It makes sense that this is true. We've been systematically underbuilding housing since at least the 1980s. Lots of places had old, run-down surpluses that were being "revitalized", hiding the issue for decades. But now the housing shortage is being felt almost everywhere in the country.
And yet, every year, we're still underbuilding relative to our population growth, thus making the problem worse. Unless our population starts to shrink like in Japan or Russia, we're either going to need to build A LOT of new housing or deal with an ever increasing population of homeless people.
Even a slowly shrinking population is probably not enough to fix the problem, because rich people like to buy vacation homes, and we have a lot of rich people. We'd need rapid population decline, like what would happen from some catastrophe. I recommend building homes instead of that.
Population has also increased from 300 million to about 340 million, or more than 10%. Nothing else changing, we'd expect the number of homeless to be 10% larger than in 2007.
The problem of homelessness isn't due to a lack of money. The problem is people don't want housing for the homeless (or any housing at all, usually) built near them. When there's a shortage of housing, there's gonna be homeless people, it's basic logic.
The amount of money required to fix the housing shortage is negligible for a country as rich as the US. But money isn't the problem here, politics is. And no amount of money can fix that.
US homeowners made a decision to use their homes as their primary or secondary investment vehicles so they have little interest in allowing any new construction that could be viewed as lowering their property values.
There’s also a good bit of plain old racism involved but people are in denial about it and insist they’re implying something else.
For example, in a nearby community they were proposing some “starter townhomes” priced at $295K (median home price in the area is 350K). These were not rentals, low income, section 8a - they were new construction townhomes on the lower end of the pricing spectrum. People FREAKED out, and suggested they’d be bought up by gangs and junkies and all sorts of ne’er-do-wells and the project was killed. Someone stood up at a zoning meeting and said “Do you really want someone who lives in one of these as your neighbor? Do you want their kids going to our schools? I sure don’t!” To thunderous applause.
I personally can’t wrap my head around the logic. It’s not like these existing homeowners are rich - in fact the sort of person who scoops up a $300K townhome is probably a young professional with an office job who probably make the same or more as the residents complaining that they’ll bring poverty. It’s nuts!
In my city we've had some success naming and shaming those people. After someone makes a really obscene comment like that we figure out who they are, or often we already knew, then one of my group uses their two minutes to put that speaker's name on the record. After these racist pricks realize we're paying attention, they stop coming to council meetings.
>so they have little interest in allowing any new construction that could be viewed as lowering their property values
This logic is so backwards on behalf of homeowners it’s unreal. Which cities are associated with out of control house prices?
SF, New York, Toronto…
What do these cities have a lot of? Housing. Increasing population density increases the tax base, which increases the level and quality of services which increases property values.
> The problem is people don't want housing for the homeless (or any housing at all, usually) built near them.
Oh, actually I think the problem is that I would like temporary housing to be built for the homeless, just far away from me. But certain people insist that they let homeless people, with their many varied problems, live up the street from me instead.
One would think that being willing to have temporary housing built somewhat distant from any major cities is a compromise on my part, but my opponents insist on getting everything they want and having homeless people live on the exact same block as me. It's like every other topic where people have zero intention of compromising, e.g. no abortions even in the case of rape, no guns allowed period, etc. etc. The internal debate people use to arrive at a position becomes: How can I best poke my neighbor in the eye and force them to exist in a political reality that they despise, instead of compromising? That is the position I would like to take.
And instead of reaching any sort of compromise that could help solve the problem, we get nothing, a political stalemate where no one wins and everyone loses. Politics in the US is absolute trash.
There is already inexpensive housing built far from any major city. How do you propose to get people to move away from their family, friends, services, and jobs?
I've been programming since I was 7, and I've always viewed software development as a means to an end. The alternative seems crazy to me - coding without a purpose? Why on earth would you want to do that???
I've been very successful in my career. Things I've built: Bloomberg's domain-specific language and simulation engine for asset-backed securities, a custom database that can process 100,000s of writes / second and 10,000s of reads / second, and the robotics framework powering the Cruise self-driving car (RIP). I retired at the age of 33.
The domain you're working in is usually more important to fully understand than software engineering concepts, although I try to understand both. But I don't really care about software development for its own sake, and I welcome LLMs replacing the more annoying grunt-work parts of the job.
Why are you discounting real wealth? I am a millionaire. If I spent my millions on buying a modest house in Palo Alto, does that mean I am no longer a millionaire? Have I lost all my wealth just by purchasing a home?
For the purposes of discussing security, counting the price of the residence is not very useful, assuming the discussion participants agree it is an “average” residence that meets minimum expected quality of life standards.
For the purposes of discussing quality of life, if the person values living in the place they are which is higher priced than most others, then the price of the residence could be useful.
I see no reason to include price of house if I were to sell it in my picture of my financial security because I have no desire to live elsewhere (or if I wanted to live somewhere more expensive).
Reading the comments here and elsewhere about this project is so vindicating for me.
In cities, NIMBYs will say "why should we build anything here, just move away and build your dream city somewhere else". I knew that there was no way that "somewhere else" would welcome construction of a new city, because there's people living out in the boonies everywhere. Those people moved to the middle of nowhere because they want to be far away from others - they're the last people who'd support new construction nearby.
So here's a new city proposal, paid for by private money, that won't take away anything from anyone, and even people who live far from the area seem to oppose it, just because it changes things.
Where are people supposed to live? There are not enough homes in cities, not enough homes in suburbs, and rural areas don't want new construction either. So where are the new homes for a growing population supposed to go? Or do y'all just want to keep increasing the homeless population indefinitely?
What I don't quite get is how government of this city is being planned. Right now, it's basically Disney world, a huge privately owned development project. Will this eventually become a municipality of its own or are they planning to build a completely privately-owned city?
(Not from the US though, so I might be missing some details on how local government works in California)
Also yes, social housing, walkable neighborhoods and all that sound nice, but promises (and renderings) are cheap. It's not clear if this has any resemblance to what will actually be built.
Honestly, if you want a truly progressive city government in California, you probably need it to be 100% private. If it's public, the regressive California constitution comes into effect, and now you can't make property taxes be high enough to pay for city services, you can't increase the property taxes on long-term landowners, and those low tax rates get inherited by the property owners' heirs. You have to pay for city services with income/sales taxes. It's basically feudalism.
With a 100% private development, you can have a land value tax - it's legal if you just call it rent, and you can increase it however much you want (at most it's capped to 5% + inflation, a lot higher than the 2% (not inflation adjusted) cap for property tax increases).
And no, this won't be social housing. NIMBYs will say they want social housing, but they won't vote in taxes to pay for it (in CA, every tax increase must pass in a ballot referendum), nor do they actually want it built anywhere, either. Because only private money is being used for this development, it will mostly be market-rate housing, and that's fine. Or most likely, it will be nothing, since rural NIMBYs will block it.
Ok, but wasn't the whole point of this that market-rare housing is becoming unaffordable, hence so many homeless? So how will this project then help reduce the homeless population?
Any increase in the number of homes reduces the homeless population. There are so many homeless people in CA mostly because there just aren't enough homes for everyone there. It won't completely solve homelessness - many people living on the streets now need social services and therapeutic help before they can afford any rent again, but there's plenty of homeless people in California with fulltime jobs paying like $30k/year (around the median salary in France). If you build enough homes, these people would be able to find housing, and social services would be less strained for the people who really do need help.
That sounds a bit like "the reason for this traffic jam is clearly that there are no enough lanes".
Evidently, there are enough buyers/renters around who can afford the higher prices and are able to price out the $30k/year group. So what would prevent rent or prices from rising to the same unaffordable levels in the new development, if there is still demand from this higher-paying group?
I feel if the market rate becomes unaffordable for middle-class fulltime employees, then you have an inequality problem, not a supply problem.
Well, the Georgists argue that a LVT plus developer friendly laws would prevent prices from rising too high. LVT taxes the value of the land, not the property, so if you have expensive land (somewhere people want to be), you're incentivized to build densely to earn profit from it.
It's not clear to me that's sufficient. You may also need something like a property profit tax to reduce speculation on housing.
"In our new house, there is no community gathering space and we leave in a culdesac at the end of a road. The result is we don’t get to know our neighbors. "
No, you won't be blocking the noise of an ambulance with noise-canceling headphones, that's not how noise-cancelling technology works. They only block persistent sounds, which an ambulance siren isn't as it changes pitch rapidly.
It's illegal to drive with headphones on let alone noise cancelling ones in many states. Some have exceptions for one earbud being in for phone calls. One notable state with no exceptions at all is of course California. See also Ohio, Maryland, Louisiana and more.
edit: this makes me wonder about deaf drivers... what is the intent of the law here?
I fully understand that noise canceling DSP algos lend themselves fully to inverting and muxing repetitive background noise like airplane noise, not sirens, but the callous, selfish effort to muffle the outside world when you're operating a multiple ton machine, often in close vicinity of other said machines, just because you don't like the sound, is problematic.
The ever-changing euphemistic language seems to me like mostly just a new way to be a hipster. The new vocabulary is a shibboleth to distinguish people who got the right sort of education from the right sort of places. Your knowledge of all the proper euphemisms to use sets you apart from the uneducated rubes.
The problem is, it sets you apart from the people you're allegedly trying to help, given that the marginalized are rarely those who got an elite education at an elite institution. This is how Republicans, a coalition of rich tax-avoiders and poorer people resenting the contempt of the elites, stay in power. And their political program - slashing benefits, cutting social services - hurts marginalized people the most.
By creating a way to be a "good person" that only the most hip and educated people can follow, the language policers are creating a rift between themselves and the people they are trying to help, preventing a political coalition from forming that would be able to pass helpful policies.
Does this fundamentally disagree with anything I wrote? Before Tumblr became a place where some people showed off their inscrutable social justice terminology, it was mostly a place where hipsters showed off their inscrutably cool aesthetics.
He has already "suffered" the consequences. Google stock is down ~35% from its highs, so his compensation (which is mostly stock) has already been reduced by that amount. Following the layoff announcement, it is up by ~3% in premarket trading, so he is being rewarded for laying off these people. This is how the system works, designed entirely for the benefit of holders of capital.
And yet, every year, we're still underbuilding relative to our population growth, thus making the problem worse. Unless our population starts to shrink like in Japan or Russia, we're either going to need to build A LOT of new housing or deal with an ever increasing population of homeless people.
Even a slowly shrinking population is probably not enough to fix the problem, because rich people like to buy vacation homes, and we have a lot of rich people. We'd need rapid population decline, like what would happen from some catastrophe. I recommend building homes instead of that.