two things
- Faircloth Limit is real
- in capitalist America, 'affordable housing' is housing that was built 20+ years ago in a bad location
since most cities outlawed new dense core housing in the late 90s or earlier, there is now generally no affordable housing in them, because very little housing has been built over the last 20 years, and the housing that has been built in that time is often replacement for what would have been affordable today
add the whole Faircloth Limit (which doesn't require replacement of subsidized housing that is destroyed), and the housing market anywhere reasonably close to a 'desirable' urban area is a hell world shit pit
What's the incentive to build dense housing when artificially creating scarcity allows you to turn massive profits on a few sticks stacked on a 1 acre lot?
Private property gang
"Affordable" housing is a joke. It's only affordable to the middle class. The poor can't afford to live in anything new and shiny.
Sorry, building new houses for the upper middle class will make them abandon the falling apart buildings they live in now, so the poors can have them. If you don't like that, you should stop being poor.
I wish that was true.
When I was going to school at SJSU in the mid 2010's I lived in a tear-down apartment with three other people in two bedrooms.
Half of our neighbors were single techbros making six figures.
Most of the working poor in the Bay Area live 30-40 miles from where they work.
The Bay Area is an absolute travesty, and one of the most neoliberal places in the U.S.
Add some "urban renewal" that forcibly gentrifies "troubled neighbourhoods" and this is literally what liberal housing policy is.
The real reason their isn't affordable housing is because developers clients are large landlords/real estate investors not people who want a new condo.
If you could get a group of 200 households together to build a new building you can easily do it at a price of 200-300k per unit for something pretty damn nice even in a major city.
The funding structures for new housing coops don't really exist anymore.
Here's ye olde switcheroo:
internet socialists: I'm going to ally with wealthy homeowners to stop the construction of new market-rate housing.
YIMBYs: To build affordable, housing, right?
YIMBYism as currently constructed is so obviously a manufactured movement that it may as well just be branded as an advertising campaign for housing developers. If you have to build “market rate,” housing it needs to be in the context of government policies that actually pressure the market at a minimum, which most YIMBY types seem to be 100% in opposition to. They also say “we’re not against public housing!” and will decline to advocate for it, even when it’s got a chance of passing.
This does not align with my lived experience of having been on the Bay Area YIMBY Slack channel for two years.
CA's article 34 and Costa-Hawkins repeal efforts had a lot of individual YIMBYs supporting them, even if the statewide-org endorsement vote did not pass.
I'll say that, from the inside, I ran into one literal developer shill and he was grasping at straws trying to get someone local to support a project that would have displaced existing tenants that the org had refused to push for.
The reason the public housing and rent control bills didn't get org-endorsed is because (shocker) it's not a leftist org and there are a lot of neolibs who don't believe in those. The vote was closer than you think, though. That also doesn't mean there weren't plenty of people who call themselves YIMBY who were calling and organizing for those efforts individually. Broad coalition groups can disagree. See: DSA whenever they have to do candidate endorsements.
For most cities where this is an issue there's already enough housing - the problem is that it's all owned by rich people
If that's the case building new market homes don't really fix any problems - rich people are just going to buy them as investments.
Hey cool. Thanks for the snark comrade, for the record I never mentioned empty homes but that can definitely be an issue as well. But yeah I'm sure you don't transfer your wealth to a rich person on the first of the month but I do and have never had an option to do otherwise.
Yeah and my leech dropped rents $500 as soon as she had 3 empty units. She wasn't keeping them artificially empty or charging more than people would pay. Limited market availability meant she could charge absurd amounts. People moving our because of Covid created the same effect as just building more housing.
You are literally describing a scenario where the problem with affordability isn't that there isn't enough housing, but that the housing is owned by a rich person who will charge you as much as they possibly can to live there.
Lotta libs here suddenly pro-market when it comes to housing lol
They can charge as much as they want because there's not enough.
When the demand for housing in the Bay dropped precipitously after Covid and people not needing to pay those prices for the sake of their commutes, the prices went down.
We literally live under capitalism. All landlords are not a cartel. Demand affects prices. Supply affects prices.
Look man, you can build your market housing. I can tell you the future though. Rich people will buy them and either keep them vacant as an investment or rent them so you can pay their mortgage and secure their wealth with yours.
Housing prices and rents will continue to rise and poor people will continue to struggle for a dignified existence.
As long as rich people are permitted to use housing as an investment they will continue to do so, artificially inflating the price of housing by maintaining scarcity (which is fine for them because they can afford the prices and they're guaranteed to continue to go up).
Since most everyday people can't compete with the rich for housing, the downstream effect of this is the maintenance of an artificially high rental pool, which as you mentioned, puts pressure on the system that keeps rents high.
Work to decommodify housing comrade. Housing is a human right and shouldn't be subject to market perversion.
I'll tell you how the current approach of urban leftists opposing market rate housing is going to turn out: everything you said about my future, but faster and worse. And when it's all over and the dust has settled, the evictions and the displacement will have been more total and more complete.
Single family exclusive zoning creates artificial scarcity. That's what I devote most of my energy to fighting. 75 percent of SF is zoned for single family. The parts that aren't? Historically black and brown neighborhoods. It makes no sense. No wonder development in the few areas it's allowed is so intensive and expensive. No wonder the displacement is so severe when the only place new multi-unit housing is allowed is in minority neighborhoods. Leaving discretionary power in the hands of wealthy white planning commissions made (almost always) of realtors means you design your city to benefit realtors. The reason that new development has a pool and a gym and a "community space" isn't to attract residents, it's to get past the planning commissions. The planning commissions who will deny their requested variances at the slightest hint that the housing being built won't be the most premium and attract only rich white couples.
So I devote my local political energy to fighting spot and exclusionary zoning, advocating for the development of housing in my wealthy suburb, legalizing public housing, and enacting rent control and eviction protections.
I'll be happy for us all when we get the revolution, but I'm not going to uphold the status quo in the meantime.
Yes, it will be affordable.
No I will define what affordable actually means, or AFFORDABLE TO WHO?
Not sure how you got a pic of me trying to weed the developers out of /r/canadahousing.
I'm not sure what the point of this is lol if housing is affordable or not isn't determined primarily by the way you make the building or whatever. Unless you make all the apartments massive or something but that isn't usually the case with these projects. It's kinda barking at the wrong tree.
yimbys are the opposite of nimbys. yes in my backyard. they should be for poor people moving in next door
They don’t tho. They want to live in urban areas and feel apart of urban culture without dealing with the long standing urban inhabitants. Look at what’s happening in Detroit Harlem and Pittsburg for examples.
They do, in my experience. In SF in particular they've been a significant agitating force behind low-income housing construction. There was one project in particular near the Embarcadero that I remember them showing up for.
Leftists and YIMBYs just have these unrealistic caricatures of each other in their heads.
The meme is that YIMBYs want to build more housing, but primarily luxury and expensive housing that does little to improve affordability.
Build new apartment, only build in nice area, spend 5% more in furnishings, add 10% more space to floor plan, call it luxury apartments. Increase rent by 100%.
only build in nice area
See that's the thing. It's mostly the area. If you go to some very expensive city centers you'll find ridiculously expensive apartments which are falling apart and also tiny. It doesn't have much to do with the building, affordable apartments is not some specific type of apartment you can build, unless, idk, you intentionally sabotage them to make them gross. Any competently made new apartment building in a nice area is gonna have expensive apartments, it's a housing market issue. More apartments being built regardless of how affordable they individually are may slightly alleviate the issue, but that depends on many things.
I feel like I can never keep track of online discourse acronyms. Like this sight should seriously have a wiki for commonly used but completely non-intuitive terms/abbreviations. So, can someone please tell me what the fuck a YIMBY is? It sounds like the name of a star wars alien or something
