There's this widespread misconception among the public that the housing shortage is caused by like, a shortage of building materials, I think because the actual explanation that the thing is short supply is "permission to erect a building" is too stupid-sounding to feel like it could the real reason - ThreadSky

mtsw.bsky.social • 339 days ago

There's this widespread misconception among the public that the housing shortage is caused by like, a shortage of building materials, I think because the actual explanation that the thing is short supply is "permission to erect a building" is too stupid-sounding to feel like it could the real reason

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Comments

mattferrel.bsky.social•337 days ago

Single family zoning should be abolished at the state level. People complaining about affordability or the homeless problem turn around and block the multi family housing that would help.

For example, in Connecticut:

https://nlihc.org/resource/report-finds-restrictive-zoning-laws-connecticut-are-correlated-racial-and-economic#:~:text=Overall%2C%2062%25%20of%20zoned%20land,and%202%25%2C%20respectively).

publiusmaximus.bsky.social•339 days ago

Just posted this to Instagram and Tumblr...

cdpositive.bsky.social•339 days ago

Investors want a guaranteed ROI, which of course includes housing. In Arizona there's a massive house/apartment building boom due to lots of cheap land, huge new Chip factory (new workers) north of Phoenix, sky high rents (people are not selling low interest loan homes, even if they've moved).

owenwmichael.bsky.social•339 days ago

I think there would also be an issue /ramping up/ the level of building materials to the amount necessary but that's a rather simpler and more temporary problem?

mtsw.bsky.social•339 days ago

not really at all in terms of building materials, in part because multifamily homes require far less lumber than single family homes. permitting more density would dramatically reduce the materials required per home

mtsw.bsky.social•339 days ago

(skilled labor is a much more serious bottleneck)

blank.org•339 days ago

Good thing we're about to... uh... *shuffles notecards* attempt to deport every working-age Hispanic person in the country who can't dig up their birth certificate. I'm sure that won't affect the... *re-shuffles* construction industry.

blank.org•339 days ago

Really not loving this thing where terrible reactionary immigration politics and terrible reactionary housing politics turn out to be mutually reinforcing and supporting.

trexpushups.bsky.social•339 days ago

Thank god the US is such a welcoming place to immigrants

*listens to ear piece*

Oh no, that's not good

tyler.britten.us•339 days ago

We're also still below the building construction employment levels of the pre-2008 boom

esports4losers.bsky.social•339 days ago

The housing shortage is caused by the most open and bleak and common regime of discrimination in place today and most people don’t even blink before supporting it.

Incumbent home owners both left and right are guilty for supporting racist and discriminatory housing policy that drives homelessness

brycecovert.bsky.social•339 days ago

I also think there's a phenomenon where many people don't think someone who's dealing with homelessness deserves a full, normal-sized house

akma.bsky.social•339 days ago

Or 'left vacant as an investment'…

hailthefi.sh•338 days ago

I think more than that there's also a lot of people who currently HAVE housing they're happy with who believe that everyone who DOESN'T should be subjected to some lower tier of housing. They don't WANT to build normal apartments with lower rents, they WANT the poors to know their place (below them)

onkelbob.bsky.social•339 days ago

Are you telling me that Ess Eff doesn't need more parking lots? Can't be true, is it?
https://sfist.com/2024/05/09/infamous-nordstrom-parking-lot-will-remain-a-parking-lot-five-more-years-city-hall-not-happy-about-it/

ivkowalenko.bsky.social•338 days ago

MPR News has been covering this issue. Minneapolis recently abolished single dwelling zoning city-wide as part of the Minneapolis 2040 plan. Residents of the city have been very active in fighting the measure, and the construction of new MDUs. https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2024/01/23/minneapolis-contentious-housing-policy-continues-to-draw-national-attention

daddyshark.bsky.social•339 days ago

You see this dissonance physically whenever there's fights over clearing encampments.

Tents on cold ground treated as sad necessities... SF even buys tents.

Try to take the same space, put up insulated walls, water, electricity, heat, and it's inhumane. Not enough sqft, yard, parking, et cetera

daddyshark.bsky.social•339 days ago

The shipping container thing really embodies the desire to square this circle.

A prepackaged shelter, better than a tent, definitely not anything problematic like a house or an apartment or God forbid a mobile home

noospheric.bsky.social•339 days ago

The price of building materials jumped by 14.6% in 2021 and 15% in 2022. The *rate* of increase dramatically slowed in 2023 (1.3%), but those prior year increases are still baked in the market. That price leap wasn't driven entirely by literal shortage, but it is a substantial drag on building.

noospheric.bsky.social•339 days ago

This is not to say that shipping containers are a solution to low- and medium-income housing shortages, just that building materials issues are not simply an excuse but part of a complex problem.

bookclubdropout.bsky.social•339 days ago

Permissions, which are incredibly hard at the moment, plus developers build to sell so there’s no incentive for them to build more quickly (gov investment in affordable housing in the uk is often tied to open market developments. (all of this relates to UK market, I don’t know others)

vaguepariah.bsky.social•339 days ago

The loan payments during construction are a huge motivator for builders to finish quickly.

bookclubdropout.bsky.social•339 days ago

Perhaps, but sitting on unbuilt land with permissions and staggering your build out rates to maximise profit is also a high incentive. In the UK the majority of building is done through a few massive house builders that don’t need to worry about scheme financing.

vaguepariah.bsky.social•339 days ago

Land and permissions are cheap, actually building is not. Construction also requires labor and there is a shortage of that. So it makes sense that developers would sit on land while building out in phases.

skyice.bsky.social•339 days ago

And offering them at affordable prices once erected.

glitchsister.com•339 days ago

most neighborhoods know outside their borders, actively went against the cities planning and zoning laws!

dystopiangrift.bsky.social•338 days ago

There are millions of empty houses "owned" by private equity companies. Those companies should be burned to the ground and houses seized for those that need them.

mtsw.bsky.social•338 days ago

no there aren't. almost all houses owned by private equity companies are rented out to people for money. almost all the "empty" ones are the ones being renovated or between tenants.

kdb150.bsky.social•338 days ago

You just don't understand the brilliant money-making scheme of paying property taxes and upkeep on a house that generates no income.

mtsw.bsky.social•338 days ago

ya to the extent the deliberately-empty-home thing is real (it is, but is a pretty small number of total units) it's not a way to *make* money, its a very expensive way to shelter stolen or illegal money, usually from foreign governments, not from the US

justsomerando.bsky.social•338 days ago

If that property is appreciating it is making money, it’s just not cash flowing. When you get to a certain level of wealth you’re just moving assets around the balance sheet.

mtsw.bsky.social•338 days ago

people really like the "homes kept deliberately empty" theory because its a "solution" to the housing crisis that doesn't require them to do anything or any tradeoffs but it's unfortunately not accurate.

jarekfa.bsky.social•338 days ago

The paradox is also that high (inflated) housing prices are retirement nest eggs for a large portion of American. The bad guys are us! Mom and pops who bought a ranch house for $200K (inflation adjusted) that’s worth $3mm now after 25 years. That type of windfall isn’t free!

euphoria5l.bsky.social•338 days ago

It's also a bizarre amount of faith in markets to have produced the right amount of housing historically for us today

aceckhouse.bsky.social•338 days ago

nice to see an independent recreation of @eean.dev's timeless banger

The socialism we need: Capitalism has failed to build badly needed housing

The socialism we have: Capitalism has built enough housing

eean.dev•338 days ago

one of the first things I did on this site was repost it here

egality.bsky.social•338 days ago

Let’s take a look at if “homes” is houses and apartments or just houses, and see if there’s any kind of games being played in the technical definitions.

dystopiangrift.bsky.social•338 days ago

The cost is too high making it prohibitive for many people/families. IDK anyone saying it’s a conspiracy.

kdb150.bsky.social•338 days ago

The cost isn't too high because of millions of homes being kept deliberately empty, the cost is too high because we are millions of housing units short of the amount we need for affordable housing to be broadly available.

dystopiangrift.bsky.social•338 days ago

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-vacant-homes-are-there-in-the-us/

mtsw.bsky.social•338 days ago

this is your own link: vacancy rate is at an all-time low

mtsw.bsky.social•338 days ago

most "vacancies" are short term (rentals between tenants), most long-term vacancies are in low demand markets or are units that require tens of thousands of dollars of renovations to be habitable. the "house kept deliberately empty" is mostly a myth

dystopiangrift.bsky.social•338 days ago

Homelessness is at an all time high…

https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-and-lowest-rates-of-homelessness/

nkwiw.com•338 days ago

sorry to ask, (as i don’t buy the theory myself) are these supposed purposefully vacant and held off the market homes going to show up in that graph of housing “inventory”? I could see that houses not ever on the market wouldn’t be counted as inventory, just as any occupied home wouldn’t be.

anachronym.trystero.social•338 days ago

Is there some investigation/research you can point to on that? Because the assertion keeps coming up, including at the governmental level.

dystopiangrift.bsky.social•338 days ago

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-vacant-homes-are-there-in-the-us/

theleakingpen.bsky.social•338 days ago

for example, in the second quarter of 2022, more than half of the US residences classified as “year-round vacant” were actively held off the market

castlebravoli7.gobirds.online•338 days ago

This theory never describes how those vacant homes would be put into use for housing the homeless. Is the government going to pay market price for these millions of tax shelter luxury condos? Seize them by eminent domain? Politically this seems a lot more difficult than lifting zoning restrictions

angryallosaurus.bsky.social•338 days ago

A vacancy tax (like British Columbia has) would be a good place to start. Pay a high enough tax on homes that aren't being lived in, and suddenly selling or renting makes financial sense.

(The tax earnings are earmarked for building more affordable housing, IIRC. Double win!)

derpyforcongress.bsky.social•338 days ago

A vacancy tax is a good thing to have, but at least in Vancouver BC it's produced only a small faction of the housing units needed despite it being raised several times. We need to allow the construction of much more housing to meet people's needs.

mtsw.bsky.social•338 days ago

It's simple, first we repeal the takings clause of the US constitution, then

unarmedballoon.bsky.social•338 days ago

Even if this conspiracy theory were true, building more housing would solve it and "punish" the people holding on to vacant property (by making it less valuable)

beaverstanacct.bsky.social•338 days ago

How do people think private equity firms, which are known for their mission to make immediate income immediately, make money off the homes they buy?

egality.bsky.social•338 days ago

Technically, the empty space is commercial and retail spaces, office spaces, so people are going to use this technicality to gaslight you in the comments.

derpyforcongress.bsky.social•338 days ago

Office spaces are expensive to convert into apartments and I hear that a lot of the conversions have big heating and cooling issues: https://cre.moodysanalytics.com/insights/cre-trends/office-to-apartment-conversions

I would personally let people build the extra amount of housing we need.

boleteful.bsky.social•339 days ago

That's one aspect of the housing crisis (I prefer 'crisis' to 'shortage'), but insufficient deployment of the existing housing stock is a bigger factor outside, say Manhattan or Bay Area. Not that I oppose upzoning, of course.

boleteful.bsky.social•339 days ago

Privatized land rents, poor transit, subsidized ownership, skewed credit and tax incentives, restricted supply, rent extraction by suburbia all play a role.

goose.haus•339 days ago

developers in our neck of the woods make this argument to justify higher development costs to angle for more aggressive outside funding to build

goose.haus•339 days ago

or to argue to cut taxes that directly target landlords. the myth exists because it's perpetuated by people who have interests

erikgunderson.bsky.social•339 days ago

Well, sure, allowing development of denser housing is ultimately the solution generally, but is that really the right solution for THIS PARTICULAR LOCATION? Let's steer these kinds of things to some mythical other part of the city sufficiently far away from me that I won't have to think about them.

vaguepariah.bsky.social•339 days ago

Here's a nice industrial zone. Why don't we change the zoning so we can build the apartments between the metal plating company and the battery recycler.

vaguepariah.bsky.social•339 days ago

It really lays bare the lie that zoning is about protecting residential from industrial harms when places like Boulder would rather put new apartments in an industrial zone instead of upzoning the single family neoghborhoods.

mtsw.bsky.social•339 days ago

this was really interesting in NYC watching wealthy yuppies moving into the Greenpoint waterfront and Gowanus in newly upzoned areas only to discover that they are superfund sites and the water table and soil are both totally toxic

smangan.bsky.social•338 days ago

There are enough apartments. The rent is too damn high.

hyperewok1.bsky.social•339 days ago

Why build affordable housing when you can build luxury apartments in essentially the same size, but with nicer countertops that therefore sell for five times as much? 🙃

coachfinstock.bsky.social•339 days ago

Can't wait until we find out the long-term problems with these shipping container homes, too.

ploeg.bsky.social•339 days ago

For one, they usually don't follow building codes, which makes them illegal to set up in a different way.

chucktownrob.bsky.social•339 days ago

Wouldn't be surprised if there also happened to be plenty of something that begins with "L" and rhymes with "red"

vaguepariah.bsky.social•339 days ago

More like chromate

swolecialism.bsky.social•339 days ago

The short term problems are bad enough. by the time you cut up a shipping container enough to make a functional home out of it, you don't have a shipping container anymore, you have a steel gazebo that contains a house inside it. Waste of time and energy

j-minotaur.bsky.social•339 days ago

Indeed. Buy a Quonset hut - which was made to be used as a building - instead.

vaguepariah.bsky.social•339 days ago

Qounset huts have their own set of idiosyncratic problems making them a poor housing typology.

j-minotaur.bsky.social•339 days ago

oh, for sure. we had one on the farm growing up that my dad used as a shop. I'd never live in one and they don't really scale (or stack like a container)

larryskorke.bsky.social•339 days ago

"Manufactured Homes, but stackable" is a perfectly reasonable idea and wouldn't be too hard to design or build. Good luck getting a permit to put three-four of them on a lot for an instant micro-condo though

josepho.bsky.social•339 days ago

I love in a very permissible area but condos have some obnoxious financing hurdles that make large condo projects essentially impossible. Multifamily for now is being held up on the debt side because banks are reluctant to lend with interest rate uncertainty. And we need for sale more than rentals.

eternalcatwar.bsky.social•339 days ago

yeah getting financing is a fucking nightmare and this is just for ADUs

northmanlogging.bsky.social•339 days ago

the permit process is hoop a jooped, but also, not enough logs are making it to US mills... while simultaneously Canadian lumber is suppressing US lumber prices. Ya all want affordable housing, but no one wants to do any logging.

ravenonthill.bsky.social•339 days ago

It's a very persistent idea, more than a century old. There's also an oligopoly that is buying up housing.

gpike.bsky.social•339 days ago

Compounded with everything that already exists being priced 4x what anybody can reasonably afford and boomers trying to keep their property values as high as possible.

drcgjones.bsky.social•338 days ago

The tiny home movement proved that recently too. Lots of people with wheel-less caravans being told they can't park them on their lots, let alone live in them.

ozmodiar.bsky.social•339 days ago

Available land, permission, and cost

thesandwichman.bsky.social•339 days ago

Financialization. The problem is not "supply vs. demand." The problem is use value vs. asset value. Housing that is "worth more" as an investment than as a dwelling creates a shortage of the latter.

nh4n3.bsky.social•339 days ago

A more practically useful term than "investment property" is "rental unit"

nh4n3.bsky.social•339 days ago

I think there's a lot of scope to talk about the way that the scaffolding around housing finance can change the balance between owners and renters but both renters and buyers face high costs

joi-itos-jibo.bsky.social•339 days ago

I disagree here, you don’t need to rent it out for it to be an investment— and that’s the core of the problem.

In our first year of homeownership, the zestimate *increased* value of our home was 25% of our household income. That number should be 0, or as equal to inflation as possible.

nh4n3.bsky.social•339 days ago

I think you're right about this but I don't think it's what people mean when they say "investment properties" are driving up costs, because at the end of the day you're just living in a house that you bought and it's not clear how that would drive up prices

nh4n3.bsky.social•339 days ago

Maybe you could say there's a kind of inflationary spiral happening which is confined to housing, where the expectation of future price increases drives increases in present construction—but that's really just moving the causality down the chain

nh4n3.bsky.social•339 days ago

Sorry that should say "increases in present consumption"

joi-itos-jibo.bsky.social•339 days ago

I think people referring to their residence as an investment- both internally in their head, and proudly in discussions with others- helps continue the status quo of not building. If it’s an investment, the price should rise, that’s the point of an investment.

nh4n3.bsky.social•339 days ago

I do agree with this at least as a partial cause but when you have someone like above saying the problem is financialization and not supply and demand this isn't what they're talking about—and of course the solution is still to build more

mtsw.bsky.social•339 days ago

you typically might as well rent it out though, unless the primary purpose is to launder money (in which case a rando tenant could jeopardize the project esp in a highly regulated landlord/tenant city like NYC)

prestobal.bsky.social•339 days ago

Yeah, down in Lima you'd regularly see apartments that were obviously vacant for years on end and it'd obviously be money laundering related. Builders wouldn't put window coverings on them, and buildings were close enough to see that an apartment not for sale nor rent was completely vacant.

mtsw.bsky.social•339 days ago

e.g. the apartment profiled on the planet money episode looking at this phenomenon was iirc owned by a corrupt Taiwanese politician who had basically stolen the money used to purchase it https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/05/27/479717380/episode-703-how-to-hide-a-million-dollars-in-plain-sight

mtsw.bsky.social•339 days ago

again, a real thing that happens, but there's only so many corrupt cabinet members around the world compared to like, run-of-the-mill rich guys who might buy an investment property but not have a reason to forego gaining rental income from it vs letting it sit vacant

asherd.xyz•339 days ago

Regardless, though, the issue here comes back to supply! The value goes up because of scarcity.

joi-itos-jibo.bsky.social•339 days ago

Exactly! And I think people referring to their residence as an investment- both internally in their head, and proudly in discussions with others- helps continue the status quo of not building. If it’s an investment, the price should rise, that’s the point of an investment.

jamellebouie.net•339 days ago

the problem with this explanation is that the modern housing market has existed for nearly a century but this acute housing shortage is a very recent phenomenon

malraux.bsky.social•339 days ago

Like I buy a bit of real estate as an investment. But how do I actually make money? By renting it out, Ie letting other people use it.

acekatana.bsky.social•339 days ago

Or by using its increased value and hypothetical rent to finance other loans and investments before flipping it, particularly in a time of substantial price growth

malraux.bsky.social•339 days ago

Sure you can pretend that you’re swapping nfts for a short period, but that never lasts.

acekatana.bsky.social•339 days ago

People can make a lot of money in the meantime! Anyhow I think it’s heavily influenced by the post-2009 bank bailout and the era of low interest rates

petergratton.bsky.social•339 days ago

That said, the way to combat that is produce far more supply, thus weakening the investment incentives.

petergratton.bsky.social•339 days ago

I wouldn’t skip this part of the explanation so quickly. The financialization of housing is vastly, vastly bigger than ever before. Some crazy percentage of Manhattan apartments are empty every night, sitting vacant as investments. The same in many places worldwide.

jamellebouie.net•339 days ago

link?

petergratton.bsky.social•339 days ago

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/realestate/new-york-decade-real-estate.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb

mtsw.bsky.social•339 days ago

the percentage is not actually that huge, outside a few ultra-high-end census tracts

johnqpublic.bsky.social•339 days ago

Somewhat related, 3% municipal empty-homes-tax in Vancouver.

British Columbia also has a real AirBnB problem that the province is trying to tackle through legislation.

The feds are trying to stimulate as much construction as possible on federal properties, major housing crunch up here too.

hilzoy.bsky.social•339 days ago

https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/02/14/rent-stabilized-apartments-vacant/

jamellebouie.net•339 days ago

there were something like 3.7 million housing units in new york city that year.

vituperativeerb.bsky.social•339 days ago

Why would it be financially better to let an investment condo remain vacant rather than rent it to someone?

petergratton.bsky.social•339 days ago

Because hnwi’s use them as fourth/ fifth homes. You can see this clearly along any expensive coastline—the house sits there, lit up, a/c’d. In places like the northern coast of the DR, you can see the vast miles of emptiness. This doesn’t affect the outer buroughs where nimbyism is more the issue.

vituperativeerb.bsky.social•339 days ago

Sorry, they’re being used as jokes or they are vacant investments

dlbowman76.com•339 days ago

It's so aggravating. You can build high-density tower block housing that is actually pretty nice to live in, but all the toxic factors that contribute to NIMBYism are preventing this.

yinkadoubledare.bsky.social•339 days ago

airbnb, on the other hand, has not existed for nearly a century, and is probably contributing along with the NIMBY zoning problem (because NIMBYs have also been a problem for a lot longer than very recently)

mtsw.bsky.social•339 days ago

its frustrating to talk about because airbnb is a real problem that takes a non-trivial number of units off the market without being *the* problem. (and its unevenly distributed - it is a HUGE problem for housing in some resort areas in particular)

mtsw.bsky.social•339 days ago

(that said idk how much "ensuring a stable housing supply for townies in ski resort towns" is gonna get people out of bed to fight them vs the housing problems in big cities)

scarymrolmecman.bsky.social•339 days ago

Always feel like people want to talk about "THE ONE HOUSING PROBLEM," when the challenges for housing in NYC are quite different from those in New Orleans or LA or even those in SF

yinkadoubledare.bsky.social•339 days ago

right, not the entire problem (although not far off from being the major issue in a few areas), but certainly A problem. it's a direct removal of normal rental units and making them fake hotel units.

of course, not really an issue where there is enough housing being built for renters and buyers!

mtsw.bsky.social•339 days ago

ive said it many times before and elsewhere in this very thread but for the record, my position is that Airbnb should be essentially banned

vaguepariah.bsky.social•339 days ago

Airbnb units in LA only account for fewer than 6 months of anemic housing production. You could ban Airbnb tomorrow and it would barely move the needle and only briefly.

yinkadoubledare.bsky.social•339 days ago

California is a whole other situation than a lot of other areas. NIMBYs have even bigger incentive to be NIMBYs there because they largely don't feel skyrocketing property values in their property tax assessments at all due to Prop 8. It's all benefit to homeowners to oppose new housing.

dmswojcicki.bsky.social•339 days ago

Also there is the accumulated demand for housing at the bottom of the income scale since the Faircloth Amendment was passed in 1998 (and decades of disinvestment in public housing prior...). The NYT Magazine story on Vienna's public housing puts our policies into stark relief.

acekatana.bsky.social•339 days ago

Market segmentation is extremely relevant to all of this! There is a tendency of flatten everything into “units” and that really obscures a lot of dynamics

craigdanz.bsky.social•339 days ago

Housing is worth so much as an asset BECAUSE of the shortage. Financialization exacerbates affordability but it doesn’t cause it and wouldn’t be much of an issue if we fixed the underlying supply problem.

holt.bsky.social•339 days ago

Theres probably an interesting analysis to be done about how much the increase in information from sources like the MLS, and the increase in the enforceability of capital discipline (NIMBYism) rewards financialization.

syzygyformation.bsky.social•339 days ago

I just assumed the shipping containers were cheaper for some reason

davethetentakil.bsky.social•339 days ago

Or, alternatively, "permission to erect a building that would provide a Minimum Attractive Rate of Return".

kmagnacca.bsky.social•339 days ago

There was a big scandal here last year about planning officials taking bribes to approve permits, but the reality is that it's the only way to get one. It's not a matter of complying w regulations, even if everything is in order & simple it takes at least a year *if you're lucky* to get permitted.

cesarini.bsky.social•339 days ago

Oh man, can you imagine how much they would bitch and moan if we did build out of shipping containers? They would be so ugly and ruin the neighborhood character!

thundergoose.bsky.social•339 days ago

At least part of the problems are people like my neighbor who lives and works in another state but keeps a house on my block for when he wants to (checks notes) visit his kid. Otherwise it stands empty. See also dedicated Air B and B houses and condos.

jeff-notheotherone.bsky.social•339 days ago

My experience in amabalA:

People: We need more homes

Developers: WE WILL BUILD EM!

P: They any good?

D: Um they go up fast, better buy now!

P: Will they fall down?

D: NAH NAH THEY GOOD …hang on, wypipo freaking out that POC might buy em… OK we can build you a custom home starting at $500,000

themilfmag.net•339 days ago

srsly i get no greater "posting is praxis" vibes than from chronic mass (housing) debaters

swolecialism.bsky.social•339 days ago

or permission to erect the kind of building that the market actually wants

justinskolnick.bsky.social•339 days ago

in the places people want to live

borgly.bsky.social•339 days ago

Frickin' legalize SROs again dammit. You might not like the class of folks who live in them, but guess where they live when they can't?

mtsw.bsky.social•339 days ago

there was a long-time SRO on broadway in san diego that was closed and converted into a high-end boutique hotel. can't be replaced because new SROs are illegal.

irontuna.bsky.social•339 days ago

A bunch of these in nyc too including some place in chelsea

jimbosaur.bsky.social•339 days ago

"5/1s by-right, everywhere." is one of those heartbreaking "obviously correct but probably electoral poison" policies that make me at least understand where democracy-skeptics are coming from.

m01r4.bsky.social•339 days ago

there’s a kind of housing/transit guy on youtube who is always talking about singapore, which: lol

jimbosaur.bsky.social•339 days ago

Tired: Make everywhere Levittown
Wired: Make everywhere Singapore
Inspired: Make everywhere Vienna

jamie.squad51.us•339 days ago

Karl-Marx-Hof is a 5/1.

neorsdstan.bsky.social•339 days ago

5/1s have a lot of issues and while they are needed, we really need to do better

mtsw.bsky.social•339 days ago

take the single staircase point access block multifamily housing pill

liminal-lds.bsky.social•339 days ago

Oh man, it's been too long since I've seen Mike Eliason push for point access blocks. Has he made it to Bluesky?

mtsw.bsky.social•339 days ago

i think he has an account here but bounced back to vichy twitter?

bobbywilliams.bsky.social•339 days ago

"People to erect a building" is also in short supply.

shebwooleybio.bsky.social•339 days ago

In many cases the buildings needed are aready there, sitting empty: apt units, schools and motels that have been closed down, unrentable office space, and things like Denver's recently closed-down old VA Hospital. They all have bathrooms and most have kitchens, or can be equipped with microwaves.

lunakersauzon.operajunkie.net•339 days ago

There's no shortage of houses, but there is an overabundance of property management companies buying out and renting at exorbitant rates any available homes in decent condition.

sladeb.bsky.social•339 days ago

People prefer technological solutions to what are essentially political problems. Once you notice it you see it everywhere.

loki1001.bsky.social•339 days ago

It is the "nudge" phenomenon. The idea is that you don't have to face political resistance if you can create this archane structure around the effect you wish to achive.

loki1001.bsky.social•339 days ago

The idea that some people would dedicate their entire lives to ensuring more housing does not get built is unfathomable to most people. And yet they are one of the most powerful forces in America.

gravity-pike.bsky.social•339 days ago

Honestly, I think that people are willing to consider shipping container homes because they feel like something needs to be done about homelessness, but strongly feel that the homeless don't deserve a home that's as good as their own. They should be forced to live somewhere categorically worse.

kristalerista.bsky.social•339 days ago

We’re stuck in an endless cycle of “we have so many vacant jobs and we need people to fill them! But they don’t have anywhere to live. Let’s build more housing. we can’t cause that would ruin the quaint character of our state. Oh no things are falling apart b/c we dont have the people to do the work

trexpushups.bsky.social•339 days ago

Good thing we don't have major party candidate running on deporting 15-20 million people.

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