housing affordability is one of the few issues where i feel like the median lefty is just wrong in their diagnosis of the problem.
Reposted from
Ned Resnikoff
I genuinely don't follow what point is being made here. Vacancies in New York are low because there isn't enough housing! This building is very expensive because ... there isn't enough housing! Where is the tension? www.nytimes.com/2025/05/27/r...
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Why hate the former and ignore the latter?
People are afraid openly confronting this fact will split the liberal coalition like Lex Luthor nuking the San Andreas Fault.
Have you looked at a graph of rent change over % of new housing? The results are extremely predictable. More housing = lower rent.
https://www.wsj.com/real-estate/miami-sees-its-first-population-drop-in-decades-e181171f?st=cjhbmfcwdbg7b7j
"between 2019 and 2022"
Come on, dude. You're not this dense.
'08 lead to fewer builders, social housing isn't enough, rent control is a bandaid, and any solution takes a decade etc
That complexity also makes it perfect for conspiracies because they thrive in places where there is no simple satisfying answer but we wish there were.
Election happens, a year or two to get rolling, a year or two to implement, then next election.
If it's not fully rolled out, it's not happening and will be held against you.
Rent Control helps, but won't solve fundamental lack of supply.
You could limit the size of apartments. You could require certain density. You could improve public transit. Lots of options.
If it were easy it would be done
IMO this is a large part of why the country is falling apart.
I think labor will still be a cost challenge up here (as someone who has worked with contractors recently) but the largest barrier is Americans hate things getting better, and old landed gentry liberals are a major barrier.
This is part of what I mean by it's hard. There are low hanging things to do, but compelling people to do good is hard.
Seattle isn't doing nearly enough, I don't want to pretend we are but moderate reforms not ending the world is a step to dealing with the massive libs who own the land in this city.
But you're right, we could do a lot more.
Ie. the landlord/owner isn't lowering it to a market price to sell it.
Same thing happens when you have largely private market control for any major infrastructure, water for instance.
The tension is: why aren’t they lowering the price when it’s unsold and there’s a low vacancy rate? Why aren’t they (and most landowners) lowering their prices to a marketable price?
The answer IMHO is the point of the piece.
But others who have to sell, to buy a new place to move into for example, likely wouldn't - they'd sell at the market rate ASAP.
Not if they're able to write off the loss or if they're making more in increased equity valuation than they're losing.
1/2
Depends on what the owner wants. Because housing functions more as infrastructure than a commodity or consumer good, they could drop the price and sell it immediately, or hold the line long term.
2/2
homes aren’t a lucrative investment if you’re building enough of them
Idk why you are bringing up rent control. YIMBYs in CA supported the statewide RSO.
Free market my entire ass. You don't have a clue on this
but this specific art piece is making a connection between the price tag and the vacancy. It appears that the apartment price is (and stays) above equilibrium price for housing. Why is that?
I will say, the main problem isn’t that some people are buying homes for $4 million; it’s that most people can’t buy homes w/ mortgages that are less than 30% of their income. And that’s because we haven’t built enough housing
(probably butchered something here but still)
Where would you purpose to build all this housing anyway?
And where? I don’t know, how about building apartments somewhere in the 95% percent of this country that only allows single-family houses. There is not a scarcity of places to add housing in this country.
Quite often, discrediting people who support a lot of good ideas to protect a status quo that is very bad
But, man, the average American is NOT into expropriation
On the plus side, in our housing market it's a wealth tax, in many places it'd pencil out as progressive
https://cayimby.org/blog/when-1-1-zero-how-nimbyism-fosters-housing-skepticism/
Sprawl is killing us
Unless you're going to drop someone like Richard Wolff, you're just using "leftists" to complain about people who exist in your imagination. Knock it off.
How is that an actual opinion I see expressed among some leftists?
There are some borderline cases in places with rent control and run-down housing stock, but they’re the exception that proves the rule.
People deserve spacious housing, too, not just 100+-year-old tenements…!
Construction at the scale required for affordability would be unrecognizable.
There are certainly ways that we can ease the hardship of high rent or homelessness, but the cause is pretty singular.
What do you mean there's not enough of them! All they build is luxury apartments!
Doom loop
But it leads ppl to oppose building *anything*, which is nuts. Because while building more doesn’t always fix housing costs, *not* building is never going to cause prices to *drop*.
A commodity that doesn’t decline in value? And can’t be moved if you tax it? MORE PLZ!
So we should absolutely encourage more housing.
The so-called "free market" doesn't fucking work when it comes to availability of affordable housing. All it does is make the top 1% filthy rich.
Tl;dw: "vacant" is a broad term which can mean between tenants or being remodeled.
Also many habitable vacant homes are not in places where the need is. We wouldn't want to cart homeless folks off to vacation houses in Aspen for example.
what % of the housing supply do these homes represent? would building additional housing make a homeless situation worse?
- Under construction/renovation
- In the process of renting/selling
- Owner died and family hasn't sold yet
- Occupied part of year (eg seasonal farm workers, vacation)
Constrained supply in high demand areas leads to people treating it like a profitable investment.
Focusing on some impossible to solve core issue is identical to doing nothing. It's not some deeper understanding of a problem.
Why not wish for a unicorn pony for each dwelling as well?
Time to come live in our shared reality and not some bizarre fantasy where the people yearn for the sovkhoz.
The 'minor regulatory tweaks' actually something beyond larping utopia.
Okay, so are you telling me to move someone whose social circle and services they’re used to/have worked with, across the damn country, isolating them, JUST for a house?
Propose the "long island housing bill" and force it through. Even if they vote against it they don't have enough power.
The key is just to build more homes than there are people who want a home.