> Put a huge tax on vacancies and cap the number of residential properties a business is allowed to purchase in a year.
While I'm not opposed at all to these policies, they won't do anything to help you. Vacant homes are less than 10% of existing homes, we need far more than that to solve the problem.
The only thing, literally the only thing that will help you, is more homes.
I'm not sure why people are so resistant to this idea. We have been under building for decades in the places where people want to live, the places that are economically productive.
There's a lot of ways to get there, and though changing zoning to allow density and ban sprawl is necessary, it won't solve the problem alone.
We should also do things like slap a huge tax on the value of land to force people to stop hoarding their land, and use that tax money to fund a government builder that will act counter cyclically to current market cycles. The huge business cycle for the building trades means that it's an unstable job and it makes it hard to have a solid workforce. Having more steady building will allow for lifetime careers, for more experience to be gained, and hopefully for productivity increases.
As it is now, there's not even enough productive capacity in places like California to build the amount of housing that's needed. We need to attack the problem from many angles simultaneously.
> I'm not sure why people are so resistant to this idea. We have been under building for decades in the places where people want to live, the places that are economically productive.
There is a lot of marketing that was driven at Americans to think that a detached single family home is the only way to live, and it's going to be hard to undo.
The sprawling 20 and 30 story apartment complexes that are all around Taipei really expanded my view of how other countries do it. “Fields and fields” of these massive structures. Someplace tourists never go I’m certain.
Hadn’t seen anything like in NY or LA, etc.
I agree there are other ways to do it, I double agree it’s going to be hard if not impossible.
Look at how strong NIMBY is in SF with people who consider themselves to be bleeding heart ultra progressives. Everyone clams up when it effects them, but, build somewhere else? “Oh we definitely need to do that!”.
>>The sprawling 20 and 30 story apartment complexes that are all around Taipei really expanded my view of how other countries do it. “Fields and fields” of these massive structures.
As an Indian. This culture caught on some time here in Bangalore early 2000s. But most people, even those living in large apartments, eventually prefer living in individual detached homes over time. Simple reason: Privacy. There are also a whole lot of other things. Space to dry clothes, walking space. Disturbance from from people staying the floor above. Unhygienic neighbours. etc etc.
The plus point is it comes inside a gated community. It's Brazil like inequality contrast here in Bangalore these days. Rich IT/software MNC working families live behind these bespoke apartment gated communities. Which is often contained within a larger slum.
The detached home/row houses gated communities are fairly expensive and in terms of US dollars are anywhere between $500K to $1 million. Most people buying these are people who won the higher salary software job lottery.
People like me who have always been there in Bangalore stay in the inner parts of the city which are not this cool and jazzy. Most homes are old, crumbling and roads are full of potholes. It's mixed population and the areas aren't all that much gentrified. So not many posh software people like to stay here.
Eventually you just pay extra for living among people of your income class.
My nephew and his wife had a house, sold it, and moved to a brand new apartment building in our downtown area. This is supposedly an upscale development, with 2BR renting for $1900/mo in a city of 40K where most apartments rent for $800-1200.
I say supposedly, because instead of an upscale living experience, here's what they got:
1. the door to the parking garage is some fancy automated thing with sensors on the headlights. It doesn't work, so they have to keep backing up and re-approaching the door several times before it opens. Other residents have had the same problem.
2. Pets are allowed but are supposed to be leashed. People let their pets run around all the time not on a leash
3. There is a park across the street for people and dogs. People don't pick up their dogs' poop like they're supposed to.
4. People have dogs that bark in the apartment for hours on end. They've left notes on the door (ignored), called management ("We'll take care of it" but they don't), and ended up confronting the person directly. The dog owner acted like she didn't know anything about it.
5. Yesterday my nephew said they arrested a guy who was harassing people at the pool and people sitting on their balconies. He was also threatening the apt staff, so police arrested him.
This apt complex (according to my nephew) has a goal of filling up the building and then selling it, so they have all kinds of rent incentives and allow guarantors for people who don't really have $1900/mo for rent.
Who wants to put up with this kind of shit? This is only a 3-story apt building. I can't even imagine the kinds of problems in a 30-story apt building.
They're moving into a detached single-family house after their first-year lease is up.
> to think that a detached single family home is the only way to live
This isn't purely marketing. A lot of it is lived experience. Americans are generally just straight up terrible neighbors, and neither building owners nor police care. Many of us have learned that a 40 foot setback works way better than a poorly-sound-insulated 2x4 wall.
Actually basic economics says, all economic transactions in an economy are designed to benefit a private property owner. *All*.
The end beneficiary in an economy, the place where money stops is a private property owner. Every economic activity no matter what that is, just acts a long chain in which the eventual beneficiary is a property owner.
That's just how it is, there's really nothing that can be done about this.
If you live next to an empty lot, and the local government allows an apartment complex to be built on it, your house just dropped tremendously in value, both due to loss of privacy and the large boost in supply of housing, which was previously lower and inflating the price of your home.
I don't think they were saying it benefits every private property owner. It's clear that there is at least one private party that benefits from the ownership of that apartment building.
> The only thing, literally the only thing that will help you, is more homes.
We are constantly told that we should become as dense Manhattan so we…can become as affordable as Manhattan?
The big cities where people want to live are already dense, they could be denser but the limitations are infrastructure related (transit, road capacity, schools, water, etc…). It might make more sense to expand where people find desirable to live rather than focus how to cram more people into the Bay Area and LA area.
No, I definitely mean tax the land, not at a constant rate, but based on its value.
This was originally a solution to help deal with rent-seeking on privatized agricultural land, when some land was more productive than others. The more productive land results in excess, unearned profit for landowners (not the workers). Farmers are very different from farm workers. Farmers have millions in assets, and though they talk big game about being poor, they have immense wealth. They extract it from the farm workers' labor on their land.
This effect is even larger in cities, where access to the city is required for access to those wages. The landowners who hoard land most effectively take most of profits, and analyses of our growing inequality (Piketty and Ronglie) show that the source of our growing inequality is a larger and larger share of wealth getting transferred to housing and land.
If we have high taxation on land value, the most expensive land in cities will be used more effectively, no longer can landlords take more than their fair share of our labor, because all that land will be used more effectively. Which also means more land is available for farming.
In short, most of our problems are caused by allowing people to rent-seek on the one thing that we can never really expand significantly: land
The way to avoid that is to stop building sprawl, and stack homes on top of each other.
Which, is the only way to add homes in the economically productive centers where housing prices are going through the roof.
I mentioned in my comment that we should ban sprawl, and I mean it. We instead ban multifamily buildings nearly everywhere, or use code to legislate them out of being feasible. This is what must change.
Instead, it's really easy to pave over farmland in the middle of nowhere, forcing people to hop on to freeway and drive for hours to get to jobs, because it's the only thing that's legal to build. Which is happening just outside the Bay Area, for Bat Area workers: large single family development far away from where the purchasers will work.
Oh, but then you change the character of my neighborhood and I can’t stand that (even though my house was built on an earlier open space, messing up someone else’s bucolic preserve, and I conveniently forget that fact).
You can keep building up or building out, adding more and more concrete... either way at some point you're going to run out of land, or water, or power, or food, or something else.
What is your alternative to house the population? Tent encampments? More wars/disease? Death squads?
Humans have a right to housing. Saying "no more housing" but not thinking through the rest of the consequences, because you are personally reliably housed, is not a solution that a society should consider even momentarily.
Refusing to house people today because at some unspecified point after we have many many more people, is not even remotely logical, ethical, or a solution to any problem.
Crucial factor: building housing does not change the population. Population growth comes from people having children, not from physical structures.
If your "solution" is to stop building housing, you have absolutely no solution, you just want to make people suffer.
The real solution is already happening: give women control over their bodies, economic control over their own futures, give women education and ensure that women have political power in society. That along with industrialization is how to stop population growth in its tracks.
Additionally, different types of housing have vastly different environmental impacts. Detached housing with yards is environmentally disastrous, particularly when in the woods, for people that take part in normal society. Multiunit housing takes far less materials, water, heating/cooling, and as importantly it allows loving with less transportation requirements, greatly enhancing quality of life while using less energy.
I think I've spelled out my solution to this fairy well. If yours is anything other than "make people homeless" i would love to hear it, or if you have any defense of your non-solution to ever increasing population, I'd love to hear it.
> Crucial factor: building housing does not change the population. Population growth comes from people having children, not from physical structures.
Look up induced demand.
People think our roads are too crowded, so they build even more roads. Then the roads are more clear, so people drive more. So the roads get more crowded and we build more roads...
I'm only having one child, partly because of the cost. If we burn down more of the planet to make it cheaper to have a second child, people will do that. Then people will complain it's too expensive so we need to burn down more of the planet to make it cheaper again. Then people will have three children because it's cheap...
I believe we're soon reaching the point where the world population will actually start to shrink - I'm not sure that running out of land would be a problem (at least not in the US)
We don't run out of land anytime soon. Currently there is 19310 m^2 for each person. 10x global population and we still could have 1930 m^2 for each person. That is quite big area.
While I'm not opposed at all to these policies, they won't do anything to help you. Vacant homes are less than 10% of existing homes, we need far more than that to solve the problem.
The only thing, literally the only thing that will help you, is more homes.
I'm not sure why people are so resistant to this idea. We have been under building for decades in the places where people want to live, the places that are economically productive.
There's a lot of ways to get there, and though changing zoning to allow density and ban sprawl is necessary, it won't solve the problem alone.
We should also do things like slap a huge tax on the value of land to force people to stop hoarding their land, and use that tax money to fund a government builder that will act counter cyclically to current market cycles. The huge business cycle for the building trades means that it's an unstable job and it makes it hard to have a solid workforce. Having more steady building will allow for lifetime careers, for more experience to be gained, and hopefully for productivity increases.
As it is now, there's not even enough productive capacity in places like California to build the amount of housing that's needed. We need to attack the problem from many angles simultaneously.