[johnea]

I'm not sure where you live, maybe that could help in your area.

But here in California every state law deregulating real estate development has been abused by developers to build more $2M-$3M houses.

This does NOTHING to help homelessness...

[scoofy]

Yes it does. Every new home adds supply and lowers the price of homes along the demand curve. Not to mention increasing the tax base to fund public housing.

[sillyfluke]

Is this the real estate version of the "trickle down" theory?

You take half the land left in the county for construction and build 5 mil mansions with ridiculous garden acrage instead of more affordable houses. You've now constrained yourself in the number of affordable homes you can build in your county in the future, as land is finite. Maybe you took a few k's off the 10 mil mansions for a short while. Congratulations.

[scoofy]

I don't think building high-end housing will completely solve homelessness, no, but it is a non-trivial improvement especially when it comes to tax revenues that can be used to build public housing.

We only build high-end housing in CA because it's wildly expensive to build housing at all. It's especially expensive exactly because the cost of the "affordable" (subsidized) housing that is required for most of these developments has to be passed to the home buyers, not the general public (who should be funding subsidized housing), which means the housing will be wildly expensive regardless.

Again, the idea that building "high end" (market rate) housing does nothing is just wrong. It's part of an approach that honestly deals with the problem of public housing funding, as will as market rates. The if we want the market to start producing housing for the middle class (and we should want that), we'll need to make it inexpensive and accessible to build so that normal people can redevelop their homes, we take the delta in property values, and use that money to fund public housing for those people most in need.

[sillyfluke]

>the idea that building "high-end" housing does nothing is just wrong.

Not sure anyone said this. The parent said it does nothing to solve homelessness and unless the homeowners are housing homeless people in their mansions, I think they're by and large correct. And you still have to contend with the luxury homes taking away future building potential by occupying a ridiculous amount of finite land that a county has available.

People call it a housing crisis for a reason. You don't solve a crisis by championing something by arguing "hey, it's not nothing" anymore than you would attempt to solve a famine crisis by dripping a couple of drops of water in a few malnourished kids' mouthes.

[scoofy]

>Not sure anyone said this

It's literally what the person I was responding to said:

>>But here in California every state law deregulating real estate development has been abused by developers to build more $2M-$3M houses.

>>This does NOTHING to help homelessness...

Given the Prop 13 tax environment. Building expensive homes is a necessary condition to facilitate local tax revenues necessary to build public housing.

I would never argue that just allowing high-end homes is enough. I'm saying that allowing high-end homes is also part of the holistic solution. OP is the one saying that it does nothing. It does not do nothing. It's not a "one or another" thing... we need to build more homes at every income level, and there is no way to do that without largely deregulating the housing environment so that developers cannot simply all target the luxury market.

[sillyfluke]

>It's literally what the person I was responding to saidz

This is funny, I literally quoted the exact line you quoted.

In good faith, let me perfectly clear:

As I said in my previous comment and you requoted: Their original comment said it does nothing to help homelessness (my emphasis, again).

They did not claim it does absolutely nothing at all to help the housing pool in some little way, which I believe are the words your are putting in their mouth.

You implied in your original comment that they were also saying the latter, and by doing so, you moved the discussion from homelessness to whether or not an action helps in some small way to bring home prices down. The latter may help the upper middle class housing situation perhaps but is not guarenteed to allieviate homelessness in anyway and may in fact do nothing to help it, or at least, that point still has to be argued. That is the distinction.

>I'm saying allowing high-end homes is part of the solution.

Yes I understand that. Somehow though the luxury homes that were promised are always built, but if anything fails to materialize it's the affordable housing that was promised--the very thing the high-end homes were supposed to finance.