Maybe we have a patience problem? My first house was not ideal, but I did what I could to build equity in it. My current house is the worst house in one of the best neighborhoods. It seems to me like so many people are chasing the dream Disney sold them on the world rather than realizing they might have to compromise. Likewise, I bet a year from now a lot of the housing glut will have come unstuck again - so maybe you have to wait a year. Life is always happening - job changes, mom passes away, it's time to downsize, it's time to upsize - people buy and sell because life changes. Sure, interest rates are higher than they were, but in my market it is a buyer's paradise - more inventory than we've had in at least 4 years, take your pick. This is honestly a great time for people who have felt shut out by competition to be buying - in some markets. And that's my final point of emphasis - national stories on real estate only tell part of the story, as each market will have unique nuances. I'd recommend talking to a real estate professional to understand what's actually happening in your local market, but this is HN and you all think us Realtors are useless freeloaders.
To be fair, I used to run pricing at one of the ibuyers. 95% of realtors have no idea what they're talking about and the other 5% are just as likely to tell you whatever they think will get you to buy vs what they know to be reality
But they still all had jobs, right? So does it matter that much? Or is there some other force keeping them from losing their hides to competent realtors?
Lack of information. Most buyers will only buy a home a few times in their lives and often in completely different markets. You only know your realtor is good or bad well after the fact. Excluding the obviously bad ones but they tend to fall away quickly.
I mean, yes. My MIL was a good realtor and retired early. Both of the homes I bought in California since meeting my wife, my actual realtor was useless as fuck and I went on MLS myself with my MIL to sort out the local market and find what was right for our needs. My agents wanted to sell me homes they could double dip on both times. In one case, she could've pulled it off but she was so incompetent that she didn't understand what we were looking for.
This comment is quite a wild ride so much so that I read it twice.
I'll just focus on your first point: patience. You might be right there but as you pointed out the last four years have been rough for buyers and patience can only last so long. Gotta understand a buyer getting traumatized by having to bid on a house they haven't even toured, buyers given only 15 minutes to view a house, 20+ offers on a house, offering $20k over asking and still not getting it. With no end in sight.
That's the market at work. Not everyone can live downtown in a walkable neighborhood. Last thing we need is the government putting mandates on how much you can sell your home for.
US realtors are undoubtedly useless freeloaders. Other countries do just fine with 1-1.5% realtor commissions while in the US they are 5-6%, that’s about $75k on a median home in SF!
> I'd recommend talking to a real estate professional to understand what's actually happening in your local market, but this is HN and you all think us Realtors are useless freeloaders.
I'll take you up on that. Is there a way to post a specific price I want to pay, and then pay the realtor x% of the difference between what I set and what I actually pay? For example, if I set $400,000 and they find me a place at $300,000, maybe I could pay them $25,000 at a 25% difference.
To address your latter point, realtors absolutely bring value to a transaction.
The world isn’t quite as black or white.
What is up for debate and highly contested is whether the commissions collected are commensurate with that value.
The old pre-internet world had deep informational asymmetry via the MLS. Realtors were magical in that they could bring forth magical houses at magical price points and the commissions “felt” like value. And more than being a facilitator, the realtor also played part as pseudo-therapist and mind reader reading situational cues to find good fits for their clients.
However, I’d argue that several things have sullied the relationship over time.
1. The low-ish barrier to entry to become a realtor. Made for a lot of professionals that could coast on value adding activities. So the client who feels that they would have never found or sold their dream property or deal has become less and less so.
2. The democratization of information via the internet has pushed the labor of searching for properties to the client.
3. The democratization of loan broker services via the internet have reduced what a seasoned buyer would have to go through to obtain financing.
So this has reduced the realtor from value adder along the whole process to merely door opening facilitator.
Now that the genie is out of the bottle, it’s not going back, but the question is, is the value offered today, still commensurate with percentages charged as Realestate prices continually go up?
> ... but this is HN and you all think us Realtors are useless freeloaders
Realtors in the US, when compared to those in pretty much any other first world country, are definitely overcharging for their services, and, according to at least one judge, they colluded to keep commissions artificially high [0]
> It seems to me like so many people are chasing the dream Disney sold them on the world rather than realizing they might have to compromise.
And why is that?
It maddens me that, generation after generation, people have been told to aim high, get a job, work hard, get a degree, move out, see the world, etc. Turns out, now people in their thirties have to "compromise" or "settle" on buying their first homes at half the size, twice the price, and ten years later than their parents, likely earning a relative third less as well.
I have heard it claimed that people did not used to include the basement in the square footage of a home, which leads to some apples and oranges comparisons in these kinds of statistics. But I’m not sure if it’s true.
> It maddens me that, generation after generation, people have been told to aim high, get a job, work hard, get a degree, move out, see the world, etc. Turns out, now people in their thirties have to "compromise" or "settle"
Well, it's the generation after Reagan came in with the whole monetarist trickle-down thing, but yes.
Sometimes I think the toxicity of this situation (and it's not just the US) fuels in large part the tendency for people to believe in conspiracy theories about secretive cabals keeping them down. And in a way, it's kinda true too when it comes to housing. You're told you're living in a land of democratic opportunity, wealth and justice. Yet somehow...
FWIW one might search for a house that has an transferable (assumable) mortgage. So the buyer picks up the loan where the seller left off. This would preserve the (presumably) lower interest rate of the seller's home loan.
"Loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) are typically assumable. Conventional mortgages, on the other hand, usually aren’t assumable. Instead, conventional mortgages typically come with a due-on-sale clause—meaning the loan must be paid off if you want to transfer the property title."
Highest rates in a "quarter of a century" indeed. Thanks Bush, Obama, and Trump. We really needed those low rates supporting elective wars for the oil empire, bailouts for the Wall Street extractionists, and then juicing the stonks to pretend the "economy" was unaffected by the pandemic. Now we've got multiple generations who grew up thinking 5% interest is "high", and a society full of impossible situations.
While I'm fond of the Austrian school of economics, history has seemingly shown that such true austerity is politically untenable - my above gripes are actually just acts in the larger pattern of post Bretton Woods looting. Modern Monetary Theory seems to be the only attempt at a way out that is actually talking about unbinding us from this martingale of austerity for Main Street plus massive continual handouts for the banks and Wall Street. The government has played these "hands off" interest rate games long enough - it's time to leave rates at the moderate level they are currently at and spend direct stimulus on things our society actually needs (which on this topic is building more housing).
> spend direct stimulus on things our society actually needs (on this topic, housing).
When governments put money into a thing, that thing will have insanely high prices. Why would sellers lower prices when they know that Uncle Sam will pay any price? Didn't you notice that high housing prices are a big part of the problem we already have? And you suggest a solution that will make it worse?
5% interest rates will change things for the better, and maybe we can phase out the mortgage interest tax deduction, too.
My suggestion to spend on housing is obviously to build more supply, not to bid up existing stock. Bidding up existing stock is exactly what the profligate monetary policy of the past two decades has done.
Yes, the prices of construction materials will go up. This is called a price signal, indicating that more of a thing is needed. I personally will not be happy about higher prices. But the pain created by this is due to economic damage that has already occurred and needs to be realized, rather than continuing to kick the can down the road as it has been.
I'm ambivalent about the mortgage interest tax deduction. People act like it's some amazing cut-from-whole-cloth subsidy, but from a business context it's just a regular straightforward deduction of a customary expense.
> I'm ambivalent about the mortgage interest tax deduction. People act like it's some amazing cut-from-whole-cloth subsidy, but from a business context it's just a regular straightforward deduction of a customary expense.
Then why isn’t there a deduction for everything else we buy? It is a handout to real estate owners and lenders, and has zero reason to exist.
If the government wants to help people who do not have enough money, the government should give them cash. Or a home, if that is the goal.
Philosophically, I think W2 workers should be able to deduct all of the expenses that are necessary and proper to earn one's income - commuting, professional clothes, a portion of food and housing, etc. What makes it a pragmatic non-starter is that it pushes individuals into even more accounting minutiae, which is its own form of horrible.
Also keep in mind that interest on a loan is being reported as income elsewhere, so it is being taxed. It's just being taxed one less time.
Politically, I don't see the point of singling out people who aren't short housing (aka they own one home) but still have a mortgage. Remember with rental properties all expenses are straightforwardly deductible (or depreciable), because revenue that pays expenses is distinct from income.
Also progressively tax holding the large amounts of existing stock.
Government has so many tools to absolutely screw over the incumbent freeloaders. It won't because it consists of and is paid by incumbent real estate freeloaders. Don't you wonder why almost nobody nowadays heard about land value tax despite it being super prominent idea century ago or so?
The SALT cap means the mortgage interest tax deduction is largely worthless anyway. Only buyers of more expensive properties and/or early in their mortgages even see the benefit of itemizing anymore.
From the global perspective US housing is opulently roomy, iow energy-economically wasteful, even in the "well off western countries" peer group. (See eg https://homescopes.com/average-home-size/) And it correspondingly shows in domestic energy use as well. In the climate crisis the direction could use a change.
I don't know why you're downvoted as your statement is spot on.
In terms of housing affordability, the dominance of mcmansions with small yards (but big enough for a swimming pool in the back) and large houses certainly reduces supply for first home buyers.
And, cities suffer because supplying utilities (light, gas, water, roads, trash, sewer, etc) all cost more because of the large horizontal footprint.
Not just the dominance, but the legal requirement for.
Height restrictions, floor area ratio, lot coverage, setbacks, parking minimums, square footage minimums, lot size minimums, and lots of other zone requirements all contribute to a floor on the price of housing.
There are plenty of really good requirements like firebreaks and egress points, but not everything should to be enforced by zoning. Many of these things should be allowed to be controlled by the market. If people truly want 2 car garages and 1/2 acre lots they can pay for it. Making it the legal minimum to construct massively distorts the market.
Zoning massively benefits the existing occupants of a location and when there is a housing crisis just makes matters so much worse.
This is due to zoning laws. Many people desperately want smaller housing, but it's effectively illegal everywhere in the USA. The only alternative is to buy rural land and try to get creative with the law (e.g. your tiny home on an existing rusted old trailer frame is considered a "remodel", etc) or simply build a small cabin and hope no one from the government comes to bulldoze it. Even success here means you're stuck far away from jobs, infrastructure, etc.
Existing small houses are priced as high (or higher) than new-build McMansions.
The entire point of wanting smaller housing is so that the neighborhood can be denser with better walkability, public transit, etc. You can certainly choose to live in a shoebox in a rural area, but it's losing on both fronts.
Most of the rural shoeboxes are old, and most new houses are McMansions. The options for somebody who wants a newly build small house in suburbia are very limited, with or without a large yard.
Find land, which there is plenty of in rural areas, and build a new small house? As far as I'm aware the legal requirements center around lot sizes rather than dwelling sizes, hence my original comment about density being the quality that has been prohibited.
Yes, we're in agreement that density is sorely missing, due to effectively being made illegal - whether SROs, lot size requirements, building codes prohibiting new triple deckers, etc.
I just don't know why your first comment had this:
> The only alternative is to buy rural land and try to get creative with the law (e.g. your tiny home on an existing rusted old trailer frame is considered a "remodel", etc) or simply build a small cabin and hope no one from the government comes to bulldoze it.
Because that isn't an alternative. Rather it just strikes me as regular rural living in a small house.
I'm surprised there haven't been more private corporate attempts to take ruralish land and bootstrap higher density walkable proto-cities with bus (or even train) service to a larger city, especially with the recent trend of remote work making attracting industry less necessary.
>Because that isn't an alternative. Rather it just strikes me as regular rural living in a small house.
It was more of a suggestion to do something quasi-legal like a multi-tenant tiny house village. I know a few folks who did this in the PNW, along with one who bought a disused kids' camp facility with small A-frame cabins and turned it into a permaculture farm & community, and then had all their friends move in.
You're right in that it's not an answer either, because it's essentially a tiny breakaway society.
Seriously, I would been fine with my family in a 2-3 bedroom but in my area those are absolute pits so my wife and I both work to overpay for a 4 bed with more space than we need (not just bedrooms, a "sitting room" we dont use, extra bathroom, hurts to look at our payments and know its under utilized)
Or is it just perfectly comfortable and what non US housing should strive for, instead of the cramped quarters that are available elsewhere? (hint: yes, it is) (And of course, there is comfortable housing available everywhere, and cramped housing available in the US, but OP mentioned US specifically, so I specifically used it in my answer.)
Yeah, you could just make your mind up and say US consumer preference reflects the highest form of taste of course. Same for huge cars, etc. But even if you managed to convince me huge houses are perfect and the good and natural platonic ideal, I'd still say it's wasteful and bad in the current climate crisis.
There is an answer to this problem, and it's public housing.
Not the designed-to-fail model that the US has historically implemented, however. There are other, very successful, public housing systems that show how it can be done successfully. We can basically copy Singapore and Vienna's homework.
I think the answer is to stop forbidding the kinds of housing that would increase supply. But higher density housing is illegal and disliked by current residents who fear their property values decreasing as supply increases and poor people move in, so they fight tooth and nail to keep supply restricted in areas that would most benefit from density.
I don’t think higher density decreases prices. On the contrary a plot of land that previously could only have a single family home but now can have a six story apartment building is more valuable. The homeowners just don’t want to live next to the apartment building or move.
But a six story apartment can now house six families. If a city has 10,000 families and 10,000 single family houses, and just 1,000 of those single family houses become 6 story apartments, there are now 15,000 living places people can choose between. That is called "an increase in quantity supplied", and the supply curve slopes downward. You see where I'm going with this.
It's less rosy than this because those 6 story apartments are built on credit where the valuation of the building is based off the market rents. If rent goes down the bank comes-a-calling telling you that your LTV dropped and you have to put up more collateral. The building owners just straight up can't afford to do this so they're stuck between keeping rents high and accepting vacancies which limits their revenue and foreclosure.
The spice must flow, property valuations must go up or the whole thing collapses. It's why non-SF-esque cities only allow expansion in-line with population growth or a little less because they will immediately be tarred and feathered if they make everyone's mortgage underwater.
To be clear this isn't a good thing, but no one wants to blink first and start another 2008.
I'm not sure I follow. If the building owner lowered their rent, wouldn't they find it easier to fill that vacancy? Or if you're saying the bank decides to take one of the units as extra collateral, why wouldn't the bank then rent out the unit?
Owners frequently have loan covenants that mandate bank approval for rents below a threshold.
You've securitized the cashflow from the property, so if that cashflow dips, the lender has an assurance they can reprice the security in line with your new cashflow story.
Even if you cover the shortfall in cashflow out of pocket, this is better for both you and the bank because you don't have to admit that the market rates at which you got your loan have changed.
Oh, okay. So you've been offered a loan partly _on the basis_ of that future cashflow, and probably wouldn't have been able to get one on equally good terms if it was "just" to build a building?
Yeah. I can see how that would create perverse incentives downstream.
Thanks for the extra context from the credit holders. It seems that this is completely overlooked in the solutions proposed to solve the housing crisis. Seems like there is an argument to be made that we need new policies to change this calculation at either the state or federal level.
Wouldn't public private partnership funding help with this?
Sibling comment covers this, but to expand: it decreases the overall price of units of housing, not of land. Which is ultimately what matters here, because we live in houses or apartments or condos, not in square feet of land.
I could not have afforded the plot of land my first city apartment was on, but I could afford an apartment in the building!
But the incumbent single family homeowners that are so opposed to upzoning currently own both land and a housing unit. While upzoning might make the value of their housing unit go down the value of their land will go up.
For this reason it would be best to allow single family homeowners to be able to vote on the zoning policies of whichever side of the city is exactly opposite and ideally non-adjacent to them. Single family homes for me, affordable high rises for thee. (The dead center can be rezoned to high scale commercial as a kind of urban Switzerland.)
This builds a monoculture of housing and ignores the fact that the housing crisis isn’t just about not having enough housing, but that what's available is exorbitant in rent and the low-income people that need housing can't afford it.
We need a mix of housing, including multiple classes of housing that more reflects the diversity of incomes, not more gigantic corporate owned apartment blocks.
The lack of housing gets solved by, gasp, adding more housing. A house in a city is luxury, the only way to keep rents down is by adding more to the offer, and guess what, apartment buildings add a lot of housing in a small surface.
Corporations are bound by economics, they can't charge out of bounds rents if the average rent price is much lower, and you get that by, you guessed it, building more.
> We need a mix of housing
No, you need a ton more housing, not a mix, you have to aim for efficiency here, specially in cities. Having a SFH in a city is a luxury, townhome I would say is above average, and everyone else should be in apartments. Apartments don't have to be ugly, if I could I would buy a 2/3 bedroom apartment, however there isn't much offer, and everything is from ages ago because the USA doesn't build.
I’m down for a ton more housing in any form so I won’t disagree with you.
I want to see better lives for people in whatever capacity they want to make it honestly.
I don’t think it’s an OR situation but I don’t think counterpointing is going to help the conversation any. You’re not wrong. I just think we also need to do things like actually build new cities instead of just adding more and more to existing ones. That’s a formula that we used to have that has just stopped completely happening and now it actually worked.
But more housing and better lives for people is the point so I’ll leave it there.
The American people are already passionate about preventing other people from building housing near them. Now you expect them to not only tolerate new buildings and neighbors, but also pay taxes to fund those buildings and subsidize those neighbors?
We don’t have to speculate about how civic control over housing development works or what kind of decisions our communities will make. They are the problem, not the solution.
Singapore's housing system works because their government is a benevolent dictatorship. Special interests aren't able to shut things down like they are in the US.
You forgot the quotes around "benevolent". It's "benevolent" to those who conform to what the state wishes to present as their archetype. Meanwhile, migrant workers are effectively indentured servants and prop up, mostly out of sight, the country in a manner not dissimilar to Qatar or Bahrain or certain sectors of the US. If public housing needs second class citizens in order for it to work, it's not worth it. One might as well as cite the excise-farming era of Singapore between Raffles and Clementi Smith as the actual golden age upon which the modern prosperity was founded, but it doesn't fit the official narrative of course. During this time, there was "public housing", but not run by the de jure government but the de facto native-place associations that the administrators, who had next to no knowledge of the local languages, called secret societies. They are in fact akin to Landsmanshaft in the Yiddish tradition. Everything since then requires a lot of qualification just to peel back the revisionism and certainly does not serve as a good example unless one thinks second class citizenship is worth the perceived order and functionality the nation projects to the world.
The PAP has a 70% approval rating which is what I think makes it a "benevolent dictatorship". Semantics can get tricky though. They're definitely not benevolent to minorities.
The US is culturally incapable of implementing effective public housing. Any attempt would very quickly be co-opted by people trying juice money out of it, or sabotage it for ideological reasons.
Singapore works because it is a city state. Here..it would have to be federal, and everyone couldn't just decide to get their public housing in the hottest most popular cities, they would have to be distributed across the country. Someone has to live in Jackson Mississippi and Shreveport Louisiana. Some sort of residency system would be needed.
Public housing has income restrictions associated with it. This article talks about how even people with stable, well-paying jobs struggle to find housing. Public housing isn't the solution for these people.
What we should copy from Vienna is mixed use development. A huge portion of American suburbs are zoned as single family only and you end up with a housing shortage, horrible traffic, and pollution. Mixed use development allows density to increase while reducing traffic and encouraging people to be more fit (by walking or biking more). It's such a no-brainer from a whole-system perspective.
The problem is that NIMBYs and existing regulations exist to preserve the status quo and protect the equity long-term homeowners have accumulated. In places like CA there are additional disincentives to reform like Proposition 13 that favor long term owners at the expense of new homebuyers. Obviously a tax-advantaged asset is going to have a higher price than an equivalent non-tax-advantaged asset. And significant property tax revenue that could otherwise fund public transit and additional construction isn't collected as a result.
Eventually enough boomers will die and the demographic forces will shift and create the opportunity for reform, but this will be too little too late for a whole generation. I'd love for a concerted national effort to tackle this problem and reduce barriers to building the kind of housing America needs, but it's hard to see that happening anytime soon.
Public housing doesn't fundamentally require income restrictions. Most locations place limits on eligibility for public housing, but that's simply because there isn't that much public housing so it's prioritized for those most in need.
Part of Vienna's success is building so much public housing there is plenty to go around, so all sorts of people live in public housing. There isn't a stigma associated with public housing since using it doesn't imply any specific trait.
I'm a big fan of building all sorts of non-market housing all over cities to avoid the slum problem. Charge means-tested rent, so someone will low income pays very little rent. Someone with a good job pays closer to market rent (and that extra revenue helps pay for the overall housing program).
One of the huge successes of Vienna's public housing model is mixing people of different socioeconomic backgrounds. People connect with people with all sorts of different backgrounds and experiences resulting in much strong social cohesion.
I've been to Vienna and I have a lot of positive things to say about the city, but trying to adapt their model 1:1 to the US is not realistic for many reasons.
You're right that public housing doesn't fundamentally require income restrictions. The government could forbid all private construction and take over home development itself, placing price caps as needed. But if you think something like that's going to work in the US when we can't even accomplish much more minor housing reform, you're dreaming. Vienna's model is certainly not that radical.
For starters, even Vienna's social housing model has income restrictions. If you and your partner both earn the average 2023 Viennese salary (about €52,000/person) then you don't quality for social housing because your combined income significantly exceeds the annual threshold (€79,490 for two people in 2023).
Even if you do qualify, you are only eligible if you have lived in Vienna for two years already. This system does nothing for new transplants. And once you do qualify, the wait time to be approved for an apartment can be in excess of 5 years. They even have a "bonus period" to move people who have been waiting for more than 5 years up in the line, because the city recognizes how frustrating that must be.
The system is easily gamed too. Vienna only checks your income once as part of the process. If your income increases later on (e.g. because you finished school and got a great job) you don't become ineligible. That part is fine by itself, but you can also transfer the apartment to a qualifying family member if you decide to move out, and they don't need to wait 5 years. This contributes to the reduced supply and long wait times because it reduces inventory and rewards those with family connections in the city.
And of course this whole system is far from free. If you make the average Viennese salary your income tax rate is 42%, whereas it's 25% for the average American worker. The average Vienna home is worth around 1 million euros and the property tax rate on such a home is a whopping 3.5%. Even in expensive coastal places like San Francisco and San Diego, property tax rates are barely above 1%. The tax burden to fund this kind of social housing (and other great things too, to be fair) is definitely heavy. It's fine to point out the positives of such a system, but the costs have to be acknowledged as well. And in the US I don't think the taxpaying population of any city is willing to bear those kinds of costs.
Vienna's system does do a great job mixing different people together, as you note. But not all of this is due to public housing. Quite a bit of it is simply how walkable the city is and how great their public transport options are. Even a moderate amount of public housing for low income individuals scattered throughout a very foot-friendly city would do a great job mixing people together.
> The government could forbid all private construction and take over home development itself, placing price caps as needed
Nothing approaching that radical an approach would be required. Just getting funded public housing agencies with a mandate to develop non-market multi-family housing using properties in the city's portfolio would be a massive victory for affordability.
Public housing can work in places where people consider themselves part of a society. A lot of Americans don’t. They see any kind of collective societal effort as a negative—something you might have to tolerate, but that you certainly don’t want to encourage. We collected every individualist outlier from all over Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, everyone who wanted to escape from society and strike out on their own. We’re reaping the cultural rewards of that now.
You can achieve the result without necessarily labeling things as 'public housing,' though.
California already has something like this: it's determining the state's housing needs at the state level. If regions don't realistically create plans for hitting their allotted target, a 'builder's remedy' is triggered. Developments which check certain boxes, and one of them is a percentage of affordable housing, override local zoning blockades.
All you really need to do is go a step further and offer developers subsidies to increase their percentages of affordable housing in their plan.
The thing that makes other countries' public housing succeed is that it's not a monolith of low income residents - the mixed incomes in the development create a more cohesive community that makes them successful. No reason we can't do it here, and no reason it has to be overtly labeled as public housing.
I truly love the idea of single-development mixed-income housing, but I just don’t see it working in the US. Either the subsidized units are poor quality, leading to the same stigma as our current public housing, or they’re the same as the unsubsidized units but only a few lucky people can get them, which would really not fly here.
> I truly love the idea of single-development mixed-income housing, but I just don’t see it working in the US.
It's already working[1] in California. This is happening through the California Housing Finance Agency[2]:
> The CalHFA Mixed-Income Program (MIP) provides long-term subordinate financing for the new construction of affordable multifamily developments throughout California that provide housing with units restricted at all income levels between 30% and 120% of the Area Median Income of the county in which the development will be located.
So while it's not outright subsidized, the state is providing the financing for these projects.
These forced developments deals are meh. Our school district is dealing with planning for such state-mandated growth. The state-level representatives approve an influx of residents despite the local communities not wanting the growth. The developers want sweetheart deals. New residents want the new residences. Who loses? The actual property owners, who see their local tax dollars stretched thin by the growth (as the new residences are less expensive than the established ones), the congestion rise, and their votes diluted.
As an analogy, the rest of the US should not vote to reduce property prices in NYC at the expense of NYC taxpayers. It would be absurd. But that exactly is what the state-level policies achieve at the state-vs-community level.
> New residents want the new residences. Who loses? The actual property owners, who see their local tax dollars stretched thin by the growth
If we're talking about California, good news: the new homeowners will pay far more in taxes than the entrenched property owners under the Prop 13 system. Also, the single family residences are more of a burden on finances in terms of infrastructure maintenance costs than high-density residences.
True, but I am not talking about California. It's its own beast.
Well-managed towns of single family homes are not an infrastructure burden. Sure, they're not as per capita efficient but recall people move to such towns, and pay taxes accordingly, in part for the density decrease.
To use an anecdote, my mother in law has lived, for many years, on a peaceful dead-end street. Last year, an apartment building was put up at the end of the street more than quadrupling the number of families that lived there.
Since then, there are cars driving by on a regular (many times a day) blaring loud music. Her neighbor's big window in her living room has had rocks thrown through it on several occasions in the first months. My mother in law feels less safe going for walks, because she no longer knows most of her neighbors and this area of the city was already not exactly low crime.
Her perception of her new neighbors, and their behavior (both criminal and otherwise) have completely devalued her experience of living at her house.
Does that make her a NIMBY? Yup. Is her quality of life now lower? Yup.
Is it the fault of higher density? No.
It is the fault of a culture that tolerates disruptive behavior. Higher density has only brought more of it to her doorstep.
You see, if Americans had the same value for "not being a nuisance" as the Japanese, then you could pack us like sardines in a can, and we'd all get along fine. "Changing the character of the neighborhood" is an actual concern that real people have, and trucking over them to build more housing will probably just cause another wave of white flight. Ideally, Americans would value respect over freedom, but I think the right to do whatever you want is too deeply ingrained in our culture at this point.
The problem is "be more like the Japanese" isn't actionable advice. Americans don't have uniform values; most Americans are already respectful neighbors (yes, even the "freedom loving" ones) so telling them to be more like the Japanese is pointless because they aren't the problem. The problem is the small portion of Americans who are deliberately antisocial. If even 10% of Americans are antisocial neighbors, then 100 Americans moving into your neighborhood will mean you have 10 awful people making the neighborhood hell.
And what can the quiet 90% do about it? Socially pressure the anti-social people? This provokes even more disruption in retaliation and stands a non-negligible chance of getting you stabbed. Calling the police with noise complaints is ineffectual, as soon as the police leave the disruption will become even worse just to spite everybody else. NIMBYism is the most proximate and pragmatic solution; stop the problem from occurring in the first place.
Yes, absolutely. The US has an enormous empathy problem that manifests as the general cultural issue you're describing and also, notably, it manifests on both sides of every single political issue. On the subject of housing, the obvious empathy problem is wealthy NIMBYs blocking lower income housing because they are worried about their property value. But the empathy problem on the other side is the people using that image to paint everybody, not understanding how many people are in the situation you're describing: Normal people simply not wanting the lives they've worked so hard to attain completely disrupted and having to choose between misery and uprooting their entire lives to take a crapshoot at moving (and even the task of moving itself is often an effort that even middle-income people can't always afford, not even to mention that it means losing your community).
Deregulation to allow building more of all housing types is the only answer. Funding more public housing will just add a trickle of liquidity to a market that has been in drought for decades.
Take San Francisco. A huge proportion of the housing stock is rent-controlled (everything pre 1979) to try and make it accessible price-wise to low income renters, effectively forcing a ton of housing stock to lock in artificially low prices the same as public housing. This hasn't fixed it, and may have made it worse due to perverse incentives for landlords / building owners. Meanwhile it remains arguably the most difficult major city in North America to build new housing in, especially infill on existing residential properties.
I moved back to Portland, OR the last few years, and the pace of housing development and policy is dramatically better. Single family zoning is illegal. You have people in rich neighborhoods adding ADUs like crazy, and developers knocking down outdated single family homes to increase density in desirable neighborhoods. New mixed use buildings are springing up all along major transit corridors in walkable/bikeable neighborhoods. Prices for new homes and luxury apartments are inaccessibly high, but all of this takes pressure off the low end of rental stock. There is also public housing being built, but it is monumentally dwarfed by private development.
"Public" doesn't exist in a country where half the people don't think other people are people. Our masters had an easy time here getting underlings to thunderdome themselves to death.
The biggest issue with 0% interest rates is that it let the stock market skyrocket. From 2009, the returns on some stocks like FAANGs are 20X or more, in less than 15 years. This created a huge, ridiculous income gap between the haves (ie. those with tech stocks) and the have nots (everyone else).
Everyone with exposure to tech stocks got extremely rich, including hedge funds. So all home owners are either those that had houses before the bust, those that had money before the housing bust and bought houses during the bust, or those that became very wealthy from tech stocks and bought houses. That raised the price of houses to unaffordable levels, and now hedge funds with all their tech wealth are buying homes to turn most people into renters. There's no room for the Have Nots to buy houses anymore. If you don't currently have a house, and you don't make millions on the stock market, there's no way you're ever going to be able to afford a house.
We need a housing crash, but the Fed will never allow it, and hedge funds know this. That's why supply remains tight. Only rich people are currently buying houses, and it won't change regardless of interest rates. Hedge funds have to suffer catastrophic losses in order for supply to reenter the market.
> So all home owners are either those that had houses before the bust, those that had money before the housing bust and bought houses during the bust, or those that became very wealthy from tech stocks and bought houses.
"Nice place!" I said to many of my professors. "How'd you afford this part of town?"
"Oh, housing crashes happen periodically" said the professors. "Find where you want to be, save money outside the markets, and just wait."
So I rented too small a place for over 5 years, saved, and waited. Sure enough, Covid tanked prices and interest rates yet my down payment was fine because I had kept it outside of the markets.
This approach is not hard. It just can take a decade.
Would be nice to see some energy around ideas like eliminating the stepped up cost basis on inherited housing and using that new tax revenue to fund social housing.
Would be better to fix housing then to fund social housing and break it even further for the largest subset of the population (everyone not extremely rich or extremely poor).
It's true. I'm continually amazed by the tall apartment buildings we call "concrete suburbs" here in Finland. What other people as plain, boring, unadorned, I see as one of the most powerful levers of equality out there.
Most apartments in the United States also sucks completely compared to anywhere else because they are not walkable to anything. They also are very dehumanising. Every usa apartment I lived in had mold issues, crackheads, managers who did nothing, managers who threatened to throw me out when I asked them to do things like take care of the mold. And one apartment had this huge owl that would fly around the complex catching rats. That was pretty cool actually.
All the flats I've lived in outside of the USA (Tokyo, Berlin, Oslo, Brest, Utrecht) were super walkable, had landlords that treated me like a person, and was not made out of cardboard.
I guess my point is either get a flat outside of the USA or get one with a bad ass owl.
That owl sounds like a cool feature, I only have coyotes come to visit.
There are nice apartments in the USA, I'm in Seattle, everyone of my friends live in apartments and they are nice. I live in an old building from the 60s, but the apartment is great.
The problem is that there aren't enough apartments.
We don't?! In my city they've been building multi-block apartment buildings en masse for several years now yet the rents are still rising. Seems like every other week another multi-hundred unit is being built.
If you are trying to buy a house now and either are getting outbid, or priced out, you unfortunately have a few realistic options, none of them ideal. 1) Wait to see if the market crashes and hope your job is still intact, 2) Set your sites on a less desirable neighborhood with a bad school district. 3) Buy a small or major fixer upper in a good neighborhood, or 4) Move to a lower COL city. Each of these are a tough pill to swallow and will depend on each situation. Waiting for our leaders to fix our broken housing policy is not a realistic option. It could get worse. We chose option 4. It took some adjusting, but are used to it now. We would still be renting otherwise.
Notice 2, 3, and 4 distribute conscientious talent across the country in a way that might well be net additive.
For 2, the purchaser will likely improve the neighborhood and schools. For 3 they improve the housing stock. For 4 they bring desirable skills to employers who cannot otherwise afford to pay for such skills.
Proverbially "Go west, young [person]!" and all that.
There is also still the option of new build. It was common for popular magazines like Sunset and other regional magazines publishing in the 1930s and 1940s to include basic blueprints/layouts for houses you could build yourself or have built. Cottages by today’s US standards, but perfectly fine starter homes. You need buildable land but, say, rural US doesn’t have that as a problem. One of the material advantages of staying around your hometown if you were born in those areas is you find out about land opportunities from family and friends and get steered to the right builders or they help in your build-your-own. End up house-rich, not house-poor.
If we still had a culture of formal coming-of-age rites, building your own small house on a little gifted land would be a good one.
I'm not an economist, but it would seem the culprit is the federal reserve. You cannot force someone to sell a home, anymore than you can force someone to buy. But the phone reserve can stay out of the marketplace and let the market choose interest rates. I don't quite understand it, but it just seems like the federal reserve is the culprit here
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadI'll just focus on your first point: patience. You might be right there but as you pointed out the last four years have been rough for buyers and patience can only last so long. Gotta understand a buyer getting traumatized by having to bid on a house they haven't even toured, buyers given only 15 minutes to view a house, 20+ offers on a house, offering $20k over asking and still not getting it. With no end in sight.
I'll take you up on that. Is there a way to post a specific price I want to pay, and then pay the realtor x% of the difference between what I set and what I actually pay? For example, if I set $400,000 and they find me a place at $300,000, maybe I could pay them $25,000 at a 25% difference.
The world isn’t quite as black or white.
What is up for debate and highly contested is whether the commissions collected are commensurate with that value.
The old pre-internet world had deep informational asymmetry via the MLS. Realtors were magical in that they could bring forth magical houses at magical price points and the commissions “felt” like value. And more than being a facilitator, the realtor also played part as pseudo-therapist and mind reader reading situational cues to find good fits for their clients.
However, I’d argue that several things have sullied the relationship over time.
1. The low-ish barrier to entry to become a realtor. Made for a lot of professionals that could coast on value adding activities. So the client who feels that they would have never found or sold their dream property or deal has become less and less so.
2. The democratization of information via the internet has pushed the labor of searching for properties to the client.
3. The democratization of loan broker services via the internet have reduced what a seasoned buyer would have to go through to obtain financing.
So this has reduced the realtor from value adder along the whole process to merely door opening facilitator.
Now that the genie is out of the bottle, it’s not going back, but the question is, is the value offered today, still commensurate with percentages charged as Realestate prices continually go up?
The average home is ~$425k and a commission is 5%.
I've never met any Realtor that brought $22k in value to a simple single family home transaction.
Realtors in the US, when compared to those in pretty much any other first world country, are definitely overcharging for their services, and, according to at least one judge, they colluded to keep commissions artificially high [0]
> It seems to me like so many people are chasing the dream Disney sold them on the world rather than realizing they might have to compromise.
And why is that?
It maddens me that, generation after generation, people have been told to aim high, get a job, work hard, get a degree, move out, see the world, etc. Turns out, now people in their thirties have to "compromise" or "settle" on buying their first homes at half the size, twice the price, and ten years later than their parents, likely earning a relative third less as well.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/realtors-liable-for-1-8-billion...
A typical starter home in the 70's and 80's was 1200 square feet. I don't think people today are buying 600 square foot houses.
Well, it's the generation after Reagan came in with the whole monetarist trickle-down thing, but yes.
Sometimes I think the toxicity of this situation (and it's not just the US) fuels in large part the tendency for people to believe in conspiracy theories about secretive cabals keeping them down. And in a way, it's kinda true too when it comes to housing. You're told you're living in a land of democratic opportunity, wealth and justice. Yet somehow...
Not in my area. Very few people are selling because no one wants to trade a 3% mortgage for a 7% mortgage.
From
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/mortgages/can-you-transfer-a-...
"Loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) are typically assumable. Conventional mortgages, on the other hand, usually aren’t assumable. Instead, conventional mortgages typically come with a due-on-sale clause—meaning the loan must be paid off if you want to transfer the property title."
While I'm fond of the Austrian school of economics, history has seemingly shown that such true austerity is politically untenable - my above gripes are actually just acts in the larger pattern of post Bretton Woods looting. Modern Monetary Theory seems to be the only attempt at a way out that is actually talking about unbinding us from this martingale of austerity for Main Street plus massive continual handouts for the banks and Wall Street. The government has played these "hands off" interest rate games long enough - it's time to leave rates at the moderate level they are currently at and spend direct stimulus on things our society actually needs (which on this topic is building more housing).
When governments put money into a thing, that thing will have insanely high prices. Why would sellers lower prices when they know that Uncle Sam will pay any price? Didn't you notice that high housing prices are a big part of the problem we already have? And you suggest a solution that will make it worse?
5% interest rates will change things for the better, and maybe we can phase out the mortgage interest tax deduction, too.
Yes, the prices of construction materials will go up. This is called a price signal, indicating that more of a thing is needed. I personally will not be happy about higher prices. But the pain created by this is due to economic damage that has already occurred and needs to be realized, rather than continuing to kick the can down the road as it has been.
I'm ambivalent about the mortgage interest tax deduction. People act like it's some amazing cut-from-whole-cloth subsidy, but from a business context it's just a regular straightforward deduction of a customary expense.
Then why isn’t there a deduction for everything else we buy? It is a handout to real estate owners and lenders, and has zero reason to exist.
If the government wants to help people who do not have enough money, the government should give them cash. Or a home, if that is the goal.
A standard deduction is simply lowering tax rates for everyone.
Also keep in mind that interest on a loan is being reported as income elsewhere, so it is being taxed. It's just being taxed one less time.
Politically, I don't see the point of singling out people who aren't short housing (aka they own one home) but still have a mortgage. Remember with rental properties all expenses are straightforwardly deductible (or depreciable), because revenue that pays expenses is distinct from income.
Government has so many tools to absolutely screw over the incumbent freeloaders. It won't because it consists of and is paid by incumbent real estate freeloaders. Don't you wonder why almost nobody nowadays heard about land value tax despite it being super prominent idea century ago or so?
In terms of housing affordability, the dominance of mcmansions with small yards (but big enough for a swimming pool in the back) and large houses certainly reduces supply for first home buyers.
And, cities suffer because supplying utilities (light, gas, water, roads, trash, sewer, etc) all cost more because of the large horizontal footprint.
Height restrictions, floor area ratio, lot coverage, setbacks, parking minimums, square footage minimums, lot size minimums, and lots of other zone requirements all contribute to a floor on the price of housing.
There are plenty of really good requirements like firebreaks and egress points, but not everything should to be enforced by zoning. Many of these things should be allowed to be controlled by the market. If people truly want 2 car garages and 1/2 acre lots they can pay for it. Making it the legal minimum to construct massively distorts the market.
Zoning massively benefits the existing occupants of a location and when there is a housing crisis just makes matters so much worse.
Existing small houses are priced as high (or higher) than new-build McMansions.
See also: "missing middle"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=SfsCniN7Nsc
Then you're just contributing to the sprawl problem, because infrastructure has to extend to you somehow.
The options are:
- bring all the infrastructure with you (be rich)
- do without (live in squalor)
The third option we need:
- small dense affordable housing
Yes, we're in agreement that density is sorely missing, due to effectively being made illegal - whether SROs, lot size requirements, building codes prohibiting new triple deckers, etc.
I just don't know why your first comment had this:
> The only alternative is to buy rural land and try to get creative with the law (e.g. your tiny home on an existing rusted old trailer frame is considered a "remodel", etc) or simply build a small cabin and hope no one from the government comes to bulldoze it.
Because that isn't an alternative. Rather it just strikes me as regular rural living in a small house.
I'm surprised there haven't been more private corporate attempts to take ruralish land and bootstrap higher density walkable proto-cities with bus (or even train) service to a larger city, especially with the recent trend of remote work making attracting industry less necessary.
It was more of a suggestion to do something quasi-legal like a multi-tenant tiny house village. I know a few folks who did this in the PNW, along with one who bought a disused kids' camp facility with small A-frame cabins and turned it into a permaculture farm & community, and then had all their friends move in.
You're right in that it's not an answer either, because it's essentially a tiny breakaway society.
Or is it just perfectly comfortable and what non US housing should strive for, instead of the cramped quarters that are available elsewhere? (hint: yes, it is) (And of course, there is comfortable housing available everywhere, and cramped housing available in the US, but OP mentioned US specifically, so I specifically used it in my answer.)
Not the designed-to-fail model that the US has historically implemented, however. There are other, very successful, public housing systems that show how it can be done successfully. We can basically copy Singapore and Vienna's homework.
The spice must flow, property valuations must go up or the whole thing collapses. It's why non-SF-esque cities only allow expansion in-line with population growth or a little less because they will immediately be tarred and feathered if they make everyone's mortgage underwater.
To be clear this isn't a good thing, but no one wants to blink first and start another 2008.
You've securitized the cashflow from the property, so if that cashflow dips, the lender has an assurance they can reprice the security in line with your new cashflow story.
Even if you cover the shortfall in cashflow out of pocket, this is better for both you and the bank because you don't have to admit that the market rates at which you got your loan have changed.
Yeah. I can see how that would create perverse incentives downstream.
I could not have afforded the plot of land my first city apartment was on, but I could afford an apartment in the building!
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/law-of-supply-demand.as...
Can’t wait to see whether and how well it works, or where it evolves, but some places are trying!
We need a mix of housing, including multiple classes of housing that more reflects the diversity of incomes, not more gigantic corporate owned apartment blocks.
There is no simply sound byte answer.
Well, there is your problem.
The lack of housing gets solved by, gasp, adding more housing. A house in a city is luxury, the only way to keep rents down is by adding more to the offer, and guess what, apartment buildings add a lot of housing in a small surface.
Corporations are bound by economics, they can't charge out of bounds rents if the average rent price is much lower, and you get that by, you guessed it, building more.
> We need a mix of housing
No, you need a ton more housing, not a mix, you have to aim for efficiency here, specially in cities. Having a SFH in a city is a luxury, townhome I would say is above average, and everyone else should be in apartments. Apartments don't have to be ugly, if I could I would buy a 2/3 bedroom apartment, however there isn't much offer, and everything is from ages ago because the USA doesn't build.
I want to see better lives for people in whatever capacity they want to make it honestly.
I don’t think it’s an OR situation but I don’t think counterpointing is going to help the conversation any. You’re not wrong. I just think we also need to do things like actually build new cities instead of just adding more and more to existing ones. That’s a formula that we used to have that has just stopped completely happening and now it actually worked.
But more housing and better lives for people is the point so I’ll leave it there.
We don’t have to speculate about how civic control over housing development works or what kind of decisions our communities will make. They are the problem, not the solution.
Additionally as other comments also suggest, resolving the various supply problems.
I will say however we are hitting record number of new apartment buildings being built, so that’s a good sign for renters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY (Youtube: Vienna's Radical Idea? Affordable Housing For All)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6DBKoWbtjE (Youtube: Does Vienna Have the World's Best Council Housing?)
Even if someone somewhere else did it well, the odds of anyone in the US doing it well are nearly nil.
What we should copy from Vienna is mixed use development. A huge portion of American suburbs are zoned as single family only and you end up with a housing shortage, horrible traffic, and pollution. Mixed use development allows density to increase while reducing traffic and encouraging people to be more fit (by walking or biking more). It's such a no-brainer from a whole-system perspective.
The problem is that NIMBYs and existing regulations exist to preserve the status quo and protect the equity long-term homeowners have accumulated. In places like CA there are additional disincentives to reform like Proposition 13 that favor long term owners at the expense of new homebuyers. Obviously a tax-advantaged asset is going to have a higher price than an equivalent non-tax-advantaged asset. And significant property tax revenue that could otherwise fund public transit and additional construction isn't collected as a result.
Eventually enough boomers will die and the demographic forces will shift and create the opportunity for reform, but this will be too little too late for a whole generation. I'd love for a concerted national effort to tackle this problem and reduce barriers to building the kind of housing America needs, but it's hard to see that happening anytime soon.
Part of Vienna's success is building so much public housing there is plenty to go around, so all sorts of people live in public housing. There isn't a stigma associated with public housing since using it doesn't imply any specific trait.
I'm a big fan of building all sorts of non-market housing all over cities to avoid the slum problem. Charge means-tested rent, so someone will low income pays very little rent. Someone with a good job pays closer to market rent (and that extra revenue helps pay for the overall housing program).
One of the huge successes of Vienna's public housing model is mixing people of different socioeconomic backgrounds. People connect with people with all sorts of different backgrounds and experiences resulting in much strong social cohesion.
You're right that public housing doesn't fundamentally require income restrictions. The government could forbid all private construction and take over home development itself, placing price caps as needed. But if you think something like that's going to work in the US when we can't even accomplish much more minor housing reform, you're dreaming. Vienna's model is certainly not that radical.
For starters, even Vienna's social housing model has income restrictions. If you and your partner both earn the average 2023 Viennese salary (about €52,000/person) then you don't quality for social housing because your combined income significantly exceeds the annual threshold (€79,490 for two people in 2023).
Even if you do qualify, you are only eligible if you have lived in Vienna for two years already. This system does nothing for new transplants. And once you do qualify, the wait time to be approved for an apartment can be in excess of 5 years. They even have a "bonus period" to move people who have been waiting for more than 5 years up in the line, because the city recognizes how frustrating that must be.
The system is easily gamed too. Vienna only checks your income once as part of the process. If your income increases later on (e.g. because you finished school and got a great job) you don't become ineligible. That part is fine by itself, but you can also transfer the apartment to a qualifying family member if you decide to move out, and they don't need to wait 5 years. This contributes to the reduced supply and long wait times because it reduces inventory and rewards those with family connections in the city.
And of course this whole system is far from free. If you make the average Viennese salary your income tax rate is 42%, whereas it's 25% for the average American worker. The average Vienna home is worth around 1 million euros and the property tax rate on such a home is a whopping 3.5%. Even in expensive coastal places like San Francisco and San Diego, property tax rates are barely above 1%. The tax burden to fund this kind of social housing (and other great things too, to be fair) is definitely heavy. It's fine to point out the positives of such a system, but the costs have to be acknowledged as well. And in the US I don't think the taxpaying population of any city is willing to bear those kinds of costs.
Vienna's system does do a great job mixing different people together, as you note. But not all of this is due to public housing. Quite a bit of it is simply how walkable the city is and how great their public transport options are. Even a moderate amount of public housing for low income individuals scattered throughout a very foot-friendly city would do a great job mixing people together.
Nothing approaching that radical an approach would be required. Just getting funded public housing agencies with a mandate to develop non-market multi-family housing using properties in the city's portfolio would be a massive victory for affordability.
Or generation X becomes the new “boomers”.
California already has something like this: it's determining the state's housing needs at the state level. If regions don't realistically create plans for hitting their allotted target, a 'builder's remedy' is triggered. Developments which check certain boxes, and one of them is a percentage of affordable housing, override local zoning blockades.
All you really need to do is go a step further and offer developers subsidies to increase their percentages of affordable housing in their plan.
The thing that makes other countries' public housing succeed is that it's not a monolith of low income residents - the mixed incomes in the development create a more cohesive community that makes them successful. No reason we can't do it here, and no reason it has to be overtly labeled as public housing.
It's already working[1] in California. This is happening through the California Housing Finance Agency[2]:
> The CalHFA Mixed-Income Program (MIP) provides long-term subordinate financing for the new construction of affordable multifamily developments throughout California that provide housing with units restricted at all income levels between 30% and 120% of the Area Median Income of the county in which the development will be located.
So while it's not outright subsidized, the state is providing the financing for these projects.
[1] https://www.calhfa.ca.gov/multifamily/mixedincome/approved/i...
[2] https://www.calhfa.ca.gov/multifamily/mixedincome/index.htm
As an analogy, the rest of the US should not vote to reduce property prices in NYC at the expense of NYC taxpayers. It would be absurd. But that exactly is what the state-level policies achieve at the state-vs-community level.
If we're talking about California, good news: the new homeowners will pay far more in taxes than the entrenched property owners under the Prop 13 system. Also, the single family residences are more of a burden on finances in terms of infrastructure maintenance costs than high-density residences.
Well-managed towns of single family homes are not an infrastructure burden. Sure, they're not as per capita efficient but recall people move to such towns, and pay taxes accordingly, in part for the density decrease.
To use an anecdote, my mother in law has lived, for many years, on a peaceful dead-end street. Last year, an apartment building was put up at the end of the street more than quadrupling the number of families that lived there.
Since then, there are cars driving by on a regular (many times a day) blaring loud music. Her neighbor's big window in her living room has had rocks thrown through it on several occasions in the first months. My mother in law feels less safe going for walks, because she no longer knows most of her neighbors and this area of the city was already not exactly low crime.
Her perception of her new neighbors, and their behavior (both criminal and otherwise) have completely devalued her experience of living at her house.
Does that make her a NIMBY? Yup. Is her quality of life now lower? Yup.
Is it the fault of higher density? No.
It is the fault of a culture that tolerates disruptive behavior. Higher density has only brought more of it to her doorstep.
And what can the quiet 90% do about it? Socially pressure the anti-social people? This provokes even more disruption in retaliation and stands a non-negligible chance of getting you stabbed. Calling the police with noise complaints is ineffectual, as soon as the police leave the disruption will become even worse just to spite everybody else. NIMBYism is the most proximate and pragmatic solution; stop the problem from occurring in the first place.
Take San Francisco. A huge proportion of the housing stock is rent-controlled (everything pre 1979) to try and make it accessible price-wise to low income renters, effectively forcing a ton of housing stock to lock in artificially low prices the same as public housing. This hasn't fixed it, and may have made it worse due to perverse incentives for landlords / building owners. Meanwhile it remains arguably the most difficult major city in North America to build new housing in, especially infill on existing residential properties.
I moved back to Portland, OR the last few years, and the pace of housing development and policy is dramatically better. Single family zoning is illegal. You have people in rich neighborhoods adding ADUs like crazy, and developers knocking down outdated single family homes to increase density in desirable neighborhoods. New mixed use buildings are springing up all along major transit corridors in walkable/bikeable neighborhoods. Prices for new homes and luxury apartments are inaccessibly high, but all of this takes pressure off the low end of rental stock. There is also public housing being built, but it is monumentally dwarfed by private development.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/magazine/vienna-social-ho...
Everyone with exposure to tech stocks got extremely rich, including hedge funds. So all home owners are either those that had houses before the bust, those that had money before the housing bust and bought houses during the bust, or those that became very wealthy from tech stocks and bought houses. That raised the price of houses to unaffordable levels, and now hedge funds with all their tech wealth are buying homes to turn most people into renters. There's no room for the Have Nots to buy houses anymore. If you don't currently have a house, and you don't make millions on the stock market, there's no way you're ever going to be able to afford a house.
We need a housing crash, but the Fed will never allow it, and hedge funds know this. That's why supply remains tight. Only rich people are currently buying houses, and it won't change regardless of interest rates. Hedge funds have to suffer catastrophic losses in order for supply to reenter the market.
"Nice place!" I said to many of my professors. "How'd you afford this part of town?"
"Oh, housing crashes happen periodically" said the professors. "Find where you want to be, save money outside the markets, and just wait."
So I rented too small a place for over 5 years, saved, and waited. Sure enough, Covid tanked prices and interest rates yet my down payment was fine because I had kept it outside of the markets.
This approach is not hard. It just can take a decade.
YMMV.
All the flats I've lived in outside of the USA (Tokyo, Berlin, Oslo, Brest, Utrecht) were super walkable, had landlords that treated me like a person, and was not made out of cardboard.
I guess my point is either get a flat outside of the USA or get one with a bad ass owl.
There are nice apartments in the USA, I'm in Seattle, everyone of my friends live in apartments and they are nice. I live in an old building from the 60s, but the apartment is great.
The problem is that there aren't enough apartments.
California is at least trying to fix their broken housing policy. No clue if they'll succeed but I think it's realistically possible.
For 2, the purchaser will likely improve the neighborhood and schools. For 3 they improve the housing stock. For 4 they bring desirable skills to employers who cannot otherwise afford to pay for such skills.
Proverbially "Go west, young [person]!" and all that.
If we still had a culture of formal coming-of-age rites, building your own small house on a little gifted land would be a good one.