There was an era where the landed gentry were aware of this. There was an era where company owners were aware of this. There was an era where governments were aware of this.
Now it's bad for return on capital and/or socialism.
As fun as it might be to dunk on strawman republicans, those developments weren't exactly showered with praise from the left either. The same housing was being decried as being "company towns" or whatever.
Company scrip is what a lot of people take issue with, I assume, as they should.
No? People also complain how it limits your career prospects (because there aren't any competitors to jump ship to), or how the company ends up with outsized political influence.
Houses are suffering from being at the front of the interest of BlackRock and other almighty lobbies
Blackrock and "other almighty lobbies" (Chamber of Commerce?) are showing up to city council meetings to block housing from getting built?
It's also, it needs be said, wasn't built to support (sigh[1]) "massive immigration". You can find a few H1B holders peppered around, but the sprawl is for the middle class, 100%.
[1] Seriously, why must everything become a callout to right wing grievance politics these days?
Obviously we disagree but the point I feel most compelled to push back against is your assertion that "living in the modern US is paradise in almost all quantifiable ways".
This is such a problematic statement that clearly labors heavily under the burden of its own premise. A crude metric is quite telling: suicide has trended upwards in the past 20 years. I presume if the data went back further the picture would be more stark.
Living in a time with gizmos and gadgets and economic plenty that is weakly distributed and calling that "paradise" is very insulting to people's lived experiences and part of the reason I think the economic message of the politics you represent alienates average folks.
Based on your posts it seems like you've been a wealthy developer for decades and likely have employed, or employ, cheap labor. Kind of feels like a rugpull, Ross.
Personally, I've managed many teams with cheap foreign developers, I'm just straight about it.
Also, when do you think I was born? You think the US hadn't been built in 1982? Absurd claims all around.
At the turn of the previous century, suicide rates were markedly higher than today, even though today is worse than 20 years ago.
https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-us-suicide-rates-since-19...
It's probably not causative, as that would be quite silly, but economic plenty for extremely wealthy people caused by a massive influx of cheap labor is clearly not a net boon on this metric.
The US made its bones well before this insane population explosion we only very recently had.
(Yes, we've had large amounts of immigration before. We also built infrastructure and were vastly less developed).
> A crude metric is quite telling: suicide has trended upwards in the past 20 years. I presume if the data went back further the picture would be more stark.
1. The data going back 70 years, which is 50 years more than 20, show that suicide has sharply risen.
2. The integrity of data much older than that is substantially in question.
> After two decades of slowly rising, the US suicide rate has stabilized over the past few years. It is now at the same level as the 1950s.
And yeah, the rates pre-1950 were much, much higher.
Suicide and basic needs being met is likely not highly correlated. On the other side suicide stats likely don’t include dependency related death, alcoholism can be a coping mechanism, if you didn’t commit suicide but instead murdered your liver and died early is that really a different statistic in your assessment?
The only way you can measure is access to basic needs, housing, shelter, medical care, nutrition. A century ago those things were significantly lower for the average person vs now. Could the world be in a better situation? Very likely yes, but is could also be much worse.
If you want to significantly change things then better, advocate for more social workers and to make sure the social welfare system works through them. They are in my experience very good at sussing out whether someone is a leech to society and is just looking for a handout of someone who is truly in need.
Advocate for adequate housing, more suburbs doesn’t help low-middle class people, you need more dense housing close to infrastructure or workplaces.
I just don't know how to express to you how philosophically naive I think the kind of utilitarian assertion you've made is.
We can easily construct a thought experiment world that you and I would both agree is a living hellscape where all human needs were simultaneously being met. Most horror science fiction is predicated on those premises.
I just think we don’t need to debate this, things are better than a century ago but they are still not great.
Quality of life isn’t solely based on basic needs alone, but for the vast majority of people those basic needs are now met when they weren’t before. That doesn’t mean we get to say, “That’s good enough let’s pack up” there’s still a lot of work to do.
Fundamentally the question to me becomes "what is the meaning of life" and I don't actually think the answer is even "to be extremely comfortable".
This is my core disagreement with tech enthusiasts (specifically AI) people. It's just a naive way of understanding the human organism.
(You know, it occurs to me that most Americans aren't even extremely comfortable because they live in comfort with a massive amount of real or perceived precarity.)
I can tell you my point of view is that we aren’t even sure what we should do. I know reasonably well how to solve the basic needs, in my experience that doesn’t mean you are going to be happy, I was the unhappiest in my life when I had the most I’ve had. Well maybe the second unhappiest, there was a point in my life I will never want to go back to, but I don’t think I will.
When everything was going well, I needed nothing, I was achieving all my life goals, I fought through the worst depression, I had to seek medical help.
What is/are the continuing issue/s? What uk council housing situation should we be looking for/at?
No amount of banging on and on about immigrants will change that.
So, like Cronus eating his kids, many countries around the world have chosen to sacrifice affordability for their kids in order to squeeze out a few more decades of good living.
It's just like the problem the US & its peers have with unfunded liabilities: a huge chunk of retirement savings in tied up the stock market, specifically, the SP500 that has a PE ratio of 30. Are you willing to bet that these companies will stay profitable at their current rate for 30y, without slipping?
It's a question without easy answers, because as the workforce reduces (low birth rates), there are fewer workers paying into Social Security and bidding stock markets to new heights. As a result, everyone withdrawing ends up with less cash and fewer goods.
What changed? Mostly a shift toward neoliberal policies in the '70s and '80s that framed government intervention as inefficient and market solutions as inherently superior. We offloaded housing policy to private developers and then acted shocked when affordability cratered.
We don’t need to reinvent anything—we just need the political will to do what we already did once, and quite successfully.
Instead of addressing systemic issues like housing, wages, climate change and healthcare, we started screaming about the culture wars (thanks Reagan). It was easier (and more profitable) to stir outrage over symbolic issues than to solve material problems. We could’ve been building homes, but we got tricked into yelling about bathrooms and book bans instead.
Most of these developments were meant to be temporary wartime measures and were heavily discriminatory. Housing hasn’t been seen as a public good so that’s partially the reason why we don’t do more of these types of projects. Habitat for Humanity is one organization that builds similar public housing projects notably not on the best real estate. Our housing situation is deliberately chosen over the last 100 years. We could have continued down that path beyond WW1 but realize it was done for a specific purpose at a specific point in time because the government realized it needed to bootstrap a nation for war.
record stops
The median home today is $350k-ish. Whoops, Congress better be prepared to allocate more or lower housing costs before this article’s advice can be implemented
waiting for Godot
> 9,543 single and 3,996 semi-detached homes while 5,000 apartments
So 18.5k homes of one kind or another over ~2 years. That’s, umm, nothing? Like seriously - the current rate of housing completions is over 2 orders of magnitude above that (it’s hovering just over 1.4M/yr right now).
[0] https://www.census.gov/construction/nrc/current/index.html
j-krieger•3h ago
blitzar•3h ago
lurk2•3h ago
azemetre•2h ago
lurk2•2h ago
neom•2h ago
tmountain•3h ago
itsanaccount•3h ago
JoshTriplett•2h ago
gruez•2h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_property_bubble
Eavolution•2h ago
blitzar•2h ago
itsanaccount•1h ago
roenxi•2h ago
It can be true that sudden change can lead to bad results and I wouldn't necessarily advise shock therapy, but making the basis of a system more rational usually leads to good outcomes. Being honest about how valuable something is won't cause society to sink beneath the ocean and neither does letting people just build houses on land they own. Someone is already eating economic losses here, we just don't quite know who or how much. Letting them do better will surely outweigh the negatives.
blitzar•2h ago
> Someone is already eating economic losses here, we just don't quite know who or how much.
It's an intergenerational transfer of wealth from the young to the old.
Rough and dirty you could probably reverse back the amount by taking the change in Average house price-to-earnings ratios. Very basic estimate is from 4x earnings to 7x, which on the stock of US housing is about $20 trillion.
izend•3h ago
[1] https://x.com/g_meslin/status/1373689001866067969 [2] https://external-preview.redd.it/UGgkJlBT0dV7DwLgbEnJpgQzj4i...
api•3h ago
My conspiracy theory is that homeowners vote at higher numbers and more reliably and like free money.
blargthorwars•1h ago
Sadly... they're kind of right.
api•51m ago
The thing that drives me insane is that this is endemic in extremely liberal cities. Ask them if they support Trump’s wall and his mass deportations, and when they freak out point out that the housing policies they favor are the same thing on a smaller scale with pretty much the same motives.
neom•2h ago
Robotbeat•3h ago
Anyway, instead of the government building housing, we have the government stopping the building of housing as much as possible.
riffraff•3h ago
We need the housing, but it doesn't solve most issues.
baggy_trough•3h ago
blitzar•2h ago
Inflating away debt is less consistent but more miraculous than compound interest.
baggy_trough•1h ago
agent281•2h ago
Building homes on federal land in the middle of no where will not do anything for people. We just need to allow people to build housing where there is a demand for labor.
Some things I think would be solved include:
- the housing crisis
- mobility => it would be easier for people to move to other parts of the country because they would be less tied to their homes - labor mismatches
- climate change => less reliance on cars
- funding infrastructure => more dense infrastructure means you don't have as much infrastructure to repair and you have more people paying for it
- city government budgets => high density areas are more tax efficient
- home insurance => the homes on the outskirts of cities are most likely to burn down; if housing is cheap the cost to insure it will be cheaper as well
IMO, if housing is 30-60% of peoples budgets and transportation is another 10-20%, if you can bring those costs down you can de-stress a lot of people. That might make politics less intense too.
* "Most problems" is not strictly accurate. But "more problems than you might think are directly related to housing" doesn't really roll off the tongue.
sleepyguy•3h ago
A quick search on realtor.com for a place like Cleveland. Plenty of houses for 150k.
dingnuts•3h ago
Nasrudith•2h ago
api•3h ago
Home equity or the future. Choose one.
If we keep pricing the next generation out of existence eventually the pyramid will collapse due to population decline. But I suppose the older homeowners living on it now will be dead so they don’t care.
blitzar•3h ago
The masses (sadly) will choose home equity every time.
I have witnessed bitterly resentful people turn into local activists protesting against any new build the day after they purchase a property.
CooCooCaCha•2h ago
blitzar•2h ago
CooCooCaCha•2h ago
TheNewsIsHere•2h ago
It was easy to miss that in the due diligence.
And it was really frustrating to experience. The development company cut so many corners that our own neighborhood had to engage several times with the city council and development bodies because their water management was threatening our properties. During construction of the water infrastructure they backflowed a toxic concentration of chemicals into the water supply. Their retention pond design is absolute garbage and while it was inspected and approval has already caused problems. They forgot to account for water going downhill while making assumptions about water volume that a week of heavy rain already invalidated.
We need the housing though, so it’s good we have that. I’m not sure we need more housing in the form of townhomes that cost $700,000+ each but at least it’s higher density than single family residences, which are killing the housing market in their own way.
Would just be nice if home building firms weren’t such a menace.
vharuck•1h ago
An optimistic theory is that new high-value housing leads to good outcomes for everyone: developers make a better profit, the area becomes more appealing, wealthier families can upgrade to the new houses, the local government gets more real estate taxes, and the previous houses of the relocators can be bought by less wealthy families (repeat this last step down the wealth scale).
spacemadness•58m ago
thrance•2h ago
As long as capital allocation is decided undemocratically, there won't be enough housing, food or medicine for everyone.
CooCooCaCha•2h ago
This increases the power of the labor class and would hopefully lead to better working conditions.
My pet theory is many of societies problems would significantly improve if we gave more people the ability to walk away.
Nasrudith•2h ago
RhysU•1h ago
This scarcity of resources is true and it has nothing to do with capital allocation methodology. It's just economics. Human beings collectively have unlimited wants. You can't solve it by changing the allocation method.
jaoane•2h ago
mayneack•2h ago
loeg•2h ago
7e•2h ago