Correct urban leftism is letting private developers make as much market housing as they want, and the less you restrain private developers the more left you are
but the issue is not that there are not enough homes, the issue is that all the homes get bought up by the rich as investments to store their wealth.
This is only half-true. Official vacancy rates can don't necessarily indicate that all those homes are being deliberately kept empty as investments- it's also normal for homes to lie vacant for a while when people move out. It's true that the root cause of the housing crisis is the commodification of housing into an investment vehicle, but that doesn't mean that there are currently millions of empty homes lying around for everyone who wants one. We should absolutely decommodify housing and guarantee universal public housing, but making that a practical reality would still require building millions, if not tens of millions, of new homes, preferably through upzoning and infill development to reduce suburban sprawl.
I don't agree with everything they say, but this video goes into why official vacancy rates are misleading, and why we still need to build lots of new homes to solve the housing crisis.
You and I basically agree on the point that we need to stop treating housing as a commodity. But it's kind of frustrating that you're not really understanding or engaging with the arguments here.
Their claim is that 4.5 million of those 15 million vacancies aren’t really vacant because they are rented or sold and not moved in yet. Then where are people staying in the meantime? There are not 4.5 million people living on the street waiting to move in to a rented house or apartment.
People living on the street aren't the full extent of the housing crisis or homeless people, as the video told you.
Their next claim is that 4.8 million are seasonal or only used occasionally. Well, that is exactly what I’m talking about when I say that available housing has been bought up and is being hoarded by rich people.
But people don't live or work in those places. If you're rent burdened in San Francisco or New York or Boston, redistributing a time share in a Colorado ski resort or a rich guy's fishing cabin in Michigan doesn't solve your problem.
And lastly, “other” vacancies might include houses that need repairs. Ok, sure, but wouldn’t it be easier and cheaper to fix up those units instead of building entirely new housing from scratch?
In the case of places that have been condemned, no, it's actually cheaper to tear them down and build something new.
Anyway, I’m not saying we don’t need to build more housing, I’m saying if we build more housing without addressing that the rich will just buy all of them up as investments, then building all that new housing won’t solve jack shit.
Yes, I agree completely. But Marxists have to ruthlessly study the policies that actually work at solving these problems and apply them, and it's been that way since Lenin. Every single country that has had a housing crisis has gotten through it by building shitload of new housing, from Singapore to the Soviet Union. It's a hell of a lot easier to brute force a solution by just building everyone an apartment, then it is to dance around with fake ticky-tacky solutions that really just give in to the bullshit arguments of suburbanites who just want to preserve their home values.
So you're just going to ignore the parts where I talk about decommodifying land and building PUBLIC housing in order to suggest that I support letting rich people buy up all the housing? Good job, asswipe. Do you remember that the original post was about DSA trying to keep new housing off a fucking golf course?
What's an acceptable vacancy rate for you, considering people need to move occasionally? Anything under 5% is generally considered a "very hot" rental market and will likely see price increases.
No, but people move from out of town, and even for people moving within a city, they don't move into currently-occupied apartments.
There need to be some number of apartments open at any given time so that people who need to move can do so. 100% occupancy would mean that every move would have to be a swap, or that no one new could move to town.
If the issue is 5,500 homes are vacant in all of Denver, then building 2000 units of housing would help since it's not going to be mostly vacant.
I don't think that's going to solve any issues completely as long as housing is a commodity though
The propaganda against these DSA libs is so strong that even the libs on this site believe in it lol.
Denver DSA's position is correct they just don't have PR chops.
Empty promises from a private developer to provide a small percentage of affordable housing in a golf course area is all but guaranteed to mean luxury apartments get built there and the affordable housing is phased out within a couple years.
Public housing and rent control will do the actual thing desired. YIMBY talking points about simply increasing supply through development are bullshit, you need to produce enough units that actually rent at a particular rate, not leave it to real estate ghouls that will do things like create an entrance just for the poors and start "upgrading" the "affordable" units within the first year, ensuring that fewer poors can live there and that they can jack up the rent on "renovated" units.
Thank you for linking, I find their statement credible and yours yimby nonsense
Seems kinda complex to me, I think I'd come down on the NO position though.
It boils down to
“Should we trust a private developer to provide timely results with no guarantees/mandates by the government”
And
“How can the state take back the land and let the community decide what to do with the land without interference?”
The liberals say that DSA wants perfection and as a result, is anti housing. But the DSA just wants the government to do the same thing as the liberals, except without a developer leading the project. Someone will make millions of dollars regardless, but liberals think the DSA is deluded enough to want housing built under capitalism with 0 profit motive involved lol.
Exactly, which is why I think I'd side with DSA on this one.
Like, it's a difficult situation entirely but when you MUST take one of several shit positions it's the better one.
DSA such a fraud captured org. There's a reason #FrauDSquAd exists.
Don’t be mean to them they’re just succdems. What more could you expect them to do?
If they vote no then then nothing happens? Or would it go back into being a golf course?
The land can be used for anything as long as it meets the requirements of being an “open space” and for “recreational purposes.” So it can be golf, or anything by else that meets those requirements. The land is current owned by a developer. If they vote no, it’s possible they’ll just turn it into a golf course again unless people somehow vote for the government to buy it up. Despite all the replies, the group wants it to be a publicly accessible park, not a golf course. Although the country is pathetic when it comes to forcing a private company to do anything.
They also point out that there are areas around the land that are unused (parking lots for example) which aren’t being considered for development. Personally I think hundreds of acres can be reduced a bit for development, but the pro-development side wants to reduce that to just about a few acres of open land and much of the used land will probably be parking lots anyway lol (in addition to the houses and apartments, but parking lots will just cause it to be less dense)
The failure of the anti-development side is that they’re not very good at explaining that other parts of the neighborhood can be used for development and don’t have any development proposals to be considered should a “no” vote succeed (they want the government and voters to think of a different plan after a no vote succeeds). This causes people to think they’re anti housing.
according to their statement the city would have the opportunity to acquire and develop the land. Idk how that would work though.
Edit: it looks like this land is required to be a golf course (or for recreation) per a 20ish year old agreement and a developer bought it a few years ago. The developers are now trying to dance around that agreement through this referendum so they can build on it. Maybe the idea is that the city could buy it on the cheap and parcel it out?
Gonna have to ask the question, are there not already paved and prepared places where new housing could be constructed instead of green spaces?
Like, the first thing that happens with making a subdivision is the bulldozers come in and remove the first foot or so of soil and replace it with clay and gravel to get foundation pads laid. Then there are the, probably, miles of sewer lines, gas lines, electric/communication lines that need to be dug in. Then there's the roadways and rain drains that have to be worked into the city's rain water diversion plans.
Proponents of the project characterize Save Open Space and the opponents as anti-housing. But many opponents of the golf course redevelopment have pointed to the industrial part of Northeast Park Hill, less than a block from the golf course, and other nearby neighborhoods along the A Line.
That part of the neighborhood includes many empty parking lots and one-story industrial buildings ripe for dense, mixed-use development. Why take over 155-acres of potential park when there is so much underused land nearby they ask?
Glancing at the map it looks like this is in the city and there isn't any other green space around that isn't a park or national park
