No war but class war.
This is what drives me crazy every time I hear people talking about needing to build more housing. The first thing we need to do is correct this problem. My suggestion is an increasing property tax premium on vacant homes. I’d suggest doubling the tax rate for each consecutive year a property is vacant for more than 185 days-just over half a year.
This has the side benefit of making Airbnb landlording less feasible as a small time investment strategy.
True, but it is not just about that there are X million houses emtpy and Y million people homeless. It is also about location of those empty houses. That might not overlap with location of the homeless, and I guess we are not talking about forced relocation here. There is probably still a good overlap of locations of empty houses and homeless and that part needs fixing.
See: the Bay Area and most of LA absolutely suffocated by suburban sprawl. You could build higher density residential dwellings, but first you need to tear down a few existing homes, plus get it past all the NIMBYS whose property values might go down if there’s not hyperinflated demand.
This is what drives me crazy every time I hear people talking about needing to build more housing.
There are regional housing shortages. The classic example is in Northern California (particularly around San Fransisco and San Jose) where you’ve got these huge tracks of ranch-style homes and barely any vertical development. A lot of that is due to the seismic activity in the region, making taller buildings more expensive to construct. But more is due to the historical development practices of throwing up a thousand cheepo ticky-tacky units on real estate they acquired dirt-cheap from the state and flipped as fast as possible. Now the land is developed as this low-traffic sprawl, and people are obsessed with propping up their land-value to justify the seven figure notes their carrying. So building denser housing is politically and logistically prohibitive.
Basically, the problem isn’t a housing shortage so much as a shit job of urban planning. Yes, houses exist, but they’re hours away from job sites with no quality mass transit to move people between residence and work. No, you can’t just pile people into these low-occupancy (often badly maintained) units if they don’t have the kind of money to afford their own cars, pay for childcare, afford the utilities, cover maintenance of the units, etc, etc. That’s a recipe for slums.
At some level, you need to actually plan your residential economy. That’s a harder kind of work that politicians and bureaucrats elected based on their cool Tweets and Instagram feeds don’t really want to do.
seismic activity
Tokyo seems to be doing just fine at building millions of homes in mid and high rises capable of not letting an empty plastic bottle fall over during earthquakes that made me sit down.
Tokyo has a very low life expectancy for many of its residencies. Building regularly get torn down and replaced inside 30-40 years.
Agreed, but the problem is that the ‘we’ in this scenario votes for this every two years. When both ruling parties tell us they’re capitalist, we need to believe them.
How does this jive with all the talk of a housing crisis. Where’s that invisible hand of the market making things affordable. I hate capitalism
https://www.commondreams.org/news/wall-street-buying-houses
Emphasis is mine.“The real estate industry would like you to believe the problem is entirely one based on supply and demand,” and that regulations need to be changed to allow for the construction of more affordable housing, reads the report. But with 16 million vacant homes across the U.S.—28 for every unhoused person—“the reality is that the owners of concentrated wealth… are playing a more pronounced role in residential housing, thereby creating price inflation, distortions, and inefficiencies in the market.”
Take it easy! Balance will trickle down any day now. We just have to trust them to regulate themselves a little longer. They wouldn’t deliberately sabotage the market for profit, now would they?
I’d like to see a breakdown by zip code, or at the very least by county, of home values and vacancy rates. I have a suspicion that the problem is a local supply and demand problem rather than a national one. It makes no difference to the insane silicon valley housing market that there are thousands vacant homes in Michigan. This is why the build housing first plan is critical. We need housing where people need to live.
Fair, but a national mandate that WFH be offered for any jobs that it’s possible to do from home would mitigate the “having to live” in a given locale.
Eh I don’t think that would have as big an effect as you think it would. It might move the problem around. Remember around 2021 when the housing markets in nice towns near nature like in Montana went crazy cause suddenly all these tech workers were working from home? The local supply demand got a huge shock since the inflow of money was not representative of the local economy.
Do you really think a bunch of techies are going to redistribute that much? While in theory we could, there’s reasons we tend to congregate where we do, and it’s not only because that’s where the jobs are. Do you really think you could get me to relocate from Boston to say, Flint MI, for any price?
How will work from home affect homelessness in any way? If they don’t have a job, they can’t have work from home. If their job is not based on a computer, they can’t work remotely
This is anecdotal, but I live in an Indiana town that isn’t especially desirable, but the cost of living is quite low. I live in one of the best neighborhoods in town in terms of things like very low crime and neighbors who get along, but there are plenty of houses for sale here that never get sold. I’ve looked them up. They’re all way, way out of our price range regardless of their size (it’s a weird subdivision with homes of all sizes). Our own home has more than doubled in value according to Zillow and we only bought it in 2017 or 2018.
The only house I have seen get bought even relatively quickly was the one next to ours, which we think was foreclosed on, was sitting vacant for years, and probably had someone squatting in it. The photos on Zillow were a nightmare. I don’t even think the second story floor would have been safe to walk on. It was valued at about what we initially paid for our house despite being twice its size including a finished basement (we don’t even have a basement). Someone bought that one within a month and is now fixing it up, presumably in the hopes of reselling it. I wish them luck.
A vacant property tax would help with this.
Exponential increase for each and every additional unit (house or apartment) vacant for more than 3 months (without undergoing active, actual remodel with a set end date for the work) in a given year.
Oh no, not enough people for every unit to be filled? Bummer, better divest starting with single family structures!
Edit: actually, now that I think more about it, I see absolutely no reason we shouldn’t just hard cap the number of housing buildings any one company or individual (no shell companies and whatever bullshit loopholes) can own if they didn’t originally build them. Let’s say 200 multi-family (apartment) buildings or 10 single family buildings. Anything more than that must be sold for whatever the market is willing to pay. Too bad, so sad if you lose money on it, that’s the risk landlords are always telling us they take.
Nobody needs more than that, at all, because housing shouldn’t be a commodity to profit from, and if they want more buildings to profit from, they can build them instead of just buying it as a
leechinvestment. Fuck companies who treat everyone like shit for profit.How about a 1% tax on every extra home you own. Still allows the millionaires to have their second homes in florida or whatever, but makes it impossible to earn money after more than a few extra houses.
Nah, too low, doesn’t snowball quick enough, and being rich doesn’t entitle you to extra housing when we have a shortage. Double the property tax every time, at the federal level. The prime home has normal tax to the county. The second and beyond homes have extra taxes owed to the IRS. You can also sell to the government for half price at any point you declare yourself unable to find a buyer for an extra home.
This gives the government land to construct denser housing and sell it at cost.
Maybe it would help to massively increase property taxes on all houses that aren’t the primary residence of their owners, and use the proceeds to build more houses
What is this doing to the housing market?
I am 40 and single. I make 90k a year, I have 130k in total proceeds from the sale of my previous house I owned for 17 years which will go towards the down payment and initial repairs/upgrades with hopefully 10k to savings, and I have very good credit.
I cannot find a house I can afford. If it’s less than 350k, it’s either a complete disaster on the inside requiring 50k or more to make decent, it’s under 1500 sq feet and very claustrophobic inside, it’s a cheaply built house in a cookie cutter neighborhood that’s already showing it’s quality, or it has less than 2 full baths and a 1 car garage. Or the taxes in the area are over 7k a year.
And a LOT of the houses have the same gray vinyl flooring that’s as ugly as it is cheap.
Mass market single family housing is a disease that the developers have perfected. Using the cheapest materials, in the cheapest way, with the laziest inspectors.
It’s even worse when you get outside of the cities into the county. At least here in Texas, that means there are no building inspections. You just have to trust that the builder made it right.
And don’t depend on the warranty to save you. The common 10-year warranty is a lie. It’s 1-year cosmetic (there are no visible cracks in the wall), 2-year functional (there are cracks, but everything still works), and 10-year structural (the doors no longer close, the wiring is failing, and the foundation is more like gravel now, but the building hasn’t actually been condemned - which it won’t be because there are no inspectors).
Your comment shows American relationship with space of their homes. I live in <1500 sq feet home with my girlfriend and I wouldn’t call it claustrophobic.
It’s really dependant on how the layout is. Generally 1500sqft isn’t a problem however if it has 5 rooms squeezed into the house it begins feeling cramped especially if you have a large family. I have 1800sqft and the first floor has plenty of space but upstairs has a low ceiling (6.5ft) and about a 2ft wide hallway leading to 2 full bedrooms, a full sized bath, and a small guest room that’s only slightly bigger than a broom closet. There isn’t a way to have rooms downstairs so I consider my upstairs cramped but my overall living conditions fine. Now imagine a single floor utilizing that space needing just as many bedrooms and it begins getting cramped with the kitchen, living room, dining room.
How often do you host dinner parties? How often do more than 4 guests attend? Do you want to have family over for the holidays? Do you ever plan to have kids? These are pretty common reasons to need at least 2 baths and 3 bdrms.
I work in the development department of a city that’s and enclave for the ultra-rich. Literally every household in the city is millionaires or better.
Every house in the city is unique. Every build site requires civil and structural engineering. Every home has an architect designing it to be a unique structure. The average new build here is 8-10 million dollars, with the big ones being 50 million+.
We’re talking tennis pavilions on the roof, indoor arboretums and galleries, the works.
And they’re all built cheaply and fall apart within a decade.
They’re shitty houses, but when people are dropping 8-figures on them, they can afford to drop a couple million more on a remodel every 5-10 years.
You can’t buy a quality house anymore.
I’m starting to think the play is to buy undeveloped land and just bite the bullet on the cost of building a house/a road to the nearest govt maintained road.
Unless you’re physically building it yourself, it’s still gonna get corners cut at every stage.
Also, don’t underestimate the drainage and erosion control engineering required for a home and a road. Those cookie cutter neighborhoods have regional drainage and detention. Your undeveloped land won’t.
I’m sure with some research you could find a company willing to follow your specifications and instructions, but obviously that comes with cost.
To your second point, thanks for the heads up. There’s plenty more research that I need to do before I worry about drainage, but I’ll keep the thought in mind.
Septic and Drainage should come before any kind of detailed architecture. It’ll save you 30 grand in Engineering revisions if you don’t have to re-do the drainage plans.
Also, never let an architect be in charge of a project. It’s like having the font designer be in charge of office software.
Where are you looking?
NW ohio, no more than an hour from work.
How many baths can you be in at once?
I think it means he can’t reasonably rent a room if the tenant doesn’t have their own bathroom.
I’m trying to think of resale value, especially since 1.5 baths around here stay on the market for a very long time.
So you want house with a high value but don’t want to pay for one. That’s your complaint.
Bro makes 90k a year, he’s barely scraping by and is living paycheck to paycheck. Having 2 bathrooms is like the minimum that you need in a house. Anything less is like third world country living.
Bro makes 90k a year, he’s barely scraping by and is living paycheck to paycheck. Having 2 bathrooms is like the minimum that you need in a house. Anything less is like third world country living.
I sometimes wonder if I’m living in an entirely different America than other people
Have you checked? Sometimes I don’t know what the fuck species I am.
If you have to ask, you’re probably some form of goblin or orc.
That’s actually fewer homes that Blackstone owns than I would have thought.
Not that it makes things any better, I just would have expected the number of homes Blackstone owns to be in the millions by now. Maybe they have subsidiaries that are buying up homes under different names.
Obviously, there are plenty of other corporations that own thousands of homes so it doesn’t make much of a difference.
A more functioning government would have immediately dropped the hammer on said business practices.
We live in a Corporate bordello.
Add in other corps:
20% of all property purchases are for investments: 65% of those properties purchases are by people who own 10 or more properties.
Doesn’t shock me at all. Like I said, it doesn’t make much of a difference which corporations actually own them. But I’m still surprised because if someone had asked me how many homes Blackstone in specific owned, I would have guessed a lot more.
I’m sure they have more hidden away in subsidiaries and shell companies
That was my guess.
Curious to know if they’re counting buildings or units. Blackstone owning one ranch-style house would be very different than Blackstone owning a 500 unit tower block.
I don’t know, IMO a home is a home. You can buy a condo just like you can buy a house. You can buy a condo bigger than some houses.
A very big building holds more people than a very little building
What difference does that make? This is about housing prices, not capacity.
The cost of housing isn’t just the price of the unit. If you need to spend an extra $500/mo on the commute, plus random budget buster repairs, a “cheap” house can be less affordable than an “expensive” one.
This makes the housing market sound similar to Diamond marketing.
I wonder if the board of Blackstone have names and addresses…
Well they obviously have 300000 addresses duh
Sounds like it’s time to start burning shit down
Or just start squatting in the vacant properties.
I don’t understand. How much higher can rents go?
rent_target = your_income - beans - tent
I genuinely don’t understand why this is legal. It’s tied housing with extra steps, isn’t it?
Just wait until we find out that Blackstone’s algorithms, trained on actual real estate deals, are giving preferential treatment to a man named Dave with bad credit over a woman named Lashawnda with good credit.
The worst part is that there’s so much class discrimination that you don’t even need to bring race into it to see how broadly fucked it is. I personally have a friend that’s an older white guy who the bank wouldn’t approve for a 15% down mortgage that would cost him about $1000/mo, but he had no issues getting approved at a manufactured home lot where the lot rent alone is $950/mo, plus the $500/mo for the home itself. All because he used to be poor and had some really unfortunate financial luck, he gets the privilege of paying twice as much for objectively worse housing.
Well, okay, but maybe you should also wait.
This shit is going to turn me into a maoist
There is one very important aspect that shouldn’t be ignored about the fact at the end. Although it may be technically correct, it is almost certainly not geographically correct. If filling those homes requires a mass movement of people requiring even something as little a a couple of hour drive, is it really relevant?
Don’t get me wrong, I hate corporate ownership of residential property, and I also think empty homes, especially if it’s a second, third, fourth, etc., should result in some kind of tax penalty. I don’t think using easily discounted facts is ultimately in our best interest when pushing for change to address these issues.
Be a shame if someone burned em all down and we all just started over.
You mean if someone burned them down and blackrock got an insurance payout valued higher at the homes were worth allowing them to build lower quality replacements and rent it out at an even higher price to people because it’s new and driving the average home price even higher? Yeah, that would be a shame
Meanwhile insurance prices go up for everyone else, and housing supply goes down, making cost of housing higher still
If it was a one time thing, sure, but if unoccupied properties had a meaningfully higher risk of arson to the point where it’s priced into insurance, there would be less of an incentive to hoard housing.
I mean you SAY shame…I would feel shame…
Hey, we got any pyromaniacs in the house? We got a thing to do!
No shame starting here:
