It’s article 34 of the state constitution. The state is BANNED from funding public housing without local voters approving it. It was engineered with the full knowledge that no one would vote to cut their housing prices in half and was marketed as such at the time.
The marketing pitch for the ballot initiative was literally, and I shit you not, “Protect capitalism”
I don’t care. It still isn’t the reason there’s a shortage. Private entities build most of the housing in the US, and they have been prevented from doing so in many of the most urban parts of California. Hopefully the momentum from the state to override local nimbys on this changes things.
Dude. History and google are a thing. Why aren’t you refferencing either?
Private entities build most of the housing nowadays specifically because the State (both federal and local) is often banned from doing so. Have you never heard of the housing act of 1949 and what that did for public construction? Private entities certainly were not doing the lions-share of the funding back then. These laws came down after that to reverse course and outright prevent any continuation of public funds for housing construction. Because, of course, we must “protect capitalism” from those nasty New Deal socialists!
The state can’t do much of anything, because their hands are legally tied. Private entities - at least in California - are largely only concerned with building high-rent luxury condos, especially in urban areas. In fact, in both San Diego and San Francisco, low rent housing is being replaced by unoccupied, high-rent luxury condos because they’re believed to be more profitable (in theory, of course, as there’s virtually no demand for them so they sit empty and rot).
I can’t speak to housing issues elsewhere as I haven’t done the research, but California is usually the poster child for housing issues… even though people ignore the legal environment and why that legal environment exists in the first place.
Dude. Relevant arguments are a thing. Why aren’t you making any?
I’m not discussing why things are set up such that the private market provides most housing. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that it works when they aren’t explicitly blocked from building housing. You see suburban sprawl everywhere combined with extremely expensive housing in cities because we no longer build dense, walkable areas, nor do we allow the dense, walkable areas we have to grow (much.)
If you want to go have a conversation about how awful it is that we have set up our social and legal structures such that housing has to be provided by private builders, I’d recommend starting a thread about it. Maybe someone else will care and discuss it with you!
Why am I making relevant arguments? Well, because they’re a thing. Why aren’t you making any sense?
It matters when you try to say one works and the other doesn’t, and site present circumstance as evidence. Present circumstance exists not because public funding doesn’t work, but because public funding wasn’t allowed to happen.
State funded construction? Exactly right.
We don’t allow those dense areas to expand because A) dense areas are not as profitable as luxury sprawl and B) we ban the public from picking up the slack and building them. So all you get is luxury sprawl when what you need is cheap, affordable housing.
Mad that you can’t come up with a counter argument? No need to act this way, though.
It was a typo, which I fixed on edit. Which took two tries to ‘take’ given the board’s slowness this morning.
The rest of your post doesn’t really make a lot of sense, so I’m just dropping the rest of this. If you want to believe that the only reason there’s a housing shortage is because states are restricted from funding direct construction, despite all the areas where private builders construct ample supply, you can persist in believing that. I can’t stop you.
I’m not sure why you think a small number of large banks is better than a large number of small banks, but anyway focus on bank size is a response to bank corruption and uneconomic behavior.
Rating agencies abetted the 2007-2008 crisis because they became pawns to powerful banks. “Hyperefficiencies” like mortgage tranches and CDOs led to heightened risks; these characters are symptoms of concentrated power.
Ordinary regulation may not avoid the problems — one barn-door is closed too late, while high-priced con-men are inventing new unsafe barns — so breaking up the “too-big-to-fail” banks may have been the best route, albeit indirect, to avoid recurrence of problems like the mortgage bubble and its associated frauds.
Instead a small number of big banks are now more powerful than ever. The next financial crisis is a matter of When not If.
Er, if you can quote me saying or implying that it’s the only reason, I’ll tip my hat. I’m fully willing to acknowledge that housing is complicated and has many factors. The ban on public housing is certainly a major factor, but not the only one.
I should point out, however, that this entire side track began when you said large banks were required to solve the housing problem. I provided historical examples of this being untrue (e.g. Housing Act of 1949) and obvious alternatives (e.g. credit unions). You seized on the mention of public funding, and I simply gave you no ground. The banks - along with other institutions, because while powerful back then they weren’t quite as all-powerful - were the ones behind Article 34 in California, which isn’t national, but is a concrete, easily cited example that I happen to be familiar with.
To that point, I maintain that large banks aren’t necessary or even beneficial for any solution to the housing problem.
I’ll also maintain that the private sector has demonstrated a unique failure in providing housing: low-cost housing is not as profitable* whereas luxury condos offer much higher returns on investment (in theory). Because of this, the construction we do see in major urban areas is focused on luxury condos, to the point that luxury condos are replacing low-cost housing. The private sector is making the housing problem worse.
If the goal is to fix the housing problem and obviate the need for rent strikes, large banks are not necessary, the private sector is part of the problem, and the public sector needs to be allowed to operate without absurd constraints in the name of “capitalism.” I don’t think this would solve every problem, but it would dramatically improve the situation.
I can’t agree with you, etsyde, because when government has tried to build housing directly, it ends up with the cost of luxury housing and the quality of late-Soviet housing blocs in Leningrad. The biggest obstacle to building more housing is that the governments listens very closely to voters who want to prevent housing in order to boost their home prices. To a degree, new high-priced housing can get around those restrictions. That can pay for lawyers, PR reps, proponents, and may even raise the average home value. These interests do not go away if you take away private firms building housing, and in point of fact they get stronger.
But, more to the point, if you want cheap housing, you just need to build more housing. The argument that developers building luxury housing causes high prices only works if you assume from the beginning that nothing else gets built, and that there is no effect on demand. The problem with urban housing is caused entirely and exclusively by not having enough housing being built. The more you block new construction, the more your city starts to look like San Francisco.
It’s my understanding of your argument.
If you banned banks tomorrow from ever funding real-estate development, sure, you’d get development by other means. Corporations would borrow money on the bond market, individuals would prepay for condos or houses, some form of construction REITs would form and fund building with equity, etc. I’m sure something would happen. So in that sense, you’re right, “required” isn’t strictly true. But without massive changes to the structure of the economy, big construction projects (say, buildings higher than five stories) are almost always funded by banks. If you want to ramp up housing production in urban areas in a big way, that means big banks - or major changes to the structure of the economy.
And honestly, if the answer to that question on the Chapo Trap House podcast had been along the lines of, “we need to restructure the economy to fund the construction of housing along the following lines…”, I’d have a lot more respect for that answer. It would probably still have numerous other problems, but at least it would address the core problem - the housing supply shortage.
For-profit developers are going to serve the most profitable segment of the market first. If you restrict the residential acreage available to development to a handful of acres like Seattle does (I’m less familiar with the details of California cities, but I do know that restrictive zoning remains a massive problem), then you’re going to run out of buildable land before you’ve sated that segment. Similarly, if you restricted the US auto market to 2 million vehicles / year, you wouldn’t see a lot of Camrys either.
Okay, then I would like to see our healthcare system run in the same manner as our law enforcement system, our firefighting system, our public education system, and our highway system and have the profit motive in healthcare being the equivalent of the profit motive in those other public service systems I just mentioned.
I feel that explaining it in this level of detail is a little unwieldy however, so I’m going to continue to say things like “I would prefer to see a healthcare system run by the government as a public service with no profit motive involved” in normal conversation.
I don’t feel a child care tax credit is an incentive to have kids. Even if it’s a 100% deduction (which I would feel is too high) it’s still not something that makes a profit for a parent. At best, it’s a break even.
And even if child care is a break even, this wouldn’t address any of the other expenses of having a child. (Which I’m sure you must be more familiar with than I am.)
What I feel it would incentivize is for parents to go out and work because they wouldn’t be facing the high expense of paying for child care while they are at their job.
The potential tax loss would, in my opinion, be minimal. It’s a deduction not a payment. So it would be a loss of tax revenue rather than a government spending program. And I feel that the alternative for many of the people who would be affected by it would be not working, so they represent a loss of tax revenue anyway. And if people put more children into day care, it would mean an expansion of the day care business with more employees, so this represents an expansion of the tax revenue pool.
I’m sorry, but have you ever been in the FSU? Many of those housing units have had next to no maintenance and still provide housing to millions. In fact, one of the reasons homelessness is not a large problem in Ukraine is because of the abundance of soviet provided housing.
They’re not phenomenal constructions. They’re certainly not amazing places to live 40+ years after their construction with said shoddy maintenance. They’re ugly as shtick, too. But they function quite well for purpose. They’re certainly far better than living on the street, or having to make deep sacrifices in every other walk of life to just to have any sort of roof over your head. And they were cheap. That’s a really bad example for your side of the argument to cite. It’s one of the only good things the Soviets got right.
Oh, I’m a vociferous opponent of money in politics and the degree of oligarchy that exists in this country, and I totally agree that our government is corrupt to the core. You’re not wrong here at all. My contention isn’t that public funding is a magic bullet. It’s just far better than leaving it to the private sector.
Tearing down units that can house 10 families to build units that can house 1 does reduce supply. And supply of luxury houses does not help supply of family units. This isn’t magic, there aren’t infinite resources, and you will never reach a point of saturation so extreme that the supply of multi-million dollar luxury houses will be so great that the price becomes affordable to someone barely scraping by.
I agree you need to build more houses. But it must be low-cost family homes. The problem is, there’s no incentive to build low cost homes in the private sector, and no capacity to in the public sector for aforementioned reasons. We need to address that fact.
I don’t think they so much drove down wages as if it’s some kind of mustache-twirling corporate evil-doing, as it’s just a consequence of a LOT of marginally useful labor and not that many jobs.
Look at it this way… is there ANY able-bodied and not mentally-challenged adult you know of who can’t handle flipping burgers at McDonalds? That’s why they don’t pay squat- if someone doesn’t do a good job, gets too vocal, or otherwise makes themselves a pain in the ass for any reason, they can be replaced by literally ANYONE at that same wage.
Meanwhile, you can’t just go find a chef anywhere; that takes culinary school, education and some demonstrated skill. So they command more money and/or better conditions than the McDonalds burger-flipper.
You see the labor prices fluctuate with the economy- low wage jobs WERE paying well above minimum around here, as people who could do better, were doing better. So they had to pay better to attract workers. I doubt that’s going to continue though.
That’s just willful ignorance in the digital age. The internet is chock-full of working class people that own rental property. Find out that some landlords are cops, order pickers at Amazon, or pizza delivery drivers doesn’t fit your narrative.
Cool, landlord is a parasitic role that leeches money off people for basically necessity while not providing any inherent service.
There’s nothing wrong with charging a fee to clean and renovate a unit and facilitate transfer to a new party. There’s nothing wrong with being a service that provides the option subscribe to keep people on retainer to perform maintenance. But those are jobs that could exist and don’t need to be attached to sitting around and leeching money off people because they have the gall to want a place to live.
If all my rent is doing is paying your property taxes and mortgage then why the fuck do I even have the middle man? The whole dynamic of a landlord deciding if I’m allowed to live somewhere, charging me a deposit, and dictating what I can do with my home to preserve the value of “their” land is inherently parasitic and adds absolutely no value to society. Again, if the landlord goes over to fix the plumbing, then they’re a plumber and can make money providing that service to a group of homes. If people don’t want to worry about cleaning a unit or finding someone else to live there then it’s reasonable to pay a service without the runaround of them keeping your security deposit in case you “ruin” “their” home, without directly paying them a fucking retainer while they skim off the top and pay what should be your own property taxes for you.
“Working class landlord” isn’t nonsensical because there aren’t people who have other professions that are generally working class who are also landlords, it’s because landlordship is in itself not a fucking job and land ownership and rental places you in the rentier class by definition.
There is no supply problem because there is enough space to house everyone, but homes sit unfilled due to ballooned rent prices and rich people take up absurd amounts of space. This is directly in parallel to how we produce more than enough food to feed the world, but economic reasons prevent us from actually just getting everyone fed.
If you start from the premise that people need housing, then the problems suddenly become very easy to solve. For instance, converting giant mansions into cooperative housing (which is what plenty of, e.g., frat houses and such already are), or converting motels into permanent steady housing for the homeless. Places in the US already started doing this (at least wrt motels and such) during COVID because the rich people got so scared of the dirty poor and unhoused running around getting infected and spreading disease to their rich family, and played their hand that the only reason that these people do not have steady housing is basically because they didn’t feel like it.
Anyway, I’m not really sure how I feel about the rent strike itself. Given how landlords react and how much of the law is on their side, I really don’t know if this is really going to do anything other than make them mad. But if it hurts them boy I hope it really puts the landlords in a bind and makes them give major concessions. The ideal is outright dissolution of landlords in some areas instead replaced by common ownership or only allowing people to own a property they currently reside in (barring vacations), but that’s not gonna happen. I’d settle for severe lowering of prices, restriction on evictions, and some form of rent control. Ideally also dissolution of rent (and mortgages and property taxes, anything that could cause someone to become homeless due to financial issues) for the duration of the COVID-related economic fallout.
Heh, yeah, you tell 'em. Wait, you’re serious, aren’t you?
This is ridiculous. You could make a fair case that land itself should not be ownable, and there are sane societies that are built on top of that principle. But no one really cares about the land anymore. This isn’t 14th century France where everyone is renting a couple acres from the baron and trying to scrape out a living. What people rent is the improvement on the land - the structure and everything that comes with it. If I build that structure, I produced that value - I should be able to rent it out. If I commission someone else to build it, I produced the surplus value over what I paid the builders, and I should be able to rent it out. If I buy it from someone who did one of the above, I should be able to rent it out. Value is produced there. Livable buildings don’t construct themselves, and they aren’t built by 22 year-olds who just graduated college and need somewhere to live.
I rented for years before I bought a condo. I never once resented my landlord or felt like they were a parasite leeching off of me. I got what I wanted out of it - a functional place to live with no commitment beyond (what was usually) a twelve-month lease. That’s a valuable service to a young man in a new city. I get that you can have bad landlords who game every inch of things to the tenant’s detriment, and go ahead and condemn them. But to claim all landlords are parasites - not even close to true.
Of course there’s a supply problem. There’s a lot more demand for housing, particularly in a small set of cities, than there are units available right now. And no one wants to negotiate with a bunch of small-minded socialists about how much space we get to take up. Look, if there was some fixed amount of housing on earth and some people were doing without, maybe this wouldn’t be such a non-starter. But none of that’s true. We can build more. Lots more. There are easy policy changes here. No need to try to run everyone’s life for them. Sheesh, trying to dictate how much space everyone gets. [wanders off muttering…]
Am I being wooshed here? Is this a real opinion?
Landlords provide a great service: they allow people to live in homes that are way better than they’d otherwise be able to afford. Think about a recent college grad: they’re just starting out in life; who knows where they’ll end up living. Without landlords they’d only be able to afford a hovel; same with working-class families that are saving up for a down payment. Landlords also provide mobility; one of the problems in the Great Recession was that some home-owners (like in Las Vegas) were underwater and couldn’t afford to move to where the jobs where. Renters didn’t have this problem.
Landlords are not a product of land shortage. Roughly 25% of rural housing is rental (PDF) where land is relatively cheap.
Sure, there are bad landlords, just like there are bad renters, but calling them nothing but leeches shows a lack of understanding on how financing and the economy work.
This is nonsensical. That’s like saying a farmer is providing you food (a basic necessity) but no inherent service, since you still have to cook dinner. It’s the usual crypto-elitist toxic socialism of the privileged, where coffee beans should be free but a barista with a liberal arts degree should make $50k a year because she’s adding value.
I think yours is a reductio ad absurdem on smiling bandit’s, but IIRC New York’s City’s early fire departments were private profit-making enterprises. When businesses were slow they drummed up customers by setting fires! Betsy DeVos is doing her best to eviscerate public schools so profits prevail in that domain. And Wars in the Middle East were justified by “Think of all the free oil we’ll get!”
Be careful what you wish for.