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The US needs to build 2 million houses to revive the American dream of homeownership
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
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Aren't there currently more empty homes than homeless in the US? Like, by a decent margin, too? I think that statistic is getting a bit dated, but I also don't expect it to have improved. What we really need is to treat homes as homes, as essentials for life, instead of as investments. But, of course, that'd cost rich people money instead of giving them a way to make even more money, so we can't do that. I'm sure some towns and cities could benefit from more homes, but the core of the problem is societal, not material.
This is also about reducing rentals
15 million long term vacant houses to 600,000 homeless.
That doesn't sound right. I think there are much much more than 600,000 homeless people in the United States. Maybe that's the number who actually sleep on the street but doesn't count people who are staying in shelters or groups of people who rent rooms in extended stay motels?
10-15% of household in the US are "housing insecure"... There's 127m households... So about 15 million housing insecure families. I think we should go with that. You're probably right that the 600k is street homeless. Many people are "homeless sheltered" meaning they can couch surf, or the state is putting them in a motel, or whatever.
A lot of it is a question of where.
The town I grew up in is a great example: it is n a generally rural area and lost its major employer years ago. The economy never really recovered and the population has dwindled, but that’s also true of the surrounding area. There are many empty homes, even in formerly upscale developments, and I can literally buy one on my credit card.
In my current town, a starter home is like 15x the price, they sell within hours, and there’s no open land left to develop.
The expensive area is where people want to live, but there are all those empty homes selling for very little just a few hours drive away
I believe there’s been a general trend of moving toward cities, that leaves lots of inexpensive empty homes behind
There are some cities that are offering money for people to move there and work remotely. They have the housing but not the jobs? I know Tulsa is one, Somewhere in Kansas, I don't remember where else.
Vermont has a program for remote workers to move there. I might take them up on it because there's no amenities in a city that can beat the night sky in a place with little to no light pollution.
Coming from a solid blue city in a solid blue state, that really doesn’t seem tempting. I’m sure it is much cheaper to live there but is it worth it?
Realistically, my company doesn’t want to let people move without adjusting pay and jobs. I’m sure many are like that. I’m privileged to get pay relative to a high cost of living area so I’m sure they’d be happy to cut me back to low pay. Lower pay and regressive/conservative …. No wonder there is extra housing supply
Plus many states just don’t have the money for such programs. Particularly the shitty ones with lots of empty housing.
yes there is currently extra housing but, unfortunately, sites like airbnb have moved large swaths of the housing market to the luxury hotel market leading to a shortage in actual housing as wealthy, investor, and corporate class people pay premiums for short term rentals that most people simply can't compete with.
Also boomers are both buying retirement homes and holding onto their previous homes, rather than letting them go back on the market and alleviate some of the shortage. They have more purchasing power than any of the younger generations because they have decades of equity built up, and they're trying to keep their previous homes to pass onto their children. Both are contributing to the upward price pressure.
So then our problem is that we allow moneyed interests to monopolize home ownership so they can extract wealth from people who actually generate it. It is quite literally the definition of rent seeking behavior.
Airbnb isnt as big a problem as much as corporate owned housing is.
Companies like Blackstone need to be absorbed by the US Govt.
airbnb itself is not the whole problem. But its important to recognize it changed markets worldwide by pitting the luxury hotel market in direct competition with housing
so the problem is more that the internet has caused a rich market to overflow into housing - you have to also consider people are going on work trips and getting reimbursed for staying at an airbnb etc. Wedding parties as well seem to prefer airbnbs. The result is a worldwide catastrophe for residential housing.
But its very simple: A high demand, luxury market overflows into residential housing. The obvious result is residential prices skyrocket with demand.
Did Airbnb cause this? not entirely, they're just the best at it. Addressing Blackstone will help by removing some of the cash competing for residential housing, but it won't solve the problem entirely until like wedding parties and vacationers go back to using hotels and companies are no longer able to reimburse people for airbnb stays. You have to address the excess demand from the market spillover that airbnb has made its profits on. Otherwise you're just ignoring one of the primary reasons Blackstone entered the market - there are lots of individuals doing the same thing as Blackstone on a smaller scale here
yeah but before airbnb this was not much of an issue. They do seem to go hand in hand.
A lot of airbnbs are owned by corporations. Also, airbnb came out around the time corporations really started investing in single family homes en masse. Airbnb started in 2008, which was at the same time as the housing bubble collapse that helped investors buy up on the cheap. It's hard to say which was the chicken and which was the egg.
yeah exactly. Its hard to say which influenced which but they are both a part of it. I mean I remember how the concept for it and the ride thing was more of a social couch surfing thing. we really need to capture these back to things like the federation and get the gross corpo profits out of it.
I disagree that airbnb is the issue here. Corporate ownership of houses that are subsequently rented out would still be an endemic issue that needs to be addressed, even IF airbnb and vrbo apps were to be outright banned (they wont be)
the airbnb's would have otherwise been rentals. I agree corp ownership is an issue regardless but that does not mean its the sole issue around a problem.
What's your plan to do that?
So, there actually is a solution, and Britain did it until Thatcher came along, and it worked great: The government buys up a lot of property, and rents it to anyone who wants it at reasonable rates. They’ve got the money to do it, and it brings in income for them anyway, and it pierces the bubble so that private landlords can’t charge “market rates” and send the whole operation into an ever-increasing spiral of both rents and property values.
A lot of British landlords actually wound up selling to the government anyway, since the lack of a bubble means you can’t even make that much from renting out properties as a business venture, so they’d rather just get rid of the properties and invest in some other endeavor that’s an actual profit seeking enterprise. Literally everyone wins except the cockheads.
I am sure in America it would be absurdly unpopular, but it works great.
Sounds like socialism! I love it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id0cqNWZ50Y&t=120s
I didn't realize I needed to have a formal policy plan before I opener my mouth. I'll freely admit I don't fully understand the intricacies of how we handle real estate, but the general belief that real estate prices must be protected and they must generally trend upwards is the unhealthy core of the problem. It prioritizes profits over human needs.
Yes.
How we change is somewhat undefined. We've many diverse examples from history. Our side is the ideological underdog. Flexibility and diversity are two of our greatest strengths.
The majority always chooses an authoritarian king, to let another decide for them in convenience in a paradigm as old as humanity. Critical to our collective ideological success is development of individual wisdom, that more individuals choose to learn and reason for themselves.
The core goals originated in FDR's 1944 Second Bill of Economic Rights, a proposed successor to The New Deal. It's been a third party platform for eighty years, including Sanders.
How to pay for it originated in Eisenhower's 1961 farewell address, where he defined and warned of the military-industrial complex. His predictions were in late stages (Reagan's nukes) in twenty five years. In 1990 perhaps the way to pay was to cut defense budget by half by 2000. But, by then the corruption likely ran too deep, as evidenced by the subsequent reckless deregulation of banks by both Democrats and Republicans (partial repeal of Glass-Steagall, Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act).
We're thirty five years past 1990. Banks own everything. Puppet kings are common. And, the Internet may have fundamentally changed communication and relationships so much that we could be past an "event horizon" of our Great Filter event. Belief in such a death perhaps makes it easier to cope with the fight.
I've certainly lost the thread of my purpose. I hope there's something of value for you here.
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