How did we create a society where we can’t afford to live in our own country?

Perhaps not in California, but it's worth noting that some places, England being among the forefront in this[0], do recognize the right to light is an important property right.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_light

For Georgia: https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/2010/title-44/chapter-9...

For a well-functioning market that doesn't get bothered by protests and other political machinations, the government needs to provide an easy mechanism to pay for whatever it is you care about. Any market which is restricted to folks who can afford high-cost lawyers and custom legal contracts, that market will be inefficient. Saying, "put a building-height covenant on it" in effect means "let's spend money and time on political advertisements and protests so neither of us are happy."

But the radius within which homeowners gain is wider than the radius in which homeowners bear inconveniences (e.g. shade on their garden). So of course it's rational for a homeowner to be pro commercial development in their city and near their neighbourhood (as it would increase demand for housing, and hence increase property value), but against commercial development near enough to affect traffic and noise levels.

"It is ironic to tell service workers that, in the name of democracy, they can’t vote for the councils who decide the zoning in any of the cities where they spend their economic lives because they happen to live across a town border."

I don't think this is a problem at all. These people are pursuing a very rational arbitrage strategy between place of work and place of living - and it is paying off for them. It is not the "service workers" who are clamoring for less regulation in trendy housing markets - it is overeducated, underemployed hipsters whose self identity is tied to living in a certain type of place and whose life script no longer accommodates the steps their parents took to climb up the housing ladder.

If fancy coffee and cute stores are so important that one would sacrifice the basic building blocks of wealth building and family stability then so be it - but I am not giving up the progressive wins of the past[1] to enable this (bad) strategy.

[1] Which, in my neighborhood, are quite profound. The Pt Reyes National Seashore, the Mt. Tam watershed and accompanying open spaces, agricultural zoning throughout west marin, etc. Remember that all of these were all achievements of the progressive left.

Manufacturing used to be concentrated in these areas because it was cheaper to ship raw materials (especially heavy and bulky ones like coal or iron ore) in and manufactured goods out over water to the ports and population centers that at the time were heavily concentrated on the east coast.

As an added bonus, the region was conveniently (and thus inexpensively) close to the coal producing regions of Appalachia that produced the fuel that powered the factories.

Once railways augmented the port network, the Great Lakes port towns were some of the first and best connected to the rail system because they were already so important economically, and rail connections reinforced their position.

Especially because even with rail you would save days and dollars getting your goods from Chicago to NY compared to the time it would take to ship them from Topeka to NY - and the same applied to acquiring raw materials.

Rail also allowed towns in the region that weren't directly on the Great Lakes or the Ohio or Mississippi rivers to participate in the boom by building spur lines. Since steel production in particular was concentrated in the region, industries that relied on steel had incentive to concentrate there, near their suppliers.

The de-emphasis of boat and rail for shipping, and their replacement by trucks in the second half of the 20th century wasn't the deciding factor in the collapse of these towns' economies, but it didn't help either because it eroded their existing advantages.

Edited to add (though this is already long): the erosion of job opportunity in the US for the past couple decades has been occurring everywhere other than a few major cities such as New York and SF (and a few outliers like Pittsburgh, which was one of the hardest hit rust belt cities but has recently rebounded as a center for the medical and bioengineering industries).

Cities outside the rust belt (including those in Kansas) have also seen an erosion in opportunity as manufacturing and other mid-skill jobs have left the country or been automated away or further concentrated in the major coastal cities.

The rust belt was just the first region to be hit visibly by the problem, as much as 20 years before the impact became obvious in the rest of the country. It had farther to fall, too, being not just a stable economic region but a powerhouse.

Take Kansas. If in theory I'm making 100k and we're playing the "low taxes" game I'd probably be fine financially, but I think it would come at the cost of... well, a few things. School quality, for one- if I have kids are they going to be better educated in NJ/NY (where I am now) than Kansas?

Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, and yes Kansas

>"Affordable housing" implies that there is a job at the destination that can pay a wage that can pay the mortgage

seems to imply disbelief that people can live well outside major cities. I'd prefer to be charitable, as the GP has stated elsewhere that they are not American and didn't know, but I've seen that line of thought here enough to understand why the parent could get defensive.

Source: I bought a house in one of these neighborhoods recently because it was so cheap. While there was absolutely nothing near me to do, going downtown still only took 15 minutes, so I had absolutely no problem with life there. I had my silence and my work-from-home office in my comedically large, cheap house and then if I wanted to catch a show or get dinner I would hop in the car and go downtown to meet up with friends.

I actually live in Boston now and am paying twice as much as my mortgage for a third of the space. Not an exaggeration. And it actually takes me twice as long to get out and do some things because Boston is so congested with traffic. Sadly, I think by the time I ever return to Austin, I'm sure it will have seen enough growth that it will be much the same cost to get culture from my suburban house.

The parent poster is right: most of the USA is cultural wasteland. It's also largely an entrepreneurial wasteland. New value creation is concentrated in the same hot spots as new culture creation.

This is always true everywhere to some extent but it's gotten much worse over my life time. I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio and I remember being a teen and an early twenty something there. You knew you weren't New York but there was a sense that things were possible. I worked on some pretty cutting edge software stuff around web and Internet there in the late 90s. Today it's an opium addiction ward and everyone who wants to do anything leaves. Meanwhile the "alpha cities" are experiencing uncontrollable real estate hyperinflation since everyone who wants to do anything must move there. This real estate hyperinflation problem is a symptom of something much larger.

The majority of the USA (by land area) is in a permanent malaise and has been since ~2000-2001. I quite frankly find it terrifying. It's a precursor to fascism, totalitarian socialism, or dissolution.

Here you see people as individuals.

> and that only the wealthy have the means to achieve it.

And here you distinguish classes.

I think this is a class issue, with at the top level: the "wealthy to the extend that you do not have to work to survive" at one side, and the "rest of us" on the other side.

Concentrating wealth to the extend that you can scrape by is a joke. This is called scraping by.

I saw this quote once and had to laugh:

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck

I had to think if it when reading your comment :)

.. which is also an option in the "drive out the poor people" scenario, no? Also, have we given up on the idea of making businesses try to obey the law?

Why? Because it will be competing for buyers with Charlie's, Dave's, Eve's, Frank's, George's, Henrietta's, Irma's, Julie's, etc houses that are all also for sale after their defaults and those remaining standing with cash or liquid credit will be able to be choosy and drive a hard bargain especially if they're not going to personally occupy the property (as then they are largely indifferent among the competing housing stock).

Because the CDO's value is a representation of the value of the underlying security, at least in theory.

From other sources online

>A Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO) is a security whose value is collaterized (i.e. 'backed') by a pool of underlying fixed-income assets. It is an investment that yields a regular return, its payments being derived from the performance of this pool. It is a financial instrument that traders use to sell securities that individually would be hard to sell (such as payments from a subprime mortgage). As part of a large diverse pool such securities would represent just a fraction of the total value of the underlying assets making it as a whole attractive to investors.

If the value of the CDO goes up it may represent that the ability for the underlying debt to be paid is more likely. If all debts are being paid it may represent that the initial value the asset was sold at was too low. E.g. the seller is not optimizing their ability to profit. Similarly large firms can signal weakness in the market by selling of the CDO for a lower price, divesting themselves of the future risk.

Markets are not bottom up or top down. Every actors behavior in the market can signal behavior changes in other levels of the market.

you mention hvac. i will not have hvac. you mention repainting, i dont have to paint if i dont want to. you mention flooring, my floor is concrete. you mention sheetrock, the sheetrock will be fine.

all of this is well within code and well within what i would call normal. but i hope that people will find it strange or un-buyable because that would reduce the market value of my improvements to the land and therefore lower my property tax. i am aiming to get the lowest operating cost possible, and having a home that has low liquidity actually greatly helps that. not every home has to be a flipping scheme.

2. Don't build homes out of flammable material.

3. Use the money you would've spent insuring a house on repairing it.