Housing becomes affordable by filtering down the market, long after it has been built by "return-oriented" developers. Building more and better housing can accelerate this process.

> Housing becomes affordable by filtering down the market, long after it has been built by "return-oriented" developers.

And long after today, most of the homeless people, or the people currently getting displaced, will be dead or gone.

YIMBY people don't seem to understand that this response is the housing equivalent of "let them eat cake". People who are at risk of displacement are not really interested in hearing about the affordable housing they might be able to afford twenty years from now if they have to spend the meantime picking between sleeping on the street and leaving.

We obviously have to build our way out of an incredibly tight supply. But talking past people and basically ignoring their concerns is not going to get people on board.

The filtering down happens as soon as new housing is built. The yuppie with a high six-figure salary is moving into San Francisco, the only question is whether they get corralled into a gigantic glass yuppie box. If they don't, they're going to pay way too much money to gentrify the Mission or something.

There is so much demand that the filtering down is not happening, or going downwards quickly enough.

This is what I mean when I say:

> But talking past people and basically ignoring their concerns is not going to get people on board.

Is what you're saying valid? Yes. But if you just act dismissive of other people don't be surprised if they're not rushing to your defense, or even against you.

This seems like a troll question, so apologies, but is it really an affordability thing? What's the average income (public assistance and otherwise) of a homeless person in Seattle? I live in podunk Ohio and a single bedroom apartment is still ~$650 per month. Would they be able to come up with that? Say the government splits it with section 8 or whatever. Same?

Is the idea that the public picks up the whole tab and the issue is just that the money just doesn't go as far with current rents?

I was paying 1900 or so a month in an outlying suburb and that was cheap for the area - the best you're gonna see for a one bedroom within a 20-25 mile radius around seattle is about 1200 a month, a two bedroom about 1500 a month.

Public assistance pays nothing, and section 8/housing authority has years or decades long waiting lists.

OK, good info, thank you. So let's say we carpet bomb the area with new housing capacity and cut rents in half. How does that help with the homeless situation? Doesn't really make any sense to me.

There is more than one kind of homeless. The mayor of Los Angeles Eric Garcetti recently said something striking, "homelessness is trauma meets high rent"[1]. Often times, decades ago, there was housing on the margins of society - yes, it wasn't very nice, but it was a warm dry place in winter.

Often people who are homeless had jobs right up until the time they became homeless, and have marketable skills, but not ones that can pay for a median rent price, Basically the lack affordable housing puts stress on people who are already on the margins or in near crisis and puts them out of the street. Most of the homeless people fit into this category.

There is another group of homeless folks though, who are long term chronic homeless, they have other complicating factors, like drug abuse, mental health issues, criminal records that make it hard to rent a home or find a job - often being in the first category of homelessness can lead you to slip into the second category, by simply the on the street.

The first group of homelessness would be largely solved with affordable housing and a program to get people into it, Unfortunately for those of us who want to solve the problem the most visible homeless are the chronic variety not the people suffering from a life event.

[1] - https://www.marketplace.org/2019/12/23/interview-la-mayor-er...

> Often people who are homeless had jobs right up until the time they became homeless, and have marketable skills, but not ones that can pay for a median rent price

And, while I believe it's a minority, in the US a shockingly high percentage of homeless people remain employed.

> I was paying 1900 or so a month in an outlying suburb and that was cheap for the area - the best you're gonna see for a one bedroom within a 20-25 mile radius around seattle is about 1200 a month, a two bedroom about 1500 a month.

Even single bedroom apartments are too luxurious with regards to the homelessness problem. Aim lower.

Typical NYC residents live in Studio Apartments (granted, at $2000/month, but that's NYC pricing there). A singular building can house hundreds, maybe thousands, of 300 Sq. Ft Studio units.

If land is more readily available, then trailer-parks provide more room than a Studio and are probably cheaper to build out. A trailer costs $20,000 to construct, and maybe $600/month to rent out the land.

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The problem is that low-end housing drives down property values. No one wants to live near a trailer park. But by golly, it fixes the housing problem really cheap.

I think people need to "wake up" and see the advantages that trailer parks can bring to their community. Yeah, trailer parks kinda suck for land value, but so do hoards of homeless people sleeping in the streets. And yes, I'm purposefully being callous: its the only real way to fight against NIMBY: you gotta "sell" how a trailer park can benefit a community in a callous way if you expect the NIMBY crowd to agree to it.

Trailer parks need land...a lot more than a apartment buildings for the same number of residents, they aren’t urban solutions.

They often go on marginal land without sewer, so you need more land to make a septic tank work. Trailers in the boonies outside of Vicksburg MS where I lived as a kid got maybe electricity, you had to take care of your own trash (usually by burning); I had many friends out there who were living in squalor. A trailer park was actually a step up from these places.

The real problem is getting rid of single room occupancy units, IMO. It's the cheapest minimally acceptable living unit: room enough for a bed and a desk, with a door only you have a key to, and access to shared bathrooms and kitchens.

The free market will not solve this problem. Just look at all the major cities in the world; they all have a problem of gentrification and rising prices for housing.

Rent-seeking will always drive the prices to the barely-acceptable and thus will make it affordable for a large portion of the population. That portion is either driven to the periphery or denied housing altogether.

So no; housing will not automatically become affordable. There are forces in the market that prevent that.

The "major cities in the world" are among the most desirable areas to be in, almost by definition. So no, housing will never be all that affordable in Manhattan NYC. But does it really need to be, provided that resources are being put towards their "highest and best use"? Some people will have to live elsewhere - and NYC has very good subway transit that helps people do just that.

> all have a problem of gentrification and rising prices for housing

We use prices to ration access to scarce resources. Why should housing in the center of a desirable city be cheap?

Good question. For that matter, why should high-value housing in the center of a desirable city enrich a bunch of private landowners, and not the surrounding community which creates that value in the first place?

> why should high-value housing in the center of a desirable city enrich a bunch of private landowners

Because they bought low-property housing from the entity who previously owned it without a guarantee that the demand was going to be there and then demand grew. Risk meet reward.

Are you suggesting to violate property rights because you did not have the foresight, luck and/or the resources to make the same investment?

>Because they bought low-property housing from the entity who previously owned it without a guarantee that the demand was going to be there and then demand grew. Risk meet reward.

Risk? More often than not, they engineer the growing of demand, help throw out old tenants (even with thuggish methods), select new tenants to drive up values (e.g. with redlining), use connections in the city government to develop specifically the areas they bought or intent to buy, and so on...

Property tax is supposed to capture public good usage.

Which is why proposition 13 is such a wicked law: it insulates property owners from the downsides of increases in property values while giving them all the upsides. It takes skin out of the game.

And that happens. However, the flop houses that used to exist when I was in college have been driven out of the market.

Most boarding houses are not code compliant and would not be buildable today. That might have something to do with it.

Which brings us back to

"The 2019 system is that building housing is illegal without very costly and hard to get permits in most non Texas big cities.

If you could just put up housing on land you own and charge however much people will pay for it, this housing crisis would quickly be gone"

Nobody is going to build a flop house as new construction even in, especially in, Texas. Have you been to Austin before? It isn’t much better than Seattle.

A lot of them were just old houses that were unrenovated. They’ve probably been torn down and rebuilt by now. My first place in the U district (1994ish) was a cheap $225/month basement room with shared bathroom and a small kitchenette. The land lady was desperate to keep non-students out so it wouldn’t turn into a flop house.

The kinds of subdivisions that turned large homes into multiple boarding situations is also not code compliant and would require at the very least a conditional use authorization (years and uncertainty) in SF.

It was allowed in Seattle in certain districts (definitely at Greek row). Not sure about now.

Because it's really expensive to build a house.

Who has the money other than massive developers? Of course they want to make €£¥$

They and their investors want to maximize their returns of course, why would that be weird? The developers who don’t want to maximize their returns are no longer in business.

Assuming the resulting house is worth more than the cost to build it, you can get a loan for the building cost.

This is basic stuff. Surprised that people are not aware of it!

Seattle does very much have a homeless problem.