| The ill effects of poor housing policy are deep and insidious Gentrification, and backlash against it is the most obvious societal outcome of failing to keep prices under control. But it goes further House prices drive out low income workers(gentrification). Loss of lower income families in turn raises the cost of doing business for any business that deals with unskilled or otherwise cheap labor. In turn these businesses must raise prices, which feeds back into housing prices among just about all other industries. Meanwhile, poor citizens learn to hate new condo buildings, gnash their teeth at the Starbucks that opened in their neighborhood, and fantasize about shooting guns at nothing in the night to keep the yuppies from moving in. After all, having wealthy neighbors is demonstrably destructive to your way of life. In fact, having an improved standard of living, can be seen as destructive. After all, if they clean up the local park and add universal pre-K, does that mean the yuppies will move in and drive up rents? These things would be obvious community wins outside the lens of housing prices. Under the specter of housing as investment, it is in the rational interest of all renters to make their city as least attractive and unpleasant as possible to live in as possible, with as few high paying jobs and businesses, except for ideally one good job for the renter themself. On the flip side, for homeowners, housing-as-investment incentivizes the kind of exclusivity you might otherwise only find with diehard bitcoiners. Ideally housing production should be 0 or negative. Construction and development is no longer viewed in the lens of whether it is good for the city, nor good for the people involved, but if it is good for my personal investment. And thus, at a societal level, we have built for the young a culture of loathing wealthy companies that bring high paying jobs and the yuppies who work those job; and for the old, a culture of loathing any change, any construction or development at all, that might interfere with the life built through homeownership We are truly not in it together, and have not been since exclusive zoning became the norm |
The other alternative to gentrifying a neighborhood is moving to a LCOL city and watching prices rise there. So now Americans want to keep other Americans out of their cities.
And on top of that we are so car dependent that we can’t hope to build the kind of infill housing we need because there is literally not enough road capacity and transit options == lol.
Too bad the US has some of the worst transit construction costs in the world and tons of local opposition to boot.
If I was a betting person I would bet against the US figuring this out and guess that renting for your life will increasingly become the norm even in previously LCOL cities.