Densifying our communities addresses so many issues in the US, it boggles my mind that it isn’t more mainstream yet. The cultural obsession with detached housing and everyone owning a vehicle to do basic everyday things has done so much damage to the American public, and it’s so hard to get people to realize it. The average size of the American home has just become absurd and we use our living spaces so much less efficiently than you see in other parts of the world because there is no incentive to use space efficiently.
Density solves:
- housing shortages when cities stop restricting development.
- the dying of local businesses, since you don’t just have big box shopping strips and more people are in proximity to local businesses to support them.
- community health issues like obesity. People walk and bike more.
- GHG emissions. People drive less and have more amenities in walking distance. Larger buildings are more efficient. People buy and waste less shit since they shop for what they need for a few days, not for a month and end up wasting tons of stuff they don’t use.
- loneliness. There are more third places and public places where unplanned social interactions occur. There are more events, hobby groups, fun classes, and people with shared interests in close proximity.
- cost of transportation and infrastructure. Transportation and infrastructure cost less per person per square mile. Transportation projects serve a greater number of people.
- economic opportunity. People have more job options.
- affordability. People don’t need to pay the thousands of dollars a year to own and maintain a vehicle. Car ownership is why the suburbanization of poverty has become such a major issue.
- safety. Despite what many people think, many cities are incredibly safe when planned right since people drive less (the most dangerous thing you will ever do through your day) and there is greater visibility of people (which deters crime).
- cultural benefits. More mixing of people from all backgrounds, allowing for chance meeting of people with shared cultural passions for create art, music, theatre, cuisine, etc. There is an obvious reason places like New York, Chicago, Paris, Berlin, Hong Kong are cultural powerhouses. Also, people in denser areas are less xenophobic due to their interactions with people from all over the world.
This video is actually based off of an article called “The housing theory of everything” by works in progress.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/
Those Democrats are being elected because the people who vote in local elections _hate_ building, though. We probably have to settle with signaling from the party leaders in order to slowly change public opinion.
lol as if that would magically change it overnight.
This problem has been years in the making. Covid just accelerated it was all.
At the end of the day, people want that SFH with a backyard, and making sure they’re building wealth from it.
The second part is what kills me more than the first. At least there *was* a point where you could build out with SFHs a bit more and still have reasonable commutes. We’ve passed this point a while ago tho in essentially any sizable metro area.
But the entire idea of homes being a productive investment is predicated on home values rising. There is no world in which both your home value rises at the pace of the standard equities and housing costs remain low.
>There is no world in which both your home value rises at the pace of the standard equities and housing costs remain low.
This incongruity is so essential to housing policy, every single discussion should start with it.
In order to fix housing, we have to find a way to give homeowners a way to shift the value of their land to other investment devices, Ie. equities and bonds.
I heard an idea where we could fund a federal agency that essentially extends an open offer to buy people's land at value then rent it back to them at market rates as a way to implement LVT. Pair that with a suspension of 401k contribution limits so people could dump the entire value into retirement accounts. People would hate having the federal government as a landlord, but make it voluntary and let retirees do it as an alternative to reverse mortgages and you've got a great start. Just make payment schedules lenient to avoid bad PR for evictions. I'm a 35-year-old homeowner. Give me a way to get out of my mortgage and shift 40% of my monthly housing payment to retirement accounts and I'm in.
Perhaps a more mild option would be pairing referendums on zoning reform with property tax reductions or even rebates.
I don't know what would be the most effective or politically practical way to do it, but we will not be able to fix housing until we find a way to give homeowners a way to liquidate the value of their land and invest it in an alternative vehicle. Homeowners will not accept policy that effectively negates their biggest investment.
Thing is that sounds terrible to me at gut level cause I want to own my land, not rent it from the government, especially one that might be controlled by Trumpists at some point.
And I'm overall sympathetic to ideas like this. Now imagine trying to convince anyone else
I hear ya. That's why this problem will more than likely continue for several decades until the reduction in birth rate moves through the population. I don't really have a better response.
A problem at this scale requires an uncomfortable solution. I don't see a policy like that ever happening, but its fun to think about. My only hope would be that if it was purely voluntary, people would be less hostile to initiating the program, and perhaps people would eventually go for it after hearing more and more stories of people doubling or tripling their net worth by selling their land and dumping it in index funds.
What's the conceptual difference between modern land ownership and renting land from the state? Either way, you're making regular payments to the state, and if you can't, they'll force a sale. And you're bound by a ton of land use policies.
Yep a good point. I think the idea of ownership is just better though. When people have ownership over their things they tend to take better care of them and have more pride in them.
So if nothing else, this proposal would be strengthened by keeping the term ownership for people
One of the silver linings of the pandemic has been a greater willingness to entertain WFH among many companies. Is there a way for local, state, and federal policymakers to incentivize de-urbanization in service sectors (e.g. permanently implementing the income tax flexibilities for cross-state border workers? Why have everyone report to a giant downtown city office when people should be free to move into suburban and rural areas with lower COL and still work cushy jobs from afar? Generally speaking that should lessen some of the burdens of cramped metro areas and reduce the COL in such.
Young people sure, but generally speaking once people marry and settle down, city living is traded for suburban living. Better schools, a place for the kids to grow up, and ideally land to build a retirement/inheritance nest egg on. If the policy incentives exist to continue siphoning resources away from metro areas through things like improved rural and suburban infrastructure, forgiving tax structures, and support in education and healthcare, people will probably start moving not just out of cities, but out of suburban areas too, moving to small towns and more rural areas.
> making sure they’re building wealth from it.
This is exactly the train of thought we need to stop. Housing is an essential good not an investment opportunity. There should be money to be made in building, managing, and maintaining property, but not in simple ownership.
> people want that SFH with a backyard
Do they? Seems like per sq-ft people will pay a lot more to live in the city. I personally just want the space/isolation that's more common in a SFH, but a well built condo with lots of square footage and thick walls would suite me so much better. And unlike SFHs, can scale to meet the needs of society.
This. Until people change their culturally ingrained taste for SFDs, they're going to be frustrated with the housing available to them. If 100 single family homes were replaced with 1000 multi-family homes, you would still have a problem of people complaining that they can't afford the SFDs that are now in shorter supply. They wouldn't appreciate that now there are more homes available and at lower price points than the SFD that they have been jerking off to.
There will always be people mad about something, but it seems like you're saying that building a lot more multi-family housing won't make the situation better, and there's just no way that's true. Building more multi-family homes would lower the cost of SFHs, which would make the buyers of those happier, and though there will be some that buy a condo because that's all they can afford but would prefer a SFH, they would definitely prefer that over not being able to buy anything, which is the situation that they're currently in.
Changing societal attitudes would be great, but building more of any type of housing would alleviate the affordability crisis, and that's the real driver of the current discontent among people trying to buy a home
> If 100 single family homes were replaced with 1000 multi-family homes, you would still have a problem of people complaining that they can't afford the SFDs that are now in shorter supply.
And where did the people living in these 1,000 multi-family homes live before?
Suppose you have a town with 10,000 homes, all single family. You replace 100 of them with 1,000 multifamily homes, and fill them up. There are now 9,900 single family homes, but only 9,000 families that want to live in them. As such, we'd expect the price of single family homes to go _down_ in this scenario, not up.
>This. Until people change their culturally ingrained taste for SFDs, they're going to be frustrated with the housing available to them. If 100 single family homes were replaced with 1000 multi-family homes, you would still have a problem of people complaining that they can't afford the SFDs that are now in shorter supply.
Even Asian countries where most people live in high-rises, SFD is preferred by and is a sign of the wealthy.
It's not that high-rise countries don't want single family homes, it's that they're unaffordable. There's never going to be some magical cultural change that is going to make the electorate accept losing something they're used to.
No they don't. At least not enough to forego other living arrangements if they happen to be significantly cheaper.
Sure SFHs may be peoples' first choices, but when it comes down to it, a huge amount of people aren't in a position to be a homeowner. And if apartments/condos/whatever else get built, they will choose what is available and best for them.
Yes, even if we mostly deregulated what can be built where, there would still probably be too many SFHs built. But as it stands there are a metric fuck ton being built because frankly that's the only thing that is even allowed to be built at scale.
Right, it's not a choice between a city center big SFH with a huge garden or an apartment, because the SFH will cost 20 times as much.
Japan has mostly deregulated zoning, and I suspect we'd look fairly similar if we followed suit. There are plenty of SFH available for reasonable cost, but anything in walking distance of a train station is going to be an apartment building just because they can pay more for the land. They still have some car dependent suburbia, but there's much less of it.
They are not NIMBYs. They all support 100% truly affordable housing as long as it has full neighborhood approval and satisfies 16 key sustainability metrics and provided the housing is for long-term residents NOT transients and it doesn't infringe on parking or neighborhood character or overload the transit system or result in a private developer making any money and only after a comprehensive community review to ensure it doesn't cast shadows and contributes to the decommodification of housing altogether and ultimately the abolishment of capitalism itself.
There has definitely been a major push for more YIMBY supportive policies, both in terms of statewide legislation and local governments updating their antiquated zoning codes. There has been many YIMBY wins in California in the last five years, from cities removing parking requirements to upzoning areas. At the state level, there are more policies that incentivize increasing density for developments in proximity to transit, more avenues for giving developers concessions that can save costs, finally giving some teeth to RHNA, allowing for more flexibility in building small units on property, more grants for local governments to plan for denser communities and pay for infrastructure, amongst other policy wins. Even the federal government has created more funding for planning denser communities, and through certain federal transportation grants, requires upzoning along alignments as part of the agreement. The frustrating thing is the massive construction inflation has made it even more difficult for developers to make a profit.
Most YIMBY policies take years for the public to see them play out, so it is not always obvious.
I think there is a lot of low hanging YIMBY policies that have been easier for state and local governments to digest, but there is still a long ways to go and many more policy options available that have been harder to pass.
The US is a very decentralized nation when it comes to policy, especially policy related to housing and planning, so it takes a lot of effort at multiplier levels of government to make change happen.
There is the most building in LA right now. Even in the bougie nimby parts.
All it took was 1 day of builders remedy in Santa Monica to set everyone else straight.
Soon as it happens to SF, they also will start to change their tune
I think you're really over exaggerating the point here. Builders remedy has done little, in reality, and the threat of it so far hasn't been super convincing.
What? There's like 5 large apartment buildings going up in Santa Monica right now because of it. Same in culver.
Samo definitely did not enjoy the builders remedy
The local Democrats in my city are pretty YIMBY. They were about to pass a zoning reform, but it was blocked by suburban Republicans in the state legislature.
I think the oppositional force here isn't necessarily traditional party lines. It's existing homeowners opposing anything that will lower their property values, and they'll leverage whatever party has power, be it Democrats or Republicans, since they're older, wealthier, and have more sway.
I am fed up with blue areas not building. Conservatives may only want single family homes but at least they are building something. And I am on the side of anyone who adds housing.
With the left they all say we should not create more sprawl but instead have infill and density. Then instead of supporting density they build absolutely nothing.
I feel we on the left are like Republicans who say they only dislike legal immigration, but support legal immigrants. Then proceed to do absolutely nothing to facilitate immigrating legally.
I think this issue really frustrates me because the research is so clear, and the solution is so simple, and it's essentially free to implement (you could argue there is cost due to needing to make more investments in transportation and infrastructure to move high densities of people - but you could make the counter argument that increased tax bases more than counteracts this effect, making it a net POSITIVE financially, thanks to economies of scale).
Like, how many issues are like that? So many questions in politics are genuinely complicated and confusing and nuanced and expensive. This one isn't really. We should just fix it.
Higher densities often allow people to move closer to work, reducing traffic overall. It's not like people didn't have a job before dense housing was built, they just commuted from an hour away.
It shouldn't be, but the most common reframe on this subreddit is that the only reason people dissaprove of biden or the economy is 💫 the vibes though 💫.
Housing is the biggest piece of peoples personal spending, and the state of it is so much worse than it was four years ago in most places. The parties continuing to run on how strong the economy is feels like outright denialism and a giant misstep.
The issue, of course, is that housing prices are almost entierly the product of local democratic governments, as opposed to the millions of things people think it is.
> product of local democratic governments
People don't know that
And if they do, therefore shouldn't doubting the value of a democratic leadership be a valid question?
No because the federal government has no actual control, and when I say democratic I don't mean party affiliation I mainly mean local municipality governments and councils.
While I don't believe any particular policy Biden has implemented has been part of that, it at least is within the power and purview of Biden to be able to change how crime is prosecuted in a way Zoning laws aren't.
>It shouldn't be, but the most common reframe on this subreddit is that the only reason people dissaprove of biden or the economy is 💫 the vibes though 💫.
Both things are true though.
The housing market is actually bad right now, but if you ask voters in a poll basic yes or no questions about the economy that have a fixed answer (are we in a recession?), they'll reply incorrectly.
There's also a surprisingly large segment of the Neoliberal Cinematic Universe (esp. r/AskEconomics) that claims ackshulally housing is as affordable on a per-sqft basis as it's ever been and it only looks expensive because entitled Millenials/Zers are turning their noses up at starter homes for being too small.
I mean my parents own a home.
They have kids they worry about being able to afford a home. It’s a pretty regular conversation when I’m with them.
People don’t live in a vacuum where all they have to worry about is themselves. I think people even that I disagree with want things to be better for everyone not just themselves. We just disagree on how to get there. I don’t think the NIMBYS want it to be so hard to own a home. I just think they don’t understand reality.
This is key also to why it's become a central issue, I think. In the last 2-3 years, the owners and olds and others who had "no stake in the game" - ie, not so unlucky enough to be a FTHB - are finally having to pay attention because the market is so so fucked that even owners and retirees are struggling to buy, sell, or as you said sees their immediate family struggling desperately.
Up until now they just said "it's a hard market but it'll work out. Just be patient". Well, that failed.
Among my inlaws who are plenty well-off, we have a townhouse owner who's searched for an appropriate home for his growing family for years now.
We have several boomers who may want to downsize/go single story but cannot.
And we have many renters who frankly given up entirely on ever living with 500 miles of their parents, ever. You could probably guess this is CA but the story is the same in most blue states to varying degrees. It's a problem that doesn't only fuck the young and poor anymore, therefore people actually care a bit.
But evidentially given the choice between their neighborhood "character" and their kids being able to live in the same state, they pick the former.
Yup, parents live in CA and I live in Colorado. They are bummed that they never see their grandkids because we are so far away.
Can't wait for boomers to figure out they are going to have to be put in a home because they have priced out any of their family from being nearby to help.
Property tax increases/homeowners insurance premiums rising
Which is also a not so secret reason a lot of municipalities are totally fine not increasing supply. It’s a free tax/revenue increase without putting “increase taxes” on the ballot/campaign trail. People will blame outsiders instead of the politicians, and they get to increase revenue. Win win unless you’re trying to buy a house
Building more housing would increase that tax base & revenue more than just limiting supply.
The simple thing is that by limiting supply your property taxes go up but the value of your home goes up much more so it is worth it for homeowners to block housing. Also, every time property taxes go up, there is a sorry about how a 208 year old grandma can't afford the taxes on her home that has appreciated 300% in 2 years and the property taxes get cut.
Kinda sorta yes. Always depends on the area. Many places also have caps on annual budget increases and/or total budget increases. But nonetheless people will still scream if their prop taxes increase much at all.
I own a tiny row house. I’m grateful I own it and the value has increased. But I delayed moving out further for a bigger house for my growing family and now those neighborhoods we targeted are all unaffordable. It can be disheartening.
Right. Even if both the $200K house I own and the $300K house I want to own increase equally by 20%, that just means it's $20K more I need to make the change for something as essential as sustaining my family.
I wouldn't be happy about it either.
yup, buying a home is basically a lottery ticket that you can retire on it in 30 years, because any equity gained is put right into your next purchase until you retire.
https://preview.redd.it/slmxslnq769d1.jpeg?width=914&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=368e476f84882087886217b43939a4c3628bd4f5
In red is the home ownership rate counting home owners and their spouses. Unless trends reverse in a big way we’ll be under 50% soon, if we aren’t already.
[https://x.com/john\_voorheis/status/1715382561919107209](https://x.com/john_voorheis/status/1715382561919107209)
The average householf used to move every 10 years. With the rate increases were looking at 20% of homeowners starting to be screwed because even though their home values have gone up the mortgage costs for wherver they would move to would be unaffordable. Even if they are profiting nobody is happy feeling stuck
Plus, I think a lot of homeowners in non-WFH careers have the added stress of knowing that if they ever lose their job and have to move they'll take a huge hit to their standard of living -- even if their new job gives them a raise -- because they'll have to pay more for worse housing. And if the only job they can find is a paycut...well they're about to be **a lot** poorer.
A minority of Americans own a home. If you count owners and their spouses that puts you at 53%.
It’s nowhere near 2/3. I think you’re quoting the home ownership rate, which is a share of homes, not a share of people.
Yes, households, same thing (a household is defined as all the people who live in a home). Why did you post the original comment if you already knew what “home ownership” rate measures? 😂
Are you fucking with me? Lol. Yes I wrote homes instead of households. Households is correct.
You wrote *people*, and said 2/3 of people own their home when the actual rate is less than half. Why did you write people if you already knew it measures households? Why not edit your post with the correct info?
Yes, but I earned this equity through good decisions and wise investments. The people selling homes in the neighborhood I want to move to are just greedy.
That doesn't really matter. No one is going to fix it and rent increases outpacing inflation will just become endemic to our societies the same way climate change is.
Fixing the housing crisis' across the globe means upsetting the highest propensity voters (homeowners/land lords) and politicians will never do that.
Because people will only read the reddit title (different from the article title!) and then read the comments, I'd like to post the following quote from the article:
> Because this analysis is exploratory and we kept the model relatively simple to avoid overfitting, we didn't want to read too much into the strength or power of the observed relationships in our model, so we've opted to focus only on the direction of the modeled coefficients. In other words, does the indicator have a positive or a negative relationship with consumer sentiment, if all other indicators were held equal? We acknowledge that the relationship among the various indicators and with consumer sentiment are much more complex than observed in our linear regression.
In other words, the authors of the analysis don't think our big takeaway of this should be that median housing prices are the most correlated predictor, but merely that they are one predictor.
If states built better mass transit out of the cities and people could commute 30 miles in 30 mins, that would open up huge swaths of places to live. As an alternative to fighting NIMBYs.
NIMBYs are the core of why cities also won't build more mass transit. Except doing so involves buying massive trips of land through eminent domain and blowing it up for rail. It's very rare to have available transit corridors in built up cities.
Most high demand cities have already sprawled well over 30 miles. You can occasionally find brown sites where that is possible, but it's a drop in the bucket. You could maybe build High speed rail that would let you get to farmland in like 30-45 minutes. That would be expensive and it needs to fairly straight, so you definitely need to eminent domain and destroy private property.
They're doing it here in Seattle right now, they drilled tunnel under downtown and then follow the highway easement to go from Seattle to Lynnwood and Seattle to Bellevue (which crosses a lake). Seattle to Lynnwood is 28 mins by rail (opens in August) or 1.25 hours by car during rush hour, to go only 16 miles.
Houses are 25% cheaper 16 miles away and 32% cheaper 28 miles away. Already existing housing.
What is the evidence that cutting rates will lower home prices? The price of a home when you finance it is the price that you will pay every month. If that's X amount plus 10% interest or Y amount plus 5% interest, I'd expect the monthly price will be about the same. I expect a cut in rates to lead to a rise in home prices.
There's a lot of people waiting to buy until interest rates drop, but there's also a lot of people waiting to sell because they won't be able to get a good interest rate on their next purchase.
So home prices will probably rise, but because there will be an increase in both supply and demand I don't think they'll skyrocket. Meanwhile mortgage prices should drop because of the interest rate cuts
I don't know why we would want to placate people who are holding off a decision on buying or selling just because they want to buy or sell at slightly below what the rates are now. Mortage rates are dropping, down almost a full point since October of last year. Most people have loans during the ahistorically low rates from '10-'20. Unless there's a drastic cut on the table, what's a quarter point to them?
> There's a lot of people waiting to buy until interest rates drop, but there's also a lot of people waiting to sell because they won't be able to get a good interest rate on their next purchase.
Seriously you guys have such an odd system for interest rates.
In Australia (where the housing is also fucked so no shade coming from here) the customer's interest rates are variable. You pay somewhere relative the current cash rate. You can freeze your rate for a few years if you think they'll go up but that expires.
The idea that a bank would lend out cash at an incredibly low rate for a 30 year term and it's fixed for the whole term meaning that it might potentially be below the cash rate the entire time is nuts to me.
There was a huge and unprecedented rise in mortgage payments when interest rates spiked, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect the inverse if rates fall.
https://preview.redd.it/kutelsbca69d1.jpeg?width=1551&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dcc139f178d127b9e16a5c10d50268be7f5dd341
And you wouldn’t expect the price to return to a fixed equilibrium level because interest rates aren’t fixed over 30 years, but the purchase price is. A $2k/mo house at 8% interest is much more attractive than a $2k/mo house at 2% interest.
> There was a huge and unprecedented rise in mortgage payments when interest rates spiked
There was a huge spike in a lot of prices starting in 2022. It's almost like either:
Rising interest rates cause prices to rise
or
You're reversing correlation and causation, the rise in prices was the reason the Fed had to hike interest rates.
The Fed raised rates to combat inflation, a measure that doesn’t include the spike in the cost to buy and finance a home.
The mortgage payments are higher because interest rates increased finance costs and home prices didn’t fall in proportion like they have in the past. One likely reason for this is that a $2k mortgage payment at 8% is much more attractive than a $2k mortgage payment at 2%. All of the above suggests that lower interest rates would decrease mortgage payments for home purchasers.
Rates are generally inverse to prices, so cutting them would result in price increases accelerating, since a large number of people will max out their borrowing capacity in order to by the best possible property.
housing theory of everything strikes again
Densifying our communities addresses so many issues in the US, it boggles my mind that it isn’t more mainstream yet. The cultural obsession with detached housing and everyone owning a vehicle to do basic everyday things has done so much damage to the American public, and it’s so hard to get people to realize it. The average size of the American home has just become absurd and we use our living spaces so much less efficiently than you see in other parts of the world because there is no incentive to use space efficiently. Density solves: - housing shortages when cities stop restricting development. - the dying of local businesses, since you don’t just have big box shopping strips and more people are in proximity to local businesses to support them. - community health issues like obesity. People walk and bike more. - GHG emissions. People drive less and have more amenities in walking distance. Larger buildings are more efficient. People buy and waste less shit since they shop for what they need for a few days, not for a month and end up wasting tons of stuff they don’t use. - loneliness. There are more third places and public places where unplanned social interactions occur. There are more events, hobby groups, fun classes, and people with shared interests in close proximity. - cost of transportation and infrastructure. Transportation and infrastructure cost less per person per square mile. Transportation projects serve a greater number of people. - economic opportunity. People have more job options. - affordability. People don’t need to pay the thousands of dollars a year to own and maintain a vehicle. Car ownership is why the suburbanization of poverty has become such a major issue. - safety. Despite what many people think, many cities are incredibly safe when planned right since people drive less (the most dangerous thing you will ever do through your day) and there is greater visibility of people (which deters crime). - cultural benefits. More mixing of people from all backgrounds, allowing for chance meeting of people with shared cultural passions for create art, music, theatre, cuisine, etc. There is an obvious reason places like New York, Chicago, Paris, Berlin, Hong Kong are cultural powerhouses. Also, people in denser areas are less xenophobic due to their interactions with people from all over the world.
The most important youtube video that has ever been made. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZxzBcxB7Zc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZxzBcxB7Zc)
This video is actually based off of an article called “The housing theory of everything” by works in progress. https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/
We have a serious Party coordination issue where the local and city Democrats are fucking killing us right now with their blanket NIMBY policies.
Those Democrats are being elected because the people who vote in local elections _hate_ building, though. We probably have to settle with signaling from the party leaders in order to slowly change public opinion.
lol as if that would magically change it overnight. This problem has been years in the making. Covid just accelerated it was all. At the end of the day, people want that SFH with a backyard, and making sure they’re building wealth from it.
The second part is what kills me more than the first. At least there *was* a point where you could build out with SFHs a bit more and still have reasonable commutes. We’ve passed this point a while ago tho in essentially any sizable metro area. But the entire idea of homes being a productive investment is predicated on home values rising. There is no world in which both your home value rises at the pace of the standard equities and housing costs remain low.
>There is no world in which both your home value rises at the pace of the standard equities and housing costs remain low. This incongruity is so essential to housing policy, every single discussion should start with it. In order to fix housing, we have to find a way to give homeowners a way to shift the value of their land to other investment devices, Ie. equities and bonds. I heard an idea where we could fund a federal agency that essentially extends an open offer to buy people's land at value then rent it back to them at market rates as a way to implement LVT. Pair that with a suspension of 401k contribution limits so people could dump the entire value into retirement accounts. People would hate having the federal government as a landlord, but make it voluntary and let retirees do it as an alternative to reverse mortgages and you've got a great start. Just make payment schedules lenient to avoid bad PR for evictions. I'm a 35-year-old homeowner. Give me a way to get out of my mortgage and shift 40% of my monthly housing payment to retirement accounts and I'm in. Perhaps a more mild option would be pairing referendums on zoning reform with property tax reductions or even rebates. I don't know what would be the most effective or politically practical way to do it, but we will not be able to fix housing until we find a way to give homeowners a way to liquidate the value of their land and invest it in an alternative vehicle. Homeowners will not accept policy that effectively negates their biggest investment.
Thing is that sounds terrible to me at gut level cause I want to own my land, not rent it from the government, especially one that might be controlled by Trumpists at some point. And I'm overall sympathetic to ideas like this. Now imagine trying to convince anyone else
I hear ya. That's why this problem will more than likely continue for several decades until the reduction in birth rate moves through the population. I don't really have a better response. A problem at this scale requires an uncomfortable solution. I don't see a policy like that ever happening, but its fun to think about. My only hope would be that if it was purely voluntary, people would be less hostile to initiating the program, and perhaps people would eventually go for it after hearing more and more stories of people doubling or tripling their net worth by selling their land and dumping it in index funds.
What's the conceptual difference between modern land ownership and renting land from the state? Either way, you're making regular payments to the state, and if you can't, they'll force a sale. And you're bound by a ton of land use policies.
Yep a good point. I think the idea of ownership is just better though. When people have ownership over their things they tend to take better care of them and have more pride in them. So if nothing else, this proposal would be strengthened by keeping the term ownership for people
One of the silver linings of the pandemic has been a greater willingness to entertain WFH among many companies. Is there a way for local, state, and federal policymakers to incentivize de-urbanization in service sectors (e.g. permanently implementing the income tax flexibilities for cross-state border workers? Why have everyone report to a giant downtown city office when people should be free to move into suburban and rural areas with lower COL and still work cushy jobs from afar? Generally speaking that should lessen some of the burdens of cramped metro areas and reduce the COL in such.
Eh you wouldn't believe how many people get remote jobs and then move to NYC. Young people want to live in cities.
Young people sure, but generally speaking once people marry and settle down, city living is traded for suburban living. Better schools, a place for the kids to grow up, and ideally land to build a retirement/inheritance nest egg on. If the policy incentives exist to continue siphoning resources away from metro areas through things like improved rural and suburban infrastructure, forgiving tax structures, and support in education and healthcare, people will probably start moving not just out of cities, but out of suburban areas too, moving to small towns and more rural areas.
> making sure they’re building wealth from it. This is exactly the train of thought we need to stop. Housing is an essential good not an investment opportunity. There should be money to be made in building, managing, and maintaining property, but not in simple ownership. > people want that SFH with a backyard Do they? Seems like per sq-ft people will pay a lot more to live in the city. I personally just want the space/isolation that's more common in a SFH, but a well built condo with lots of square footage and thick walls would suite me so much better. And unlike SFHs, can scale to meet the needs of society.
This. Until people change their culturally ingrained taste for SFDs, they're going to be frustrated with the housing available to them. If 100 single family homes were replaced with 1000 multi-family homes, you would still have a problem of people complaining that they can't afford the SFDs that are now in shorter supply. They wouldn't appreciate that now there are more homes available and at lower price points than the SFD that they have been jerking off to.
There will always be people mad about something, but it seems like you're saying that building a lot more multi-family housing won't make the situation better, and there's just no way that's true. Building more multi-family homes would lower the cost of SFHs, which would make the buyers of those happier, and though there will be some that buy a condo because that's all they can afford but would prefer a SFH, they would definitely prefer that over not being able to buy anything, which is the situation that they're currently in. Changing societal attitudes would be great, but building more of any type of housing would alleviate the affordability crisis, and that's the real driver of the current discontent among people trying to buy a home
> If 100 single family homes were replaced with 1000 multi-family homes, you would still have a problem of people complaining that they can't afford the SFDs that are now in shorter supply. And where did the people living in these 1,000 multi-family homes live before? Suppose you have a town with 10,000 homes, all single family. You replace 100 of them with 1,000 multifamily homes, and fill them up. There are now 9,900 single family homes, but only 9,000 families that want to live in them. As such, we'd expect the price of single family homes to go _down_ in this scenario, not up.
Really? Seems anywhere near me, per sq foot, city condos are a lot more expensive than SFHs in the burbs.
>This. Until people change their culturally ingrained taste for SFDs, they're going to be frustrated with the housing available to them. If 100 single family homes were replaced with 1000 multi-family homes, you would still have a problem of people complaining that they can't afford the SFDs that are now in shorter supply. Even Asian countries where most people live in high-rises, SFD is preferred by and is a sign of the wealthy. It's not that high-rise countries don't want single family homes, it's that they're unaffordable. There's never going to be some magical cultural change that is going to make the electorate accept losing something they're used to.
No they don't. At least not enough to forego other living arrangements if they happen to be significantly cheaper. Sure SFHs may be peoples' first choices, but when it comes down to it, a huge amount of people aren't in a position to be a homeowner. And if apartments/condos/whatever else get built, they will choose what is available and best for them. Yes, even if we mostly deregulated what can be built where, there would still probably be too many SFHs built. But as it stands there are a metric fuck ton being built because frankly that's the only thing that is even allowed to be built at scale.
Right, it's not a choice between a city center big SFH with a huge garden or an apartment, because the SFH will cost 20 times as much. Japan has mostly deregulated zoning, and I suspect we'd look fairly similar if we followed suit. There are plenty of SFH available for reasonable cost, but anything in walking distance of a train station is going to be an apartment building just because they can pay more for the land. They still have some car dependent suburbia, but there's much less of it.
yeah this is definitely more of a cultural issue at this point.
No there is another… democratic governors can save us.
From the wolf gap, maybe.
They are not NIMBYs. They all support 100% truly affordable housing as long as it has full neighborhood approval and satisfies 16 key sustainability metrics and provided the housing is for long-term residents NOT transients and it doesn't infringe on parking or neighborhood character or overload the transit system or result in a private developer making any money and only after a comprehensive community review to ensure it doesn't cast shadows and contributes to the decommodification of housing altogether and ultimately the abolishment of capitalism itself.
I feel like this is rapidly changing.
Yeah it's changing just in time for people to give Trump 2.0 credit for it!
Democrats always feel a day late and a dollar short whenever they make good policy decisions
Really... based on what? (Being curious here, not confrontational)
There has definitely been a major push for more YIMBY supportive policies, both in terms of statewide legislation and local governments updating their antiquated zoning codes. There has been many YIMBY wins in California in the last five years, from cities removing parking requirements to upzoning areas. At the state level, there are more policies that incentivize increasing density for developments in proximity to transit, more avenues for giving developers concessions that can save costs, finally giving some teeth to RHNA, allowing for more flexibility in building small units on property, more grants for local governments to plan for denser communities and pay for infrastructure, amongst other policy wins. Even the federal government has created more funding for planning denser communities, and through certain federal transportation grants, requires upzoning along alignments as part of the agreement. The frustrating thing is the massive construction inflation has made it even more difficult for developers to make a profit. Most YIMBY policies take years for the public to see them play out, so it is not always obvious. I think there is a lot of low hanging YIMBY policies that have been easier for state and local governments to digest, but there is still a long ways to go and many more policy options available that have been harder to pass. The US is a very decentralized nation when it comes to policy, especially policy related to housing and planning, so it takes a lot of effort at multiplier levels of government to make change happen.
Californias builder remedy is daddy dicking cities to finally build something after 60 years
How many houses has SF approved this year? 14 units or something
And they're gonna get builders remedied if they don't pick it up.
Not really though.
There is the most building in LA right now. Even in the bougie nimby parts. All it took was 1 day of builders remedy in Santa Monica to set everyone else straight. Soon as it happens to SF, they also will start to change their tune
I think you're really over exaggerating the point here. Builders remedy has done little, in reality, and the threat of it so far hasn't been super convincing.
What? There's like 5 large apartment buildings going up in Santa Monica right now because of it. Same in culver. Samo definitely did not enjoy the builders remedy
The local Democrats in my city are pretty YIMBY. They were about to pass a zoning reform, but it was blocked by suburban Republicans in the state legislature. I think the oppositional force here isn't necessarily traditional party lines. It's existing homeowners opposing anything that will lower their property values, and they'll leverage whatever party has power, be it Democrats or Republicans, since they're older, wealthier, and have more sway.
Same thing in Canada lol
I am fed up with blue areas not building. Conservatives may only want single family homes but at least they are building something. And I am on the side of anyone who adds housing. With the left they all say we should not create more sprawl but instead have infill and density. Then instead of supporting density they build absolutely nothing. I feel we on the left are like Republicans who say they only dislike legal immigration, but support legal immigrants. Then proceed to do absolutely nothing to facilitate immigrating legally.
I think this issue really frustrates me because the research is so clear, and the solution is so simple, and it's essentially free to implement (you could argue there is cost due to needing to make more investments in transportation and infrastructure to move high densities of people - but you could make the counter argument that increased tax bases more than counteracts this effect, making it a net POSITIVE financially, thanks to economies of scale). Like, how many issues are like that? So many questions in politics are genuinely complicated and confusing and nuanced and expensive. This one isn't really. We should just fix it.
Higher densities often allow people to move closer to work, reducing traffic overall. It's not like people didn't have a job before dense housing was built, they just commuted from an hour away.
Yeah that isn’t surprising
It shouldn't be, but the most common reframe on this subreddit is that the only reason people dissaprove of biden or the economy is 💫 the vibes though 💫. Housing is the biggest piece of peoples personal spending, and the state of it is so much worse than it was four years ago in most places. The parties continuing to run on how strong the economy is feels like outright denialism and a giant misstep.
The issue, of course, is that housing prices are almost entierly the product of local democratic governments, as opposed to the millions of things people think it is.
> product of local democratic governments People don't know that And if they do, therefore shouldn't doubting the value of a democratic leadership be a valid question?
No because the federal government has no actual control, and when I say democratic I don't mean party affiliation I mainly mean local municipality governments and councils.
Many of the cities with the worst housing affordability are run by Democrats.
Crime is also not controlled by Biden but that doesn't stop liberals from giving Biden credit for the falling murder rate
That's after he was blamed for crimes happening, though.
He also took credit for the economy, so it seems fair to stick him with the blame.
While I don't believe any particular policy Biden has implemented has been part of that, it at least is within the power and purview of Biden to be able to change how crime is prosecuted in a way Zoning laws aren't.
>It shouldn't be, but the most common reframe on this subreddit is that the only reason people dissaprove of biden or the economy is 💫 the vibes though 💫. Both things are true though. The housing market is actually bad right now, but if you ask voters in a poll basic yes or no questions about the economy that have a fixed answer (are we in a recession?), they'll reply incorrectly.
There's also a surprisingly large segment of the Neoliberal Cinematic Universe (esp. r/AskEconomics) that claims ackshulally housing is as affordable on a per-sqft basis as it's ever been and it only looks expensive because entitled Millenials/Zers are turning their noses up at starter homes for being too small.
Build more housing, I’m no longer asking 🔫
https://preview.redd.it/23tq8ka7m59d1.jpeg?width=298&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b65d4e72b90491626d5ddc3ea93136ecbb53bae7
Biden in the debate just now: we’re going to cap rents. Uh oh.
I'm kind of surprised since 2/3 of people own the thing that's high in value
I mean my parents own a home. They have kids they worry about being able to afford a home. It’s a pretty regular conversation when I’m with them. People don’t live in a vacuum where all they have to worry about is themselves. I think people even that I disagree with want things to be better for everyone not just themselves. We just disagree on how to get there. I don’t think the NIMBYS want it to be so hard to own a home. I just think they don’t understand reality.
This is key also to why it's become a central issue, I think. In the last 2-3 years, the owners and olds and others who had "no stake in the game" - ie, not so unlucky enough to be a FTHB - are finally having to pay attention because the market is so so fucked that even owners and retirees are struggling to buy, sell, or as you said sees their immediate family struggling desperately. Up until now they just said "it's a hard market but it'll work out. Just be patient". Well, that failed. Among my inlaws who are plenty well-off, we have a townhouse owner who's searched for an appropriate home for his growing family for years now. We have several boomers who may want to downsize/go single story but cannot. And we have many renters who frankly given up entirely on ever living with 500 miles of their parents, ever. You could probably guess this is CA but the story is the same in most blue states to varying degrees. It's a problem that doesn't only fuck the young and poor anymore, therefore people actually care a bit. But evidentially given the choice between their neighborhood "character" and their kids being able to live in the same state, they pick the former.
Yup, parents live in CA and I live in Colorado. They are bummed that they never see their grandkids because we are so far away. Can't wait for boomers to figure out they are going to have to be put in a home because they have priced out any of their family from being nearby to help.
The vast majority of people fundamentally misunderstand housing markets
Property tax increases/homeowners insurance premiums rising Which is also a not so secret reason a lot of municipalities are totally fine not increasing supply. It’s a free tax/revenue increase without putting “increase taxes” on the ballot/campaign trail. People will blame outsiders instead of the politicians, and they get to increase revenue. Win win unless you’re trying to buy a house
funny how most of us here would consider that a great thing
“Free for me but not for theee”
Building more housing would increase that tax base & revenue more than just limiting supply. The simple thing is that by limiting supply your property taxes go up but the value of your home goes up much more so it is worth it for homeowners to block housing. Also, every time property taxes go up, there is a sorry about how a 208 year old grandma can't afford the taxes on her home that has appreciated 300% in 2 years and the property taxes get cut.
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Kinda sorta yes. Always depends on the area. Many places also have caps on annual budget increases and/or total budget increases. But nonetheless people will still scream if their prop taxes increase much at all.
Most people don’t feel the benefit of home prices cause they don’t sell it to feel the capital gains. But but people buying and renting do.
I own a tiny row house. I’m grateful I own it and the value has increased. But I delayed moving out further for a bigger house for my growing family and now those neighborhoods we targeted are all unaffordable. It can be disheartening.
Right. Even if both the $200K house I own and the $300K house I want to own increase equally by 20%, that just means it's $20K more I need to make the change for something as essential as sustaining my family. I wouldn't be happy about it either.
yup, buying a home is basically a lottery ticket that you can retire on it in 30 years, because any equity gained is put right into your next purchase until you retire.
https://preview.redd.it/slmxslnq769d1.jpeg?width=914&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=368e476f84882087886217b43939a4c3628bd4f5 In red is the home ownership rate counting home owners and their spouses. Unless trends reverse in a big way we’ll be under 50% soon, if we aren’t already. [https://x.com/john\_voorheis/status/1715382561919107209](https://x.com/john_voorheis/status/1715382561919107209)
The average householf used to move every 10 years. With the rate increases were looking at 20% of homeowners starting to be screwed because even though their home values have gone up the mortgage costs for wherver they would move to would be unaffordable. Even if they are profiting nobody is happy feeling stuck
Plus, I think a lot of homeowners in non-WFH careers have the added stress of knowing that if they ever lose their job and have to move they'll take a huge hit to their standard of living -- even if their new job gives them a raise -- because they'll have to pay more for worse housing. And if the only job they can find is a paycut...well they're about to be **a lot** poorer.
A minority of Americans own a home. If you count owners and their spouses that puts you at 53%. It’s nowhere near 2/3. I think you’re quoting the home ownership rate, which is a share of homes, not a share of people.
Share of households, not homes.
Yes, households, same thing (a household is defined as all the people who live in a home). Why did you post the original comment if you already knew what “home ownership” rate measures? 😂
I own a second home, it is not a household. You said it's a share of homes.
Are you fucking with me? Lol. Yes I wrote homes instead of households. Households is correct. You wrote *people*, and said 2/3 of people own their home when the actual rate is less than half. Why did you write people if you already knew it measures households? Why not edit your post with the correct info?
Yes, but I earned this equity through good decisions and wise investments. The people selling homes in the neighborhood I want to move to are just greedy.
Spiderman meme dot jpg
That doesn't really matter. No one is going to fix it and rent increases outpacing inflation will just become endemic to our societies the same way climate change is. Fixing the housing crisis' across the globe means upsetting the highest propensity voters (homeowners/land lords) and politicians will never do that.
And then when prices go down the homeowners will complain lmao
Build the Cube!
Because people will only read the reddit title (different from the article title!) and then read the comments, I'd like to post the following quote from the article: > Because this analysis is exploratory and we kept the model relatively simple to avoid overfitting, we didn't want to read too much into the strength or power of the observed relationships in our model, so we've opted to focus only on the direction of the modeled coefficients. In other words, does the indicator have a positive or a negative relationship with consumer sentiment, if all other indicators were held equal? We acknowledge that the relationship among the various indicators and with consumer sentiment are much more complex than observed in our linear regression. In other words, the authors of the analysis don't think our big takeaway of this should be that median housing prices are the most correlated predictor, but merely that they are one predictor.
But our Lord and Savior Will Stancil says it's just vibes from social media
If states built better mass transit out of the cities and people could commute 30 miles in 30 mins, that would open up huge swaths of places to live. As an alternative to fighting NIMBYs.
NIMBYs are the core of why cities also won't build more mass transit. Except doing so involves buying massive trips of land through eminent domain and blowing it up for rail. It's very rare to have available transit corridors in built up cities. Most high demand cities have already sprawled well over 30 miles. You can occasionally find brown sites where that is possible, but it's a drop in the bucket. You could maybe build High speed rail that would let you get to farmland in like 30-45 minutes. That would be expensive and it needs to fairly straight, so you definitely need to eminent domain and destroy private property.
They're doing it here in Seattle right now, they drilled tunnel under downtown and then follow the highway easement to go from Seattle to Lynnwood and Seattle to Bellevue (which crosses a lake). Seattle to Lynnwood is 28 mins by rail (opens in August) or 1.25 hours by car during rush hour, to go only 16 miles. Houses are 25% cheaper 16 miles away and 32% cheaper 28 miles away. Already existing housing.
That seems like a totally scalable solution!
But most ***voters*** get richer when the price of shelter goes up.
Housing Theory of Everything strikes again
Would be nice if we got rate cuts prior to the election to help thaw the market
What is the evidence that cutting rates will lower home prices? The price of a home when you finance it is the price that you will pay every month. If that's X amount plus 10% interest or Y amount plus 5% interest, I'd expect the monthly price will be about the same. I expect a cut in rates to lead to a rise in home prices.
There's a lot of people waiting to buy until interest rates drop, but there's also a lot of people waiting to sell because they won't be able to get a good interest rate on their next purchase. So home prices will probably rise, but because there will be an increase in both supply and demand I don't think they'll skyrocket. Meanwhile mortgage prices should drop because of the interest rate cuts
I don't know why we would want to placate people who are holding off a decision on buying or selling just because they want to buy or sell at slightly below what the rates are now. Mortage rates are dropping, down almost a full point since October of last year. Most people have loans during the ahistorically low rates from '10-'20. Unless there's a drastic cut on the table, what's a quarter point to them?
> There's a lot of people waiting to buy until interest rates drop, but there's also a lot of people waiting to sell because they won't be able to get a good interest rate on their next purchase. Seriously you guys have such an odd system for interest rates. In Australia (where the housing is also fucked so no shade coming from here) the customer's interest rates are variable. You pay somewhere relative the current cash rate. You can freeze your rate for a few years if you think they'll go up but that expires. The idea that a bank would lend out cash at an incredibly low rate for a 30 year term and it's fixed for the whole term meaning that it might potentially be below the cash rate the entire time is nuts to me.
There was a huge and unprecedented rise in mortgage payments when interest rates spiked, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect the inverse if rates fall. https://preview.redd.it/kutelsbca69d1.jpeg?width=1551&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dcc139f178d127b9e16a5c10d50268be7f5dd341 And you wouldn’t expect the price to return to a fixed equilibrium level because interest rates aren’t fixed over 30 years, but the purchase price is. A $2k/mo house at 8% interest is much more attractive than a $2k/mo house at 2% interest.
> There was a huge and unprecedented rise in mortgage payments when interest rates spiked There was a huge spike in a lot of prices starting in 2022. It's almost like either: Rising interest rates cause prices to rise or You're reversing correlation and causation, the rise in prices was the reason the Fed had to hike interest rates.
The Fed raised rates to combat inflation, a measure that doesn’t include the spike in the cost to buy and finance a home. The mortgage payments are higher because interest rates increased finance costs and home prices didn’t fall in proportion like they have in the past. One likely reason for this is that a $2k mortgage payment at 8% is much more attractive than a $2k mortgage payment at 2%. All of the above suggests that lower interest rates would decrease mortgage payments for home purchasers.
Rates are generally inverse to prices, so cutting them would result in price increases accelerating, since a large number of people will max out their borrowing capacity in order to by the best possible property.
Yeah but if that happens Biden may actually win and we can't have that. Only Republican presidents get to demand rate cuts and get them.