I think zoning is a big part of the problem. Before WW2, it was much easier to build the housing that new immigrants needed when they arrived. Toda, there is miles of red tape and zoning regulations that keep new neighborhoods from forming and maturing. It's a real shame.
I don't think so. The problem is simply to many refugees for the infrastructure/system to absorb. Do we build 10's of 1000's of housing units for future refugee's and immigrants every year, where are the funds for these units procured?
My grandfather slept in a park on a bench when he arrived after WW2 as a DP. No one provided him with anything, he had to look for work, find a way to feed himself and finally he managed to split a room in a rooming house with 2 other people. He said the bed they slept in was always warm because someone was getting up to go to work and someone came home from work and was going to sleep. Many families lived the same way. What's interesting is they had no social assistance or help of any kind. Today there is a belief these types of people should be provided with everything. It just isn't plausible.
>Today there is a belief these types of people should be provided with everything. It just isn't plausible.
Living standards were lower back then and WW2 USA was far less wealthy than it is today. Now it can afford to provide humane present-day conditions to people until they can find work and housing themselves. Just count the money the US spent on the war on terror and the war on drugs, it's more than the GDP of some countries.
Refugees don't want hand-outs, they want opportunities to work and provide for themselves. If you deny them decent opportunities and humane living conditions from the start, they're guaranteed to turn to crime to survive, then everyone looses.
I don't know about WW2 USA, but 1970s USA was wealthier - wages have not kept up with house prices [1], car prices, education, gas [2], or rent [2,3]. But GDP is up...
>I don't know about WW2 USA, but 1970s USA was wealthier
You mean the average american was wealthier in 1977. The USA of today is wealthier than the USA of 1977, just that the wealth in more unevenly spread. Maybe fixing wealth inequality is something to look into, but who am I kidding, we both know that aint gonna happen.
I assume you’re not trying to be intentionally misleading but those graphs do not support your assertion that the US, presumably referring to the average American, is less wealthy today.
You can’t just cherry pick things that have become more expensive and ignore the many things that are cheaper when making such a general assertion.
Here is a better source for your reference:
In comparing household incomes of the middle class in the United States in 1980 to today, we conclude that real incomes for today’s middle class are somewhat higher than they used it to be, particularly for households headed by two adults. It is also clear that failing to adjust for demographic shifts in the population relating to age, race, and education can indicate a more positive outlook than is truly the case.
We find, as in prior research, that prices in housing, healthcare, and education have risen more than middle-class incomes and so are relatively more expensive. However, we also find that these price increases are offset by relative price decreases in transportation, food, and recreation, among others, making real middle-class incomes slightly higher than in the past.
>Refugees don't want hand-outs, they want opportunities to work and provide for themselves. If you deny them decent opportunities and humane living conditions from the start, they're guaranteed to turn to crime to survive, then everyone looses.
Isn't that what American citizens want, those same opportunities. Perhaps, they also deserve what you want to give to refugees.
Well it seemed that a lot of American citizens who could have benefited from basic societal relief have voted against their own interests repeatedly.
Whether they are aware of it or emotionally manipulated into it is left as an exercise to the reader.
"... In a rooming house..." Personally I think this is part of the problem today. We no longer have rooming houses. We no longer have really cheap housing due to zoning and other regulations.
Many of the migrants arriving in New York would like to be working -- they didn't come to hang around in city shelters for months at a time. But they can't, legally. Part of the solution seems like it should involve making it easier to let people who want to work, work.
Houston has zoning if we define zoning as "rules that define where you can build, what you can build, and what auxiliary details you must include". They just don't call it zoning.
More importantly, near everyone arguing for change in zoning aren't saying that zoning should be abolished, just changed. So, Houston is not a counter-example.
I’m sure there is a lot more available space than the city lets on. You can see residential luxury high-rises where most of lights on every floor are off at night. Nobody is living in them. 10s of empty rent controlled units in each of many buildings where those units stay empty for years.
The city may be struggling to house these migrants, but I’m sure there is a strong incentive to keep normal housing units unavailable so friends of politicians can fill their low demand hotel rooms and supply catering at very favorable rates.
The inept Federal government is at fault and has been for decades.
The incompetence and inaction demonstrated by the legislative branch on issues clearly within their purview (e.g.immigration) is stupefying. This behavior would surely result in termination in the private sector, why is it continuously tolerated in by voters?
“I don’t know if you guys understand what’s going on right now,” Adams said at a press conference this month. “There’s no housing, folks. There’s no housing.”
well there ever be enough affordable housing again?
No, sanctuary cities are munis that state they won’t treat illegal immigrants, refugees, etc like shit that are already there. They aren’t trying to necessarily _recruit_ and/or ask for more.
States shipping them there are abusing the empathy of these cities.
Is it possible to say that a city is "full" and how would a government enforce that? What I see in the news is that there is a large influx of immigrants to New York City at the moment. The City is required to house them. Besides taxes and zoning, which could reduce the number, how else can the government reduce the number of people in the city?
It’s not as simple as you’re saying but you’re also a bit off for the record.
Annual net migration per 1000:
Of all countries the US ranks #39.
Of developed countries with a population > 10M the US ranks #8 (#9 if you include Saudi Arabia but that’s obviously misleading). The countries ahead of us are Australia, Canada, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, UK and Italy.
Of developed countries with a population > 5M the US ranks #14. This adds New Zealand, Switzerland, Singapore, Norway, Ireland and Austria.
Normalizing to population also comes with various considerations.
For further perspective: in terms of foreign born population the US is #1 with about 50 million in total as well as annually with 2 million per year (countered by 1 million emigrants to get your total of a net 3/1000). This is a whopping 15% of the US population, 18% of the total migrant population in the world and 28% of the migrant population in high income countries.
Normalizing to population the migrant proportion is 14% in all high income countries and 12% in developed countries.
While these numbers are also challenging to interpret as all of these nations have different immigration needs and migrant patterns I wouldn’t call the US “not high at all”.
Edit: The parent has chosen partisanship (in a reply that may or may not still exist), so I've copy-pasted the parent and done the editing myself for convenience (I am not endorsing this research):
NYC has a population of 8.8 million people and only 300 sq miles of land [1], which works out to about 30,000 people per square mile, or 46 people per acre. That's about 90 sq ft per person. Sounds tight to me.
Seems like the problem is that the land is pretty much full. How is that the housing markets fault? How many people should NYC be capable of handling, and who gets to decide that?
Can't NYC be free to decide it's big enough? What's preventing people from moving elsewhere? Plenty of land in this country.
Well I mean no one wants to see people being homeless, but if you migrate to a city with no available housing doesn't that suggest you should try moving somewhere else?
I mean it's hard even getting a hotel room in some places. You make sure you have a reservation before you go.
I can see a point complaining about how we don't have the right kind of assistance programs for refugees. But complaining that it's the city's fault or the market's fault there's no room for people who come with no plan doesn't seem fair.
I mean there's a lot of land in this country. Plenty of room for everyone. Just not in one place.
Suggesting we force people to use their land to build more housing seems pretty dystopian to me. Force me to build upwards on my land? Seems like a great scifi story premise, so many people you're forced to house and feed strangers that never stop showing up.
Anyhow like I said, America is a big country. Plenty of places to live. Not exaggerating.
> Anyhow like I said, America is a big country. Plenty of places to live. Not exaggerating.
Plenty of places to exist, but people cannot live in this country without work to pay for it. Most of the empty (cheap) space in the country doesn't exactly have good, if any, work.
> Suggesting we force people to use their land to build more housing seems pretty dystopian to me. Force me to build upwards on my land?
You have this wildly backwards. No one is being forced to build upwards on their own land. People are being forced not to build upwards on their own land.
The amount of land of the "city proper" doesn't matter that much. Like any other large world city, NYC has plenty of rail or car commuter suburbs, and peripheral cities with their own urban cores which still owe their existence to the main metropole. By that measure we should mostly be comparing New York's characteristics to the rest of the world's large metropolitan areas, and its overall density seems pretty average over the entire metropolitan area.
The core reason that cities get big is that they are economically beneficial[1]. Companies have access to more employees, suppliers, and customers. Residents have access to more jobs, and more people with/companies marketing to their interests (hence the mythical "cultural amenities" of big cities) and so on. The city as a whole is connected to other cities worldwide by transport links. It follows that at least some people see themselves better off in a city, and thus we would expect to see housing demand in big cities. Hence Tokyo's population increases despite Japan's decreasing, or this website's industry concentrating in a few counties in California. Obviously, this is true of New York as well. The ideal distribution of population between cities should also be different from the past. Many towns/cities in the Western world were founded to either serve as a central place for agriculture, to extract some sort of other resource, or to do some sort of industrial production using those resources. Both are greatly mechanized now, or using cheaper labour (whether migrant or offshore), hence the declining economies of many such places. It follows that bigger cities are the recepients of those leaving such places.
Following from the housing demand is a need for homebuilding. There are really only two broad ways for new homes to be built; greenfield or infill. The problem with greenfield development is that there is no land close to many urban centres left. Hence, greenfield is usually found at the edge of existing urban areas, and as a result, they are almost always far less dense, more car dependent (even with good transport links), and considered to be ugly "sprawl". They are also usually not within the jurisdiction of the central city anymore. There are often greenbelts around cities imposed by higher governments to legally prevent "sprawling" greenfield development from happening, although the answer is often just to keep on building greenfield sites beyond the greenbelt. Of course, the further you are from the economic nucleus the less the economic benefits of that nucleus. Transportation costs ($$ and time) increase and agglomeration benefits decrease, not to mention environmental effects.
The alternative is building in existing cities; redevelopment of existing housing (i.e. infill). This comes with, of course, NIMBYs. People are afraid of change, which redevelopment is by definition. Of course, there is the aspect of the middle classes not liking to see the lower classes, and a big dash of racial bias thrown in, but at its core it is conservatism in its most literal sense: preserving the past. The political problem of housing construction is that while building housing is good on a national, or even regional level, it is opposed by local government, which is run by locals who value their current environment, and are often willing to pay (in the form of high property taxes) to keep it that way. In a democracy, the more local of a government land-use planning is being done at, the more political power NIMBYs have, and the US has relatively strong local planning powers (thanks to Euclid v. Amber[2]). Additionally, most suburbs in the US are not politically part of their metropole, may not even be in the same state, are often entirely residential (+amenities), and thus have even stronger political reasons for opposing redevelopment. Compound this with the fact that increasing property prices is an easy way to retire (sell the whole thing and move to Florida with your spouse at 65) for ...
NYC is nowhere near the population density of many other global cities, even nice ones like Seoul [0] (sorry for the mediocre link). Anecdotally, as an NYC resident I am astounded by the number of empty lots in Manhattan and buildings with three or fewer stories. I don’t think the issue is land capacity.
68 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 71.9 ms ] threadI don't think so. The problem is simply to many refugees for the infrastructure/system to absorb. Do we build 10's of 1000's of housing units for future refugee's and immigrants every year, where are the funds for these units procured?
My grandfather slept in a park on a bench when he arrived after WW2 as a DP. No one provided him with anything, he had to look for work, find a way to feed himself and finally he managed to split a room in a rooming house with 2 other people. He said the bed they slept in was always warm because someone was getting up to go to work and someone came home from work and was going to sleep. Many families lived the same way. What's interesting is they had no social assistance or help of any kind. Today there is a belief these types of people should be provided with everything. It just isn't plausible.
Living standards were lower back then and WW2 USA was far less wealthy than it is today. Now it can afford to provide humane present-day conditions to people until they can find work and housing themselves. Just count the money the US spent on the war on terror and the war on drugs, it's more than the GDP of some countries.
Refugees don't want hand-outs, they want opportunities to work and provide for themselves. If you deny them decent opportunities and humane living conditions from the start, they're guaranteed to turn to crime to survive, then everyone looses.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/lostgeneration/comments/fgkb83/its_...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/439mr8/e...
[3] https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/rent-growth-since-...
You mean the average american was wealthier in 1977. The USA of today is wealthier than the USA of 1977, just that the wealth in more unevenly spread. Maybe fixing wealth inequality is something to look into, but who am I kidding, we both know that aint gonna happen.
You can’t just cherry pick things that have become more expensive and ignore the many things that are cheaper when making such a general assertion.
Here is a better source for your reference:
In comparing household incomes of the middle class in the United States in 1980 to today, we conclude that real incomes for today’s middle class are somewhat higher than they used it to be, particularly for households headed by two adults. It is also clear that failing to adjust for demographic shifts in the population relating to age, race, and education can indicate a more positive outlook than is truly the case.
We find, as in prior research, that prices in housing, healthcare, and education have risen more than middle-class incomes and so are relatively more expensive. However, we also find that these price increases are offset by relative price decreases in transportation, food, and recreation, among others, making real middle-class incomes slightly higher than in the past.
https://www.clevelandfed.org/en/publications/economic-commen...
Isn't that what American citizens want, those same opportunities. Perhaps, they also deserve what you want to give to refugees.
(see eg https://news.cornell.edu/media-relations/tip-sheets/expedite... -- 6 months before they can even apply for a work permit!)
More importantly, near everyone arguing for change in zoning aren't saying that zoning should be abolished, just changed. So, Houston is not a counter-example.
The city may be struggling to house these migrants, but I’m sure there is a strong incentive to keep normal housing units unavailable so friends of politicians can fill their low demand hotel rooms and supply catering at very favorable rates.
Most people turn their lights off at night?
The incompetence and inaction demonstrated by the legislative branch on issues clearly within their purview (e.g.immigration) is stupefying. This behavior would surely result in termination in the private sector, why is it continuously tolerated in by voters?
- easy to blame the other 400 or so Congress members for all the problems
- a relative malaise and sleepy cynicism in the population in general when it comes to politics
- the executive branch is equally inept, inconsistent, and corrupt
well there ever be enough affordable housing again?
States shipping them there are abusing the empathy of these cities.
The US is ~3 per 1000 NOM, its not high at all whether we are talking advanced economies or global South
Annual net migration per 1000:
Of all countries the US ranks #39.
Of developed countries with a population > 10M the US ranks #8 (#9 if you include Saudi Arabia but that’s obviously misleading). The countries ahead of us are Australia, Canada, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, UK and Italy.
Of developed countries with a population > 5M the US ranks #14. This adds New Zealand, Switzerland, Singapore, Norway, Ireland and Austria.
Normalizing to population also comes with various considerations.
For further perspective: in terms of foreign born population the US is #1 with about 50 million in total as well as annually with 2 million per year (countered by 1 million emigrants to get your total of a net 3/1000). This is a whopping 15% of the US population, 18% of the total migrant population in the world and 28% of the migrant population in high income countries.
Normalizing to population the migrant proportion is 14% in all high income countries and 12% in developed countries.
While these numbers are also challenging to interpret as all of these nations have different immigration needs and migrant patterns I wouldn’t call the US “not high at all”.
Feel free to correct me if I missed a country.
Your feeling is not backed by actual data.
The US admitted 22465. https://www.statista.com/statistics/200061/number-of-refugee... They are considering 125k in 2023. https://www.state.gov/refugee-admissions/
Turkey is absolutely overwhelmed, hosting 10% of all global refugees. (Also mostly from US fuckups.) https://www.unrefugees.org/refugee-facts/statistics/
>22465
>125k
Standardized representation, please!
Edit: The parent has chosen partisanship (in a reply that may or may not still exist), so I've copy-pasted the parent and done the editing myself for convenience (I am not endorsing this research):
Germany had 1200k show up last year (~1000k from Ukraine, ~200k from places the US fucked up). https://www.dw.com/en/migration-to-germany-to-hit-12-million... The US admitted ~22k. https://www.statista.com/statistics/200061/number-of-refugee... They are considering 125k in 2023. https://www.state.gov/refugee-admissions/
Turkey is absolutely overwhelmed, hosting 10% of all global refugees. (Also mostly from US fuckups.) https://www.unrefugees.org/refugee-facts/statistics/
Seems like the problem is that the land is pretty much full. How is that the housing markets fault? How many people should NYC be capable of handling, and who gets to decide that?
Can't NYC be free to decide it's big enough? What's preventing people from moving elsewhere? Plenty of land in this country.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_Cit...
It means people in SF/NYC say they're already so big enough, they should build somewhere else.
It means people in small towns say they should stay a small town, and go build where there's already big cities.
It means people don't build housing enough and people go homeless.
I mean it's hard even getting a hotel room in some places. You make sure you have a reservation before you go.
I can see a point complaining about how we don't have the right kind of assistance programs for refugees. But complaining that it's the city's fault or the market's fault there's no room for people who come with no plan doesn't seem fair.
I mean there's a lot of land in this country. Plenty of room for everyone. Just not in one place.
Suggesting we force people to use their land to build more housing seems pretty dystopian to me. Force me to build upwards on my land? Seems like a great scifi story premise, so many people you're forced to house and feed strangers that never stop showing up.
Anyhow like I said, America is a big country. Plenty of places to live. Not exaggerating.
Plenty of places to exist, but people cannot live in this country without work to pay for it. Most of the empty (cheap) space in the country doesn't exactly have good, if any, work.
You have this wildly backwards. No one is being forced to build upwards on their own land. People are being forced not to build upwards on their own land.
The core reason that cities get big is that they are economically beneficial[1]. Companies have access to more employees, suppliers, and customers. Residents have access to more jobs, and more people with/companies marketing to their interests (hence the mythical "cultural amenities" of big cities) and so on. The city as a whole is connected to other cities worldwide by transport links. It follows that at least some people see themselves better off in a city, and thus we would expect to see housing demand in big cities. Hence Tokyo's population increases despite Japan's decreasing, or this website's industry concentrating in a few counties in California. Obviously, this is true of New York as well. The ideal distribution of population between cities should also be different from the past. Many towns/cities in the Western world were founded to either serve as a central place for agriculture, to extract some sort of other resource, or to do some sort of industrial production using those resources. Both are greatly mechanized now, or using cheaper labour (whether migrant or offshore), hence the declining economies of many such places. It follows that bigger cities are the recepients of those leaving such places.
Following from the housing demand is a need for homebuilding. There are really only two broad ways for new homes to be built; greenfield or infill. The problem with greenfield development is that there is no land close to many urban centres left. Hence, greenfield is usually found at the edge of existing urban areas, and as a result, they are almost always far less dense, more car dependent (even with good transport links), and considered to be ugly "sprawl". They are also usually not within the jurisdiction of the central city anymore. There are often greenbelts around cities imposed by higher governments to legally prevent "sprawling" greenfield development from happening, although the answer is often just to keep on building greenfield sites beyond the greenbelt. Of course, the further you are from the economic nucleus the less the economic benefits of that nucleus. Transportation costs ($$ and time) increase and agglomeration benefits decrease, not to mention environmental effects.
The alternative is building in existing cities; redevelopment of existing housing (i.e. infill). This comes with, of course, NIMBYs. People are afraid of change, which redevelopment is by definition. Of course, there is the aspect of the middle classes not liking to see the lower classes, and a big dash of racial bias thrown in, but at its core it is conservatism in its most literal sense: preserving the past. The political problem of housing construction is that while building housing is good on a national, or even regional level, it is opposed by local government, which is run by locals who value their current environment, and are often willing to pay (in the form of high property taxes) to keep it that way. In a democracy, the more local of a government land-use planning is being done at, the more political power NIMBYs have, and the US has relatively strong local planning powers (thanks to Euclid v. Amber[2]). Additionally, most suburbs in the US are not politically part of their metropole, may not even be in the same state, are often entirely residential (+amenities), and thus have even stronger political reasons for opposing redevelopment. Compound this with the fact that increasing property prices is an easy way to retire (sell the whole thing and move to Florida with your spouse at 65) for ...
[0] https://graylinegroup.com/megacities-and-complexity/