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Comment by epsteingpt | Hacker News Reader

For those looking for the actual data. It's from 2024 - says nothing about the current situation.

* ~37K affordable housing units (baseline) across ~400 projects * 89% rent collection rate (down from 90.6% in 2023) * That's 600 units that went 'delinquent' in 2024 - assuming a $24K 'base' rent (just a guess) that's $15M in lost rent. * Deeply troubled projects (that can't survive without this rent) are at 11% - seems like the inverse. * Cumulative arrears (unpaid rent) of $500M

Here's the problem: * If no one had to pay, no one would. * We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons. Not paying means no ownership means subjugation to the worst actions of the worst members of society. * The projects fall into disrepair, there's no way to bring them back, because they won't be maintained.

Landlords aren't a great solution to the problem to be sure. They can be greedy and heartless.

The bigger problem is the bid up of asset prices - aka private equity and class warfare. As soon as you switch (from renting to owning) your incentives immediately shift.

There doesn't actually seem to be a way around this. Taxing to spend on rent ironically makes the problem worse because you just transfer the money into the cash flows of the owners.

Anyone thinking there's a simple solution to this problem hasn't spent enough time with the problem.

View on HN

The solution is pretty simple: build and unreasonable amount of housing. And entirely new cities. America has enough land. We could build new infrastructure, give people lots of land or build houses like we did in the 40s and 50s. Of the price of a house was brought down to 1x the annual salary of the median individual income some of these problems wouldn’t exist. We need to flood the system with investment and inventory.

> The solution is pretty simple: build and unreasonable amount of housing. And entirely new cities.

So it is not simple. "Just build more" always comes up in those discussions, and while it does help (and has been proven to help), it is not the definite answer for the housing issues.

Build a new city from the ground up with a bunch of cheap modern housing, walkable and all modern goodies and ... nobody will move. People don't move just because housing is cheap. Actually many people are willing to spend a significant amount of their income to live in specific places. We move to have a job, to build a career, to be close to friends and family, to have better access to entertainment and activities, ...

This is why most developed country experience rural flight. The housing crisis is (mostly) a big city problem. You can usually find extremely cheap housing if you go deep in the countryside. And building is also cheaper (the price of the land is less, there is less permits issues, etc).

And for big cities, "build more" is way more challenging. Ground space is limited, so one solution is to build more vertical, but it is costly and has its own limitation. Spreading may cause issue with water management and require big investment in a public transport infrastructure if you don't want to have a nightmare traffic. Pollution can be a very big issue, etc. And that's for all the non-political issues. The political side of things can get very messy, very quickly.

If there was a simple solution, every big city in the world would have done it by now.

Actually we already had a solution to this, normalized remote work.

If I can work remote for Citadel from a 6 bedroom house in North Dakota it’s a choice to rent a studio apartment in Manhattan.

Not to mention the massive environmental benefits of taking cars off the streets. If you have mobility issues, working remote is a game changer. For those who need to use wheelchairs it’s miles easier to work from home. The nightmare of public transportation while in a wheelchair isn’t something I’d wish on anyone

Instead of just building houses I'd consider building social networks - of the physical kind - which have shops, entertainment, and co-working spaces within walking distance.

Not everyone loves the isolation of WFH, so you could replace "jobs" in the old factory sense, now long gone, with co-working spaces which include a social element but are basically still remote work.

The big issue with the US housing market isn't the distribution of housing, it's the distribution of work and support infra of all kinds, including social support.

Because Systems Thinking isn't much of a thing in the US you get these partial solutions when what's needed are integrated solutions that consider all of the moving parts and try to fit them together in a workable way.

The US is very good at extracting and concentrating wealth, but not so good at systems-first distributed investment.

Some people prefer to build those networks online. For one of my developer groups we have members that are a few states away and can only come in once a year.

Given a more worker friendly legal system I’d argue forcing anyone who can’t easily travel due to a disability, to work in person for a remote possible job is an undue burden.

I could never ever ever imagine that working currently however.

I don’t need work to make friends. I’d rather be freer to speak my mind when I do socialize.

I had a higher paying full remote job last year. No one there knows what my personal beliefs are, or what music I like. If it wasn’t for the profile picture they wouldn’t even know my appearance.

As it should be. I hate LinkedIn photos since it opens the flood gates to all sorts of discrimination.

The US used to be really good at this. Look at the city grid system that built new York or savanah Georgia or st Louis. Those land grant cities created blocks that were essentially self contained neighborhoods with local businesses, parks, schools, government services and housing.

> Build a new city from the ground up with a bunch of cheap modern housing, walkable and all modern goodies and ... nobody will move.

If you build a city full of empty buildings in a place with minimal existing population like the Alaskan wilderness then obviously. But what if you double the housing stock in all the existing cities where people want to live?

> Ground space is limited, so one solution is to build more vertical, but it is costly and has its own limitation.

Extremely tall buildings can get pretty expensive, but moderate height buildings (e.g. five stories) have similar per-unit construction costs to single family homes. Meanwhile now count the number of places you can draw a 100 mile radius where the median height of the existing buildings is even that tall. It might literally be nowhere in the US.

Notice also the extent to which density can thwart the scarcity of land. You put a five story building with four units per story on a plot of land instead of a single family home and the contribution per unit of the cost of land has gone down by 95%.

> Meanwhile now count the number of places you can draw a 100 mile radius where the median height of the existing buildings is even that tall.

100 miles? My dude, that is a circle from Poughkeepsie to the tip of Long Island. Forget one-story single-family housing, there is farmland in that circle. There are hundreds of square miles of state parks in that circle.

If people were willing and able to commute that distance you could easily quintuple the housing stock in that area building nothing but one story SFH.

Manhattan itself has a median height of 4-5 stories; the outer boroughs bring that down to 2-3, because commuting from Far Rockaway to midtown is already a schlep.

> My dude, that is a circle from Poughkeepsie to the tip of Long Island. Forget one-story single-family housing, there is farmland in that circle.

That's kind of the point. Notice that housing demand is recursive.

The area you're talking about is NYC metro. If you draw a 100 mile radius around Manhattan then Poughkeepsie is inside it. Is someone going to live in Poughkeepsie and commute to Manhattan? Probably not. Is someone going to live in Poughkeepsie and commute in the direction of Manhattan? Absolutely. Which in turn recursively alleviates housing pressure in that direction. More housing in Poughkeepsie frees up existing housing in Peekskill, more availability in Peekskill frees up existing housing in Yonkers, lots of people are willing to commute from Yonkers to Manhattan.

And both "100 miles" and the NYC metro area (the highest population density metro area in the US) are far extremes. The point is that even that would improve affordability if it was the only option. Meanwhile in reality there are single family homes that could be 5 story buildings in Yonkers, if it wasn't prohibited by zoning.

> If people were willing and able to commute that distance you could easily quintuple the housing stock in that area building nothing but one story SFH.

If you actually did that, would housing affordability improve? Yes it would. It's in fact what's slowly happening on its own when the better alternatives are banned; it's why housing in Manhattan isn't twice what it is now. But that's sprawl. Sprawl sucks. People pay less for housing but have 60 minute commutes. Why do that by adding far away single family homes instead of adding medium-height buildings closer to where people work?

Is your suggestion "we should do the status quo, except the bridge and tunnel commuters should be confined to tiny high-rise enclaves clustered around train stations strung out over a hundred miles"?

My suggestion is that we should get rid of zoning density restrictions and allow the market to respond to high housing costs in a sensible way instead of the nonsensible way it's being forced to right now.

It's the people who like density restrictions who keep trying to force people to build high rises next to train stations. But that's the thing that doesn't work, because high rises cost significantly more per unit to build and if you constrain where things can be built like that then the cost of land in the few areas that allow multi-unit housing gets out of control because of the legislated scarcity.

If NYC lifts all its density restrictions, why do you need people commuting inward over a hundred mile radius?

High rise buildings cost significantly more per unit to build than mid rise buildings or single family homes. They would continue to exist or even increase in number in places like Manhattan because some people are willing to pay the extra cost to have even a slightly shorter commute, and then the cost of land closer to that area will still be higher than it costs further away because of expected future growth. Building mid rise buildings reduces the effective scarcity of land, doesn't eliminate it.

So the availability of housing 100 miles away still affects the price, because there are still people (e.g. retirees who only go into the city once a month) who would choose a longer distance for a lower rent, or who prefer to live in a lower density area even for a similar cost, and giving them a place to get that means they're not bidding up the price in the city.

Expecting 31,416 square miles of area with a median height of 5 stories would be wild. That's most of the entire Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale MSA (~37,000sqmi).

But yet people think the heart of Paris, Rome or even Hong Kong are wonderful. Build the neighborhoods correctly and beautifully and the city can continue indefinitely

The Paris metro area (Aire d'attraction des villes) is only ~7,300 square miles, with the city proper only being 41 square miles. They're talking 31,400 square miles of essentially Paris proper.

So imagine the city of Paris, but stretched about 766x. If you want to include the whole metro area, then ~4.3x

Hong Kong is ~431 square miles. So about 73 Hong Kongs. But not really, because only ~25% of that area is actually urban. So more like 291x the urban area of HK.

Just because the scale doesn’t exist today doesn’t mean it can’t exist or wouldn’t be desired if built.

500 years ago people would have thought any of the cities described were impossible.

> doesn’t mean it can’t exist or wouldn’t be desired if built.

I never said anything contrary to that. I'm just saying it would be wild to see a metro area that size with that high of average development.

The above commenter suggested:

> It might literally be nowhere in the US.

It's definitely not a thing in the US. It's almost certainly not a thing in Europe either, but I'm open to being proven wrong there. It might exist in China, I haven't looked. A 100mi radius circle is massive in area. Pies are squared, if you get my point.

I'm actually inclined to believe it was a typo for 10 mile radius.

But if you design the city correctly around self contained neighborhoods that are no more than a 15 minute walk no one has to commute that far.

This makes no sense. People want to commute to the best job they can get, not the one that happens to be in their neighborhood. And people aren't going to move neighborhoods when they move jobs, especially with spouses and kids who have jobs and schools in the existing place.

Id argue you are just taking the status quo as inevitable when it is really just a result of policy choices and not how human society has ever been structured before

Madrid is doing this. Savanah Georgia did this. Manhattan did this. You could also reverse the consolidation of everything. Instead of CVS owning every pharmacy, incentives to prompt the pharmacy being owned by the pharmacist. Or a local butcher. And most jobs that require commutes don't require it now, and if cities were built with the appropriate mix of housing all incomes could live in a section of down further cutting down on commutes.

It would of course be a functioning state's responsibility to plan urban/city development and economic incentives to move there. Regarding the ownership vs renter housing debate: I think Singapore may be an excellent example of a state doing it's duty: affordable state-owned housing and people are distributed per housing per the national demographics so you also build social coherence vs ghetto-fication.

Singapore is a special case, since it doesn't really have any rural areas.

The housing doesn't need to be state owned to get the same effect though. A functional government can create the system

> nobody will move. People don't move just because housing is cheap.

Judging by what I see happening in Texas where the mentality definitely is build, build, build...people definitely do choose to live in the way flung out there suburbs and actively look to move there. Just around DFW places like Prosper, Forney, Weatherford, Burelson, and far more continue to attract tons of people wanting to buy a house even if its way flung out there. People drive from as far out as Kyle and Serenada and consider themselves part of Austin. Houston is about done with its third highway loop, TX SH 99. Tons of people don't blink an eye about having an hour long commute it seems.

I'd argue this isn't a great way to build our cities without also laying the groundwork for decent transit but you can't say people aren't choosing it. I kind of like the multi-polar MSA setup in some ways that we have here in DFW, although it could be a lot better. If you're wanting a more urban lifestyle, you don't have to be directly in Dallas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_State_Highway_99

> Ground space is limited

For a lot of the US this just isn't true. It is true for several notable big cities in the US though, I will agree. Can't really add more land to San Francisco or Manhattan cheaply.

I don’t agree. Orlando was nothing. Raleigh research triangle park was nothing. Silicon Valley was nothing until they were. Each of them were built from a single seed project: Disney, State grant of free land and two roads being built, NASA facility respectively.

We could also recognize that at certain levels of development single family residences are no longer viable. The government should use eminent domain to take entire blocks back for redevelopment vertically. They should be required to give the home owners triple the value of The property they are taking in the form of replacement square footage or a property in the new development and one or more properties elsewhere. Imagine ing each nimby stood to have a windfall in the form of multiple properties they could rent or sell in exchange for giving up their property. There would be a lot less resistance. Not no resistance but a lot less.

Build the infrastructure, plan the city grid like we used to, incentivize employers to move headquarters there, build new factories, create special economic zones. There are tons of options.

We could increase supply and demand by having a “grow to 1 billion Americans” project. We would create a path to citizenship for people with a requirement that they help build and/or finance the build of homes store fronts etc. create a targeted immigration plan so the new metro is comprised of a broad range of culture, ages, income levels and skills so cultural mixing occurs and assimilation into the shared American experience is facilitated. Make the new metros operate on lower minimum wage, grant 5 year tax abatement for individuals, give the land away for free. Then once the city is established in 20 years do the same thing.

> it is not the definite answer for the housing issues.

it kind of is.

Rural real estate prices just keep going up while the population goes down. You'd expect the opposite, but it's not happening. As long as everything except real estate is cheap and pensions are high, old people will never sell. They consider themselves to be saintly generous to leave real estate to their (then also elderly) children when they die.

Free land for internal colonisation was a successful policy that almost every country in the recent past has employed. Even small countries.

America already has plenty of cities that aren't doing very well, and aren't getting migration, so new cities aren't going to help. There's plenty of cheap housing inventory in the US, just not in the places where the jobs are.

I guess many jobs don't want to be in the places where very cheap housing exists. What is the point of earning SV money and live in a bad neighbourhood?

Depends on what you mean. Sidney, Nebraska, for example, doesn't really have "bad neighborhoods" in the NY or SF sense. But it's still a small town in Nebraska. Not a dying one, though. And you can get a non-trashed - by NY standards - 3 bedroom house for $120K.

So, what do you actually want? Do you have to live in NY or SF, or can you live in flyover country? You can buy out there, if you're willing to live out there. If it were me, I'd consider taking 20% less Silicon Valley money for full remote (if I could get that), and live where I could buy something.

> So, what do you actually want?

This. Also, not everybody wants the same thing, so there's no single universal solution.

I live in the big city because I enjoy going out dancing, having a drink at a bar with a bunch of acquaintances, coming home late at night, etc., all without having to sit in traffic or in transit for more than one hour each way. If I lived where my parents live (which I actually did for a few months at the beginning of the year, so I know), my social life would be dead.

My sister, on the other hand, lives in a big-ass house with a larger yard than her dogs know what to do with, which cost less than my apartment. She doesn't care about going out, neither does her SO; they're full WFH, and the school bus picks up her kids from their front gate. Their setup works great for them.

And it is also a matter of age and stage in life. I enjoyed living in a big city (Bucharest) for the parties and socializing (in my 20), dancing (Casa de Tango) in my 30-40, with schools nearby. Now I sometimes work from a house in the mountains next to the Ukraine border, my neighbors are hundreds of meters from each other, the nearest supermarket is 15 km away (15 min drive) and a family of deer live in my outer yard.

I mean that higher end jobs don't want to be in an area where they don't enjoy. They are the higher tax payers and they want to enjoy their lives far from the kind of people that live in rent controlled housing - there are differences in education, culture, habits that make people want to separate. Not elitism or something like this, just living with similar people. Whatever we want or say, people are different, not identical, not equal as potential friends and buddies.

Well, in Sidney, you won't live next to rent controlled housing type people. (At least, there won't be many, and you can pick a place where you don't.)

But you won't live next to people who are similar to you, either. (Though that dirt farmer's land may be worth more than your startup...)

America doesn't need new cities. There is an unbelievable amount of space wasted within every city and any urban planner can show you. Development policy in the 40s and 50s was backward and we continue to suffer the consequences today.

Absolutely, but it's easier to build quality mixed use development and walkable, bikable neighbourhoods when you don't have thousands of NIMBYs screaming down every proposal.

Pick your favorite place on the planet. Then tell me if 8 billion people can live there, and would it be the same place if they did?

I know the answer to both of these questions, and so do you.

"This solution won't work in <ludicrously overextended case>, therefore let's do nothing!" -- common software engineering requirements management technique

Go read about the history of paris. One government minister bulldozed most of the city to create what the world now loves. At the time many people wept for the loss of what paris had been (described as a that commercial street in Harry Potter a quaint, magical village that stretched on in any direction). Paris has now created business districts in the suburbs. But even they are are building single family housing instead of the low rise blocks everyone loves in paris core.

Single-family homes are built out in the suburbs. In the city proper, they build multi-story buildings. There are SFH inside the city limits, but these are old, and I'm not aware of any such new developments.

But the thing is, just like elsewhere, much fewer people actually want to live out in the suburbs, which is reflected in the price. Because getting to Paris proper sucks if you don't have a direct rail connection (which most of the outer 'burbs don't), and even then, you're likely to waste hours commuting, between the unreliable service and just sheer distance. Things are improving for "mid-distance" suburbs, but we're not quite there yet.

I live in one of the most populous metropolitan areas on the planet because it's the best place to live in the world. Increasing density and population is working great so far; maybe it won't scale all the way to 8 billion, but as and when there's a problem we'll deal with it.

... I'm talking about building new cities, which seems like the exact opposite of what you're describing?

Anyway, as far what happens when you make renting impossible (or just de facto not financially realistic), in Amsterdam it led to a lot of rentals being sold. The people buying had roughly 2x the income of those renting, on average. So, I guess that's a good thing, if your goal is to evict lower income renters so people can buy a place more cheaply. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t05cFv02pzY discusses this at length.

It can be both. A well developed new city will be faster and easier to build. Retrofitting an existing city bumps up against existing infrastructure (we have to move these pipes and electricity lines) and the individual property owners. My grand father owns the last remaining house with a few acres in a dense office park. He is single handedly blocking about a billion dollars of new development.

World is full of empty houses. It's just that people want to live in New York and not in some other place where housing is cheap or, occasionally, even free. And New York is already pretty full.

Detroit had tons of extra housing. Why have people people fled to other cities?

There is no easy fast solution to this. Just build more housing will not solve complex issues. Not saying there should not be more construction, though.

Because outsourcing and globalization decimated the economy. Now people are going back and doing amazing things. Same think happened in most cities in the Midwest and north Carolina (when textiles and furniture manufacturers left)

But the same thing happened in every downtown core when the federal highway system carved up neighborhoods and companies like IBM moved their headquarters out of new York and into suburban office parks.

Some cities are desirable. Some are not. New York is a city that people all around the world want to live in. Detroit is the opposite.

New York wasn't in the 70s and 80s for the same reason Detroit is now.

if only there were a fungible way to measure which land is "desirable" or not, and then allow people to build there instead of making it illegal.

> New York is a city that people all around the world want to live in I don't know anyone that wants to live in NY. I would not move there for a 7 figure salary. I think some opinions in this discussion are based on old realities from 50 years ago, no longer accurate.

There must just be 8 million of us that haven't figured out how to leave, huh?

NYC is certainly the best city in the US.

This is a very bold and subjective statement. I don't disagree it is the best city in US for some people, but the objective best - I doubt it.

We shouldn't talk about "objective best" without pinning down what that means. I can only really imagine it in a sort of Aristotelian sense - a city could be the best city because it most fully embodies the notion of what it means to be city (as opposed to a more rural or suburban area): a usually cosmopolitan agglomeration of people where the density/economies of scale/competition create an environment that allows art, culture, entertainment, public services, etc. to flourish. In that particular sense I think NYC is the clear best city in the country, no competition, with maybe Chicago being a somewhat distant runner-up. In that mode of thinking it's arguably the best city in the world, actually.

Now, that said: when I lived in the US I (mostly) preferred living in Seattle over NYC for the weather, natural beauty, and more laid-back vibe...subjectively Seattle was better for me, but I still don't have an issue with saying NYC is "objectively" a better city than Seattle.

> In that particular sense I think NYC is the clear best city in the country,

yes. if you don't like cities, you won't like NYC. but as far as "city" goes, NYC is the clear best and I don't think it's particularly close.

Detroit’s population has been steadily increasing, and rents there have doubled or tripled in the last 5-10 years.

I'm not sure how you get there without killing or violently subjugating tens of millions of people.

Everything preventing what you want is backed by a law. On the other side of that law is someone making a buck either via business being driven straight to them or business being driven away from someone else and they will fight to preserve it.

Even a simple amendment to the clean water act to exempt residential square footage would have every asshole who makes money off an engineering stamp up in arms. Even some guy who designs bridges would be pissed because he doesn't to compete with all the other labor that would put on the market.

Wash rinse repeat for literally every other issue that's roadblocking the construction of housing.

And this is assuming you want to just develop existing areas further (turn suburbs into cities, exurbs into suburbs, as happened from ~1870 through ~1970). Creating cities from scratch is way harder. Where are those people gonna work?

See Detroit mid-2010s for why massive overbuilding isn't a good strategy here.

That’s a bad example. Detroit isn’t an example of over building it’s an example of eroding the demand across the entire economy by outsourcing jobs. There is a big difference between a city with full employment with a robust consumer base that happens to have a ton of housing hit the market and one that has it’s entire bedrock industry carved into pieces over several generations.

If you want a valid example look at Austin Texas or Japan. Housing inventory growth in a robust economy leads to….wait for it….rent decreases.

Austin sure has become so much more affordable ... Wait!

The rent in Austin is 22% lower than it was 3 years ago.

And 25% higher than 6 years ago.

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-f...

> Now, Austin is one of the only major U.S. cities where rents are falling.

> Austin rents have tumbled for 19 straight months, data from Zillow show. The typical asking rent in the capital city sat at $1,645 as of December, according to Zillow — above where rents stood prior to the pandemic but below where they peaked amid the region’s red-hot growth.

> The chief reason behind Austin’s falling rents, real estate experts and housing advocates said, is a massive apartment building boom unmatched by any other major city in Texas or in the rest of the country. Apartment builders in the Austin area kicked into overdrive during the pandemic, resulting in tens of thousands of new apartments hitting the market.

Austin had a rent and house price explosion in 2021-2022 when a lot of people moved in at the same time, rents had been falling in 2023-2025 from the peak but did not fall to the level of 2020, they are picking up again in 2026.

Can you explain more? What happened in Detroit in the mid 2010s, how did itreverse course after that?

It happened over a longer period obviously, and what happened is the US adopted a failed industrial policy that saw our core manufacturing base shipped to China for the benefit of Wall Street and the financial sector.

Globalization wasn't a loss for all of America - the benefit of shipping manufacturing overseas was that the resulting imports were cheaper than producing domestically. After all if they weren't, people would've preferred to buy domestic. So it was a net win for the consumer via cheaper goods, but came at the expense of Detroit, Pittsburgh and other "rust belt" cities & communities.

We're still grappling with the consequences. We should've invested in transitioning those workers to comparable or better jobs but the ball got completely dropped on that.

If your purchasing power is cut in half because you lost your manufacturing job and had to replace it with running a cash register, but the cost of toys also dropped in half (but not things like food and housing, which doubled in price), are you actually better off?

No.

Average Americans are poorer now than they were before they could buy everything at Walmart. As long as housing continues to be a "Line must go up" investment, Americans will continue to become poorer as more and more of their income has to be directed to housing.

The price didn't even fall that much. One look at Temu and friends should disabuse you of the notion that we are actually getting things for "Cheap". Usually it just means product quality was drastically reduced thanks to millions spent on "value engineering", so that your new products don't last long enough to put you out of business.

Sure is great that GE can now reliably predict the lifespan of parts in their washing machines so they never make the mistake of gasp overspeccing a component so it lasts a lifetime!

Excellent analysis.

I'll see if I can find a source i saw recently that showed that thinks like appliances, TVs, computer, toys, clothes etc that were outsourceable have dropped in price a lot but health care, education, insurance, housing and basically every domestic has increased at rates well beyond inflation and incomes.

And part of the problem is systematic under investment in the public sector. We haven't built enough schools, hospitals or required universities to expand in proportion to the population.

It wasn’t a net win for the consumer. The consumer is now much worse off than before and our country is weaker.

It was just a mistake to allow ourselves to be ruled by the financial sector.

I thought that as well. But the benefits of cheaper goods when manufacturing is shift elsewhere comes at the cost if the future innovations that follow manufacturing. American businesses forget that happening to the British when we took over manufacturing for England. Now China and Mexico have innovations we lack because their engineering has access to the assembly lines and see where innovations need to happen.

Detroit was the hub of the auto industry. Outsourcing and foreign competition hollowed out the central city (which deliberately didn't have public transit) and left gigantic abandoned houses and skyscrapers throughout.

There has been massive public investment and popular support to cause a revival of sorts in the city and is a success story.

Go look at some photos from like 2010-2014.

This happened throughout North Carolina where I live when textiles and furniture manufacturing was off shored. I assure you it wasn’t over building that caused the same outcome. It’s almost like the is an alternate explanation that is the common thread. What could it be?

Such short term issues from massive economic collapse suggests building more housing works.

How was the work outsourced around that timeframe? Do they no longer have an auto-industry at all in Detroit, or is it just greatly reduced?

Detroit was pretty much the place where cars were designed and manufactured in the US at one point in time. The highest producing factories, the engineering, the management, most of it happened practically inside the city. Over time these auto manufacturers opened plants on lower cost of living places, spreading out across the Midwest while a lot of the engineering and management still took place in Detroit.

People often point to foreign competition for the downfall of urban Detroit but the writing was on the wall and decay starting well before foreign imports made a big splash. Between 1945 and 1957, GM, Ford, and Chrysler built 25 brand-new auto plants in the Detroit metro area. Not a single one was built inside the city limits. They weren't building these factories overseas (yet), they were building them in cheaper parts of the US. Detroit lost hundreds of thousands of well-paying factory jobs well before Volkswagen and Toyota started selling things in real numbers in the 1960s.

The great lakes cities were the wealthiest most influential region for a period of time. Go watch movies from the 80s. Detroit was the industrial heart of America.

There are lots of factors but broadly characterizing them as globalization is generally fair. Some included: The rise of japanese cars added competition but they were held at bay by import restrictions and the American preference for massive cars until the gas shortages in the 70s, the trend towards efficient capital meant most industrial firms switched to prioritizing their more profitable financing arms, Reagan liberalized international trade that let foreign imports into the US market, NAFTA moving manufacturing to mexico and canada, companies moving manufacturing to non union states in the south, then moving the parts supply chain abroad.

Tax property values.

We could talk about the merits of Georgeism but honestly let's set that aside - conventional property taxes are sufficient here. Most of Manhattan apparently has <1% annual property tax, and the eclectic sometimes regressive way it's calculated in NYC is suggestive of corruption. These asset bubbles can only inflate because the owners make nearly as much money sitting on a vacant property as they make with tenants, so they borrow approximately All The Money to dump it into real estate. Property taxes are not just a necessary evil to keep the schools running and the garbage collected (cough), they're a tiny fractional "decommodification" of property as asset, because the money collected from the owners is spent on the residents. Most of this money passes through directly into higher rents, and we shouldn't care about that, because it's spent on the residents (if the residents don't want good public services, literally hand them a check, direct redistribution). This punishes vacant properties appreciably, and pushes them back into the market.

The ecosystem of debt and bank collateral that has grown around near-zero property taxes has strongly encouraged high vacancy rates, because the banks directly demand that what rents be collected, are high enough to justify the collateral valuation, but don't actually demand that rents be collected.

Set property values to the rate of inflation (depending on your preferences, CPI or local COL or local selling prices or S&P), and you have fully "decommodified" housing without lining the landlords up against the wall and shooting them, an option that is increasingly popular.

Am I understanding your point correctly as you hoping that an increase in tax rates drives property values down enough thay aggregate tax amounts are reduced?

The practical rental math in NYC is simple. Buy a $1M coop in a building with near zero costs. HOA will be at least 2k per month with the majority of that being property taxes. Thats your base rent. If you have a loan, add that to the base. You will not get cheaper rent until you drive aggregate taxes or interests rate down. There isn’t a huge profit margin on rents in NYC. I looked at a unit next door, and if we wanted to have rents break even on mortgage we would need to offer 85% cash up front. Im on the board of our coop, so I see how all of our financials function and same for prior buildings.

Your coop building is on the unfair side of the "eclectic sometimes regressive" property tax calculation the parent comment mentions. Large (10+) multi-family rental properties are taxed at a much higher rate than single-family and 2-4 family properties. Correcting this imbalance would lower property taxes on your coop building while still raising overall tax revenue for the city.

We have 36 units in our coop iirc, so we are “large”. Generally I think our taxes are fairly reasonable. I just don’t think there is any reasonable solution here that isnt focused on a simple triangle:

- Build more, destroy short term value of existing owners

- Lower taxes, hurt short term city functioning

- Lower interest rates, drive up inflation

The only “fun” solution IMO is cut taxes and cut jobs programs that don’t deliver city value. DOE is a welfare scheme at this point.

NYC is home to ~half of the co-op housing in the United States. This is a relatively unusual arrangement. Co-ops generally forbid renting / subletting, they practically ban REITs, new resident-owners go before a board to get approval. They should be considered the same as owner-occupied housing, and for long-term owner-occupied houses where the asset value isn't a big deal, higher property taxes are on average a wash - they pay higher amounts for higher levels of public services. Perhaps your $2k/month goes to $3k/month but transit becomes free, trash collection becomes effective, and the schools become better. Or in the alternate universe your $2k a month goes to $3k a month and then we hand residents a $12k check at the end of the year.

Either way, vacancy gets punished, landlords can't treat the city's housing like gold boullion, and the price of housing is fractionally more tied to the cost of living than the future economic outlook in potentia.

Picture a conventional Ponzi scheme operating in the Lower East Side, which has scaled to be 30% of the city's economy. Whole industries have risen up around this scheme, it's essentially printing money in a way that seems like it might be legal if you squint, and you're not trying to regulate/tax it. It's growing so fast that it's actually causing problematic inflation for the rest of the city.

Can you afford to let it grow unchecked, indefinitely?

> Most of Manhattan apparently has <1% annual property tax, and the eclectic sometimes regressive way it's calculated in NYC is suggestive of corruption.

While NYC has never lacked for rot and corruption, those really aren't needed - or even particularly useful - for something like this.

As soon as you've got any sort of law / regulation / status quo that benefits a class of well-to-do people, there will be intense pressure to maintain that situation. Vs. the opposition - honest reformers, idealists, the poor, whoever - even if they're far more numerous, just never seem to have the zeal / focus / attention span / whatever to correct the problem.

> just never seem to have the zeal / focus / attention span / whatever to correct the problem

Mainly because, bluntly, the people who have the most zeal, attention span, talent, and focus... aren't in the group.

Somewhat. 99%-ish of adult humans will show far more zeal, focus, attention span, etc. on any "Issue X", if both they and their peers have a whole lotta money riding on Issue X.

Then there's the problem of late-stage capitalism's whole "Those who have the most gold should make most of the rules. Especially rules about who is entitled to how much gold. And double especially if they're obsessed with nothing beyond more-is-better gold hoarding."

Ignoring the morality, that optimization leads to the sort "Rich get richer, poor get poorer, God obviously only loves the rich, desperately poor people resort to desperate measures" instabilities and violence that made Europe an often-horrible place from the Napoleonic Wars through WWII.

> These asset bubbles can only inflate because the owners make nearly as much money sitting on a vacant property as they make with tenants, so they borrow approximately All The Money to dump it into real estate.

The problem is, as long as the stonk based US pension system keeps flooding dozens of billions of dollars a month into the markets, there will always be enough money to flow into REITs and driving up prices, even for vacancies.

Now, introducing (or adequately hiking) property taxes has the problem it may cost the REITs a bit of their profits - but it will be a nasty issue for individual families and small shops, and the large stores will just pass on the cost to customers because even with that, they will still be cheaper than small stores.

Vacancy taxes sound good on paper, because they - if done well - only hit REITs that hope for value gains and other unproductive uses of rare real estate (like Chinese and Russians parking wealth in Western real estate so it can't be seized by the government). The issue with them is a second order effect. If made painful enough to be worth the effort and actually force landlords to either rent out if need be at a lower price or sell, again if need be at a lower price. That however immediately forces REITs to write off significant chunks of the asset value (if rented out) or, even worse, actually realize a loss on the books (if selling).

Unfortunately, the markets really, really do not like either of these two things happening, we've seen that during Covid and the hard pushback against remote working that followed.

I have said it before, and I will say it again: the US pension system being so laser focused on stock and asset markets is going to fry its host society alive, because what needs to be done for society to survive cannot be done because too much pensioner wealth would be wiped out.

Vacancy taxes are, to my understanding, nearly impossible to administer effectively without approaching them formally as normal property taxes that have some kind of out. Lying about when the unit got vacated is basically expected, while creating a new resident out of whole cloth and filing taxes for them including a Residency Benefit Transfer is a bunch of easy to detect felonies†, and understood as such by everyone. Spend the money on better schools/roads/park and even this isn't practical.

†Modulo accomodations for undocumented immigrants

Tax more

Ever heard of the tale of the goose that laid golden eggs?

Imagine progressively feeding the goose less, so as to have a greater profit margin on the golden eggs it laid. No particular percentage of feed reduction seemed too harmful, until one day it died unexpectedly.

This sounds like private equity, except they'd also demand that the goose increase egg production by 10% per quarter.

Just to be clear on the analogy, the goose is the tenants, and the person feeding it less every day is the landlord class?

The golden goose is the landlords who develop and maintain housing, the withholding of feed excessive taxation.

But aren't the tenants feeding the goose, in that case? With rent?

It feels like you've left some important people out.

a certain share A of the prospective benefit of housing is in potential asset price appreciation, and a certain share B is in the utility value of the home.

The systems that contribute towards A are mutually reinforcing, vicious spirals in a neoliberal capitalist world. Just like in the art world, there is no hard objective value to vacant housing, and many purchases are made on debt. It's worth whatever the last guy paid, and so the banks will loan you 80% (or more) of whatever the last guy paid. This is a form of money creation. We have collectively bid up the housing stock, completely separated from the utility value, at a rate we generally expect to be competitive to loaning real operating businesses money to invest in actual operations.

If you tax ALL of the prospective value, and price sinks down all the way to B, you can still have profitable private housing development in a steady state. Unmet demand is a thing that exists. Yes getting to B overnight probably represents a crash in your overall asset investment picture, but getting 1/10th of the way there, locally, less so. Phasing it in over time, less so. If you're expecting 5% and you get 4.5% that's still a return.

The thing about this type of redistribution is, it's just a way better more functional economy than the idea of conventional price setting with the addition of rent control, or than the status quo. Rent control tears incentive structures and makes willing landlords into unwilling landlords who are instructed to be creative in how miserable they make their tenants; Its supposed goal of affordability simply shifts costs from older tenants to newer tenants. The status quo where property taxes are very low and so A is significantly greater than B simply doesn't establish those incentives of mutually agreeable economic exchange to a great degree in the first place. "I bought a house as an investment. Rent it out? I mean... there are upsides and downsides."

> We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons. Not paying means no ownership means subjugation to the worst actions of the worst members of society

We tried cramming people from generational poverty into one place and it didn't go super great, therefore public housing as a concept must be the failure, and not our hilariously bad implementation?

Singapore, Austria, Finland, and even a number of mixed income public housing projects in the US have actually done quite well. The narrative that it's all inevitably going to turn into the worst examples is pretty worn out.

> The bigger problem is the bid up of asset prices - aka private equity and class warfare.

This is definitely true: housing can either be affordable or it can be a safe investment, never both. Really private equity moving in on the safe investment is a symptom of the problem: regulatory capture by the landed gentry resulting in strangulation of production which benefits a small group at the expense of the greater public.

The thing that goes wrong again and again and again with public and low cost housing is that they build housing, and nothing else.

Stick a bunch of people in a tower in a field with no entertainment, no work nearby, building rubble surrounding their environment, no maintenance happening, no follow through on planned facilities, and the consequences are absolutely 100% predictable. Literally last night I watched a pair of bbc documentaries about a new estate, one from when it was new in the mid 60s, one from the late 70s. The residents are there in the 60’s, going “well it’s a pain having to walk all the way up but we trust that the lifts will be installed soon, and we’re looking forwards to the leisure centre” - fast forward 15 years, still no lifts, no leisure centres, and surprise surprise the kids are setting fire to cars to have something to do. If government won’t uphold the social contract, why should citizens?

The implementation is entirely the problem, and unfortunately few seem to realise that it can be done well. You can’t just make containers for humans and expect that to solve everything.

Public housing isn’t actually free in the countries you listed. It’s subsidized, but the people who live there still have to pay. The affordable housing units in New York are also subsidized. The question is what do we do if people stop paying even the subsidized rent?

> The question is what do we do if people stop paying even the subsidized rent?

If they stop because they actually can't pay it, then we should pay it for them. Another homeless person on the street makes us all less safe and less healthy, and tax dollars going toward keeping them housed is a good use of that money.

If they stop paying because they just don't feel like it, you evict them.

Singapore doesn’t have crime like the U.S. There is also no free public housing. You still must work and the housing is subsidised. But not free.

Why bother with such details? Class warfare is right, and details are details. /sarcasm

For example mixed income housing is really nice for “us” that have been in generational poverty. For “them” it is just living with signals of alcohol abuse, domestic abuse and more. All while their children get a good front seat into “empowerment”.

With sarcasm over, details matter, complexity matters, social assistance matters, a contingency plan for total failure to rehabilitate some people matters.

Many people would benefit from the Northern European style of institutionalisation where if incarcerated people would need to go to isolated communities and learn to buy groceries, cook a meal take care of personal hygiene (in Sweden they literally have prison islands where inmates have houses and must live as they would in the outside world. Then progressively move to temporary shelters to get their footing and then be released. If need be put those people in the countryside.

As a personal experience: Many German youths get sent to the middle of Portugal when their environment leads them astray. In the countryside there is a publicly funded host family or community to receive them and they have to learn trade jobs like being a painter or a plumber and get pushed into an normalised environment. There is no access to drugs as well in the middle of nowhere. There is alcohol but in the next morning there is work to do and people who are waiting for you. I met some of those youths when I was young and it always struck me that a good solution for failed communities in urban environments was to break them apart and scatter them into other more rural communities in such small units (family at most) that their habits would not impact the locals and that the habits could not be fulfilled as a matter of fact. Where are you going to hang out at night in a village of 1k? There is housing but you likely need to repair it; the locals will lend you a hand but they will exert peer pressure for you to normalise.

There is no need for class warfare. But there needs to be a warfare against antisocial self destruction behaviours.

Singapore system won't work in USA cities. Their town councils are near scholars level. Quite a few of them doctorate. They are pretty much selected on 2 criteria, merit and perceived likability with accountabilities evaluated both by government and locals citizens. American leaders are selected based on sound bites with zero accountability to citizens for maybe 2 years to 4 years. They do accountable to mega donors which almost always work against for the good of the public. Singapore also have world class city planners that entire America have never experienced or seen before. Heck even China look up to Singapore during 80s and 90s for advice. And the quality of people going to USA in the last 10 years are very low. Look at Singapore Amos going there. Meanwhile hundreds of American engineers migrated to Russia and China.

One of the real reason Singapore system won't work is also the mentality (respect level is way higher), I believe it's actually the primary thing, at 15 years old many Singaporeans are already talking about investment, how to compete hard and so-on, the level is way higher than in the west and people are driven in life in general, but life is hard over there, harder even but more rewarding.

In SG, they can also plan for decades ahead because of a more stable political climate where people actually respect their government for most and ACCEPT that there is some humans that are considered "superior" and take the lead, it's a huge difference with the west where people favorite sport is to non-stop shit on their government or denigrate without offering solutions, in the west, we seem to not be able to accept that there is even a class system where people have more power/rights than others (while there is, it's inevitable).

I don't think respect is the explanation for Singapore's success, it's more likely a side effect of the real magic: ethics and reputability.

Singapore is the third least corrupt country in the world[1]. Another country that has managed to pull off successful public housing, Finland, is the second least corrupt in the world.

The United States meanwhile is in 29th place (and that's being generous, imho) and at its worst ever in the corruption index[2]. It's been falling for a decade. Perhaps that's the real explanation: we can't have nice things because the resources needed to build and operate them are actively siphoned off through embezzlement, bribes, kickbacks, and fraud. Rigid class systems don't do anything to prevent fraud, either, in fact they entrench it deeply.

[1] https://www.transparency.org/en/countries/singapore

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/10/business/corruption-index-tra...

It only works in Singapore because there’s too little land. There is too little options. HDBs are capped value. While Condos are quite expensive in comparison, and you cannot own both. Singapore system for housing would be hard to replicate anywhere else without government stealing everything off the citizens and disallowing private ownership of land.

> We tried cramming people from generational poverty into one place and it didn't go super great, therefore public housing as a concept must be the failure, and not our hilariously bad implementation?

Well-stated! Yes, defective implementations with negative outcomes should not be used to make overly broad or even grossly incorrect assertions about human nature.

You're seeing the next version of this - cooked up by the smartest public policy people - fail in real time. That's what this article is about.

89% of these projects are - in fact - doing well. But that number is decreasing. The net result is less supply of public housing in one of the richest states in the entire world.

I'm not sure what your proposal is?

> We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons. Not paying means no ownership means subjugation to the worst actions of the worst members of society.

I tried free housing for the first 18 years of my life and it worked out fine

Why aren’t you still there?

Because I'm 37 now. Be awkward to stay there.

Cities have to truly compete with private rent-seekers for it to work.

In Vienna they are still building state of the art for that reason:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-soc...

I suspect the answer is two-fold:

1) Pass legislation to ban the fed from pulling interest rates below 2%. The unprecedented ZIRP completely fucked up asset values and it will take decades to unwind it.

2) In cities, the government should own all the land and owners of properties should hold only a long-term lease. This will allow the government to control land use and upzone density while ensuring private building owners have skin in the game to actually build and maintain dwellings.

Rents are going down in Austin, Texas despite an increasing population and lots of landlords.

the main reasons for public housing failing (see Cabrini Greene, Pruitt Igoe) in the US are concentrated poverty, rents not covering maintenance/capital expenses, lack of good jobs (too far to access on transit, companies relocated to suburbs), high youth to adult ratios. it's too reductive to say lack of ownership when tenants formed unions to get thing fixed but management didn't have funds, threat to maintenance workers (needing police escort to do work), organizational issues with mgmt (patronage system for jobs in public housing, lack of accountability).

Run it down, swoop in low, build it up, sell out high, repeat.

NY is back in the first phase of a realestate cycle. As the wheel turns ...

Is charging just enough rent to reasonably mantain the building such a strange prospect?

I don't understand why we can't just copy another country's housing strategy. There are many countries in the world where housing is affordable, relatively high quality, and the homelessness rate is low. What are we doing that makes this problem so seemingly intractable? Why is our approach to public housing seemingly worse than any other approach in history?

Far fewer than you'd think: The vast majority of Europe is in the same boat as the US.

Whenever there's value in agglomeration (ie, all the time), the value of well placed properties just skyrockets, because growth is only going to make that land better. That's why a common recommendation is to up the tax of land as to make speculation with valuable property a bad investment: It's already price like an auction, so higher taxes cannot increase rent prices. The problem is political, as countries with housing problems have a whole lot of individuals have a big percentage of their net worth in housing. Big tax increases would make their property values drop, and they'd be quite upset. So it solves the problem while losing elections.

Instead, governments are happy providing tax advantages to existing residents, in practice making prices go up even faster.

What makes the problem intractable is that we have a system where for a huge chuck of the country your retirement is based on housing prices appreciating. It's clear if you directly own a home but even if you don't lots of the places you park your money to watch it grow are ultimately investing/speculating on real estate.

Some might call it housing asset based welfare. Even if you don't like that mouthful another simple example is the University of California putting 4 billion into Blackstone's REIT with "a minimum 11.25% annualized net return through January 2028." That REIT is 90% rentals. So probably at least a few people will feel the squeeze from it.

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/university-californ...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10901-009-9177-6

It's the other way round:) Europe is salivating at the American real estate market. Some European countries don't have capital gains tax on real estate and real estate is the only investment vehicle without this tax. The only country where real estate prices haven't skyrocket looks to be Finland but their general situation is very specific and it's hard to say whether it's by design or by accident.

Social housing in Europe while exists, distribution of it is extremely corrupted process. Applying and waiting will give you something in 5 years or never, you'll know in 5 years. You have to be young couple both employed with perfect portfolio, or whatever the role model in that time and location is. Young couples both employed in desirable city basically don't exist anymore, even if you are after two rounds of waiting suddenly you are not a young couple anymore:) Usually you have to know someone and give a bribe.

You mean like in Sweeden, where you have to wait 20 years for assigned flat?

Europe has no homelesness, because migrants are housed at hotels at great expense!

That's due to moving away from the government ensuring an adequate supply of rental units over the last decades. Intentional free market style policies.

You mean Stockholm. You can buy, wait 20 years, or find a private building owner. But same problem, not building enough.

I mean better than having no assigned flat at all....

Waiting time can last longer than your ability to rent housing on a market regulated by supply and demand.

A bit of a misnomer. Housing is, actually, extremely affordable across the US - just not in major cities.

You can plunk $10-$20K and get land and a homestead in dozens of states.

Agree with the other comment that overbuilding is a reasonable strategy, but if you look at Detroit downtown (mid 2010s) having an overbuilt downtown is bad too.

It's a hard problem.

Similar things in lots of countries. There are villages in Italy and Spain with near-zero housing prices. The qualifier that needs added is "housing in commute range of jobs".

Stoke on Trent was selling houses for £1 with improvement grants attached! https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/stoke-shows-why-selling-...

And of course if 'jobs' becomes 'there is nothing a person can do that can't be more efficiently done by hiring AI more cheaply, plus you get to treat AI completely differently because AI is not a person' that complicates matters very much.

> You can plunk $10-$20K and get land and a homestead in dozens of states.

In a place where the only jobs to be had are at below-subsistence minimum wage at the dollar store and you have to drive 2 hours to see a doctor, sure.

There's a huge middle ground between Manhattan and homesteading on a $10k property. Here in Atlanta you can buy a 4/3 house for $270k or a 2/1 house for $160k. The rust belt and sunbelt are full of places with cheap housing.

That’s most definitely not $10-20k, tho.

Well we didn't exactly divvy up either housing or employment rationally, so looking through history without state subsidies and development, we're going to see slums pop up where the jobs are. Or just massive homeless populations I guess.

China managed this quite well with the hukou system, which allegedly is going to be loosened over time, but that seems distinctly unlikely to be understood by the powers that be here in the US.

That's actually the same in most countries: the cities where everyone wants to move to (examples from Germany: Berlin, Hamburg, Munich) become unaffordable, and at the same time smaller cities and villages in less desirable areas (e.g. in East Germany, but also in more remote areas of Bavaria) are depopulated - there you can buy a cheap house, but you can't get a job. Remote working would have helped to somewhat alleviate this, but no, now we all have to go back to the office so we can sit there and spend the whole day in Zoom/Slack/Teams calls instead of doing the exact same thing from home...

10k??? Yes because I want to live in east bumfuck in a food desert and drive 40 minutes to the one megamart and where the services barely work and my police/fire/usps is on the next town over 20 miles away.

Did I mention the legions of uneducated anti-Christians who would probably kill me for being queer?

> Here's the problem: * If no one had to pay, no one would. * We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons

Here's the actual problem. You've based your argument on a debunked economic theory ie the tragedy of the commons. You may as well argue trickle down economics.

Garrett Hardin wrote an essay called The Tragedy of the Commons in 1968 [1] and it became all the rage in neoliberal circles to justify wealth transfer to private hands (ie privatization) [2]. It never fit experimental data. Ultimately, Elinor Ostrom debunked it entirely using empircal data from the world over, work for which she won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics [3].

Whatever your arguments against free housing might be, the tragedy of the commons ain't it.

[1]: https://math.uchicago.edu/~shmuel/Modeling/Hardin,%20Tragedy...

[2]: https://socialistproject.ca/2008/08/b133/

[3]: https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false...

> Anyone thinking there's a simple solution to this problem hasn't spent enough time with the problem.

I've spent a lot of time with the problem. and there is a simple solution: relax zoning restrictions and various lot requirements to allow private developers to build more housing. the market incentives are already there, they're just blocked by NIMBY's and stupid city councils, etc.

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