Property owners should be deprived of the franchise until they pay their debt to society. Okay, maybe that's too much, but really - if you treat your house as a commodity, and your top local political priority is to increase your property value so you can cash out and leave, why should you be taken seriously as a resident of the community, let alone be constantly catered to?
My real plan to fix the housing crisis is to introduce major fines for landlords who hold vacant properties, and to double those fines every month that the property remains vacant. We'd solve homelessness before the end of winter. (Plenty of loopholes would need closing to prevent landlords from destroying the homes rather than allow people to live in them, engaging in trickery to pretend the property is occupied, etc.)
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.)
To the homeowners who are afraid of multifamily housing blocking their views, etc: high-rise apartment buildings are not the only kind of multifamily housing! Duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes can be built on single family lots without dramatically changing the fabric of a neighborhood. Townhouses provide low-rise, higher-density housing. These types of housing offer a similar neighborhood feel but use land and resources more efficiently than detached single family housing.
Thanks, Hamilton. I think it's really important that writers like you, who are serious progressives, speak out about this, since it's so often miscoded as a Reaganite deregulatory agenda. I should say that zoning is only part of the story--there are so many other veto points that make producing housing difficult even after zoning (e.g. CEQA in California) that are a product of our messy and disorganized approach to local politics. The problem is that so many of our problems are wrapped in faux-progressive language. For example, Prop 33 was framed as progressive (let cities impose rent control to keep rents down!) when it was anything but (maybe don't let cities create byzantine rent control regimes to deter new housing!).
Connecticut, where I have lived since 1988, is a perfect example of this. In 1965 the legislature passed the “Home Rule Act” which allowed the 169 towns that cover all of Connecticut (there is no unincorporated land here) to set the rules for zoning, etc. There is absolutely no regional or county government here although there are a few consolidated school districts (and all of the towns in them are of the same affluent socioeconomic stripe). So the richer white towns, through “Open Space” initiatives and zoning regulations severely restricting multi-family housing have succeeded in making liberal Connecticut one of the most segregated states in the country. Year after year we occupy the #1 or #2 spot in per capita income while at the same time having three of the poorest cities in the country. The problem is we are locked into this system. I am looking for but not finding a success story that would show us the way out of this shameful situation.
The path, as California is doing slowly and painfully, is breaking local control of housing and having the state set mandates for new housing that localities have to follow. Obviously it is painstaking work but we have plenty of evidence that leaving control to the towns is a dead end.
It's pretty fuckin ridiculous. I can scarcely believe so many liberals support these zoning laws. I thought the liberal project was intended to LIBERATE people... not constrain them.
I own a million dollar home in a nice neighborhood and I'd vote to have "the projects" built right next door.
Both of these policies are good ideas. But if you look at the numbers, there is no way out of the housing crisis without a ton of new housing construction. Regulating AirBNB is great but some people have a fantasy that that's all it will take to solve the housing crisis and that is not the case.
I live in Austin — similar situation. But to me this extends beyond housing.... How is America possibly supposed to keep up with the housing demands of a growing population? With housing, also comes the need for energy, water (many cities are running low), and the destruction of natural habitat (natural carbon capture), which make environments hotter and less healthy, even while housing costs creep upward. As birth control becomes less available and we continue to NEVER have a conversation about population size and the energetic demands of humans procreating unchecked, the scope of it all is — ugh — overwhelming, daunting, depressing.
Also true: Where I live, in the heart of a blue state (Illinois) one can move right in to a perfectly nice house that you can get for about $100,000. And don't tell me there are no jobs in such places. You do know that most people work, right? And should you have a remote job or do freelance, so much the better. I bought a huge old house (Victorian) with a great yard. The neighborhood is safe and walkable. Within a 5- or 10-minute walk, I can hit bars, restaurants, a grocery store, two pharmacies, most municipal services and a couple of parks. Housing has gone up a bit in recent years, but not much. Your house will be a home, not an investment -- don't expect it to appreciate a ton.
I was curious so I looked up where you were talking about. I'm sure that being in a suburb of Peoria is very nice, but I'm not sure if we should really think of that area as being flush with jobs, and the sort of people who can get remote work are not usually the ones aching in the housing crisis.
‘The self-concept of liberals as generous people willing to help others falls apart on the issue of housing.’ …..also on all other issues. The second a liberal is affected personally by absolutely anything, a republican jumps out of them. Look at the reaction to the election loss and the sudden vitriol towards minorities.
It's an important point. And another one to add to it is that, for some of us homeowners in places that are already BUCKING the nimbyism prevalent elsewhere in expensive east and west coast cities, the burden of embracing density is disproportionately large. For example, I'd like to see more plentiful housing and less homelessness, but I'd also like to be able to see the sky outside my bedroom window! You know, sunlight, that eternal and universal curative that people throughout the ages have lauded for its healing effects? Well, the developer who bought my neighbor's lot here in Portland Oregon has built a two story structure jammed up against my bedroom window, obscuring any view of the sky forever.
Why would I want to encourage the building of more housing when I am sick every day to see how many people are moving into San Diego? This beautiful city is getting more and more congested with traffic and new buildings (yes, Including housing), and I say if there is no housing here available then people won’t move here. Myself, I prefer to stunt San Diego‘s growth not expand it!
They just began construction on new affordable (we'll see) apartments on the grounds of an old flea market less than a mile from my house. I'm happy that my neighbors don't seem too upset about it, except that we hope that it won't screw up the traffic on our streets (which, again, we'll see.)
The home owners cast as villains are voters and taxpayers too . Many of their neighborhoods were made possible by rail and highway construction . That is no longer on the agenda of the top 10 % . Why do commentators here take their part ? It is a big country with a lot of land .
Property owners should be deprived of the franchise until they pay their debt to society. Okay, maybe that's too much, but really - if you treat your house as a commodity, and your top local political priority is to increase your property value so you can cash out and leave, why should you be taken seriously as a resident of the community, let alone be constantly catered to?
My real plan to fix the housing crisis is to introduce major fines for landlords who hold vacant properties, and to double those fines every month that the property remains vacant. We'd solve homelessness before the end of winter. (Plenty of loopholes would need closing to prevent landlords from destroying the homes rather than allow people to live in them, engaging in trickery to pretend the property is occupied, etc.)
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.)
To the homeowners who are afraid of multifamily housing blocking their views, etc: high-rise apartment buildings are not the only kind of multifamily housing! Duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes can be built on single family lots without dramatically changing the fabric of a neighborhood. Townhouses provide low-rise, higher-density housing. These types of housing offer a similar neighborhood feel but use land and resources more efficiently than detached single family housing.
I really loved this piece about housing density in the Boston area that shows just how beautiful a neighborhood can be while still having higher density: https://www.lincolninst.edu/data/what-does-15-units-per-acre-look-like/storymap/
Thanks, Hamilton. I think it's really important that writers like you, who are serious progressives, speak out about this, since it's so often miscoded as a Reaganite deregulatory agenda. I should say that zoning is only part of the story--there are so many other veto points that make producing housing difficult even after zoning (e.g. CEQA in California) that are a product of our messy and disorganized approach to local politics. The problem is that so many of our problems are wrapped in faux-progressive language. For example, Prop 33 was framed as progressive (let cities impose rent control to keep rents down!) when it was anything but (maybe don't let cities create byzantine rent control regimes to deter new housing!).
Connecticut, where I have lived since 1988, is a perfect example of this. In 1965 the legislature passed the “Home Rule Act” which allowed the 169 towns that cover all of Connecticut (there is no unincorporated land here) to set the rules for zoning, etc. There is absolutely no regional or county government here although there are a few consolidated school districts (and all of the towns in them are of the same affluent socioeconomic stripe). So the richer white towns, through “Open Space” initiatives and zoning regulations severely restricting multi-family housing have succeeded in making liberal Connecticut one of the most segregated states in the country. Year after year we occupy the #1 or #2 spot in per capita income while at the same time having three of the poorest cities in the country. The problem is we are locked into this system. I am looking for but not finding a success story that would show us the way out of this shameful situation.
The path, as California is doing slowly and painfully, is breaking local control of housing and having the state set mandates for new housing that localities have to follow. Obviously it is painstaking work but we have plenty of evidence that leaving control to the towns is a dead end.
It's pretty fuckin ridiculous. I can scarcely believe so many liberals support these zoning laws. I thought the liberal project was intended to LIBERATE people... not constrain them.
I own a million dollar home in a nice neighborhood and I'd vote to have "the projects" built right next door.
This could help a bit.
France has had a housing shortage for a while now.
A new tax on 2nd homes has released more homes.
I live in a small apartment block. Where 1 American owned 2 apartments. Both are being sold.
1 has just sold very quickly.
I think the same is happening in Portugal.
AirBNB doesn't help.
Both of these policies are good ideas. But if you look at the numbers, there is no way out of the housing crisis without a ton of new housing construction. Regulating AirBNB is great but some people have a fantasy that that's all it will take to solve the housing crisis and that is not the case.
That is why I said 'a bit.'
But I’m only aesthetically liberal and progressive! My real values are money and status. What can I do?
You win best comment.
Montgomery County, MD is trying to tackle this. With mixed success, sure, mostly because of Chevy Chase, but it's trying!
I live in Austin — similar situation. But to me this extends beyond housing.... How is America possibly supposed to keep up with the housing demands of a growing population? With housing, also comes the need for energy, water (many cities are running low), and the destruction of natural habitat (natural carbon capture), which make environments hotter and less healthy, even while housing costs creep upward. As birth control becomes less available and we continue to NEVER have a conversation about population size and the energetic demands of humans procreating unchecked, the scope of it all is — ugh — overwhelming, daunting, depressing.
This is all true.
Also true: Where I live, in the heart of a blue state (Illinois) one can move right in to a perfectly nice house that you can get for about $100,000. And don't tell me there are no jobs in such places. You do know that most people work, right? And should you have a remote job or do freelance, so much the better. I bought a huge old house (Victorian) with a great yard. The neighborhood is safe and walkable. Within a 5- or 10-minute walk, I can hit bars, restaurants, a grocery store, two pharmacies, most municipal services and a couple of parks. Housing has gone up a bit in recent years, but not much. Your house will be a home, not an investment -- don't expect it to appreciate a ton.
So why isn't your town booming in population the way that the Dallas exurbs are?
I wonder that, too. It’s a crazy good deal to live where I live.
Not exceptional at all. There are tons of great houses here for about that much.
I was curious so I looked up where you were talking about. I'm sure that being in a suburb of Peoria is very nice, but I'm not sure if we should really think of that area as being flush with jobs, and the sort of people who can get remote work are not usually the ones aching in the housing crisis.
‘The self-concept of liberals as generous people willing to help others falls apart on the issue of housing.’ …..also on all other issues. The second a liberal is affected personally by absolutely anything, a republican jumps out of them. Look at the reaction to the election loss and the sudden vitriol towards minorities.
It's an important point. And another one to add to it is that, for some of us homeowners in places that are already BUCKING the nimbyism prevalent elsewhere in expensive east and west coast cities, the burden of embracing density is disproportionately large. For example, I'd like to see more plentiful housing and less homelessness, but I'd also like to be able to see the sky outside my bedroom window! You know, sunlight, that eternal and universal curative that people throughout the ages have lauded for its healing effects? Well, the developer who bought my neighbor's lot here in Portland Oregon has built a two story structure jammed up against my bedroom window, obscuring any view of the sky forever.
Why would I want to encourage the building of more housing when I am sick every day to see how many people are moving into San Diego? This beautiful city is getting more and more congested with traffic and new buildings (yes, Including housing), and I say if there is no housing here available then people won’t move here. Myself, I prefer to stunt San Diego‘s growth not expand it!
They just began construction on new affordable (we'll see) apartments on the grounds of an old flea market less than a mile from my house. I'm happy that my neighbors don't seem too upset about it, except that we hope that it won't screw up the traffic on our streets (which, again, we'll see.)
So I guess that's something, anyway.
The home owners cast as villains are voters and taxpayers too . Many of their neighborhoods were made possible by rail and highway construction . That is no longer on the agenda of the top 10 % . Why do commentators here take their part ? It is a big country with a lot of land .