The American Housing Crisis Might Be Our Next Big Political Issue

They think the YIMBYs are dismissing their concerns about gentrification and displacement. I'm not sure that's true, but either way, the YIMBY movement's image is of a bunch of affluent white tech workers who don't care about low-income, minority residents whose neighborhoods might get gentrified. That image will need to change if the YIMBYs want to succeed.

Because they don't have low income leaders in their organization and they've been dismissive of minority concerns. See: http://www.sfexaminer.com/sb-827-rallies-end-yimbys-shouting...

While I support the Yimby approach the truth is it is largely led by upper middle class white people. To get things done in politics, you don't to have the best argument, you need to have the best consensus of citizens and $$ supporting you. The yimby org doesn't realize this - they think they can steam roll over minority groups to get things done, but frankly they need to a better job building bridges with these groups. This is how politics work.

Which voting block, besides rural land owners, does this?

Rent control to reduce uncertainty for people already living there isn't a lottery odds thing - it's not a solution to the problem of hard to find new places, it's a solution to the problem of getting priced out by external forces.

It has side effects, but is also addressing a specific problem people want to handle that isn't necessarily fixed by "just build a bunch of new market-rate housing."

Weakening rent control in the 90s in CA didn't prevent the current homelessness problems, so I have some skepticism around taking that even further. Pushing people who could afford marginal housing into no longer being able to afford it seems like a bang-up way to increase homelessness.

Part of the root of the problem seems to be cities that trying to both avoid densifying but also increase commercial and office space and occupancy and jobs. Either policy would be fine by itself, but they explode when put together. Some cities are slowly starting to realize this, but saying "we don't need a constant economic growth rate of X% if we don't want the feel of our city to change" may not be an easy choice for politicians to sell.

(to be sure, the most insidious form of rent control in California is Prop 13)

Rent control isn't the fundamental cause of high housing costs: it's mostly a matter of supply and demand. And, yes, rent control limits supply a bit, but nowhere near as much as complicated, arcane, and expensive building and zoning codes.

Given the trade offs, the only reforms I'd make to rent control is having some kind of gradual income requirements. The higher your income, the less rent control you get, up to the point (say, $100k+) where you aren't protected by it at all. Even that is mostly for optics, though, and wouldn't help housing costs too much.

I feel like its a branding issue. "Rent Control" sounds good, I don't think people consider it beyond the initial feeling the words imbue. It is also weird that young people are generally in favor of rent control even though they move frequently and it is just another wealth transfer from the young to the old.

The problem isn't with rent control, it's wit rich folks opposing new construction because of various flimsy reasons.

Where do you think new housing has come up most in the Bay Area? Poor neighborhoods with lots of rent control, or rich neighbourhoods?

(Hint: you don't hear about gentrification issues in rich parts of the bay area because nobody can build new things there)

> People should be means tested every so often

This would create disincentives for seeking a higher salary (because an increase in salary might be offset by getting kicked out of your BMR unit).

> YIMBYs are supremely confident in its diagnosis of the complex housing problem: it's rent control and other impediments to the free market

YIMBYs do not have a position on rent control, because both sides are advocated for and debated.

The biggest problem with the YIMBY movement is people blindly accepting criticisms of YIMBY without bothering to investigate what YIMBY movements actually believe.

When there was a big panel discussion in my small Bay Area town last year, without a YIMBY member on the panel, the panel all concluded that YIMBYs oppose affordable housing. However, in this small town, the ONLY PEOPLE WHO SHOWED UP to advocate for recent affordable housing projects were YIMBY members. And it turns out that SB 35, the only YIMBY legislation I know about, is actually about building affordable housing.

So please stop reinforcing false beliefs.

YIMBYs do a great job of listening. They have changed their engagement in response to this. They are politically naive in that they believe they can advocate for ideas and trust that people will listen to them, instead of seeking out engagement of current power brokers first. And for example they didn't expect SB 827 to get the momentum that it got, perhaps not realizing that including transportation and basic good urban planning they will wake up a lot more people than with they did with the SB 35 affordable housing bill.

California politics is all about optics, unfortunately. At least, it is, until we stop letting that happen.

San Francisco is essentially built out as far as zoning will allow. Attempts to fill in the gaps are frequently opposed and defeated in the community review proces. So I’m skeptical that there’s a lack of interest, but if you’re right, what’s the harm in zoning for more units anyway? If there’s truly no interest after the standard 700sqft “luxury apartment” falls to its Manhattan, Seattle, or Chicago price (all of which are a steal for SF), the only change has been on paper.

Then the jobs will move to where the people are.

A community near me is booming because telecommuting makes it practical to commute to NYC by train twice a week. Eventually that will lead to new business and economic activity. We shouldn’t be screwing up property rights everywhere because tech companies are too stupid and have too much dumb money to geographically diversify and prefer to pay too much for talent instead.

Something like 80+% of urban Americans live in cities with an average house price below $300k.

The South is the most populous region with 114 million but includes part of what you mentioned. If you combine Texas (28 mil) and Georgia (10 mil) you would almost get the population of California (38 mil). Florida also has 20 million people.

For a US election, it really is how many Congressional Districts (House) or States (Senate) is this an issue.

Although, if it is the party of the incumbent is in charge of the municipalities where this is a problem, it might get a bit uncomfortable for the incumbent to place it as a major part of their reelection strategy.

Yes, it is true.

Thanks for your addition to my post. Khrushchev built a lot but it was not a fully solved problem, based on your post.

I am not Russian, have been to Russia, speak only a little bit of Russian.

I think an AMA thread would be a very good idea! I would be interested to hear more about DRAKON and any LISP and AI work that was done during those periods.

Perhaps not, but my experience visiting Moscow recently suggests that they're in perhaps a slightly better place? There are dense residential areas in various parts of the city, even if the housing stock is older and less than stellar. Those areas are well-served by transit, which is expanding, improving, and generally seems to function better than most of what's in the Bay Area. It's by no means perfect (protests against renovation/relocation programs and the current waste management snafu clearly demonstrate otherwise), but at least they're doing something, as opposed to what appears to be a partial "ignore the problem and we can keep single-family homes throughout all of the SF Bay Area forever" mentality here.

I love learning about accounts like this because some of it is so alien to the way things work in the Western capitalist system. I grew up later but still saw some tail end of communism and some things like

* You were told which job you would get

* You would be assigned an apartment to live in. Imagine going to the DMV but instead it's a housing office where you'd get a place

* You could opt out of paying for a TV subscription but then a government agent would come to put a seal on the TV. They put a couple of pieces of lead around the electric plug, and crimp them on with a special tool that stamped a tamper-evident pattern. Just wild!

* In the early days I am told there would be frequent "work actions" where workers at random companies would be asked to go outside and do manual labor where needed e.g. when clearing right of way for a railroad, laying ties, etc.

The Japanese are used to living in tiny accommodations. If we follow their route we could probably reduce costs a lot. Get rid of parking spots. No outdoor patio. Can easily reduce the square footage by 50%.

>but at the same time it’s the nicer multifamily buildings that face stiffer opposition, due to the perception that such buildings are inherently reserved for the impossibly wealthy.

I do think you're looking at two different opposition demographics here. On the one hand, you have homeowners concerned about the future of their neighborhood; on the other hand, you have low-income communities concerned about gentrification. While they occasionally support the same political candidates -- particularly in San Francisco -- they live in different places, and crucially, the latter often live in neighborhoods which have had many apartment buildings for years (e.g. the Mission). These are not entirely separate fights, but I did mean to address the homeowners' concerns in this particular argument, motivated by the observation that suburbs are quite common and underutilized. I would even say that building larger apartment buildings in low-income medium-density districts is the norm for addressing housing issues right now (that and building exurbs), while upzoning less dense areas is not currently performed in a way that seems to point to a more general strategy for addressing housing issues.

That's a good point, but, despite what some may wish, we don't actually have a national politics that's decided by a straight-up popular vote. There are a lot of people in those cities, but they don't always wield proportional influence on national issues.

>Something like 1/3rd of the population lives in the DC-NYC-Boston corridor. Throw in the West Coast, Chicago, etc. and you're looking at a much more national problem.

There's a lot of people who live in single family houses in those areas.

Chicago is an odd inclusion in that sentence.

> I don't see you moving to St. Louis to buy a cheap house.

I own a home very near the one in that Zillow link.

Nah, it's simpler than that. People have some bizarre views about the Midwest, as evidenced by the FUD-laden reply to my post above:

- "What about crime!?" (Most of the region is quite safe. The MSA is about middle of the pack on crime. Yes, there are some bad neighborhoods. And there's a ~0% chance anybody reading this on HN would ever live in one of those neighborhoods.)

- "How long will it take to sell a house in St. Louis?!" (The housing market is doing fine there.)

- "Do they even have jobs in St. Louis?!" (Median household income in the metro is a pretty healthy $52,340.)

I think I have a pretty good idea what that guy imagines St. Louis -- and Cincinnati and Indianapolis and Milwaukee and Kansas City -- to be like, and I strongly suspect it's got a pretty loose relationship with reality. Unfortunately for cities like St. Louis, marketing is important, and there's probably nothing I could say that would change that guy's mind. There's almost nothing in his comment that makes any real sense, but it is what it is.

From experience, people do not want you to respond to complaints about the high cost of housing on the coasts with evidence that the problem isn't universal.

If you accept that the South and the Midwest are legitimate places to live, then you're forced to really consider it, which is difficult -- moving long distances is hard! It's much easier to conclude that those places aren't real options.

i agree with your assessment that we are artificially constraining city populations. i feel it's more than just the engineering potential that limits a city's capacity. consider the political climate, the economic environment, the sunk cost by existing home owners, businesses, and city services, the accumulated technical debt of legacy construction practices, artificial boundaries developed by cities to bolster real estate values, and not to mention the accumulated debt of a city like san francisco which the last i read was at $10B. there are a lot of forces at play to gain consensus especially when you have significant momentum moving along a trajectory started easily 30 years ago that lead us to where we are today.

more importantly, it's far easier to create incentives to entice companies with high economic value and high paying jobs to an area with few competitive forces.

physical limit is probably to narrow to effectively argue my original position. there are many limiting factors including physical boundaries of geography. consider the political climate, economic environment, accumulated technical debt of past construction practices, artificial boundaries development by cities to bolster real estate values, not to mention investments made by individual home owners and businesses. there are a lot of forces at play to gain consensus especially when you have significant momentum moving along a trajectory started easily 30 years ago that led us to where we are today. and not to mention the accumulated debt of a city like san francisco which the last i read was at $10B. these forces are like concrete or better yet non-newtonian in nature, the more you stir the pot the more rigid it becomes.

i agree there are a lot benefits to density, i'm not down playing those benefits. but i do think we have a lot of great technology in play and coming down the pipe that allows us to have many of the same benefits across large geographic areas.

also i feel large cities are captive to it's wealthy benefactors whether it's a company, an individual, or a politician who wields influence.

more importantly, it's far easier to create incentives to entice companies with high economic value and high paying jobs to an area with few competitive forces.

It’s not really a solution so much as it is a bandaid. Sure, you could raise interest rates and nominal house prices will go down. But it doesn’t solve the problem of limited housing supply in places like the Bay Area.

It's not a terribly elaborate solution, just a simple and good one: let's have the federal reserve stop promoting monetary policy that encourages reckless spending, easy money, expensive houses, and tons of plastic shit.

Some people present it as a solution to all the world's ills, which it is far from. But it's a good foundation for many solutions for many ills.

Not GP, and this comment is copied from earlier in my history, but...

One example: the US central bank's (Fed) Quantitative Easing (QE). In my view, QE's inflation happened before QE started. A significant purpose of QE was to prop up the loans made before the financial crisis. The inflation happened with the creation of trillions of dollars of securitized sub-prime housing loans. Rather than allowing those loans to default, the Fed is acting as a buyer of last resort through QE MBS purchases [0]. Without the Fed, much less money would be available for housing loans, and their prices would return to historical ratios to income [1, 2]. [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MBST

[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/....

[2] Blue line in http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data/Fig3-1.xls

My goal is not to create a Venezuela like housing crisis.

But housing investment is sucking in $ from everywhere, even non-American investors. Some at top are raking in money while everyone else is paying for it.

There is a reason more and more wealth is concentrated in less and less people at the top.