Housing should be affordable except for when I sell my house for $1M

NYC is an archipelago separated by large bodies of water, and it is hard to avoid going through Manhattan to go between the western suburbs, the northern suburbs/Bronx, and the eastern suburbs/Brooklyn/Queens. What few links exist are always horribly congested.

I think your causality is backwards. Why has downtown and midtown always been the two main population centers, and not one continuous city? Because that’s where the exposed bedrock is, with some swampy midlands in between in the West Village. Geology.

If your neighborhood hires landscapers, or has a pool, or you share literally any part of the building structure, then an HOA comes into play. Often new developments have private roads that need maintenance, snow clearing, etc.

This is because small local governments are often too cash poor to foot the additional road maintenance, utilities, etc so they want to offload the cost to the developers/ the developers customers.

It all comes down to luck of the draw.

Sometimes I even break the rules and put my garbage bins out too early and leave them out too late and I’ve never heard a word about it.

There was even a foreclosed house in the neighborhood that was increasingly unmaintained, and the HOA hounded the bank and got them to take better care of the property until it was finally sold.

Overall, our HOA is a net positive.

I also was part of an HOA for 4-unit condo building I lived in previously. It was perfectly fine and its purpose and necessity was very apparent.

I’m sure there are nightmare HOAs out there, just like there are nightmare neighbors in places with no HOA.

When I bought my first house, I was adamant that I didn’t want an HOA. Over the next ten years the neighborhood went to crap. I ended up living next to neighbors who didn’t maintain their yards, parked junker cars on their lawn and let their houses go to trash.

When I moved, I specifically wanted an HOA. After five years, I still love my HOA. Mostly for two reasons. First, other neighbors here generally have the same mind set and care about their most expensive possession. Second when someone starts letting things slide the HOA slaps ‘‘em on the wrist.

But they also aren’t allowed to monitor grass height and whatnot.

But that’s the big thing with all construction. It’s super, super regulated. It’s probably the most heavily regulated thing there is… what gets built is the small subset of things that can both work financially and get approved. If you got on the right merry go round early enough, it’s great. It’s probably the biggest thing creating inequality.

The irony is that long term, many HOAs hurt property values. But supposedly they exist to enhance property values.

I've seen rents go up with inflation where inflation grows at 25% yoy, and I've seen people kicked out of an apartment 3 months after moving in because the owner found a buyer with a good deal.

But I agree with you, single family housing is the goal for some cultures and generations, and it was carefully crafted by governmental policy, propaganda, marketing and third party interests. We are now seeing the consequences of such.

Yet, not all people have that goal, but a lot are content to just owning a place to live even with relatives, a community or others.

I feel it's hard to not wanting to own something if it grants more rights and protections against injustices. In the countries I've lived, having a property deed of any sorts with your name on it makes your life so much better and stress free.

I read an article recently (can't find it immediately) proposing a social housing mechanism where you pay into it via rent and gain equity not in the specific housing unit itself, but rather in the social housing program as a whole. Kind of like a REIT, only at a certain point you get an entitlement to a housing unit and no longer have to pay rent, as if you'd paid off a mortgage.

Rates in European countries [1].

Rates in the US [2].

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/246355/home-ownership-ra...

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

Having previously been renting in the SF Bay Area, ownership worked out much better in my case. With the rate that rent had been increasing there it'd take several bad unexpected house repairs each year to equal the increases.

Factoring in planned improvements might make money spent over time more of a wash, but the big difference there is that I can save and plan for improvements… point in case I have planned major bathroom renovations that I've been sticking money into a high yield savings account for. If push comes to shove, don't actually need to do the renovations though, and that money can go towards other more important things helping mitigate or prevent financial disaster. On most peoples' salaries that's difficult to do when renting unless you're renting something so small that it's difficult to use as anything but a place to sleep.

Even when a big unexpected house expense inevitably happens I will have had the benefit of having been able to invest the cash that would've otherwise have been spent in the meantime somewhere where it's making some interest instead of going into the black hole of rent with no returns at all.

China has a huge population. So it's more reasonable for them to emit more gas given population size.

If we want to be pedantic, the tiny middle eastern oil rich cities are the biggest emitters per capita but their impact is small given the small population. Australia also beats the US but they are also much smaller then the US.

In terms of any reasonable impact measurement the world stands to gain the most if the US cuts down usage. Hence why I chose the US as the number one emitter. We stand to benefit if China cuts down too but they are at roughly half our emissions per capita meaning such cuts will be viciously closer to the bone if you know what I mean.

My point with the landfill is reductio ad absurdum. There is definitely something that you would oppose if proposed to be built near your home. I guess you are saying at that point you would be a nimby too? And I'm saying that's not a debate that gets us anywhere in terms of where to build things we need built, it just leads to further polarization.

Also, I would suggest closely analyzing your thoughts and feelings when you run into a situation where you are broadly considering some category of people "morons or evil". Such categories obviously exist, but when you see them in the real world, the picture is often more complex than you might be willing to admit at first.

This isn’t an ask. It’s a general grievance.

> media did a pretty good job of depicting people being dragged away by riot police screaming as hippies getting bored and leaving

I was there. Never saw screaming people dragged around. Did see tear gas, which isn’t nice. Not saying it didn’t happen, but it wasn’t common. Mostly, people were yelling at each other about stuff being stolen from their tents.

Those are so vague as to be meaningless, and so sweeping as to be quixotic. Protests always fail when there is not a clear and attainable path to success. This is something successful movements understand, and unsuccessful ones don't.

Private ownership of land is actually in the governments best interest. Private individuals will improve land creating further tax. And buildings and people are the 2 things of value a government has. With private ownership the people are truly invested in the government and the government with the people.

Let me introduce you to the myriad of definitions of income and area, and how dare you suggest we include public subsidies or salaries in the calculation, also, why aren’t we creating a special category for [things]. These floating variables immediately corrupt. You can fight political nature, or you can write good policy.

You can’t. Plenty of countries have no-foreigner and first-time only requirements, and they’re flagrantly violated throughout. There isn’t a demand-side solution to housing I’ve seen. That said, there are better and worse ideas, and the affordable-housing gimmick is among the worst.

Similarly we are "richer" because we have nice cars, but also you can't do almost anything in the US without a car (outside of a few cities). So the cost of the car is not a luxury, it's a basic requirement to participate in society.

In other words, in 1940 you might have been able to opt out of a car and post high-school education and have a normal life. In 2023, you arguably can't.