If you see any discussion on social media (IG, FB, TikTok, etc) relating to housing costs the popular opinion (even among left-leaning individuals) still seems to be that corporations owning single family homes are the primary driver of housing prices in the US. Blackrock is the primary boogeyman. Yes, they own a nominal percentage of ho…
If you see any discussion on social media (IG, FB, TikTok, etc) relating to housing costs the popular opinion (even among left-leaning individuals) still seems to be that corporations owning single family homes are the primary driver of housing prices in the US. Blackrock is the primary boogeyman. Yes, they own a nominal percentage of housing, but it's not even enough to create this situation. Nobody believes that building more housing will lower costs, ("They're all going to be luxury condos that nobody can afford").
Without going into whether that is true or false, Toronto did fall prey to this very issue - tons of massive condo buildings built with shit materials, tiny impractical layouts, basically made ‘for investment’. For a while people would buy and sell them, as investment properties, without ever trying to live in them, and now that part of the market is pretty dead and massive buildings sit unfinished because the investors can’t justify/ finance finishing the buildings because nobody wants to buy the shitty impractical overpriced badly constructed shoeboxes.
Meanwhile people are paying 60% of their gross income to house themselves because prices are insane.
There needs to be some common sense policy that ensures the fucking rich people don’t ruin everything like they usually do.
I think we have to understand that to solve this problem somebody will get rich doing it. There's no way around it. Right now the value and wealth is tied into land not being efficient (SFH). If we avoid housing construction because we're afraid of developers making money building homes then it won't ever happen. We can't wait for a fundamental change in our economic system for housing to fix that.
Unfortunately, the devil's bargain in Texas is trading income tax for property taxes. New SF houses are "luxury" because it's cheaper and easier to permit in many places (Texas included). If permitting and construction favored multi-unit housing, it would happen more (on top of large apartment buildings that have popped up recently). Towers.net has done a great job of chronicling the ways that bad permitting and zoning resulted in this design of big SFH with small footprints. Fixing zoning will also fix this.
I guess what are we talking about with "eventually?" A decade, five years, 20 years? This problem in the US (especially California) has festered for decades. Action needs to be taken now. We can't let downtown-adjacent neighborhoods like Austin's 78704 become calcified into only SFH as the city continues to sprawl. Density matters and increasing housing matters.
I don't discount your concerns (taxes, displacement and corporate dealmaking) don't exist, but we can't let perfect to be the enemy of good in solving this crisis. These concerns (with additional complaints about traffic and parking) when put into aggregate and action from collectivist homeowners associations in Austin result in no change in the status quo.
Let people do what they want with their property (sell them, divide them up, turn them into MFH) and don't let housing become the thing that destroys blue cities (sending Ausitinites to Buda and Bastrop) and blue states.
"So just knocking down and rebuilding with more density without careful study and debate is not going to fix the housing affordability crisis."
Unironically: I believe it will solve the problem. This is the crux of the entire debate. More housing will fix affordability. And you have to build housing where people want to live. Density reduces dependency on cars. Rebuilding in the same place updates aging infrastructure.
Some of the problems you're talking about are tangentially related to housing (lack of responsibility from developers is entirely one of governance and regulation from the state).
>guess what.... Your property taxes are going up soon.
Honestly, the point is that your property taxes probably should have already been high, because you are occupying valuable land. We *should* charge people a lot in taxes to live in a SFH on a lot that could plausibly house many families. We shouldn't love corporations, but we cannot afford to romanticize the family who is crowding out 20 other families.
(And if it's a SFH vs a 20-family MFH + developers getting some profits...so be it. Profits aren't as evil as homelessness and the displacement that not building results in.)
If you see any discussion on social media (IG, FB, TikTok, etc) relating to housing costs the popular opinion (even among left-leaning individuals) still seems to be that corporations owning single family homes are the primary driver of housing prices in the US. Blackrock is the primary boogeyman. Yes, they own a nominal percentage of housing, but it's not even enough to create this situation. Nobody believes that building more housing will lower costs, ("They're all going to be luxury condos that nobody can afford").
Without going into whether that is true or false, Toronto did fall prey to this very issue - tons of massive condo buildings built with shit materials, tiny impractical layouts, basically made ‘for investment’. For a while people would buy and sell them, as investment properties, without ever trying to live in them, and now that part of the market is pretty dead and massive buildings sit unfinished because the investors can’t justify/ finance finishing the buildings because nobody wants to buy the shitty impractical overpriced badly constructed shoeboxes.
Meanwhile people are paying 60% of their gross income to house themselves because prices are insane.
There needs to be some common sense policy that ensures the fucking rich people don’t ruin everything like they usually do.
Rents are down SIGNIFICANTLY in Austin in the past year because housing construction has boomed. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GcYk1lFXMAAes3q?format=jpg&name=medium. Improving housing costs isn't just apartments, and isn't just updating zoning. It's both.
I think we have to understand that to solve this problem somebody will get rich doing it. There's no way around it. Right now the value and wealth is tied into land not being efficient (SFH). If we avoid housing construction because we're afraid of developers making money building homes then it won't ever happen. We can't wait for a fundamental change in our economic system for housing to fix that.
Unfortunately, the devil's bargain in Texas is trading income tax for property taxes. New SF houses are "luxury" because it's cheaper and easier to permit in many places (Texas included). If permitting and construction favored multi-unit housing, it would happen more (on top of large apartment buildings that have popped up recently). Towers.net has done a great job of chronicling the ways that bad permitting and zoning resulted in this design of big SFH with small footprints. Fixing zoning will also fix this.
I guess what are we talking about with "eventually?" A decade, five years, 20 years? This problem in the US (especially California) has festered for decades. Action needs to be taken now. We can't let downtown-adjacent neighborhoods like Austin's 78704 become calcified into only SFH as the city continues to sprawl. Density matters and increasing housing matters.
I don't discount your concerns (taxes, displacement and corporate dealmaking) don't exist, but we can't let perfect to be the enemy of good in solving this crisis. These concerns (with additional complaints about traffic and parking) when put into aggregate and action from collectivist homeowners associations in Austin result in no change in the status quo.
Let people do what they want with their property (sell them, divide them up, turn them into MFH) and don't let housing become the thing that destroys blue cities (sending Ausitinites to Buda and Bastrop) and blue states.
"So just knocking down and rebuilding with more density without careful study and debate is not going to fix the housing affordability crisis."
Unironically: I believe it will solve the problem. This is the crux of the entire debate. More housing will fix affordability. And you have to build housing where people want to live. Density reduces dependency on cars. Rebuilding in the same place updates aging infrastructure.
Some of the problems you're talking about are tangentially related to housing (lack of responsibility from developers is entirely one of governance and regulation from the state).
>guess what.... Your property taxes are going up soon.
Honestly, the point is that your property taxes probably should have already been high, because you are occupying valuable land. We *should* charge people a lot in taxes to live in a SFH on a lot that could plausibly house many families. We shouldn't love corporations, but we cannot afford to romanticize the family who is crowding out 20 other families.
(And if it's a SFH vs a 20-family MFH + developers getting some profits...so be it. Profits aren't as evil as homelessness and the displacement that not building results in.)