The absolute state of online housing discourse
The absolute state of online housing discourse
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.
She's the problem
Welcome to Lemmy, a contortionist's wet dream
The polling on rent and immigrants is ridiculous. Over half the country wants to just start deporting immigrants. And nobody likes not being able to afford rent.
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.
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.
You need to read my comment again, a little more carefully this time.
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 love this
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
We're disproving this really fast in California. It turns out developers want to build single family homes. It's more profitable to them than buildings.
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.
EVERY BUILDING project in my city is upscale rich housing.
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.
Don't worry we'll bail them out like we always do
I don't think you live where I live. Because where I live there is just no room to build many more houses without demolishing other houses first. There is a lot of discussion about moving away from single-family houses and increasing the density of living space. I don't see how this would be solved by making it easier to build.
ETA: Just to be clear, I absolutely am not advocating for deporting immigrants.
Do some reading about "the missing middle." In many cases the sort of medium-density housing like row houses or duplex/triplex/quadruplex designs that offer more comfort and privacy than a massive apartment complex but are more affordable than single family houses on large lots are explicitly regulated against in American cities, and local codes need to change in order to allow the sort of humane-but-cost-effective housing that will make a dent in the affordability crisis. Problem is, though, that existing homeowners see denser housing as a threat, both to the value of their own properties, and to the comfortable social homogeneity of their neighborhoods. At some level you need to have the power to force these developments through over the objections of the neighbors, undemocratic as that is, or else the problem never gets solved.
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Thank you for the clarification in your "ETA".
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Evolving the (sub)urban planning directive beyond "single-family houses" while also "increasing the density of living space” is "making it easier to build", TBH. 😅
- I realised afterwards that I said nothing about executing landlords. I'm also not in favour, in case anyone was wondering.
- Hm, I guess it comes down to what is meant by "make it easier".
The only way to reduce the proportion of single-family houses around here seems to be by adding rules and restrictions. Adding more rules is usually not what people mean when they say "make it easier". But I get your point.
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If housing is expensive where you live, and most of the land is tied up in single-family homes, what's stopping people from just converting their homes into plexes, or straight-up selling to someone who will turn a couple single-family lots into an apartment complex that houses hundreds?
If you're anywhere in North America, chances are it's literally illegal to do so, because of restrictive zoning and other NIMBY land use policies that make it literally illegal to build enough housing in the places that need it most.
So the solution, then, is to make it legal and easy to build housing so people don't have to fight over scraps.
Again, this is more of the "off-load to oppressed middle-class (ie. everyone non-corpo/5%) to 'solve' w/o lasting foundational change to build from"... See: recycling program, education system, etc.
This is a short video about how one law makes it more difficult to build denser housing in the US and Canada: https://youtu.be/iRdwXQb7CfM?si=fLJ6qcVIOzHEFOvU
Do whatever's needed to increase affordability except anything that will reduce the value of my house.
That's basically the two sides.
Who is getting mad at the second part but not the first?
People who realize that not all places that need more affordable housing have space to build more housing, and that prices are inflated because of landlords and companies buying up the limited property. Like in cities.
Different situations, different priorities.
Are these being discussed as one or the other things? Why can't we have both, where applicable?
Edit: Er... I only just now noticed the "deport immigrants" part of the top panel. 😨 I want everything but that one.
NIMBYs whose main complaint about short-term rentals is the (admittedly significant) nuisance factor of having a "party house" next door... but also don't want a duplex or other multifamily housing arrangement across the street, where it might bring The Poors into the neighborhood and drive down their property values.
Fact is, though, that most Americans are in debt up to their eyeballs, and their financial situation only works out if they think of their house as an eternally-appreciating asset that they can continually leverage to pay off other debts. If the line ever stops going up, they're fucked. I hate NIMBYism, but we've made our society into such a hypercapitalist hellscape that on some level it's hard to blame people for it.
"Make it easy to build new houses" seems to be a mix between
- let's not have so many pesky building codes
- let's make way more shitty wood-frame bungalows - aka the least effective for infrastructure - because all cities should go bankrupt like Detroit
... and I'm not sure which one this is.
Yep, developers are already building unlivable shit boxes as it is, you don't want to lower standards even more.
Some regulations could be looked at (like parking minimums), but you have to be real careful that you're not just enabling developers to build substandard housing. I saw a YouTube video recently where some guy was advocating removing stairwells from buildings that are mandated by fire codes, and that strikes me as a dangerous idea.
As an architectural professional, this misses the point. It's as easy as it's ever been to buy a plot of farmland for relative pennies vaguely near a major metro and throw up a cookie-cutter exurban subdivision full of builder-grade single-family homes. The cost has gone up due to inflation, but if anything bureaucratic and administrative expenses have dropped as a percentage of the overall cost. Builders are constantly fighting new code provisions that would increase costs, but on average most new code revisions add something on the order of a couple thousand dollars of cost to the average new home -- basically nothing against the current average sales price. Most of the cost in a new home is materials and (espescially) contractor labor and profit -- if builders want to offer cheaper standard homes, they ultimately will have to reduce their own cut.
What people are actually talking about when this comes up, is building denser housing closer in. Local zoning regulations often explicitly prohibit multi-family housing in large swathes of cities, especially the kinds most desired by families (townhomes and multiplexes, rather than large apartment complexes). It's easier to build less expensive housing closer to where people want to live, if it can be made legal to build new, middle-density homes where more density is in demand, and even to convert large single-family properties into livable duplexes (such as can be found in cities like Boston and Seattle).
There are other initiatives that I'm more ambivalent about -- for example, the push to change the building code to permit single-stair apartment buildings, that @[email protected] mentions below. This would put American building practice more in alignment with European practice, but I am personally of the opinion that the requirement in US codes for multiple means of egress is one of the most significant safety improvements we've made, and single-stair towers, in combination with the related design philosophy for residents to shelter in place during a fire, was one of the largest contributors to tragedies like Grenfell. But the advocates do have a point that egress requirements do dramatically reduce the efficiency of the typical apartment tower floorplate in the US, and there is probably a way to balance out the risk with other fire protection features.
the best version of this is removing zoning restrictions on multi-units. But if we don't
redactedthe landlords, they'll still take advantage of us.
This is becoming a global problem. It's not just that you can't easily build houses anywhere, there's also the fact that housing is mostly built for profit so if prices go too low, new housing stops being built. I think you can see where this is going.
Even taking you at your word, just building more houses wouldn't solve the problem unless the other existing issues are solved first. There are already more than enough houses, several times more unoccupied houses than there are homeless people in fact. If you just make it easier to build more, those new houses will just end up in the same situation as the existing lot: bought up by corporate groups as investments, held ransom by landlords, and generally NOT made available to consumers who want to buy a home.
So yeah. You're gonna see some pushback if you're only making that second argument, all that will do is make the investor class richer without solving any problems.
True as it may be that there are more vacant homes than there are homeless people in America, the expression misses the forest for the trees. In many cases, those homes are vacant for a reason -- they may be located in places like dying rural villages, or declining Rust Belt manufacturing towns where the local economy is severely depressed and there's no work to be had for residents. They may also be severely dilapidated and unsafe to live in. Solving the housing crisis isn't as simple as just assigning existing vacant homes to people who don't have them -- housing needs to be in the right place, and of decent quality, too, or else it's not doing any good.
Plus, it's just a weird argument to be making that we should be just forcefully shipping homeless people out to Bumretch, Kentucky to live in a dilapidated shed. No jobs, no opportunities.
The places where housing is needed are cities. The places with jobs and opportunities. And the cities that are most expensive are the ones with the absolute lowest vacancy rates.
Additionally, why would we actually want zero vacancies? Vacancies are good for the average person. Vacancies mean you can shop for a new home or apartment without finding someone to swap units with you. Vacancies mean your landlord has a credible threat of vacancy if they demand too much in rent. Vacancies give power to renters and buyers. Why would any left-leaning person willingly -- much less gleefully -- take bargaining power away from renters and give it to landlords on a silver platter?
At this point, I'm half-convinced this "vacancy truth" rhetoric the person you're responding to is espousing is a psyop by landlords to protect their economic interests.
This has that twitter style 'make up a dude to get mad at' vibe to it.
Hot take. Stop making so many new people so we don't have to live crowded like ants and destroying all our environment to provide housing.
Just stop having so many children.
That's already happened. US birthrates have been below replacement rates for over a decade, and most of Europe before that.
My european country population keeps growing each years and birth/death rate while was good over some time (more death than births) is turning around once again and births are again skyrocketing.
We only had a few sensible years of decreasing population, since 2018 aprox population is again on the rise here.
Pretty sure US population has also being growing lately instead of decreasing as it should.
population control is just advocating for eugenics
They aren't advocating for population control, they are advocating for individuals to make their own decisions wisely.
Edit: Nevermind. https://lemmy.world/comment/13130336
No it's not.
Society can handle many many more people, they just choose not to so they can have their SUVs and newest iphones.
The more humans we have the worse we will live.
I suppose it's a moral choice. More people living worse or less people living better.
I prefer the later. Specially because the prize is just having less children, it's just a small cultural change.
I get nothing out of a crowded world where I have to be miserable just to make space for more people.
Less people being able to live to their fullest seems the more humanist approach.
It would be funny if someone was against increasing the supply of housing in general terms
Because ð issue isn't a lack of housing, ð issue is speculation sucking up ð available housing and consequently raising costs for everyone.
Ðere are more empty units ðan ðere are unhoused people, and it is all down to speculators artificially driving up ð price to keep ðeir rent checks up.
I am curious about your use of the thorn