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Typo posted:It was a genuine question about public housing, not an argument against it. Just because I'm against one form of government intervention doesn't mean I'm against it in all its forms. Sorry, it sounded like an argument I have heard many times already. Obviously, there are issues with public housing in many countries, but it is very often with the cheapest and least desirous types available. It doesn't have to go down that route.
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Oct 20, 2014 12:03
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EB Nulshit posted:Yes. Because there's a finite amount of space in the places people want to live. Additionally, the quantity demanded is not fixed- as you made housing more and more affordable more and more people would want to live there so you are fighting yourself. Like this thread really doesn't have to be endless studies- the very ideas behind rent control as typically implemented are entirely nonsense. e: the reason comparisons to minimum wage don't make sense is that min. wage is far below the tipping point at which you would clearly see market effects. Raise the min. wage to $30 / hr tomorrow and you'd see the same distortions that have occurred at every attempt to control housing. tsa fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Oct 20, 2014 |
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Oct 20, 2014 18:39
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When you're willing to build multiple 80 story apartment buildings, you can very quickly run out new people ready to move in, dude. Let's say you build an 80 story tower in the style of the mid-century NYC middle class co-ops, like Penn South - you can fairly easy get yourself 27 bedrooms across multiple size apartments per floor, which assuming you're housing married couples per each master bedroom and a kid per each other bedroom, should leave you with about 50 people per floor in a third-manhattan-block building with plenty surrounding open space and a shared play area with the building next to it on the block. Subtract a floor maintenence/skylobby stuff halfway up and use the ground floor for retail/light offices, each of these towers holds 4000 people or so, more if you're willing to build them out a bit more, have higher bedroom counts and lose a little green space at the ground level. A large city might be able to drop in 100 if buildings like these, there's your room for 400,000 people, larger than the population of the city proper of all cities below Minneapolis. You're not going to get so many more people moving to whatever cities to fill them all up and still lack housing in the rest of the city.
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Oct 21, 2014 05:35
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Nintendo Kid posted:A large city might be able to drop in 100 if buildings like these, there's your room for 400,000 people, larger than the population of the city proper of all cities below Minneapolis. You're not going to get so many more people moving to whatever cities to fill them all up and still lack housing in the rest of the city. I don't understand. How will you lack housing if you keep building housing units?
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Oct 21, 2014 06:01
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Who's land is all this mythical new housing going to be built on? Who gets their house torn down because J. Public Fuckwit down at City Hall decided that your neighbourhood has to go for "affordable housing"?
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Oct 21, 2014 06:25
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-Troika- posted:Who's land is all this mythical new housing going to be built on? Who gets their house torn down because J. Public Fuckwit down at City Hall decided that your neighbourhood has to go for "affordable housing"? Who cares?
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Oct 21, 2014 06:25
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"tear down poor people's houses to build poor people's apartments" - Owlbot 2000, D&D 2014
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Oct 21, 2014 06:26
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OwlBot 2000 posted:Who cares? Cool, a volunteer.
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Oct 21, 2014 06:40
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-Troika- posted:"tear down poor people's houses to build poor people's apartments" - Owlbot 2000, D&D 2014 Uh I think they're not gonna be houses in most places, just apartment complexes that take up a lot of surface area but aren't very tall. If it is decided that the city is unaffordable and there's an urgent need for housing, and you have a fair plan to remunerate whoever is temporarily relocated, then it doesn't particularly matter which individual is or isn't in the group. Also, the buildings getting torn down aren't for poor people (that's the point, remember? They're getting pushed to the edges) and the new housing units won't just be for poor people. Also nobody's "neighborhood has to go", there's no need for histrionics. on the left posted:Cool, a volunteer. Sure why not. OwlBot 2000 fucked around with this message at 06:58 on Oct 21, 2014 |
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Oct 21, 2014 06:51
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In a parallel universe -troika- is asking, "who gets their shack torn down to build some drat interstate highway or subway system? I don't care if it's more efficient and would help hundreds of thousands of people"
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Oct 21, 2014 06:57
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So your proposal is to use mass eminent domain to seize properties, apparently arbitrarily, in city centres. I'm sure this would work out well......
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Oct 21, 2014 09:53
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Fangz posted:So your proposal is to use mass eminent domain to seize properties, apparently arbitrarily, in city centres. I'm sure this would work out well...... It is more or less how our highway systems were built.
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Oct 21, 2014 10:08
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Fangz posted:So your proposal is to use mass eminent domain to seize properties, apparently arbitrarily, in city centres. I'm sure this would work out well...... That's.....that's why eminent domain exists? The city would acquire land to build housing the same way it acquires any sort of land, by buying it, or if necessary eminent domain. There's not some new problem here to be solved
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Oct 21, 2014 11:06
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Fangz posted:So your proposal is to use mass eminent domain to seize properties, apparently arbitrarily, in city centres. I'm sure this would work out well...... It's not at all uncommon for cities to have old buildings that could be redeveloped or even whole areas that have become run down and could do with a bit of renewal (c.f. London's Docklands in the '70s). You wouldn't have to do mass property seizure unless you went about things in an incredibly hamfisted way.
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Oct 21, 2014 12:12
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LemonDrizzle posted:It's not at all uncommon for cities to have old buildings that could be redeveloped or even whole areas that have become run down and could do with a bit of renewal (c.f. London's Docklands in the '70s). You wouldn't have to do mass property seizure unless you went about things in an incredibly hamfisted way. Yeah you would buy the property at market value and either convert it or tear it down and build housing. We aren't talking about government "confiscation."
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Oct 21, 2014 12:24
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An alternative to eminent domain. I'll quote myself since it was lost at the bottom of the previous page.nelson posted:To encourage development I would first change zoning and permits to allow building high density (preferably mixed use) housing. Second I would change the property tax structure so that land itself was taxed much higher but the improvements/developments on the land weren't taxed on top of that. This would discourage speculators from just sitting on underdeveloped property waiting for prices to rise. Either develop it or sell it to someone who will. Just holding on to it wouldn't be worth the tax burden.
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Oct 21, 2014 12:39
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Fangz posted:So your proposal is to use mass eminent domain to seize properties, apparently arbitrarily, in city centres. I'm sure this would work out well...... Nope. There's got to be someone in an area willing to sell for a high enough price. I didn't say there was anything about this where one would step back and try to figure out how to gently caress it up on the cheap.
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Oct 21, 2014 12:55
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There's always going to be pushback though if you build housing in a 'nice' area. A large part of what makes an area nice is its exclusivity. Regardless of if you're converting commercial or residential space to a midrise or tower, the surrounding area will have their million dollar homes drop in value, which will create a huge blowback from politically connected people. I was just reading that some of the nicest suburbs in Chicago haven't allowed for apartment construction in 100 years. mastershakeman fucked around with this message at 13:21 on Oct 21, 2014 |
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Oct 21, 2014 13:19
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EB Nulshit posted:Yes. ... how does nobody see the incredibly obvious problem with this idea? If you constructed a shitload of condos when there's no demand for them, you end up with a shitload of vacant buildings, at a loss of shitloads of money. Either your shiny new condos go unoccupied, or they suck people away from existing neighborhoods. Either way, you've wasted enormous amounts of brick and mortar in your attempt to subsidize housing, when instead you could have just... subsidized housing. For example, let's say an entire city government goes insane and actually does this: Nintendo Kid posted:When you're willing to build multiple 80 story apartment buildings, you can very quickly run out new people ready to move in, dude. Let's say you build an 80 story tower in the style of the mid-century NYC middle class co-ops, like Penn South - you can fairly easy get yourself 27 bedrooms across multiple size apartments per floor, which assuming you're housing married couples per each master bedroom and a kid per each other bedroom, should leave you with about 50 people per floor in a third-manhattan-block building with plenty surrounding open space and a shared play area with the building next to it on the block. Subtract a floor maintenence/skylobby stuff halfway up and use the ground floor for retail/light offices, each of these towers holds 4000 people or so, more if you're willing to build them out a bit more, have higher bedroom counts and lose a little green space at the ground level. So housing for 400 000 people gets "dropped" into the middle of a city. Presumably it's not going on new development land on the city's periphery because then you're back at the problem of nobody wanting to live there, so you're knocking down something to build your apartments. Presumably you're not knocking down existing apartments because then what would be the point? So by process of elimination you're bulldozing your city's commercial district to put houses there. Let's ignore the fact that this would ruin the local economy, because some people here just hate the E-word. Instead, maybe we can just focus on the fact that the commercial district will have to relocate somewhere, and assuming they can't flee the city, they're probably just going to move to the suburbs, which are experiencing a mass exodus as 400 000 people move away into the inner city. The best case scenario is that you've spent incredible amounts of money in order to force businesses and residents to switch places, at a net loss to all of them.
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Oct 21, 2014 13:20
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Guy DeBorgore posted:... how does nobody see the incredibly obvious problem with this idea? If you constructed a shitload of condos when there's no demand for them, you end up with a shitload of vacant buildings, at a loss of shitloads of money. Either your shiny new condos go unoccupied, or they suck people away from existing neighborhoods. Either way, you've wasted enormous amounts of brick and mortar in your attempt to subsidize housing, when instead you could have just... subsidized housing. There is demand. We're only doing this in cities where housing prices are insane, remember? For example, let's say an entire city government goes insane and actually does this: quote:So housing for 400 000 people gets "dropped" into the middle of a city. Don't drop a bunch of concentrated housing into a single area. That's dumb for a bunch of reasons that have already been posted.
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Oct 21, 2014 13:27
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The point is that you can build plenty of housing on small amounts of land and it doesn't need to look like poo poo or be maintained like poo poo. Additionally private developers are tearing poo poo down for high end housing all the time.
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Oct 21, 2014 13:45
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Guy DeBorgore posted:... how does nobody see the incredibly obvious problem with this idea? If you constructed a shitload of condos when there's no demand for them, you end up with a shitload of vacant buildings, at a loss of shitloads of money. Either your shiny new condos go unoccupied, or they suck people away from existing neighborhoods. Either way, you've wasted enormous amounts of brick and mortar in your attempt to subsidize housing, when instead you could have just... subsidized housing. You probably wouldn't want to drop all 100 buildings at once for multiple reasons. Instead you'd probably base your new construction on an estimate of how many families you expect to migrate to your city on net, and plan to build enough to house them plus a little extra if you want prices to fall on average. Then instead of bulldozing thriving commercial areas you'd want to replace old low-rise apartment buildings or 2-3 family units or single family homes or vacant commercial areas or etc. Basically best case scenario is you're smart about it and it works out fine but is still quite expensive. Then your plans leak and literally every home owner in your city turns against you because a substantial amount of their wealth is tied up in property and you get voted out or taken down for banging a 15 year old or whatever and the dream dies.
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Oct 21, 2014 13:57
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Ardennes posted:It is more or less how our highway systems were built. And that was extremely controversial at the time (but it primarily went through poor neighborhoods and segregated whites from blacks so who cares).
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Oct 21, 2014 14:10
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Fangz posted:So your proposal is to use mass eminent domain to seize properties, apparently arbitrarily, in city centres. I'm sure this would work out well...... Who said arbitrarily? You would try to spread them out over the city, work with the public transportation system, and try to achieve a good mix of income levels for new residents.
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Oct 21, 2014 14:20
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computer parts posted:And that was extremely controversial at the time (but it primarily went through poor neighborhoods and segregated whites from blacks so who cares). In this case, I don't think increased public housing would have the same effect, especially since giant multiple block spanning projects are severely out of style. Yeah, I don't know why you would need to flatten commercial areas, if anything it would make sense to build in the more "mid-city" area outside of a downtown that are still close enough for easy public transportation. Ultimately, something will have to go but the city can pick and choose where to put developments. One thing is we aren't talking about necessarily a situation where we need to increase housing for even more than 5% of the population, if anything even if you provide a few percentage points of housing stock it may help. There is a supply problem but it can still be controllable without mega-projects, since the goal is to manage prices not to be more than a secondary source of housing.
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Oct 21, 2014 14:40
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nelson posted:To encourage development I would first change zoning and permits to allow building high density (preferably mixed use) housing. Second I would change the property tax structure so that land itself was taxed much higher but the improvements/developments on the land weren't taxed on top of that. This would discourage speculators from just sitting on underdeveloped property waiting for prices to rise. Either develop it or sell it to someone who will. Just holding on to it wouldn't be worth the tax burden. Well the issue with basing tax much more on land than with unit is that you're building higher density housing with not a lot of increase in taxes. If the taxes go to schools (etc) you'd have an increase in students without a corresponding increase in funding. But yeah, zoning in a lot of cases is pretty ridiculous. It should be relatively easy to fix from a gentrification standpoint - if the locals are worried about rising rents they can push for denser zoning. Which is a much better solution and is more plausible to accomplish than, say, using eminent domain to build a high rise.
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Oct 21, 2014 15:18
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esquilax posted:Which is a much better solution and is more plausible to accomplish than, say, using eminent domain to build a high rise. Why is eminent domain being mentioned? Buildings go up for sale all the time. Buy a small one, stop renewing the leases, demolish it, and build a taller one. What's the need for eminent domain?
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Oct 21, 2014 15:21
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EB Nulshit posted:Why is eminent domain being mentioned? Buildings go up for sale all the time. Buy a small one, stop renewing the leases, demolish it, and build a taller one. What's the need for eminent domain? I mentioned it because other people were talking about it, and I think it's silly to talk about it. Zoning is the issue, since in many cases you are not even allowed to build taller buildings. Changing zoning to allow people to build taller buildings is a major first step in the local fight against rising rents and home prices. In many areas, it may be the only step needed.
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Oct 21, 2014 15:29
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Jacobin had a write up addressing New York's housing cost issue and criticizes de Blasio's plan. Interesting read: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/de-blasios-doomed-housing-plan/
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Oct 21, 2014 15:57
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Guy DeBorgore posted:So by process of elimination you're bulldozing your city's commercial district to put houses there. Let's ignore the fact that this would ruin the local economy, because some people here just hate the E-word. Instead, maybe we can just focus on the fact that the commercial district will have to relocate somewhere, and assuming they can't flee the city, they're probably just going to move to the suburbs, which are experiencing a mass exodus as 400 000 people move away into the inner city. The best case scenario is that you've spent incredible amounts of money in order to force businesses and residents to switch places, at a net loss to all of them.
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Oct 21, 2014 16:19
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Found an interesting article on ZeroHedge re: NYC Real estate: “The Census Bureau estimates that 30 percent of all apartments in the quadrant from 49th to 70th Streets between Fifth and Park are vacant at least ten months a year.” http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-10-16/meet-proposed-tax-could-crush-high-end-nyc-real-estate
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Oct 22, 2014 16:59
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Rent control is a response to higher rents which is a response to higher demand relative to supply for housing. Compounding this problem is that in dense areas, it is more profitable to build Class A housing than lower Class housing*. The answer to rising rents is to reduce inequality (to reduce the allure of appealing to Class A renters) or increase subsidies for lower Class housing and to reduce property values to make building Class B and C properties more profitable. Two things that are never going to happen politically: higher taxes specifically on the wealthy and lower property values. Further, the desire for ever and explosively appreciating housing is partially a result of 30+ years of stagnant wages. If people could afford to retire and do the things they wanted without gambling on housing, they wouldn't be so concerned with house prices and booms (like 1950-1980, give or take). So, we have all the problems one would expect for living in the second gilded age and we should probably fix that first. * Excerpt from LA Times that reflects my experience in LA: quote:Although he predicts that rent growth at the top end might flatten out, the new buildings won't translate into more affordable rents for the broad middle of the market.
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Oct 22, 2014 20:39
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Yeah if you're going to do new construction with the insane land prices in LA, there's no sense shooting for middle income. The market is not going to provide for anyone but the rich.
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Oct 22, 2014 21:10
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Fangz posted:So your proposal is to use mass eminent domain to seize properties, apparently arbitrarily, in city centres. I'm sure this would work out well...... Forums Poster Fangz appears to not understand that eminent domain involves the big scary government handing you a sack of cash in exchange for your land at market value.
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Oct 22, 2014 22:19
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:Forums Poster Fangz appears to not understand that eminent domain involves the big scary government handing you a sack of cash in exchange for your land at market value. A lot of people will say "you didn't give me what it's really worth and anyway I don't want to move even for ten times what it's worth".
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Oct 22, 2014 22:24
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computer parts posted:A lot of people will say "you didn't give me what it's really worth and anyway I don't want to move even for ten times what it's worth". Another really common thing that happens is that they'll only buy what they need, which means that you can be left with a weird little slice of land that you can't do much with. Though during the big interstate system buildout these little slices were frequently rented out or sold to billboard companies.
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Oct 22, 2014 22:29
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:Another really common thing that happens is that they'll only buy what they need, which means that you can be left with a weird little slice of land that you can't do much with. Granted, isn't that in part due to building a highway through different sized lots? If the city buys land in an urban area they will probably use most of the lot just like private contractors do.
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Oct 22, 2014 22:44
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MickeyFinn posted:"The stuff that's coming on line, it's all Class A. And if you're going to build Class A, you've got to be in a good market," he said. "Class B rents are going to keep going up. No one's building affordable, middle-class apartments unless you've got a subsidy or tax credits or something." This is kind of meaningless. If you have a situation where demand outstrips supply, any increase in supply is going to be helpful and will always be taken up by those with the most money to spend unless you have a seller who hates money and profit involved somewhere. Also, the difference in construction cost between a typical 'luxury' apartment and an 'affordable' one is negligible - the luxury is mainly about nice interior decoration rather than anything structural in most cases. That stuff only adds a few (tens of) thousands to the price of the place - hardly a big issue if prices are out of the average guy's reach by a few hundreds of thousands.
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Oct 22, 2014 23:42
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Prior to this I never knew that public housing could substitute private housing so easily for low and lower income citizens. Very interesting.
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Oct 23, 2014 01:04
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It's a good idea just because it's easier and more efficient for the government just to own and run rent-subsidized housing for the poor than it is to give the subsidy money to private landlords or try to fix prices
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Oct 23, 2014 01:36
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