the_dunk_tank
It's the dunk tank.
This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.
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Hot take, I agree with the Libs on this one, we should be building more housing. The country is increasingly urbanizing, which should be a good thing, but local petite bourg real estate owners want to restrict supply to make their assets more valuable. Hence the affordability crisis. Throwing up more high rises in Cali would do a lot to help lower housing costs and reduce homelessness.
I don't agree with libs on this one. More housing doesn't directly relate to more affordable housing. If it was affordable high rises, sure. But the housing we're building is "market rates" and higher and that just doesn't push down prices, it drags prices up.
Housing is an inelastic good and landlords will charge whatever they "can" which is based off other available houses.
I should have prefaced, as a socialist I think we should build more PUBLIC housing. That would address the problem more quickly and directly.
However...
Part of the reason they can charge so much is they don't have much competition, any open space is going to have a lot of people competing for it so you can Jack up prices, somebody will probably be able to pay. If there was more selection people could go for cheaper options and landlords wouldn't be able to ask exorbitant prices for subpar properties.
If it reaches the scale of Red Vienna then it definitely starts to have an effect
Yeah part of the reason the Karl Marx Hof worked is because private landlords now had to compete with this really nice, affordable, housing bloc. You can't charge exorbitant rents if your tenants have a decent affordable option on the plate.
That is until nobody can afford to pay, then all that land is overvalued and the bubble gets scary again
like making more housing is kinda of the solution, the problem is that you don't need to build houses as much as should retrofit existing buildings that are empty in dense urbans spaces into housing, as they would have access to much better infrastructure and would be cheaper and less damaging to de enviroment as building materials have such a fucked up carbon footprint due to their production, like i am from brazil and i think the best thing lula did was his proposal to use old federal buildings that have lost their use into housing (for example, a bunch of stuff in rio that is on the most valued land with a bunch of transportation and infrastructure already built in that lost their function when the capital moved to Brasilia) which is incredibly better than the other program that we already had from his first term that builds houses because those tend to be so far away from where people actually live on the areas that have the least job oportunities
In areas where that's viable, I agree. Issue is in a lot of newer, usually Western US cities, restrictive zoning resulted in a lot of low density, single family development. In some cases it probably would be more efficient to replace some of it with higher density apartment complexes.
There's plenty of houses already. building houses doesn't work if the new house immediatly gets bought by an investment firm that rents it out for 1.5x the areas median income.
The whole thing with investment firms buying up housing as a speculative asset is really only a problem in places like NYC, on the Marco scale they're a drop in the bucket. This is really more caused by upper middle class people who want to drive their home prices up to fund their retirement than it is BlackRock.
It doesn't really matter who is buying the properties and charging more money to live there than people make. It's just an example of how streamlined the process of "just build more houses" being ineffective has become.
We need to build houses but they need to be explicit subsidized lower income housing and then once that hurdle is cleared you need to be able to push back against the corporations that want to buy them AND the 80% of Americans who don't believe people intrinsically deserve a place to live.
I agree that's what we really need to do to solve this problem on the nation wide scale. I do think in the super in demand cities, like LA or Austin, building ANYTHING probably would help a bit because the market is just that restricted.
that's why this society is doomed.
Is there any example of this occurring, because these high rises in California are all exclusively going for 4-5k a month for a 1 bedroom, which im not sure is very helpful for a population thay struggles to pay any rent
The libs are not right because they do not agree with you on public housing, its all mArKeT bAsEd SoLuTiOns.
Never mnid thats fair enough then, idk much about "the economy" other than its function according to the POSIWID* maxim, its a bit weird that we need to build way more houses than physically necessary otherwise people will die on the streets.
However, there seem to be other more video game based solutions to the problem...
The issue is the areas people are moving to don't have enough supply generally. Yeah there's a lot of vacant homes but a lot of them are in like, Bumfuck Nebraska. Thing is there actually is a lot of affordable housing in the US, it's just far away from all the job and infrastructure, that's why a culture of "super commuters" who drive like two hours to an office in LA to work exists now, and why during the pandemic a bunch of workers who went remote decided to go buy houses in West Virginia and Idaho.
well, theres your problem
lmao so technically the problemo is because american urban planners (best in world) built all the houses over 9000~~km~~ miles from where the economy functions, fucking genius. Therefore, it is an issue of building more homes... but closer to urban centers. Where I live, there is a lot of property development (suburbification) going on... but its in the areas 2+ hours from the city center. We truly are america's 51st state.