[bigyabai]

> which is fundamentally a housing supply issue

There are plenty of houses. The issue is demand; people are paying $4,000/month to live in a shithole because nobody knows what things are worth. Rich executives, H1Bs and digital nomads all flock there to displace working-class families that support the basic service economy. If you built 400 condos, 1600 more rich people move in. Supply is not the issue as far as I can see it.

[zer00eyz]

> There are plenty of houses.

Are there?

Home ownership is a functional unmovable number in the USA: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S

The problem is that we only have plenty of houses... that are under occupied.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q...

We dont build high density housing. We killed off the boarding house. There's like one left in DC when there used to be dozens... They were common enough that even in the 80's you could make a tv show about it, now if you said bording house someone would look at you like you had 9 heads.

We dont have SRO's any more... In 1940 the YMCA of New York had 100k rooms for rent...

https://ishc.com/wp-content/uploads/YMCAs2.pdf

> If you built 400 condos, 1600 more rich people move in. Supply is not the issue as far as I can see it.

Do you know what the largest predictor of voting is? Home ownership. DO you know what drives home owners to the polls more than anything else? Protecting the value of their home.

https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/wealthy-bay-area-town-a...

The state has, and continues to sue towns for the fuckery that they have been doing to block housing development to prop up property prices. 60 percent of people who are the most likely to vote will turn up to the polls to make sure the costs do NOT go down. It is the tyranny of majority...

SO yes there are plenty of HOUSES, and not enough of everything else that we need for people to live.

[wahnfrieden]

Makes no sense. You can build until demand goes down. Demand is high in part because supply’s low. If there were more homes than rich people who wanted them, prices would be lower. But that doesn’t happen because of NIMBYism. I suspect you know all this but are mythologizing the situation as inescapable destiny.

Maybe you’re used to seeing half measures. Be careful with that because half measures are sometimes used as justification to throw out the whole idea of progress instead of doing it properly (“well we tried that and things were still bad so now we have to do it my way”)

[mlrtime]

>Makes no sense. You can build until demand goes down.

It makes a lot of sense when you realize who builds and brings capital. Debeers for an extreme example.

[wahnfrieden]

I understand why building doesn't happen. OP is saying that even if you build, it's hopeless because demand is endlessly met by rich people keeping prices high.

[grafmax]

Let’s say prices go down until houses are sold at cost. Even at cost people with little money won’t be able to buy houses.

[wahnfrieden]

Labor costs and a big part of materials cost is driven by landlords

[pandaman]

Even when rents go down to cost, they are still going to be greater than zero and labor and materials won't turn free. Cost won't ever be so low that one could afford housing while doing nothing productive and even less so while indulging in a drug habit.

[wahnfrieden]

The comment I'm replying to is about working-class families who are priced out

[pandaman]

Since the US had been deindustrialized, most of the working class is now in service sector and does not produce much. Thus service labor is discounted and the construction labor is at premium. Basically, if it costs 1000 man-days of labor to build a house all in (materials, tooling, labor itself) it will have to cost 1000*k man-hours of waiting tables, where k is the discount coefficient between doing a skilled back-breaking labor and taking orders from the tables to the kitchen. At some values of k there is just not enough working days in the lifetime.