High housing prices are a massive tax on both middle class and investment. It all flows to landlords and lenders. Cut housing prices by 1/2 - 2/3 and the middle class has money for other things. We need an Elon Musk for housing.
Anecdotally, when my parents bought their house in the east bay, it came with old (now invalid) covenants that literally said no black people could live there unless they were servants. The house was built in the 40s!
In fact, it has to be that way given the housing/cost structure of the Bay Area and its ripple effects: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/dining/san-francisco-rest...
Add to that imminent price increases due to impending minimum wage hike in SF in July.
So America is the only racist country?
While European countries would've been racist as well, it was uniquely American to have, in the country, such a large number of the people they were racist towards. If there's not many people the racist policy would have an effect on, it isn't going to have much of an effect at all.
Secondly, how about reducing our reliance of fossil fuels and instead using electricity for driving the cars (I know, I know, electricity comes largely from fossil fuels, but net, it is beneficial to use it for driving cars than gas)? That's not going to benefit the common public?
There is nothing confusing about it. There's no difficult problem that needs outside-the-box solutions. It's currently illegal to build as much housing as we need.
Make it not illegal.
It's like half the tweets on https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv
Also, in California, building more housing is a net negative for city finances due to Prop 13 (1978) passed by citizens.
"Employment, construction, and the cost of San Francisco apartments"
https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employme...
> Building enough housing to roll back prices to the "good old days" is probably not realistic, because the necessary construction rates were never achieved even when planning and zoning were considerably less restrictive than they are now. Building enough to compensate for the growing economy is a somewhat more realistic goal and would keep things from getting worse.
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I'm a Bucky Fuller fanboy. One of his ideas was factory-built helicopter-delivered homes that installed on a single mast (low site prep costs) and had all plumbing, electrical, kitchen, etc. pre-installed. You could roll out a neighborhood in less time than it takes to build one regular house. He was stymied by resistance from the construction industry, they didn't want to see their jobs vanish in a puff of automated efficiency. At one point they were going to require all the innards of these "Dymaxion Houses" to be installed on-site just to make work for the crews.
Our problem isn't that we need a technological savior, we already had one! Our problem is that we won't apply what we already have to efficiently solve our problems.
Did you know that early light-bulbs didn't burn out? There's a bulb in Livermore that has been lit for one hundred and seventeen years.[1] Modern light bulb break because they are built to. This kind of b.s. is all around us. We're living well below our possibilities as a species.
Time for NIMBY concentration camps??