That’s news to me.
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A minority, but a significant and visible minority, of homeless folk aren’t best served by conventional housing. Since these folks also make poor hosts, the parasites have no use for them. Instead, the capitalists have cruelly thrown them out like trash unto our streets.
These folk simply aren’t relevant when we are discussing mercifully letting homeless people live indoors generally. But these folks are the “poster people” of homelessness. Surprise, surprise.
Other than the constant stanning for the obvious troll, which is just weird, you make interesting points and elevate the discussion, as always.
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Ok. After that what?
(Not that hard to look up how many vacant housing units there are - about 15 million. I took a pretty wild guess at the rate of increase of housing units per year over the last few years (looked at the number of units each year though) and assumed relatively constant vacancy rates)
What are some ideas as to what the best course would be next once we fill up the vacant housing?
I guess I don’t know enough about all these vacant houses. Why is no one buying or selling them?
Well, since the capitalists have the ‘insentives’ (400 words for yellow snow) to ‘create’ a sustainable 10-20 year oversupply of housing, all we need to do is let renters switch to rent-to-own for those 10-20 years.
Isn’t that a win-win for everyone? Isn’t building equity a “good”? Isn’t more home ownership a “good”?
Why wouldn’t the capitalists ‘create’ still more empty and useless housing during that period? That’s what they’re doing now. They must have the “incentives” to do so. Don’t you understand how “incentives” work?
I asked what some ideas were if we filled up the housing vacancy. Microbet mentioned the idea of waiting until we are closer to filling up the housing vacancy.
Are we not going to get closer to filling up the housing vacancy? This seem like something we should figure out pretty soon.
It’s easier to rent than buy for several reasons nowadays - especially so if you wont even have to even pay rent.
There are a lot of ways in which housing is developed and used. Singaporian, Cuban, unplanned settlements, the reed housing of the Uros people of Lake Titicaca, more housing just shifting to home ownership as opposed to rentals. My preference is pretty much something like all of the above.
There are entire empty cities in China. I guess the answer is speculation*. I think you were unnecessarily answering a question with a question though. Unless you don’t think what I said was true (and you could just accept that there are these vacancies for the purpose of this discussion), how do you feel about a policy that lets people just live in the housing immediately (as opposed to being homeless) with the understanding that we have time to worry about what happens when it is approaching running out?
*I’m sure a non-zero amount is that in some places there is virtually no demand.
There were two different parts of the chat.
First was this part: “since we know that there’s a shit-ton of useless housing now (even if we assume no more useless housing is ‘created’) can’t we wait years and years to worry about this other shiz”. The part in (parens) was a hidden assumption. The point @microbet was making didn’t depend on the supply of useless housing increasing, so there was no need to muddy the waters speculating if it would or not.
The second part was when @microbet speculated that the supply of useless houses would indeed continue to be ‘created’. All things being equal, like the “insentives” , I can’t see any reason it would not. And this second part was the point I was trying to make when I responded to your post.
I could be down. Opens up a can of worms as to whether the owners of these properties get any compensation.
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my apologies
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Y = Useful Lifespan (yr)
S = Buy (house+lot)
R = Rent (mo)
M = PMI (yr)
B = exp (replacement house cost)
A = exp (appreciation)
Over Y years…
Net Buy-Sell: (S+YM+B)-(S+A)
Cost to Rent: 12YR
Shrinkage: (12YR+A) - (YM+B)
Simple Interest /yr: Shrinkage/SY
Check my maths.
So I can go bankrupt and still keep the condo!
Why would any tenant ever pay rent? If I can move into a million dollar house, never pay rent, and never get evicted. I will live there forever for free. I will effectively own a million dollar home without ever paying for it. How does Sabo stop this from happening if evictions are banned?
Looks like I will be repeating this Econ 101 questions again 24 hours later or less.
Why should million dollar houses exist?
I didn’t really understand from the rest of your post why you think that’s an error. But I also wouldn’t say that it was the only (or even best) place to start thinking. I was just curious if I could make an argument using premises that I thought Sabo might agree with.
Otherwise, I think what you wrote seems along similar lines? That is, when you say that “the problem seems to be a misallocation of housing supply” it seems to me that you’re making a similar calculation.
Other than that, the crux of the argument was supposed to be that approaches like this:
might not work as well as approaches that just try to expand the availability of affordable (or unexploitative) housing. Admittedly it’s a bit too theoretical, but that’s my concern. One analogy that came to mind was the unintended consequences of ban the box laws, although I’m sure the analogy isn’t perfect.
I think this is OK, and in practice I support plans that do this. The part that bugs me is that it’s subsidizing rent-seeking. That’s why I was curious about approaches where government just pays to create housing but then otherwise hands it over, rather than subsidies that end up being paid to landlords.
15 years worth of vacant houses available?
The vacancy rate where I live is 1.5%. They were building ~25 000 condos / apartments / houses (1.4% of the population) per year and the vacancy rate was still going down.
You think the answer to cities like NYC is to stop building housing? There’s a massive supply problem.