Reddit reviews The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think
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I answered that question in "Do millennials have a future in Seattle? Do millennials have a future in any superstar cities?" Matt Yglesias answers it in The Rent Is too Damn High (And What to Do About It).
The short answer is "We need to build more housing."
The problem is that most existing owners don't want more housing because they view their housing as an investment, rather than a piece of decaying capital. William explains this in chapters 7 – 8 of Zoning Rules!: The Economics of Land Use Regulation.
We had some fun with bowling-ball-head a few years back Amazon Reviews
> Californian's are doing to us what was done to them
No. Colorado is doing to itself what California has done to itself through punitive, parochial, high-cost zoning. See Matt Yglesias's book The Rent Is Too Damn High or Zoning's Steep Price for details.
We have century-old technologies, like steel-framed buildings and elevators, to build as much housing as we could possibly want. We just make deploying them illegal.
In the words of Kim-Mai Cutler: "Let's cut this housing from 28 units to 4 because we want to preserve this auto repair shop with a 1926 facade."
Maybe someday people and especially reporters will read The Rent is Too Damn High, or for that matter a basic economics textbook?
You can't mandate affordable housing. We tried that in the US in the 60s and 70s. What actually works is loosening of zoning restrictions and barriers to density in order to profitably and rapidly expand the housing stock. Unless you want to fully nationalize real estate and construction, you have to have policies that enable profitable construction and careful shepherding of restrictions so that they protect clean and functional living space, but do not place arbitrary limits that drive up housing costs, as is the case in most "liberal" cities.
Source: http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Too-Damn-High-ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO
http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Healthier/dp/0143120549
http://www.amazon.com/The-Gated-City-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B005KGATLO
There's nothing wrong with preserving genuinely historical buildings, but rigid heights caps and building limitations can have really, really bad consequences over the long run. As the city's population increases, scarcity of living, office, and retail space is going to set in. You end up with astronomical rent, sprawl, and congestion. "Preserving your downtown" ends up being "gentrifying your downtown and driving people out to the suburbs at enormous environmental and economic cost".
I mean, it's almost literally like jamming down a lid on a bot that's boiling over - everything's going to burst out to the sides, and it's going to be messy.
This has already happened in most of the big coastal cities, and it will happen to San Antonio too unless you guys embrace some more density (i.e., taller buildings). I live in DC, and it's already happened here. Go lookup rental ads on DC Craigslist. That's the future of San Antonio if the same policy stays in place.
A useful book on the subject: http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Damn-High-ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO
It isn't "our culture", it's the regulatory structure.
It doesn't take a decision of "Americans as a people" to keep dense housing from being built in urban commercial centers. Land that is near places where people work has a great deal of value as a place for said people to live. All that is required is that it be legal to build appropriate housing and developers will do the rest. And if they can't, they'll make suburbs instead.
Yglesias writes about this stuff all the time, in fact he wrote a great book about it : The Rent is Too Damn High. He's against rent control of all sorts, but thinks the issue has a lot more to do with zoning / density regulations.
Oh, hey, I know something about that:
You're interested? Want to learn more? Here you go:
And last but not least, if you want to get involved and try and change things:
https://bendyimby.com/
Edit if you want a real deep dive into housing issues, I highly recommend these, which have different points of view:
It's a pretty straightforward housing shortage, pretty much what you see in bigger cities on the West Coast (SF, Seattle). Vacancy rates are at historic lows (~1%), and with the improving economy more people are moving out of their parents' basements and forming new households.
Meanwhile new construction hasn't kept up, partially just due to the overall lag between deciding there's a market for more housing and actually finishing construction, and partially because various regulations make building new housing in Bellingham expensive (impact fees, parking minimums, caps on density, low income housing fees, etc.).
And econ 101 says raising the minimum wage has exactly the effect you describe: more dollars chasing the same amount of housing just makes prices go up (that's not to say it doesn't help people in other ways, but it doesn't help make housing more affordable).
Background: http://seattletransitblog.com/2015/09/28/better-vocabulary-for-the-housing-debate/, http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Too-Damn-High-ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0078XGJXO
The author of the NIMBYism quote is Matt Yglesias, who wrote a great e-book on density and urban revival.
The key idea is not that tall buildings automatically result in low rents. It's that more buildings (including more tall buildings when all the land has been used up) will lower rents. So New York should also allow more building, for the exact same reason.
The reason rents are so high is that lots of people want to live in London and New York and regulations (and local neighborhood groups) prevent developers from building enough housing for all of them. Some of the regulations are worth it! Historic preservation, maintaining historic views, etc. really are worth something. But they're not free. Residents pay for it in higher rents. And people who want to move there but can't afford it pay for it in being locked out.
The concept is laid out in better writing and with more evidence in two short e-books on the subject (not written by me) here and [here](http://www.amazon.com/Gated-City-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B005KGATLO/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1396795981&sr=1-2&keywords=the+rent+is+too+damn+high "this guy now writes for The Economist").
I grew up in coastal Southern California, so I'm used to the conundrum. But I think I see it a bit differently to you.
The owning a home thing is, frankly, increasingly impossible unless you make big bucks. But the dirty secret is that it's sort of becoming like that everywhere (read: most major metropolitan areas with lots of jobs and industry). You can buck the trend a bit by moving to a "non-hub" area...and real estate is a lot cheaper there but there's a reason for it--if you lose your job you'll likely have to move a large distance away to find a new one, etc. And you know why the federal government thinks you make too much money? Because you're likely getting a salary premium working here and would face a salary cut elsewhere, even in what seems like a more affordable area.
And the thing is, this isn't our fault. It's largely the fault of bad planning choices, NIMBYism, irrational fear of urban sprawl, etc--which leads to underdevelopment/density where the jobs are. Pretty much everywhere in the peninsula, east bay, southern Marin, and especially south bay should be being developed with new higher density housing now given the insane premium on home prices and rents here. But they're not being--mostly because of a regulatory/NIMBY/greed clusterfuck that benefits longtime property owners at the expense of everyone else.
Recommended reading: Matt Yglesias's great "The Rent is Too Damn High"
http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Damn-High-ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO
If you care about this issue, make your views known to your local zoning board and elected officials. Insane real estate prices in metro areas are not inevitable, they are a result of deliberate anti-growth, anti-development policies that prioritize car ownership and suburbanization.
I highly recommend this e-book for a more lucid explanation. The writer is a DC resident, and I think you'll find it very relevant.
Sure:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Gated-City-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B005KGATLO
http://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO
This is all just thinly veiled rambling. I don't know why you are getting so upset. Did I say I was part of the creative class moving into silver lake? No. I have lived in the east San Fernando Valley my whole life and dont intend to spend 600k on a shack in silverlake.
You are going on and on about national debt issues and the prison industrial complex. I am an urban planner by trade and education, so I offer you the theoretical, market historical context for gentrification.
I can also offer you some reading material if you are interested in this subject.
An easy read is "The Rent is Too Damn High" - This book discusses the economics of ever increasing property prices and rent, how our laws against density and building in general have betrayed lower income people.
"Naked City:The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places" - This book discusses that "authenticity" I was talking about that people are interested in now (btw, I never said I was seeking it). It also discusses gentrification's toll on the poor and its market based reality.
If you are interested in the creative class part, Richard Florida is an author always writing about that. Im not a huge fan of his though, for more general reasons. But when I say the creative class invades cheap neighborhoods is artistic and entrepreneurial skilled workers who bring their homes and maybe even their work to the area. This isn't a new thing, its happened through history, especially the past century. They are the pioneers of the gentrifying neighborhood before the people with the real money start entering.
I'm glad this was posted and glad to see Krugman drawing attention to this; I think this applies hugely to Vancouver and Toronto. Both cities are astonishingly spread out, with huge swathes dedicated to single family homes. There is no lack of space in our cities, merely numerous restrictions which prevent building. Vancouver in particular has highly motivated NIMBYs who have successfully made any development a bureaucratic minefield and oppose any development which is approved anyways. While foreign money is frequently blamed, low vacancy rates and low inventory suggest that this housing shortage is a problem of not enough supply. Notably Montreal suffers much less from high housing costs and rents. I believe this is partly due to lower population growth, but also to much more willingness to build. High inventories have been pushing condo prices in Montreal down over the last year.
Furthermore, in the modern service economy, housing is arguably the most important form of capital and is currently a major factor in rising wealth inequality.
Further reading:
The Rent is Too Damn High
Overview from the Economist
"The high cost of land in urban areas is one of the primary reasons that we can’t “build our way out” of the current crisis by slashing regulations and giving huge tax breaks to private developers, like a lot of liberals and conservatives claim. The only way for developers to make good profits in this circumstance is to invest in high-end housing whose sale or rents will make them profits beyond the massive costs of land, materials, and labor for construction. The only way to engineer affordability in this kind of housing market is for governments to heavily subsidize capitalist developers and landlords. Wouldn’t it just make more sense for governments to cut out the middleman and construct or finance that housing themselves, pledging to provide it at affordable rates to anyone who wants it?"
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/11/capitalism-affordable-housing-rent-commodities-profit?fbclid=IwAR1_-S0z2Nufvt44BAs-B4stGBh8IBIcjvzyVjs4amO0kIKnwCZUVeNpSXs
Which, coincidentally, is a nice short book by Matthew Iglesias regarding housing issues in America. /off-topic
See here.
> Truth be told if the government didn't mandate the construction of affordable housing there wouldn't be as much as there is.
I'm going to disagree pretty vehemently with you on this one. In fact the opposite is true. When price controls are put in, it is usually in response to the rising prices caused by government restrictions. The price controls seek to remedy the symptoms without addressing the cause and in fact make prices go even higher. How is that possible? Because luxury apartments are exempt from price controls, and since contractors and landlords can't make any money at all on apartments that have price controls on them, they don't build new units at all, even when the regulations wouldn't prohibit them from doing so. Check out this book. It goes into detail as to why there hasn't been a new non-luxury apartment complex built in NYC since the 1970's and it's all because of the rent controls put into place. You can't make money on apartments if you're not allowed to do at least one of the following:
NYC has effectively outlawed all three scenarios. There are height restrictions, room volume minimum requirements, and of course, price controls. They have eliminated any incentive to build new apartments there. But since luxury apartments are exempt (since you don't want only cheap housing for obvious reasons), they are the only ones that get built.
This article was bunch of emotionalistic, argument free bullshit. He doesn't even bother to address what the other side says.
Plutocrats would be bankrupted if farm subsidies, the export import bank, IP laws, the war on drugs, QE2, zoning laws, occupational licensing laws, tarriffs, and overseas wars were abolished. The government is the oligarchy. Legislation enriches those with political power.
The poor would be enriched if barriers to employment (occupational licensing laws), laws that increase rents (zoning laws), and laws that engender crime (drug prohibition) were abolished.
The right wing extremist Matt yglesias has published a great e-book detailing the damage done to the poor by zoning legislation.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Too-Damn-High-ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO
The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It
Tbh, if you think MR is a school website, you probably don't read that much econ generally to begin with. It might be worth moderating the confidence in your opinion.
More here.