Comment by jeffbee
4 months ago
Sorry, are you suggesting that the solution to housing shortage is to move into an existing building with strangers?
4 months ago
Sorry, are you suggesting that the solution to housing shortage is to move into an existing building with strangers?
If I'm reading myself right, I'm suggesting that there's no need to "the solution to housing shortage," since -- with more than 2 rooms per person on average -- it's not a problem to begin with. The problem frequently called "the housing shortage" is a problem of "housing affordability in the megacities," and we should call it by its real name.
How are those rooms distributed? It's not like they are individually moving parts.
People buy a house big enough to hold their kids, then they age and the kids move out, and there's lots of fully owned homes with empty rooms, but no places for the now-adult children to live, until a prior generation dies.
> "the housing shortage" is a problem of "housing affordability in the megacities," and we should call it by its real name.
Housing affordability problems are driven by a single thing: shortage of housing. Refusing to call the shortage a shortage and instead only referring to the symptom, inaffordability, rather than the cause, shortage is willful deception to prevent action on the cause.
This is not a problem just in megacities, it's spreading everywhere else in the country as the problem gets worse and worse. It showed up first in the most in-demand cities but as remote work increased let people spread out more, it affected more and more locations. Meanwhile, people living in the highly economically productive areas with the greatest housing shortages say there's no need to allow more housing to be built because remote work solves the problem. They speak out of both sides of their mouth though, as a few short years ago they denied that shortage caused the affordability problem, but when there's something that can be used to lessen the shortage (remote work, banning AirBNB), they grab on eagerly to the the shortage explanation for housing affordability.
The story of the housing shortage in the US is people desperately, by any means they possibly can, avoid addressing the shortage and being realistic about it.
> willful deception to prevent action on the cause.
I don't care either way. I don't live in the US. Action or non-action, I'm unaffected by that. There's no reason for me to "willfully deceit" anyone, as I don't stand to either gain or lose with any outcome. There's also no reason for you to frame this as a personal attack.
I've checked Zillow though.
There's a plenty of $1 homes, mostly dilapidated and non-functional even though the land could be worth $1 if one can afford demolition and rebuilding. But at the range of $10,000 to $15,000 there's a lot of pretty normally looking homes. Even if one doesn't have that amount as a down payment, I assume plenty of banks would be willing to give a mortgage for that sum with 25 years of $150/mo payments.
The problem is nobody wants to live where these houses are, because it's not SF, while in SF there are a lot of options under $2M, but not many people have that amount of money.
"Housing shortage" doesn't exist. The only shortage that exists is the shortage of $10,000 homes in SF.