Who tf is saying “execute landlords” maoist style but also “deport immigrants”
My U.S.S.R. refugee/immigrant next door neighbor that owns a few houses she rents out. She’s not the brightest bulb.
The problem is that people say the latter as if it’s a solution on its own without also doing the former.
To my knowledge absolutely no one saying “Ban landlords” is also saying “Don’t build any more housing.” But there are plenty of people who think that you can build housing, in an environment where rich landowners have the ability to buy up and hoard everything you build, and don’t comprehend that this in no way solves the problem.
To my knowledge absolutely no one saying “Ban landlords” is also saying “Don’t build any more housing.”
There are plenty of people (EDIT: some of whom are in this very thread) who like to site that there are more vacant houses in the country than there are homeless people, as if to imply we already have all the housing we need.
But the fact of the matter is that US and Canadian cities have increased in population without a proportional increase in housing stock. The difference is mostly made up by more people living with their parents into adulthood, people living with more roommates to make rent, and multiple families living in “single family” houses.
We don’t do anything about it because home owners treat housing as an investment and expect its price to keep going up forever. Also because people hate multi-unit residential buildings for all sorts of nonsensical and racist reasons.
To be clear I am an advocate for the Vienna model of public housing and programs that temporarily repossess and rent out vacant properties, but I am first and foremost an advocate for housing abundance.
There are plenty of people (EDIT: some of whom are in this very thread) who like to site that there are more vacant houses in the country than there are homeless people, as if to imply we already have all the housing we need.
I feel like you’re taking very much the wrong implication from that statement then. Again, I can’t seem to see any meaningful number of these people actively advocating against building more housing. That doesn’t seem to be a position that anyone seriously takes. What is being said is that we clearly have capacity that is not being properly utilized. And we’re both clearly in agreement as to why that’s the case.
I think it’s important to remember that when people are pushing back on a position generally held in bad faith (e.g. “The only solution to our housing crisis is to build more housing”, a framing that is basically designed to protect the wealthy and ultimately maintain the status quo), they’re going to frame their own arguments against the position they’re pushing back on. They’re not laying out an election platform. They’re not going to take the time to establish the specific nuances of their position for every possible context and audience. If you were to ask that same person “Do you think we should never build any more housing, ever” the percentage that are going to say “Yes” is going to be a rounding error. You have to read people’s arguments in the context in which they are given.
When you say “doing the former” what specifically do mean?
Empirically, building more housing does lower the cost of rent. See Austin for an example. But yeah there is more that could be done for sure.
No to deporting immigrants. Yes to banning landlords. For everything else, see my original comment.
And it’s not that building more housing doesn’t help, but on its own it will never be a solution.
As long as housing is an investment, there has to be a housing crisis. Because if the price of housing isn’t on a constant upward trend then it no longer functions as an investment, and the only way to ensure that the price of housing constantly increases is for the supply to be insufficient to meet demand. No matter how much housing you build, wealthy investors will always ensure that it is insufficient to meet demand, because they’d be bad investors if they didn’t.
As long as housing is an investment, there has to be a housing crisis.
100% Agree
I’m not sure how banning landlords works though. Like everybody has to own their own house? What about apartment buildings or people living somewhere for the short-term? Or are you think like where the government is the landlord for everybody - sort of like Vienna?
I need you to learn about the California city of Berkeley, where it is illegal to build more housing because it might cast too much shade and disrupt your neighbor’s hobbyist tomato garden.
You probably read that and thought I was exaggerating for effect. I am not.
Whenever someone says they aim to make it “easier to build houses”, I feel they just mean they’ll remove certain standards. Not the “must have this many parking spaces” standards which we can do without, the “do we really need a fire ladder?” standards. And then the house is sold at the same price(+inflation) than before because the cost cut all goes to the builder, not the buyer.
If you assume the building company is exploiting every change in regulation (they do like money after all), small changes do nothing and you readily adopt more extreme views (and if you’re racists you blame the people with neither money nor power, but that’s expected of them).
It depends where you are, in the UK we have american HOA level regulations on house building, your permission can be denied because of the shade of your roof tiles or because the sheds are using the wrong shape of corrugated roofing sheets. Of course the problem is more that these things are very ill defined and the local planning office gets incredibly petty with the power they’re given.
So you’ll be interested in California’s solution. If the project contains enough low income housing and the city won’t approve it the developer can just build it anyways. All the safety standards are still required, they just can’t be stopped from building it. And if they build it within a certain distance of a light rail stop they don’t have to include parking.
I’ve never met a person actually making that argument, though. I’m certainly not advocating removing building safety codes, only the NIMBY bullshit like exclusionary zoning that was literally designed to keep people of color far away from white people. Even the opening paragraphs of Wikipedia page for the YIMBY movement say it’s primarily in favor of removing things like exclusionary zoning and parking minimums:
The YIMBY movement (short for “yes in my back yard”) is a pro-housing movement[1] that focuses on encouraging new housing, opposing density limits (such as single-family zoning), and supporting public transportation. It stands in opposition to NIMBY (“not in my back yard”) tendencies, which generally oppose most forms of urban development in order to maintain the status quo.[2][3][4]
As a popular organized movement in the United States, the YIMBY movement began in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 2010s amid a housing affordability crisis and has subsequently become a potent political force in local, state, and national[5][6] politics in the United States.[7][8]
The YIMBY position supports increasing the supply of housing within cities where housing costs have escalated to unaffordable levels.[9] They have also supported infrastructure development projects like improving housing development[10] (especially for affordable housing[11] or trailer parks[12]), high-speed rail lines,[13][4] homeless shelters,[14] day cares,[15] schools, universities and colleges,[16][17] bike lanes, and pedestrian safety infrastructure.[3] YIMBYs often seek rezoning that would allow denser housing to be produced or the repurposing of obsolete buildings, such as shopping malls, into housing.[18][19][20] Cities that have adopted YIMBY policies have seen substantial increase in housing supply and reductions in rent.[21]
The YIMBY movement has supporters across the political spectrum, including left-leaning adherents who believe housing production is a social justice issue, free-market libertarian proponents who think the supply of housing should not be regulated by the government, and environmentalists who believe land use reform will slow down exurban development into natural areas.[22] Some YIMBYs also support efforts to shape growth in the public interest such as transit-oriented development,[23][24] green construction,[25] or expanding the role of public housing. YIMBYs argue cities can be made increasingly affordable and accessible by building more infill housing,[26][27][28]: 1 and that greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced by denser cities.[29]
At first, yes, but eventually prices come down when there’s a glut of supply
Literally everyone agrees that more housing should be built and it shouldn’t be too hard to do so (just don’t sacrifice safety standards). However, simply building more housing isn’t enough. A lot of the housing built nowadays are built for the rich while there aren’t many small starter-homes being built. We need to do so much more than just building more homes, or else we risk the rich just buying them all up again.
This is myopic thinking. We all live in one big housing market. If you don’t have enough houses built, it doesn’t provide housing for the working class. You just end up with multi-millionaires living in tiny homes.
When you restrict the ability of builders to build new homes, they focus on maximizing the profit of the few homes they can make. We had cheap housing in the US in eras where we made it possible for builders to build vast numbers of housing on a colossal scale. That way you can really harness economies of scale and drive down the price tremendously.
There are two ways to make money by making something. You can either make high-margin luxury goods, or you can make vast numbers of low-margin affordable goods. Our current restrictions on home buildings encourage developer to take the former path, when we want to encourage them to take the latter.
- make it legal and easy to build housing
- mega corps and russian oligarchs buy the houses and rent them to people
- profit?
…keep building legal and easy housing. Megacorps and oligarchs get crushed when the bubble pops underneath them.
Well, it’ll ding them. But the ones hurt worst will be those invested in the ponzi scheme that is the american retirement system.
Like at my last job my tiny nothing of a 401k was invested in mortgage holdings. Had the bubble burst then all my money would be gone.
“Marginal Utility” - $10,000 is a lot to me. Its not worth stooping over to pick up for a Blackrock Exec.
