this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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Housing Bubble 2: Return of the Ugly
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This is what drives me crazy every time I hear people talking about needing to build more housing. The first thing we need to do is correct this problem. My suggestion is an increasing property tax premium on vacant homes. I’d suggest doubling the tax rate for each consecutive year a property is vacant for more than 185 days-just over half a year.
This has the side benefit of making Airbnb landlording less feasible as a small time investment strategy.
True, but it is not just about that there are X million houses emtpy and Y million people homeless. It is also about location of those empty houses. That might not overlap with location of the homeless, and I guess we are not talking about forced relocation here. There is probably still a good overlap of locations of empty houses and homeless and that part needs fixing.
See: the Bay Area and most of LA absolutely suffocated by suburban sprawl. You could build higher density residential dwellings, but first you need to tear down a few existing homes, plus get it past all the NIMBYS whose property values might go down if there's not hyperinflated demand.
There are regional housing shortages. The classic example is in Northern California (particularly around San Fransisco and San Jose) where you've got these huge tracks of ranch-style homes and barely any vertical development. A lot of that is due to the seismic activity in the region, making taller buildings more expensive to construct. But more is due to the historical development practices of throwing up a thousand cheepo ticky-tacky units on real estate they acquired dirt-cheap from the state and flipped as fast as possible. Now the land is developed as this low-traffic sprawl, and people are obsessed with propping up their land-value to justify the seven figure notes their carrying. So building denser housing is politically and logistically prohibitive.
Basically, the problem isn't a housing shortage so much as a shit job of urban planning. Yes, houses exist, but they're hours away from job sites with no quality mass transit to move people between residence and work. No, you can't just pile people into these low-occupancy (often badly maintained) units if they don't have the kind of money to afford their own cars, pay for childcare, afford the utilities, cover maintenance of the units, etc, etc. That's a recipe for slums.
At some level, you need to actually plan your residential economy. That's a harder kind of work that politicians and bureaucrats elected based on their cool Tweets and Instagram feeds don't really want to do.
Tokyo seems to be doing just fine at building millions of homes in mid and high rises capable of not letting an empty plastic bottle fall over during earthquakes that made me sit down.
Tokyo has a very low life expectancy for many of its residencies. Building regularly get torn down and replaced inside 30-40 years.
Agreed, but the problem is that the 'we' in this scenario votes for this every two years. When both ruling parties tell us they're capitalist, we need to believe them.