![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
In which I argue that the lack of affordable housing indicates something horribly wrong, and not with capitalism as such.
Have you heard of Walmart? Of course you have. What are they known for? Providing lots and lots of cheap shit. Also for bullying local governments and squeezing suppliers, but that's not the point here, which is: cheap shit. They have nicer competitors: Target, Kmart, Dollar Stores.
Plane seats are jammed and humiliating but also cheaper than they ever have been, modulo gas prices.
You can spend thousands of dollars on a fancy bicycle, or less than $100 on a cheap one.
Stores are full of cheap, if sometimes unhealthy, food.
You can spend under $13,000, or maybe $12,000 on a new car, or over $100,000 on a luxury sports car.
Many of us wear cheap clothes, "from Third World sweatshops"; others spend $thousands on elite designer clothing.
You can get a watch for $15, or $1500. They'll tell time about the same.
Our economy is full of selling cheap stuff to the masses and expensive stuff to the rich, and various things in between, (sometimes including selling cheap stuff for higher prices, if you can pull off price discrimination.) Because that's how you make the most profit, not by only making luxury stuff.
But in housing, particularly in some markets, it's said that developers are only building luxury housing. If true, why would that be? Why would housing be unlike every other part of the economy?
"Everyone needs housing, so they can extort you." Nope, that won't fly. Everyone needs food and clothing, and in the US lots of people need cars.
"They're just chasing profit." But the point of my examples is that there's tons of profit in non-luxury goods and services. Walmart is *huge*, with its founder's children inheriting $20 billion each of accumulated profit.
And in fact, if you look around the world, you do see cheap(er) housing options. Mobile and manufactured homes for the individual, pre-fab housing for soulless but cheap developer tracts, microapartments that cut living space to 100 square feet, SRO hotels that go further by making you share bathroom and kitchen (if any), granny apartments. In cheap land markets (prefab housing in surbuban developments) and expensive ones (microapartments in Tokyo and Hong Kong.)
But not in Boston, or San Francisco. Why not? Is there something about those places that makes developers spontaneously ignore non-luxury demand? Or is something, like zoning laws and permitting processes, preventing them from doing so?
If you know me, you probably know my answer: the latter. But if you don't like that answer, what's your alternative? Why don't we see Walmarts, Spirit Airlines, $15 watches, and $13,000 cars of modern urban housing?
Have you heard of Walmart? Of course you have. What are they known for? Providing lots and lots of cheap shit. Also for bullying local governments and squeezing suppliers, but that's not the point here, which is: cheap shit. They have nicer competitors: Target, Kmart, Dollar Stores.
Plane seats are jammed and humiliating but also cheaper than they ever have been, modulo gas prices.
You can spend thousands of dollars on a fancy bicycle, or less than $100 on a cheap one.
Stores are full of cheap, if sometimes unhealthy, food.
You can spend under $13,000, or maybe $12,000 on a new car, or over $100,000 on a luxury sports car.
Many of us wear cheap clothes, "from Third World sweatshops"; others spend $thousands on elite designer clothing.
You can get a watch for $15, or $1500. They'll tell time about the same.
Our economy is full of selling cheap stuff to the masses and expensive stuff to the rich, and various things in between, (sometimes including selling cheap stuff for higher prices, if you can pull off price discrimination.) Because that's how you make the most profit, not by only making luxury stuff.
But in housing, particularly in some markets, it's said that developers are only building luxury housing. If true, why would that be? Why would housing be unlike every other part of the economy?
"Everyone needs housing, so they can extort you." Nope, that won't fly. Everyone needs food and clothing, and in the US lots of people need cars.
"They're just chasing profit." But the point of my examples is that there's tons of profit in non-luxury goods and services. Walmart is *huge*, with its founder's children inheriting $20 billion each of accumulated profit.
And in fact, if you look around the world, you do see cheap(er) housing options. Mobile and manufactured homes for the individual, pre-fab housing for soulless but cheap developer tracts, microapartments that cut living space to 100 square feet, SRO hotels that go further by making you share bathroom and kitchen (if any), granny apartments. In cheap land markets (prefab housing in surbuban developments) and expensive ones (microapartments in Tokyo and Hong Kong.)
But not in Boston, or San Francisco. Why not? Is there something about those places that makes developers spontaneously ignore non-luxury demand? Or is something, like zoning laws and permitting processes, preventing them from doing so?
If you know me, you probably know my answer: the latter. But if you don't like that answer, what's your alternative? Why don't we see Walmarts, Spirit Airlines, $15 watches, and $13,000 cars of modern urban housing?
no subject
Date: 2017-07-16 19:24 (UTC)From:Cars uses lots of material, houses use far more, watches and clothes use very little. Also, cars and houses both have extensive safety regulations, which are pretty clearly an excellent idea.
In addition to changing zoning laws, and improving rentals (like in Germany), one change that is obvious in conception and likely very difficult in execution would be to find a way to ban housing speculation. Changing the dynamic of renting vs buying houses might help enough to fix this problem.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-16 20:29 (UTC)From:My point wasn't "why don't we have $15 houses like watches" (did you really think it was?) It's that businesses generally diversify to serve both luxury and non-luxury demand, and if new development is only serving luxury, as some people claim, that's something unusual that needs explanation.
And yeah, I think it's almost entirely zoning and related laws. Ideally you want to build high enough that the cost of housing approximates the construction cost, with the land cost spread over a large number of units. You also want to be able to offer small housing. If a market is full of 1200 square foot studios and no 400 or 120 square foot ones, again, something's *gone wrong*, and probably not with capitalism per se.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-16 22:19 (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2017-07-17 03:11 (UTC)From:Clearly land represents much of the cost, but even in the sorts of towns and very small cities that few people wish to live, there's still a floor on housing prices that isn't about land cost, and when median local income is factored in, this floor isn't all that low. Some of this floor is clearly due to the lack of 120 square foot studios, but health and safety regulations keep that from happening, and I'm all in favor of this, because actual homelessness can clearly be solved via other means and I don't see any other problem sufficiently bad to relax laws to allow for the existence of what would likely amount to a Victorian penny hang with a few amenities.
Also, the biggest problems with housing costs are clearly in urban areas that many people wish to live in, like many large to mid-sized West coast cities. Here, I know that a fair portion of the high cost is due to speculation and resale for profit, and that's clearly caused by capitalism.
Your link in late May to an article comparing and contrasting German vs UK housing clearly showed that governments can do a lot to increase affordable housing, but outside of the highest real-estate markets in the US, the housing situation here is far better than in the UK (looking at that article and then doing some comparison research on US vs UK housing showed me just how incredibly terrible housing problems are in the UK compared to almost all of the US), so we clearly aren't doing nearly as bad as we could be, except in a handful of few highly popular regions like the Bay Area.
Also, two of the more important differences between UK and German housing were less available mortgage credit and greater tenants rights in Germany, both of which are the result of the government strictly regulating capitalism. Now add in rampant real estate speculation in pretty much all US cities that are popular places to move to, and you have many reasons for more expensive housing that has little to do with zoning laws. Sure, zoning laws could be improved, but I'm not sure that would be nearly sufficient, and in the absence of other reforms might not change the problem at all.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-17 04:00 (UTC)From:A ban on 120 square foot apartments is not health or safety related, even if some people pretend it is. Lots of people live healthily in them elsewhere, while San Francisco invented minimum housing sizes as a racist weapon against Chinatown.
All of which is almost irrelevant when 330 square feet of parking space are required for every unit.
> what would likely amount to a Victorian penny hang with a few amenities.
I've actually *been* in a Tokyo microapartment.
> I know that a fair portion of the high cost is due to speculation and resale for profit
I don't know that. The role of outside capital seems massively overstated. Vacancy rates are very low. Housing growth has badly lagged job creation in all such cities; just today I was reading about 5000/year vs. 1000/year in Los Angeles. Houston alone has about as many housing starts as the state of California.
Housing is cheaper in much of the US, but not in the top job-creating and environmentally friendly cities. That's a costly disjunction.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-17 04:18 (UTC)From:I absolutely agree that this should go, and it would help a lot. In lots of cities in the US, studios are often 500 square feet, and they go down to 300, which means that a parking space might more than triple the land needed per apartment (assuming either ground-level parking only, or only a low parking structure that has fewer stories than the apartment building).
In any case, it's fascinating to consider what new construction will look like if the suggestions that self-driving cars will produce a rapid and massive shift to transportation as a service prove true.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-17 04:13 (UTC)From:Most "dense" US cities are anything but. If we take Brooklyn as an upper bound for "human scale" architecture that still has green space, vs. the high rises of Manhattan or the packed 8 story buildings of Paris, we find that's still twice as dense as San Francisco or the densest Boston suburbs, 3x as dense as Boston or Chicago, 5x as dense as Seattle or LA, and 7x as dense as most of the Bay Area -- which, if it had more housing and density, would take some of the pressure off of San Francisco.
Why don't we see more of those densities? It's illegal to build them. Hell, in most cases it'd be illegal to build the *existing* densities, which pre-date zoning laws.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-17 04:19 (UTC)From:Housing costs in Manhattan are 3x construction costs; in most urban markets, they're only a bit above construction costs.
Since 2000, San Francisco has built 30,000 new units, but the population has grown by 76,000 people.