The membership of Denver DSA has voted to endorse a “NO on 2O” position - denying the developers the ability to execute a plan that we think is ultimately a loss for the city. Read our statement below if you wish to learn more about why: pic.twitter.com/FOyUpb43eZ— Denver🌹DSA (@DSAdenver) March 17, 2023
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
People living on the street aren't the full extent of the housing crisis or homeless people, as the video told you.
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.
In the case of places that have been condemned, no, it's actually cheaper to tear them down and build something new.
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.
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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?
Here's what a real solution to a housing crisis looks like, and we should demolish every SFH Mcmansion neighborhood and golf course to build it. Cry about it.
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.
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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