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Mendrian posted:false scarcity is also a real problem in a lot of places. Where? I'm not really convinced that this is really why housing prices can are so high in highly desirable metros which are undergoing population growth. Lack of supply of housing units is a much simpler and more plausible explanation. There are a lot of cities in the US where due to declining population, there is an abundance of housing, and as a result prices are very low.
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Mar 26, 2023 21:29
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I've been doing work on affordable housing initiatives for several years. Almost the only people who want it also need it, and nobody wants to pay for it. On the first point, good luck getting residents to sign off on any change in zoning that could possibly affect them in any way. Even if they're not worried about more of the "wrong people," which they are, because everyone sucks, they're worried about anything that prevents their property values from continuously rising to the moon... and more housing stock does just that. They don't want any development at all, because of parking or traffic or some other garbage reason, let alone housing. They will have no concern until the economy has collapsed from the total elimination of service workers that aren't high school students. On the second, in the rare instance when we were able to get a mixed-use development approved -- fully residential apartment buildings don't happen anymore -- the total number of affordable units included is comical. When you put the costs on the developer, the developer will make "luxury apartments" that hardly anyone can afford, and if you push them too hard, they will choose not to build. To do anything effectively, the town/city/state has to subsidize development. And nobody is going to subsidize development of affordable housing because nobody with money wants development in the first place, because as previously stated, everyone sucks. So the best we can hope for is pushing for mixed-use luxury developments so the rich foreign students flock to those and leave the older housing stock for everyone else (but also, the rich foreign students are also the "wrong people" because they're students.) BRAKE FOR MOOSE fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Mar 26, 2023 |
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Mar 26, 2023 21:30
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silence_kit posted:Where? I'm not really convinced that this is really why housing prices can are so high in highly desirable metros which are undergoing population growth. Lack of supply of housing units is a much simpler and more plausible explanation. There are a lot of cities in the US where due to declining population, there is an abundance of housing, and as a result prices are very low. If people are allowing their apartment units to go unfilled and won't budge on the price despite the market saying they should lower prices, that's your false scarcity right there. I'm not saying there's a simple conspiracy by megacorps to buy all the housing and then charge more for it, I'm saying that 'just build more units' will never completely solve the problem. Companies build units in big metros only because they can charge stupid amounts of money for it, so they're never going to build enough units to lower the price. We're relying on capitalists to solve the problem of capitalism in housing. How would that ever be successful?
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Mar 26, 2023 21:37
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BRAKE FOR MOOSE posted:I've been doing work on affordable housing initiatives for several years. Almost the only people who want it also need it, and nobody wants to pay for it. I don't work in the area, but this is was the impression I got w.r.t. the problem. Building housing is pretty unpopular among people who participate in local government, and this is why it doesn't get done. I find this explanation for why housing prices can be high in many rich American cities to be way more plausible than e.g. Epic High Five's posts about the 'Landlord-Industrial Complex'.
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Mar 26, 2023 21:37
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Mendrian posted:If people are allowing their apartment units to go unfilled and won't budge on the price despite the market saying they should lower prices, that's your false scarcity right there. I'm not saying there's a simple conspiracy by megacorps to buy all the housing and then charge more for it, I'm saying that 'just build more units' will never completely solve the problem. Companies build units in big metros only because they can charge stupid amounts of money for it, so they're never going to build enough units to lower the price. Vacancy rates are in the low single digit percent range for most major metro areas. Los Angeles, the city I'm most familiar with, is about 3% right now. Most of those 3% are 'normal' vacancies from apartment churn that will be filled within a few weeks. My guess is that stubborn vacancies are a small fraction of the overall vacancy rate, maybe somewhere on the order of 0.1%-0.5%.
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Mar 26, 2023 21:39
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Mendrian posted:If people are allowing their apartment units to go unfilled and won't budge on the price despite the market saying they should lower prices, that's your false scarcity right there. I don't think that this is the dominant effect. Can you produce examples of this? Mendrian posted:We're relying on capitalists to solve the problem of capitalism in housing. How would that ever be successful? I think it is more correct to attribute it to government failure.
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Mar 26, 2023 21:42
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There was a state law passed recently that states the following: quote:This new law requires that an MBTA community shall have at least one zoning district of reasonable size in which multi-family housing is permitted as of right and meets other criteria set forth in the statute: "MBTA community" is the majority of eastern Massachusetts. You would not believe how much people are losing their poo poo over this. Residents will stand up and go on rants about how we should disavow state grants rather than accede to these outrageous demands.
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Mar 26, 2023 21:49
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im curious how apartment housing construction gets started. like do property management corps commission them from developers or do developers start construction and then search for a buyer?
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Mar 26, 2023 21:49
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lobster shirt posted:im curious how apartment housing construction gets started. like do property management corps commission them from developers or do developers start construction and then search for a buyer? There's no one size fits all answer - it really depends. In most cases a developer will buy the land, deal with the local government bureaucracy, and get the building built. Some developers have in house contractors while others hire third party contractors to do the construction. Once the building is completed, depending on the developer, they can either sell off the individual units as condos, sell it to a real estate investment firm, or keep it in their portfolio and hire a property management company to run the building as apartments. Some of the larger developers also have in-house property management but that's less common from what I've seen.
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Mar 26, 2023 22:02
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Small walkable communities sound great until you want a pizza at 11 pm. Or an ER within a half hour any time. Plus, yeah, broadband. Asheville has all these things (don’t move here)
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Mar 26, 2023 22:43
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Dull Fork posted:Out of curiosity, what policies do you think could actually solve unaffordable rent? There’s a lot of decent options that others posted to help out with affordability. There’s no good known solution, as this is an issue that everywhere deals with to some extent or another. There’s one thing that hasn’t been explicitly stated and hasn’t been used (as far as I know) on a large scale, which is to give money to those who are rent burdened or can’t afford rent. I imagine this would look something like a massive section 8 expansion (including Mooseontheloose’s suggestion of all properties needing to allow vouchers), direct subsidy for housing to get renters out of that rent-burdened/houseless category, or similar. Obviously, this is much more complicated than other policies, such as rent control. But it would at least help those who can’t even afford rent. And then you don’t get into policies that do lead to a decrease in available/future units, loving over future renters as well Kalit fucked around with this message at 02:23 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 26, 2023 22:45
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Kalit posted:There’s a lot of decent options that others posted to help out with affordability. There’s no good known solution, as this is an issue that everywhere deals with to some extent or another. Massively expanding section 8 could actually get passed, yeah, and could even expand housing stock if set up right.
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Mar 26, 2023 23:32
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Housing is not built as homes for people. It is built as homes for money. Actual people living there is only begrudgingly allowed if they give landlords even more massive piles of money. Major cities all have huge swathes of luxury apartments that have been sitting empty for years.
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Mar 26, 2023 23:37
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Kalit posted:There’s a lot of decent options that others posted to help out with affordability. There’s no good known solution, as this is an issue that everywhere deals with to some extent or another. The point of UBI is it isn't means-tested, that's what the U is.
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Mar 27, 2023 00:01
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Housing is not built as homes for people. It is built as homes for money. Actual people living there is only begrudgingly allowed if they give landlords even more massive piles of money. Major cities all have huge swathes of luxury apartments that have been sitting empty for years. Rental properties do not generate any income unless someone is, you know, renting them. In any case, if it were true that landlords are keeping rental properties vacant to raise the rents on their other properties, a good way to punish them would be to permit more housing so that the rents dropped anyway.
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Mar 27, 2023 00:08
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Quixzlizx posted:The point of UBI is it isn't means-tested, that's what the U is. I was using UBI as an analogous example since it is a concept familiar to most people (or at least D&D posters). Obviously the implementation would be different if you wanted a guaranteed rent assistance to those who cannot afford rent/are rent burdened Kalit fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 00:22
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James Garfield posted:Rental properties do not generate any income unless someone is, you know, renting them. Or a ruinous vacancy tax and enforcement funded by judgements against said landlords alongside making occupancy rates public information without exception, things that are vigorously opposed despite this situation definitely never happening in reality. Building more units for them to play this sort of game with isn't going to do anything but make it worse and entrench it further. Real estate plays by very convoluted and irrational rules, it's the oldest form of rent seeking and one of the pillars of the Capitalist mode, and lots of old fortunes are tied up in it. There is absolutely money to be made in keeping a property vacant, just look at all the empty storefronts on display whenever you stop to look for them. The name on the contact sign to rent doesn't change and it's the same one going up in front of starter homes all over the rest of the town.
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Mar 27, 2023 00:32
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BRAKE FOR MOOSE posted:There was a state law passed recently that states the following: It should also be stated that Massachusetts's also has something called 40B Housing, which for simplicties sake states that every community has to have 10% of its housing deemed affordable (between 30 to 80% AMI) now towns have a few ways to not get to 10% by basically saying they are in the process of building but whatever, the key component of the law is that a developer can tell a suburban community to gently caress off and build a new apartment's building with X% of the apartment's deemed affordable. Essentially, it cracks the suburbs restrictive zoning laws and forces them to build housing or have it forced on them. Is it completely successful? No. But a lot of construction of housing units is used using this law.
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Mar 27, 2023 00:34
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Kalit posted:I was using UBI as an analogous example since it is a concept familiar to most people. Obviously the implementation would be different if you wanted a guaranteed rent assistance to those who cannot afford rent/are rent burdened But what you suggested is a completely different concept. It's like saying you want a starfighter that can't operate in space, so actually just a regular jet fighter. What you're talking about isn't anything close to UBI, it's just standard welfare/income assistance in the form of a housing subsidy.
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Mar 27, 2023 00:35
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Small walkable communities sound great until you want a pizza at 11 pm. Or an ER within a half hour any time. Plus, yeah, broadband. Every walkable italian community I lived in had pizza until at least the midnight. And it was safe to send my 11 year old to get it. I went to ER with the ambulance. This is not some impossible equation.
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Mar 27, 2023 00:37
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Quixzlizx posted:But what you suggested is a completely different concept. It's like saying you want a starfighter that can't operate in space, so actually just a regular jet fighter. Fine, I have changed the wording in my previous post 
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Mar 27, 2023 00:38
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I feel like the problem of things not being open late at night or other non "regular" hours would be fixed if we break the from the religious like adherence of the 9 to 5 and respect people's different chrono types / Circadian Rhythm. 8 hours or whatever is defined as a work day should count no matter what block it is. also hello my fellow night owls/graveyard peeps.
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Mar 27, 2023 00:50
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PhazonLink posted:I feel like the problem of things not being open late at night or other non "regular" hours would be fixed if we break the from the religious like adherence of the 9 to 5 and respect people's different chrono types / Circadian Rhythm. 8 hours or whatever is defined as a work day should count no matter what block it is. Most things are open more than 9 to 5, that's the relam of office workers, post offices, and doctor's offices. And maybe single shift factories, but those are usually 7 to 3. I've worked in factories on three shifts, and retail tends to stay open really late around here with even the grocery store staying open until 11 pm. Resturants close a little earlier at 10 pm, though bars have their last call at 2 am on weekdays.
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Mar 27, 2023 01:39
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Mellow Seas posted:18 year-olds move extremely enthusiastically to cities in the middle of nowhere where they don't know anyone. They're called Ames, Charlottesville, Athens, Madison, and so on. There's no reason people in their 20s and 30s wouldn't do the same in the right circumstance. With the right incentives (cheap rear end housing, the chance to live in a well-planned place for once in your stupid American life, relocation stipends) you could draw a lot of remote workers, and since those types of people tend of have deeper pockets they would be able to support a robust local services economy. I don't think using college towns as an example of sustainable remote communities is a great idea, considering your first example, Ames, loses literally half its population during school breaks and becomes a depressing ghost town. because nobody actually wants to live there.
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Mar 27, 2023 03:25
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we have another latex chemical extravaganza https://twitter.com/UR_Ninja/status/1640068953576816641 whats more interesting is that another citywide text got sent out after the first one, assuring people that Baxter water treatment plant concluded that its water was safe to drink until at least monday at midnight this is the coverage of water treatment plants in philly. not a single word has been mentioned of the other treatment plants besides baxter  moreover philly water has gone radio silent after saying that'd provide a 5pm update https://twitter.com/PhillyH2O/status/1640083097117917186 bottled water is completely sold out throughout the city, and people are pissed because either they think the city made them spend money on water for no reason, or they think the city is lying to people to prevent further panic fortunately the absolute fools didnt buy out the bottled seltzer at the stores, so me and my cat's drinking water is secure e: this thread is a sum-up of the details of the accident, apparently the chemicals are the exact same that were spilled in east palestine https://twitter.com/UR_Ninja/status/1640169722120400896 A big flaming stink fucked around with this message at 04:15 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 04:11
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mastershakeman posted:Housing is expensive because 2/3rds of the country can't contemplate moving somewhere that is both cold and has no easy access to mountains Define cold because the northeast gets pretty drat cold.
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Mar 27, 2023 04:52
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A big flaming stink posted:we have another latex chemical extravaganza This happens weekly in Orleans parish, but for brain-eating amoebas, not latex chemicals.
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Mar 27, 2023 05:00
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A big flaming stink posted:we have another latex chemical extravaganza Don't worry, dilution is the solution to pollution!
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Mar 27, 2023 06:48
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I filled up as much as possible when the alert went out. The Giant Heirloom market on 9th and market was pretty dead oddly enough.
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Mar 27, 2023 07:04
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 14:37 |
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Say hello to the next thread. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4028078
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Mar 27, 2023 09:23
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