Of course timber won't fix the housing shortage. The housing shortage is artificial. There are plenty of empty units across the country. It's a distribution issue of: owners holding vacant units, people wanting/needing to live in specific locations, and individual preferences for bigger, fancier, better school, sfh, etc attributes. With an almost stagnate population growth this isn't really a building issue even if it is a supply side issue.
Owners holding vacant units is not a significant cause of the housing shortage. Overly restrictive zoning and subjective reviews exploited by NIMBYs explains almost all of it.
"Overly restrictive zoning and subjective reviews exploited by NIMBYs explains almost all of it."
You seem to be ignoring the main part of my statement - distribution and preferences matter. "NIMBYs" can't be a retort to that when NIMBY is by definition local - there are many other areas to build in across the country.
"Owners holding vacant units is not a significant cause of the housing shortage."
It may not be the biggest cause, but it is "significant". It is more pronounced in some markets and sectors (apartments).
"Yes, we could all sleep in tents and live off the land if we truly wanted to."
Great strawman.
"Tell me where I could move where housing hasn't doubled in price in the last 5 years AND has employment for a family."
In the vast majority of country housing cost has gone up but has not doubled in the past 5 years. Many medium sized cities and suburbs have employment to support a family while not being outrageously priced. You can even find lists made by various organizations for the most affordable cities. Also, if you care to read the context in this thread, I do acknowledge that a part of the problem is people wanting/needing to live in the same place.
Those studies are so often flawed will pieces. Houses begging sold or between tenants are counted as vacant. Vacancies in rural Pennsylvania and Kentucky don't matter much for the homeless in Oakland.
What do you even do with that information? Ship the homeless around the country?
Other studies should that the higher the vacancy rate the lower the homeless rate and the cheaper housing is. So we can just allow people to build where people want to live and solve both problems.
If you do the right "step-up" programs and purchasable housing becomes extremely cheap around the country, it will solve itself. There are a lot of homeless people in Oakland that if found out they can buy a house in Kentucky and afford it with a restaurant dish-cleaning job, they would move. Stop treating the homeless as "shippable containers" they have agency.
I think you missed the thread - we're making it nearly impossible for someone to own a rental, it would flood the market with purchasable homes - cratering home prices potentially making the medium drop from $400k to $100k (at least for a certain class of homes), create programs for homeless people to get loans - some kind of step-up, combined with a job, and the homeless would suddenly be home owners and become people contributing to the world again.
I don't think I missed the thread. Crating home prices is basically recreating half of the 20008 financial crisis when people are underwater and unable to move, nor have any financial flexibility. Giving homeless people a program to help them out of homelessness and into some form of housing can be good, but jumping them up to homeowners seems a giant leap. If you get them into a stable job and apartment, they aren't homeless anymore. If they're stable, they'll eventually qualify for a loan like everyone else.
I believe that if you offered homeless people in Oakland a job and a house in Kentucky that they could pay off in 10 years while working as a dish washer, you would have very few takers.
I would also suggest that the town that has the dishwashing job in Kentucky - that business is likely to close in 5 years and there won't be any more unskilled jobs in the town and they'll be out of a job and unable to pay the mortgage, get foreclosed and be homeless again -- they know that story.
Better the devil you know than the devil you don't - homeless in California is known while a homeless in Kentucky is something else with even fewer opportunities out.
Plus that town in Kentucky is likely already dealing with a homelessness epidemic of their own before you start bussing people in from out of state.
Also ignoring that many people who live in California would face non-trivial threats to their health and livelihood if they were move to a regressive Bible Belt state. That is not a theoretical concern, but one born out by numerous tragedies.
"Better the devil you know than the devil you don't - homeless in California is known while a homeless in Kentucky is something else with even fewer opportunities out."
Sounds like when homeless people or people on various assistance sometimes turn down opportunities because they're afraid (sometimes rightfully do) that it will ruin one of their other assistance. How do you help people who don't want to be helped?
The dish washer jobs pays less than minimum wage under the table, beacuse the government flew desperate people from the poorest part of the planet to town to compete with the existing dishwashers.
> The Center for Immigration Studies found last year from January 2023 to December 2023, at least 320,000 illegal immigrants were allowed to fly into the U.S. from their home country through a controversial program of the Biden administration using the Customs and Border Patrol app, the CBP One app that was created to let migrants apply for parole into the US.
> The Parole program allows for two-year periods of legal status during which adults are eligible for work authorization.
The humanitarian parole program was created to allow 30,000 Cuban/Haitian/Nicaraguan/Venezuelan nationals in per month on a two year work visa as long as they have a US sponsor that will financially support them and pass background checks.
In return, Mexico is allowing the US to expel 30,000 illegal migrants per month from those countries to Mexico rather than their home countries.
It reduced illegal border crossings by people from those countries by more than were admitted through the program, so housing requirements should be reduced overall.
The parole process has reduced the number of aliens from those countries entering the US and government spending and lets us do background checks, capture biometrics and cap how long they're allowed to be here.
There's a reason why the court tossed Texas' lawsuits against it this week. They couldn't find injury.
I agree. It's government policy at this point to bring in as many people as possible for some reason. My guess is to drive down wages, some others have guessed that it's due to a belief that global conflict is rising and the native population is unwilling to fight.
This perspective seems to be missing the forest for the trees. Bribery isn't illegal for Congress, it's just called lobbying. Insider trading isn't illegal either.
Loose immigration policy and the lack of border enforcement obviously exerts downward pressure on wages for low skill workers. It also bids up rents since illegal immigrants are willing to pile into a 1 bedroom apartment. The elite own businesses and real estate, both of which benefit from illegal immigration reducing wages and increasing demand for rent. If you take a minute to think about the incentives, then see the effects in the world around you, it's pretty obvious what's going on.
This is wrong. Homelessness scales with affordability, not mental illness or addiction rates. This is why San Fransisco and LA have the highest rates in the country. Noah Smith writes about this at length, the data is very clear.
Homelessness in San Francisco doesn't kill you from the elements in January or July. A homeless person in Minneapolis or Chicago in January may die from the elements on an excessively cold night. A homeless person in Arizona in July can also die from it being too hot.
It's rarely ever too hot or too cold in costal California cities.
> Homelessness in San Francisco doesn't kill you from the elements in January or July.
This would be equally true of other large cities in the southern half (including July for many), and none of them have anywhere near the same rate. Notwithstanding, northern cities have indoor shelters and if the cold mattered that much, the rates would be quite small, but they're not. In expensive cities like NY, homelessness rates are high.
> Between the lines: The county is also trying to address other health factors that put people at increased risk for heat illness or death, including drug use and unsheltered homelessness, by embedding social workers at cooling centers to help with finding housing and harm-reduction strategies, Sunenshine says.
> More than half of last year's heat deaths were people experiencing homelessness and two-thirds involved substance use, she said.
> Green was among the 334 people in Texas who died from heat in 2023, according to data compiled by the Texas Department of State Health Services between Jan. 1 and Nov. 30.
> The heat killed more Texans in 2023 than any other year on record, according to the figures, which are not yet final. The state’s heat-related death records began in 1989.
> Heat-related deaths are typically associated with a secondary factor such as mobility problems, mental illness, drug and alcohol use or homelessness that prevents people from escaping extreme heat, Dwyer said. That’s one reason why elderly people have a higher risk of heat-related death, she said.
California has 4.2 heat related deaths per million. (all of California - including Fresno).
Arizona has 71.9 heat related deaths per million.
Texas is 6.7.
San Francisco had the third lowest ER room encounters for heat related emergencies at 5.1 per 100,000 residents (it was behind Marin and Santa Clara).
While hot weather in San Francisco should not be ignored, it is no where near the mortality rate that is seen in other southern cities.
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You cannot have the same rates of unhoused people (note: using unhoused here because a person who is homeless living in a hotel room is homeless, but not unhoused) in northern cities because you will die in Minneapolis in the winter if you don't have a place to stay.
San Francisco has 887 homeless people per 100k residents. Boston has 657. Denver has 670. Minneapolis has 209. Chicago has 141. I'll also draw special attention to page 9 with the percent of the population that is unsheltered.
The unsheltered per 100,000 residents:
San Francisco 420
Denver 184
Boston 18
Chicago 46
Minneapolis 38
I'm well aware of Texas. It isn't the only other city around.
> Boston has 657.
This supports what I said. You also forgot NY.
And check the rankings by State. CA is second behind DC, and after that there is VT, OR, HI, NY, WA, ME.. and so on. Not exactly pristine weather year-round. The common factor is affordability.
"Or to put it another way, while 33% of the homeless population suffers from mental illness, nearly 100% of the homeless population can’t afford housing. 100% is a much bigger number than 33%. Which is why mental health, while a factor in homelessness, cannot possibly or statistically be a lead factor."
The quality of the analysis and arguments are terrible. We can just ignore factors if they don't explain everything? And why is it missing a section on the biggest correlating factor - lack of employment? The severe mental health and substance abuse (with other factors like criminal records) greatly impact one's ability to get any job. Affordability is a moot point for people in these categories as without a job, you can't afford anything. It would be better to do more granular analysis on those who are employed but homeless. That is likely to be the marginal diffence explained in the housing cost section.
> We can just ignore factors if they don't explain everything?
No, we just can't rely on them to explain everything! As you purport.
Only 33% of the homeless suffer from mental illness, and it certainly is not a strong predictor as to why rates are high in some cities but not others. That's the data.
> Affordability is a moot point for people in these categories
It matters to everyone, but even if we pretend it doesn't, that's 67% percent of the homeless.
The data does not support that. You cannot simply subtract 33 from 100 and claim affordability is the primary factor. Mental illness is not the only factor affecting employability. You have substance abuse, criminal records, etc that all prevent people from finding employment.
> You have substance abuse, criminal records, etc that all prevent people from finding employment.
Those all respectively represent a small fraction of the whole, and there's usually overlap. You cannot add them all up as though they are completely separate parts of that 100%.
Ultimately affordability is the primary factor, it's indisputable.
I'm not saying to ads them up! Please read my comment, as I very clearly stated that there was overlap.
"Ultimately affordability is the primary factor, it's indisputable."
What comprises affordability? It's cost and income. It does not matter what the cost is if you have no income because you have employability issues. Until you fix the employment aspect, the cost aspect is moot.
You can point to a poor quality blog post that doesn't examine all the factors all you want. Perhaps that makes it "indisputable" in your own mind, but thats not going to convince people who want to have real conversation about the root of the issue.
It might be correlated, and it might making a difference at the margins (eg the people who have a job and can afford to live in a car). But the vast majority of the homeless population does not fit in that margin. Most of them do have other problems preventing them from getting any job, like severe mental health, substance abuse, or criminal records. Affordability is a moot point when employment is unattainable.
Your link didn't address the other factors preventing a job, such as criminal records. Sure, severe mental health issues are only a quarter. And substance use is something like 40%, but significant overlap. Add in felony convictions and see were we land.
"Except we know it's a building issue. Housing starts are lower than they were in 2000 despite adding 50 million in population."
Check the timeline and distribution though. Housing starts dropped in 2008. Measure the population from that point. From 2008 on, you're looking at .5% population growth and it's dropping. Housing starts are still reasonable at about .5M-1M units.
The problem is distribution. Population growth in certain cities has outpaced building in those cities. However, there are other cities where the inverse is true.
"Vacancy is good - higher vacancy is related to lower prices. Vacancy rates are the lowest they've been in decades."
Vacancy is only going to lead to lower prices if those vacant units are on the market. That's not necessarily the case with the corporate owners.
Mixed density and smaller builds are almost nowhere to be found, and small developers have incredible difficulty securing loans from banks to build them. The large developers focus on expensive projects that have more overhead and checks, and even there they don't build that much because they are few in number. People would opt for mixed density were it actually available.
Zoning and regs are actually among the factors that make certain projects riskier, so reform helps in this regard. Just see Minneapolis. Zoning reform works. It works so well that there is some push back from NIMBYs in those cities pissed off that their areas are changing fast.
"Where the jobs are, yes."
"Check the vacancy rate in major cities."
What are the vacancy rates in the smaller cities and rural areas? What are we doing to utilize the vacant units by bringing jobs to those areas? Is it really more effiecnt to build new housing rather than take advantage of the existing housing? Should we just concentrate everything in a few major cities and leave everyone else behind?
Sure, reducing zoning will mean less rules and people can do more things, like build. The interesting thing is that building mfh was only a small part of the change - a change that CA also made state-wide but isnt seeing much benefit from. The change that made the real difference was increasing density for apartments and reducing parking requirements. The rents for apartments dropped, but sfh values have continued to climb as population declines. Bringing me back to the preferences and distribution part of my original comment -affordability is mostly driven by preferences and distribution.
> What are the vacancy rates in the smaller cities and rural areas?
Also not amazing. Many have fled the cities to purchase properties in rural areas, which drives up the prices there too. This is particularly pronounced in Canada.
> What are we doing to utilize the vacant units by bringing jobs to those areas?
Bringing what jobs? You're going to move a company HQ to the middle of nowhere? You're going to move manufacturing there? Be serious.
> Should we just concentrate everything in a few major cities and leave everyone else behind?
"We"? These are municipalities with their own policies, and people go where they want. If they want to make a life in the middle of nowhere with few prospects, they are welcome to, but you cannot force people and their businesses there to satisfy some notion that it would make their lives "affordable".
Raise prop taxes for non-rented vacation units by 150%
Raise prop taxes for rentals by %350.
Raise prop taxes for airbnbs by %500.
Everyone will own a home, and home prices will plummet as people try to unload extremely expensive property taxes.
And if it doesn't work, double my percentages. Or just make it 100k per year. Those people crazy enough to keep holding them, will fund the creation of homeless housing. DV's are just landlords and other types of bottom feeders.
- Make it illegal for corporations to own residential homes / any property in residentially zone locations
- Generate policies to eliminate real estate parasites (illegal to have percentage profits off of sales, open data, low friction technological avenues to remove those jobs altogether)
- Marginally increasing second / third / fourth property taxes on individuals (first home untaxed, second taxed at 20% market-rate valuation per year, third taxed at 50%, fourth at 100%, etc).
- Create avenues to easily demolish HOAs when they go off the rails
- Multi-unit housing can no longer be owned or managed by a for-profit entity (rent goes exclusively towards building upgrades and paying works for upkeep & administration, all transparently visible
- Limit Big Lumber's ability to export Lumber outside of the US -- trees grown in the US should stay in it to house people.
This would be a start to fixing the issue. The objective being, of course, to utterly collapse the housing market, and make houses homes again.
For what it's worth - you come across as completely unserious if your suggestion to fix housing shortages is genuinely to levy a $100k tax for property owners who aren't currently renting out their units.
I'll tell you what's unserious - people wanting to actually solve the housing crisis. Every solution is 100% idiotic. The way we currently operate is to build more housing, they are building a dramatic amount of housing, and the price of a house is still $400k medium. It is telling me they are not selling to families but instead to corporations, bnbers, rentals, foreign governments.
Maybe they still cost $400K, because the purchase of the land, the labor and the materials and the interest to finance the project eat up most of that $400K, not to mention some places charge you building permits that cost ten's of thousands of dollars - if not more.
Nobody is going to build houses and sell them at a loss or at break-even price, they need to cover their costs and make some profit as well to keep the business alive.
I was speaking to my house builder in the middle of 2023 and he noted that it had become impossible to build a starter house (2/3 bedrooms, 1.5-2 bath) for less than $450k CAD (~$300k USD) -- excluding land, utility connection, and financing costs.
He also mentioned that new requirements going into effect this year were going to add $10-15k per house.
People tend to have a poor grasp on what building a new house actually costs. They cost a lot to build with no gouging whatsoever.
Coming from a construction background, I can confirm all of this. Permits are out of control, material prices are nuts (not COVID nuts, but still at least 300% higher than the good old days), and subcontractors are both hard to find and more expensive. It's not crazy to build a decent 3-4 bedroom house and have it cost $400k all said and done, even in my small-big-ish town.
A lot of people in here arguing, bet there are very few of us that have actually built houses before :)
Raising property taxes on rentals increases cost to renters. Raising taxes on vacant units is a good idea though (but perhaps hard to enforce).
Remote work is solving the housing shortage already though, through opening up living to much wider geography (and locales that don't impede building, such as TX and FL). It will just take a decade or so to normalize.
In-person work forced people to compete over limited housing in small areas
I would say it is doing the opposite of solving the housing shortage right now. It is exporting it instead while also not doing much about the shortage at its origins.
All those cute picturesque towns in the Mountain West don’t have a large supply of homes to begin with, so it only takes a few wealthy Californians to seriously upend the local market with wages paid much higher than what locals can get for their skills.
I mean, landlords are going to pass on their costs directly to tenants. If you raise property taxes, then rents simply go up. None of these tax increases are going to magically make a 20% down payment appear in someone's bank account that they could use to purchase something outright. None of these tax increases are going to prevent people who legitimately want to rent from renting. (Some examples: apartments that are $30k a month for rich people that need to live in some city for 3 months of the year. $8k/month assisted living facilities for rich people that are now old and need access to care while still living alone.)
Probably the most realistic thing to do is to simply implement rent control. "You can't legally collect more than $X/month in rent" fixes the problem of rent being too high. If that makes owning rental units unpopular, so be it.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with allowing someone to rent a unit for $30k per month - even if there are thousands of them. If we're collecting 100k in property taxes earmarked for certain programs - that would effectively fund building an entire ADU on a property per year for that expensive rental to exist.
Couldn't agree more. I'm tired of the HN crowd that espouses the benefits of building more supply, yet consider the AirBNB and rental-afflicted homes to be totally untouchable. Even worse are the ones that seem to strongly believe in environmentalism, yet have no problem tearing down forests to build more supply on them...for AirBNBs and rentals.
There are so many people that think drugs or poor decisions are leading to the homeless tents all over the place. The drugs and poor decisions are things that come AFTER going homeless. The studies are showing that rising housing costs have directly caused the homeless crisis. WE neeed to do something fast.
On top of the house that took the space where trees previously were? There’s only so much space for trees. Seizing it for AirBNBs seems like a massive waste when we have hotels that use space much more efficiently.
Or just a tax on nonprimary residential holdings. Couldn't hurt to take a couple bucks off the folks keeping multiple pie-de-terres or managing a ton of rental units. After all, they can definitely afford it.
