Affordable Housing Program Costs More, Shelters Less
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The only sustainable way to make something affordable is to push down the prices. The only way to do it is to increase competition — which, in order, requires dramatically lowering the barriers of entry.
But it seems that nobody is actually interested in that, and NIMBY attitude and monetary diversion schemes prevail.
Remove the laws that prevent building more units and tax the value of the land as opposed to the value of the property as a whole. That second part encourages maximum use of the land, which generally means more units.
Other than that, work on the infrastructure to support the new units and get out of the way.
Guess who has the most votes for determining local policy?
This is called "Trickle Down Economics". This works for saving more of the elites money, but not for us. Frankly it just doesn't work, at all, when looked at with a lens of government. But boy, will they sell us this package that "It'll lower costs... We'll be able to hire more people.... We'll be able to...". In the end, they stockpile and shovel the money out of the US.
If X costs $100 and by eliminating ALL governmental costs, goes to $80... and the average person only has $40, neither choice does a damn bit of good. They're both unaffordable. But now, one pays less to the burden of citizenship and public resource usage (aka Taxes).
You want to stimulate the economy? Put money in the hands of the people! Yeah, you won't "save" that mythical $20 of compliance costs, but if the citizenry has $150, now they can afford your X. Course, the argument here is that X now goes up to $200. But Y over there is willing to play 'Supply and Demand' and undercut X... Just like how things do now in many markets.
But, you know, something about socialist programs makes people get up and deny the very facts about supply and demand, and competition. For some reason, they all claim that everything will miraculously buffer up by Z% because socialist programs.
Landowners are coddled by protection from competition. We want to make their lives harder.
There is no amount of money you can put in the hands of 100 people that results in them all having apartments, when there are only 50 apartments.
For every homeless person, we have 5-7 houses empty (various stats around, depending on number of homeless). http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-we-cant-just-put-ho... . We already have the supply. It's there. They are already built.
Now.. Who do these houses belong to? Banks. Insurance firms. In reality, any company that needs illiquid money storage uses property. And they extract as much worth as they can from that. That's only logical from their standpoint. And maybe some office space, sure.
But all those houses are simply rotting as people aren't living in them. I say, put them to good use. Eminent domain them, or tax them appropriately so that individuals and families can get them.
I think you're mistaking me for some capitalist. If anything, I'm more communist for essentials, socialist for 'effective member of society', and capitalist for stuff on the edge.
People need to be near each other. Near family, support networks, schools, social services, and jobs. It's not enough to have surplus housing "in the US." We need it in the specific cities and neighborhoods with affordability crises.
Your solution is for people to move thousands of miles to dead end towns with no economic opportunities or social support networks? I think you have mistaken yourself for their advocate.
Here's a litmus test: when you win, who benefits? People trying to collect wages? Or people trying to collect rent checks?
How does your communist solution decide who gets to live in California and who has to live in North Dakota?
How about finding a way to reboot the X market, so that the price goes back down to a reasonable level (e.g. $35)?
Medical is fucked. Primarily, because of complete opaqueness in everything, and heavy regulatory control over many parts. We could either use a whole lot of socialism here, or a whole lot of capitalism here. Cause right now, we have the worst of each with none of the gains.
Education is also fucked. Except this is good ol' protectionism straight up. We need look no further than the laws that forbid bankruptcy on school debt. Only one other area shares that distinction: criminal debt as a part of a punishment. Once these laws were enacted, school spending/loans/building/spending loop was going to spiral out of control. They have a captive audience, and they know it. And, a simple fix? Re-allow bankruptcy. It'd certainly be painful for the schools... but what's that phrase? "Market Correction"?
I do still think you're wrong, overall. Cheap goods don't do a damn bit of good when people don't have money. And where we're going, AI applications and robotics are going to eat a lot of things quickly. I'm just waiting for the trucking industry to go "poof".. But you know, cheap goods.. With jobless, moneyless workers displaced who can't afford even cheap.
That is not a market correction either. In practice if we took away the student loans entirely, we would see a much more reasonable school pricing. Their audience is captive because they know that they can extract an extra $10k/yr from federal assistance alone.
Those 2 areas where people were declaring bankruptcy are licensed professions. Simply put it would be easy to put a licensure check to say (If Bankruptcy is granted for bills related to school for license, it is rescinded until paid determined by judge.)
But anyways, the rates of bankruptcy were minuscule for everyone. But no matter, fuck us all over. Where does the school have to have skin in the game, when they push substandard college or lie about graduation and placement? Removing bankruptcy protectionism would greatly help the market correct. Because that's all this law does. And we all see how it affexta scholastic higher ed spending.
It's ironical that many such people would nevertheless take all aid they are eligible for.
In Poland, there's this recent government program called "500+", which wants to encourage families to have more children by offering them 500 PLN (around 125 USD) per month, tax-free, for every child after the first one. When it was introduced, I found myself surprised by all the hate from almost every one I know. For instance, the typical opinion of my cow-orkers is that the primary users of this program are pathological, lazy people who will breed more pathological, lazy people. Note that at the same time, those same cow-orkers admit that if they were eligible for it, they'd obviously take the handout.
I just don't understand where all that hate towards other people comes from. And don't get me started on immigration...
"There but for the grace of ____ go I."
As we can see by the rising obesity rates in poor communities, caloric value has been emphasized for far too long.
http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20151206/entlife/15120916...
Also, you make the claim that people are poor due to bad financial decisions, yet provide no evidence. Well, there is evidence that when given money, poor people spend it to better their lives:
https://qz.com/853651/definitive-data-on-what-poor-people-bu...
Isn't this Section 8? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_8_(housing)
The unspoken constraint in every housing debate is to avoid adding new supply and risk devaluing the existing investments made by constituents.
Just giving poor renters a subsidy puts them in competition with middle-class renters for the same units. Middle-class renters can always win that competition by repurposing some of their discretionary income towards rent. Poor renters stay priced out, and middle class renters pay more for the same units. No thanks.
Look at the raise in college tuition prices ever since goverment got involved in student loans. That is precisely what will happen when goverment starts sending landlords paychecks.
But we don't like the idea that the government might seize properties or the like as a punishment. So...
These evil landlords are not running charities. Maintnence is probably sub par because, as you mentioned, the rent is generally far below market.
Combine that rents increasing way beyond inflation and it's not good value at all.
Laws that require fire sprinklers, escape routes, and floors that don't collapse aren't the issue -- the issue lies with laws that mandate a certain amount of luxury (like minimum square-footage requirements, occupancy limits, and restrictions on roommates who aren't family).
By mandating a certain level of luxury (and thus, of cost), the only effect is to make sure that people who can't afford it will end up homeless; or illegally subletting, squatting, or some other black-market, unsafe option that leaves them at the mercy of slumlords who know that they are the last option for housing. It's crucial to note that there is no backpressure mechanism at work here -- reducing housing options for people with the least money will not cause the construction of housing that meets those standards. Mandating luxury does not work without mandating supply as well. Such zoning laws ended SROs and rooming houses (by prohibiting any new construction) and such drastic reductions in the cheapest housing options have led us to this.
Mandating any sorts of minimum standards for luxury of housing units without mandating supply will not fix anything. I use the word "luxury" intentionally here -- from the perspective of someone who has had to sleep in homeless shelters, a dry room big enough for a bed and with a door that locks (for which one has the only key) is serviceable housing.
To quote Paul Groth,
> a good hotel room of 150 square feet—dry space, perhaps with a bath or a room sink, cold and sometimes hot water, enough electric service to run a 60-watt bulb and a television, central heat, and access to telephones and other services—constitutes a living unit mechanically more luxuriant than those lived in by a third to a half of the population of the earth. As Dolores Hayden reminds us, many of the world's people would consider an American two-car garage an excellent dwelling in its own right.
Hell, even the smallest commercial office space rentals are much cheaper (i've seen some go for $200/month) and safer (they are in sprinklered buildings) than any housing most USians can access. It is morally abhorrent for zoning laws to criminalise renting a room inside a sprinklered building when the alternative is living on the street or in a homeless shelter.
Local neighborhood groups don't have the power to make people not be poor, but they do have the power to make people not be poor near them, and that's good enough in their books.
If you believe that enabling unsanitary 3rd world hellholes, just because you assume that would make housing a tiny bit less expensive, represents any type of progress... Perhaps you should rethink your priorities.
You're imagining that they're referencing 3rd-world hell holes, but they're not. Look again.
> a dry room big enough for a bed and with a door that locks (for which one has the only key) is serviceable housing.
What they're referring to is a boarding house with common lavatories and eating areas, which was deemed sufficient for most U.S. congressmen staying in Washington for the nation's first 80 years.
The case isn't being made that this is a good permanent solution. However, boarding houses are much better than the streets, which is the next lowest rung from long-term motels.
The unsanitary hellhole is the US, given how many people are forced to live on the street due to land use / zoning laws that prohibit building cheap high-density housing and a simultaneous lack of social housing.
There is nothing "unsanitary" about high-density housing if it's built with proper structural/electrical/fire safety/plumbing standards. Japan is no "unsanitary hellhole" despite the fact that it allows very-high-density housing options that would make NIMBYs shit bricks -- like manga cafés (sleeping in the cubicles tends to be allowed) and capsule hotels.
With properly installed fire sprinklers, fire-resistant materials, and working fire alarm systems, there's not much fire safety risk. Anyway, the "single family homes" that US housing policy loves (to the exclusion of everything else) never have fire sprinklers and they go up like Zippos once a fire takes hold.
So by rising that minimum level of luxury they want, you're making them work harder. The result is that the ratios are out of whack. By creating 2% homeless instead of 0.2%, you're massively increasing average luxury, and therefore making sure 20% don't live in shared housing with it's problems (e.g. everything gets stolen, especially from the weak, and of course women have some extra issues).
Your argument assumes that by lowering standards you can fix things. You can, but only by creating other problems (sanitation standards going down by a lot, for one thing, which WILL result in consequences).
It's pretty hard to see this until you've lived in both situations.
If you want to avoid this: http://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/17/asia/china-beijing-rat-tri... then you need to accept that you're also creating homeless in the process.
Better solution is to ease up on the limits on expanding supply. It's not like it's construction costs preventing new buildings from going down.
For the last two months I've been living on-and-off at a shelter, and the problems are legion as far as working my way out of it.
Finding a decent paying job while navigating the shelter minefields? I battle it everyday, but when someone steals your charging cords and toiletries while you sleep and you lose all connections to the net for a week while you figure out how to get a new USB-C charging cord with no income and miss a week's worth of trying to find work, it's easy to be discouraged and wonder if you will ever make it.
I'm 52yo and I'm exhausted all the time, except for a couple of hours in the morning after I wake and work on trying to find work. According to the health app in my phone, I'm walking 6-8 miles a day just getting between the local Starbucks where I "work", the shelter, and places where I can find some crap to eat.
What I find most odd is that there is absolutely no tech whatsoever at the shelter...no public wifi, very minimal computer access (30min a day after hours wait). Don't get me wrong I am incredibly grateful that the shelter exists, and the kind folks working there are doing God's work, but too many people "living" there are making no efforts to move on and just see the place as a free flop-house.
Lately I've been sleeping in an empty lot near downtown because I've twice now caught fairly serious illnesses sleeping at the shelter, and it's ridiculous that you are expected to bunk-up at 3p everyday at a place with no public wifi so someone like me can't work in the afternoon and evening..
Yes yes, I get it...I made the choices that put me in my shit-sandwich situation, but doesn't everyone, even the "blameless" people depicted in this story? Couldn't most have made better choices somewhere along their lives to prevent themselves from having to live in low-income situations?
Much of the article discusses how the rich developers, in Florida at least, are gaming the tax-credit side of building low-cost housing in order to enrich themselves illegally.
Same old same old. I’ve known many building contractors in my life and almost all employ various sorts of schemes to make extra money during the construction phases.
How does that happen? How does a search during jaywalking stop lead to loss of those things?
You have to take OP's word on that.
Is there a good reason not to?
[edit] Ok so I created a generic yahoo email account and added it to my profile...you were right I should at least try.
Thanks for the reminder.
Definitely remove that site from your HN profile, as the other posted suggested. It plus google severely compromises your privacy.
So yeah my conundrum...how in the hell can you be taken seriously enough to get hired and still remain basically anonymous?
I'll without a doubt admit that I'm flying pretty much blind these days trying to juggle being homeless, having terrible tech, and trying to find a way out, and I am almost surely making mistakes that may someday really come back to bite me.
It is time to wake up, recognize that SROs and the like are needed and recreate the societal fabric we tore out and never replaced.
So assuming some long-term political will to overcome the NIMBYs, here's a plan that'd actually work to solve SF's homeless problem:
1. Design a standard-plan Single-Room Occupancy building, along the style of the Russian Khrushchyovka [1]. Prefab / economy of scale, three to five stories, no elevator, shared bathrooms and kitchens. Optimize it to be the cheapest habitable room that you can give someone a key to.
2. Pass a state law allowing a department to buy land and build one of these regardless of local zoning and input. You want to stop us from fixing the housing problem? Too bad, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
3. Add in a feedback mechanism to force construction of more housing where/when rents get too high. Something like set up a waitlist system and automatically build another one of these when the waitlist gets long enough inside a geographic area. Qualify people for free or subsidized rents based on current market rates - rental rates go up, and you can make more money and still qualify, which causes more people to enter the waitlist, which causes more units to get built, which drives rents down.
Real estate and subsequent policy is hard. Everybody has to live somewhere, and people who work have to work somewhere. Those places have to meet all sorts of standards which cost money, even if we can all agree they are necessary (ex: running water, bedrooms need window access for fire escape, etc).
The costs of real estate raise the costs for everybody. The renter. The company on floor 6. The bagel shop around the corner. When their real estate costs go up, the rent goes up, the prices of bagels go up, and so on.
There is no magic wand to fix this problem. Like climate change, it is an enormous problem that requires action on as many fronts as possible.
As far as we can tell, population will keep rising, and the value of land will keep going up. Real estate cost problems are never going to just go away.
Actually, there is.
Increase the availability of desirable living spaces in and around urban centers, and reduce commuting time by connecting these desirable living spaces with a working public transportation network.
If you look at the greater picture, the reality is that most land on earth, even land deemed livable, is vacant. There lies the solution to the problem. The only question that remains is: how do we get people to move there?
how do we get people to move there?
It seems the two of you agree, unless you feel that getting people to move there is a small problem that does not require action on many fronts.
Also, once you move enough people, real estate costs go up again and the problem isn't really solved.
Absent government subsidies for matters such as the provision of roads and utilities, as well as programs like Medicaid that help rural Americans find health care, rural Americans would be dirt poor.
I live in upstate New York. I know well the cities, the suburbs, and the rural backcountry. They are truly worlds apart.
It is absurd that somebody is paying $550/month to live in a place without running water. In under 2 months I built a cabin for under $500 and have enough space to grow a garden.
I am very in favor of Georgist style land taxation.
> There is more than enough land for everyone to have a small chunk. With technology it is easy to be connected and employed anywhere.
Anywhere there are utilities. Also, who decides how those chunks are allocated? Who gets a chunk in Monaco and who gets one in the New Mexico desert?
Henry George has some good ideas on valuing and taxing land. Maybe even negatively taxing the worse land.
You're missing the point. The reason why housing is expensive is not the lack of available land. The reason why housing is expensive is due to the fact that a lot of people want to live in and around very specific locations and don't want to waste time commuting to and from those locations.
The other half of the answer is that (in short) we've created a set of legal structures to prevent land owners from building the amount of housing that the market would otherwise build on their own land.
The scarcity, and thus value, comes from excluding people.
There actually is a lack of affordable land. Rural land has been amalgamated by the agriculture companies, timber companies, and government. Buying rural land usually has to be done in large acreages and it is still expensive.