My city, like many in the US, is facing rising rents and a shortage of low income, or even just affordable housing. The city has been preempted by the state from passing any sort rent control, public housing options or really any thing other than what the developers want to build.
In the face of a drought of affordable housing developers have offered the city the exact opposite of what we need, more luxury housing. They claiming that the increased supply will cause wealthier renters to move into the new housing, which will open up space in market rate housing for middle income renters to move in which should open up space in low income housing for the poor to move in. The housing will trickle down.
The developers will first claim that this trickle down housing policy will lower rents, until anyone interrogates it. Under scrutiny, they eventually concede that it only slows down the rate of increasing rent. Not a solution. Barely a stop gap. But any alternative has been foreclosed upon. So in our thirst for affordable housing developers offer to piss in our mouths. And the YIMBYs fucking beg for more. Piss in our mouths, we are thirsty.
that "economic filtering" thing about how increasing the inventory of luxury housing induces rich renters to upgrade and frees up lower income housing is like the stupidest shit i have ever read. i first saw it in an article in the last week or so and i was just like, "this is a thing educated scholars think happens?"
i seriously cannot force myself to accept it is anything other than a quarter-assed justification builders and their investors throw around for their self-serving / self-dealing scam to only ever build luxury housing. rich fucks warehouse that shit on their books as an appreciating asset, they sit vacant for years, but get passed around as an investment asset among the elites for deal sweeteners and obscuring the exchange of actual assets/favors like art.
my only consolation is that when the revolution comes, all that vacant luxury housing in prime locations is going to make for great multi-family housing, free clinics, and shelters. like was done in cuba. it lifted my heart to see so many luxury homes from the 20s-50s be occupied by regular ass people and families all over havana and made me realize why gusanos are filled with so much hate.
And if I understand the matter there's nothing luxurious about luxury housing these days. More square footage, but the same shitty construction techniques that use the least amount of materials allowed by the building code as everything else.
Unoccupied houses tend to go to shit really quickly - Mold creeps in with no one to notice, animals get in, water leaks in. All it takes is one broken window and a few days or weeks of rain to get a black mold infestation that makes the building a tear-down.
Rarely is there much in the way of extra footage. At best is location.
I was in one of the high end apartments once. The tenant was paying 2K for vinyl plank floors, white drywall and bare concrete ceiling. But hey there was a coffee shop in the lobby.
I can't tell you how many times articles quote the some local professor to say "the highest demand in our city is for luxury housing". When you look into the methodology, the difference between our top income tenants vs top rental units is slightly higher than the difference between bottom income tenants and bottom rental units. And of course the demand of a rich person to live in a nicer apartment is one-to-one with the demand of a poor person to not be homeless. A better metric would multiply the differences by the vacancy rates of the units in those brackets.