite construction to pump the market with many new housing units as possible to not just meet, but also exceed demand. That’s the only way to bring house prices down in a genuine way while also giving people homes that they actually want to live in places that they want to live in.
Where do you have those statistics from? Because all sources I’ve seen draw an image like this. where even the states with the lowest amount of empty houses per homeless person still have more than 5:
I’ve said time and time again that “building more houses” is not the solution.
The problem is resource hoarding. Regulate the real estate monopolies. Stricter bans on AirBnBs and second vacation homes. Rent control properties. And renovate buildings that aren’t up to code.
Outside of extremely dense cities, it’s never, ever been a population issue. It’s a class issue.
I really don’t see how building more houses/units is not the solution, at least in some cases. I live in a VHCOL area and we straight up have a housing shortage for a variety of reasons.
Who needs a Bitcoin to live? Nobody. But the price of a Bitcoin is still 90,000 dollars. People aren’t living in their bitcoins, they want Bitcoins because other people want them. That’s why they’re expensive.
A house is like a Bitcoin that you need to live. Rich people are hoarding houses because other rich people want them, the same as Bitcoins. The problem is everyone needs a house. So we need to ban rich people from hoarding them somehow. Then the price will go down.
Massively increase property taxes. Exempt owner-occupants from those increases.
You want a second home, you’re going to be paying the full, punitive tax rate on one of them.
I mean, it’s also been said that a lot of these empty houses are in rural/suburban neighborhoods outside of dying industrial centers. We’re effectively talking about “Ghost Towns”, with no social services and a deteriorating domestic infrastructure, that people are deliberately abandoning.
And we’re stacking that up against the homeless encampments that appear in large, dense, urban environments where social services are (relatively) robust and utilities operate at full capacity around the clock.
Picking people up from under the I-10 overpass and moving them to
doesn’t address homelessness as a structural problem. It just shuttles people around the state aimlessly and hopes you can squirrel them away where your voters won’t see them anymore.
At some point, you absolutely do need to build more apartment blocks and rail corridors and invest in local/state/federal public services again, such that you can gainfully employ (or at least comfortably retire) people with no future economic prospects. You can’t just take folks out to shacks in the boonies and say “Homelessness Resolved!”
Sounds like all those places need are people to live in them.
It’s a win-win.
They need economic activity to be livable. Shoving broke people onto a reservation doesn’t accomplish that.
They create the economic activity.
More people living in an area means there’s more to do and more people to do it.
On average, each additional person contributes more than they take out.
You have to go back and actually read Kapital.
Visit a refugee camp and explain that to the locals
…But nobody wants to live there.
You could give a bunch of homeless people housing, but there’s simply no structure around it. They have no money, and there’s no jobs. There’s no services around. They won’t be much better off than homeless in a big city tbh. Might be WORSE off.
There needs to be available housing near the places where there’s actually things to do, jobs to hold, services to use.
Worst part is, I bet a LOT of those ghots towns are suburban, not urban - so it makes it more difficult and expensive to build up a new community there. Everything is spaced out
A lot of those places suck and they’re not going to turn into vibrant cultural centers with social services quickly.
It won’t happen overnight.
If homeless people would prefer living in tents under highways, that’s their choice.
Stalin thought Siberia needed a lot of people living there. Look how that turned out.
Forgive my ignorance; I don’t know much about Siberia other than it is desolate and not much fun. How did that turn out?
You need jobs near those places first. The locations are dying because of lack of industry.
The people who move there will create jobs and demand.
That’s really not how it works. If you’re homeless you’re not in a position to be a job creator.
More people living in a location means there is more work to be done and more people to do it.
Each additional person, on average, can contribute more than they take out.
If that were universally applicable the towns wouldn’t be dying to begin with. The houses are empty because there’s a lack of available work.
You are incorrect.
Homeless people, on average, contribute less to society than housed people, on average. Generally multiple societal structural failures and bad luck are major contributions to a person ending up homeless, but their own genetic- and nuture-driven characteristics play a role, too, and having a higher physical and mental disability burden than the average human is common.
Also, living remotely often means subsistence is a major part of how people get on, and subsistence is an intensely knowledge- and skill-based task highly specific to locale. Hunting in rural Alaska is not immediately transferable to hunting in Greenland, and dumping someone in rural Montana is not going to poof make them an expert gatherer.
Just one more suburb bro I swear, it’s all we need just one more and it’ll be fixed
I’ve said the same thing. More housing will just be bought by more speculators. I also think a massive tax on owning more than 5 properties would be helpful as well. Put the revenue from that into affordable housing subsidies.
If you build enough housing it gets back into being economically competitive for the average person to own their home. Speculators can speculate until it doesn’t make sense any more.
We got into the current situation because we slowed way down on building homes.
It’s also the huge amount of housing that’s built that’s not affordable. We have had 5 neighborhoods built within 4 miles of my house over the past 5 years. Nothing is below 500k starting price.
The alternative is that nothing gets built and people compete for the existing stock which drives up prices anyway
Either take your 500k house or be happy on the street, there are no other options.
Or, now hear me out, we limit profit on things like this.
that’s because you can’t build homes for cheaper than that.
developers aren’t going to charge 300K for a home that cost them 400K to build
They actually can build homes cheaper than that, there’s a certain price point where they feel they’re making the kind of profit they want which is basically the cost of a older home profit-wise. There’s a recent article that came out that I’m can’t find right now but I read it just a couple months ago that talked about the 400 to $500,000 price range is the profit margin that builders want to make. That means they’re probably making 20 to 30% profit. And while they can build cheaper homes they make less profit so they are not motivated to.
I know it’s not going to happen under this regime but it seems like the solution is to offer tax breaks, subsidies, or whatever we think might give the developers some incentive to build lower income housing.
OK. you go develop those homes then.
since you’re such an expert and seem to think a 10% margin is totally worthwhile?
I run a company, and it often is. Think about it this way. If you sell a 250k home,10% would be 25k. A developer often sells an entire neighborhood, so let’s say conservatively 30 homes. That’s 750,000$. If that’s not enough profit to keep building, well, you now know the problem with our society.
The land is expensive. Every time you buy and build or rebuild you want to make a profit off of your investment and effort so it goes up. Even if the structure is crap and you intend to tear it down and rebuild the seller still expects to be paid for the structure. The only way to make land more affordable is to build upwards and make condos/apts and increase the number of residents per unit area.
It doesn’t need to be an either-or situation. We can attack the problem from multiple sides, since there’s isn’t a silver bullet. New housing absolutely has to be part of it, but obviously it’s not super helpful if the new stock isn’t affordable or practical for average people.
Counterproductive regulations (restrictive zoning, vetocracy setups) have prevented environmentally sensible and affordable housing from being added in sufficient quantities in most of the US for a long time. We have more people living in smaller households than we used to; it just doesn’t math without adding new stock.
New construction is always more expensive. We should keep building anyway. The new construction of today becomes more affordable over time.
We also need way more investment in mental health and rehab services.
Fixing the supply problem fixes the hoarding problem. Housing is an attractive investment because it’s scarce. Once you build enough, investors will invest in something else.
Building more housing is the solution, even if those homes largely go to the upper middle class and wealthy. Building new homes primarily for well off people isn’t a historic anomaly, it’s the norm. If you’re already building a house, it doesn’t take that much more to add some luxury features to make it appeal to the high end of the market. This is how it’s always been. Historically, the affordable housing of today is the luxury housing of yesterday.
Preventing new home construction doesn’t prevent neighborhoods from gentrifying. You just end up with yuppies living in newly renovated former tenements.
seriously. poor people don’t buy new homes. rich people do. i grew up poor. every house we lived in was 30+ years old. poor people buy homes that are old.
the issue is there are no more old homes anymore because we don’t build enough new homes. so now rich people buy old homes and push our the poor people who can’t afford any home.
people like me, making 150K and now going into poor communities and buying up the homes for ourselves because we can’t afford anything newer. all the old homes in the richer towns are crazy expensive, and the new ones are 2x the cost of the old ones.
new constructed home in my city is about 2-3million. a 50 year old house is like 1-1.5 million. a newly constructed home in a poor shit down is 500K. a old home in a shit town is like 350K. I can afford a 350K house. i can’t afford one that’s 500K or more.
people move to wear they can afford homes.
An excise tax on multiple house owners would be good in my opinion. And make the percentage go up with the number houses an individual or entity owns.
Are you including landlords? Most people with multiple houses have them to rent out: they’re not empty.
Some percentage of people have a second “empty” house for vacations or as snowbirds, but I imagine the number with more is vanishingly small.
I like the variation we have now, but more so. Let’s increase property taxes substantially, but also increase the residential exemption significantly.
I didn’t say anything about empty houses. I just said houses. Fuck landlords. And if you can afford an extra house that you don’t live in all the time, you can afford extra taxes on that house.
Oh and yeah, we should absolutely lower the taxes on single occupancy homes. EAT THE FUCKING RICH
Exactly this
except you’re wrong.
housing production has been below population growth for over two decades.
when covid happened rents in my city dropped 50% overnight. why? because nobody wanted to live there anymore.
demand is everything. prices are low where demand is low, and prices are high where demand is high.
renovation is often more expensive than new housing. what needs to happen is for all the SFH crap to be zoned to multi family and for 3-5 story condo buildings to replace them. boom housing crisis solved.
also you need a vacancy rate of 8% or greater or more to bring prices down. the vacancy rate in my city is like 1.3% only way to get a massive vacancy rate is a economic crisis or to build more housing than there is demand.
No, you’re just wrong. You can’t twist reality to fit some niche ideological fantasy that you find sexy.
The reality is that statistics show that if we took all the vacant houses including all those that are inhabitable, under renovations, all the second, third, whatever homes, and we took all the investment properties as well and made them all immediately available, there would still NOT be enough houses to meet the current demand.
The reality is that we have very nonsensical and outdated zoning as well as restrictive construction process that strangle output. We need to reform our zoning laws and expedite construction to pump the market with many new housing units as possible to not just meet, but also exceed demand. That’s the only way to bring house prices down in a genuine way while also giving people homes that they actually want to live in places that they want to live in.
Property developers well never, not in a million years, build enough new housing to make their industry significantly less profitable.
The only solution is local government building social housing and being as good landlord at low prices. Good luck with that, America!
Where did you get your information from? Please cite some reputable sources. I’m pretty sure you’re !confidently_incorrect@lemmy.world.
Where do you have those statistics from? Because all sources I’ve seen draw an image like this. where even the states with the lowest amount of empty houses per homeless person still have more than 5:
https://www.mortgagecalculator.org/images/us-homeless-crisis.jpg