Is THIS the Problem ?

Those incentives aren’t loopholes for the wealthy. They’re the very mechanism by which the U.S. gets housing built at all. Without them the roi just isn’t there. So eliminate them and we'll end up with fewer units built and higher rents.

The thing with the housing issue is we don’t really have an affordability issue. What we have is people not being able to afford the quality of housing they want in the locations they want to live in. If everyone were suddenly content with 900-sq-ft 50s bungalows on modest lots, or with higher-density buildings, the ‘affordability’ crisis would basically disappear. The problem is that housing expectations shifted upward, while supply hasn’t been allowed to shift with them.

So irrespective of what policy path someone prefers, the first step in improving the housing situation is putting more resources toward closing the supply gap. Everything else is downstream of that. And the hard part that people never want to confront is that we can’t expand a sector without redirecting labor and capital from somewhere else.

Housing isn’t exempt from basic resource allocation. If we want more units built or improve communities, we have to decide which other sectors we’re willing to pull employment along with the goods they produce from. That’s literally what ‘managing scarce resources’ means. So to improve the housing issue, what sector of the economy do you want to cut? Retail is usually the default.

You and I see the world very differently.

My view .... Nearly everything in US law is written by the wealthy for the benefit of the wealthy. If you see it differently, we can agree to disagree. The positions seem impossible to reconcile, so not a good investment to spend much time engaging, Peace.

I think we was pretty damn close to Joe Biden. Both focused on fueling and stabilizing capitalism in similar manners. Biden spent a ton during covid and may have kept inflation rates high for decades - do you think he wouldn't spend massive amounts like FDR when unemployment was 25%?

Also, FDR today would very likely levy a lot more economic and military pressure on Russia and China and find those two particular countries to be much more viable threats than either Trump or Biden would. And he probably wouldn't be mobilization massive work programs with a 4% unemployment rate of today. The times absolutely did matter.

He'd maybe expand social safety nets be also did a lot of stuff that prevent the economy from overheating once inflation crept in.

I agree about the influence of the wealthy, corruption, etc. I don’t agree with you and Sanders on your correlation implies causation claim, in terms of how all that is impacting the economic lives of the people. I doubt all that has much affect. Instead it's almost all about collective consumer behavior. Change that behavior and economic outcomes improve, irrespective of the rich.

If modern medical technology existed in the 1930s, I think FDR absolutely would have built something very similar to the health care system we have today. The same instincts that drove social security, the cdc, rural electrification, and labor protections would have driven him to institutionalize modern medicine too.... even knowing that doing so would pull a huge amount of labor and resources out of the consumer economy.

And that’s something people overlook: the rise of modern medical care (specialists, diagnostics, pharmaceuticals, hospitals, long-term care, home health, etc.) didn’t just expand a sector, it absorbed millions of workers who, in the 1960s, would have been in manufacturing, homebuilding, or other goods-producing industries.

Healthcare went from a tiny share of the workforce to one of the largest. That shift alone has as much impact on today’s housing squeeze as things like easy credit, zoning, and high land values. I mean it’s not like we just forgot to build houses; it’s that a massive share of labor that used to build them is now taking care of old people.

So my point in that regard isn’t that housing is suddenly unaffordable in some absolute sense. It’s that our society now allocates far more human capital to health, education, and services than it did in the ’60s. FDR, faced with today’s technology and demographics, would have made the same choices and would have had the same downstream effects on housing.

Wow. Putting Biden on FDR's level.

Homelessness went up a record 18% in Biden's last year, 2024 when he was functionally riddled with dementia. A nepotist whose coke addicted son peddled influence for $$$ in Ukraine and elsewhere. A plagiarist who was embarrassed out of a presidential campaign as a young man and shielded from the media as a senile candidate in 2020.

Roosevelt was a powerful and inspiring speaker who put oligarchs in their place. He was effectively a king during a critical 13 year period in American history. Biden was a gaffe machine who was obsequious to oligarchs and a senile puppet on wheels during his presidency.

Your point seems to be that FDR would have been a feudalist in 2025 because almost everyone in power today is a slave to feudalism.

We are the only industrialized country which makes connection to a feudal holdfast (a private corporation) a requirement for access to health insurance. In 1944, FDR unveiled a proposed 2nd bill of rights in which health care was an economic right. Maybe you think he was lying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bil...

What FDR would or wouldn’t have done about healthcare isn’t at all relevant to the point I was making. My point is about resource allocation. If you want housing to be dramatically cheaper, you have to decide which other major sector of the economy you want to shrink so that labor and capital can shift into housing. That’s just basic economics: scarce resources have to come from somewhere. And for large scale issues like housing, those resources need to come from the masses, not taxing Rolexes.

The same applies to education just as it does with healthcare. The only reason education costs what it does today is precisely because we’ve already shifted an enormous share of labor into the education sector over the past several decades. So if you want education to be even cheaper, that labor has to come from somewhere else. Which sector are you proposing to downsize?

You can say ‘make healthcare cheaper’ or ‘make education cheaper’ or ‘make housing cheaper,’ but the underlying tradeoff is the same every time: which mass-market industry do you want to strip workers and investment from to make that happen?

I don't have to do anything to make housing cheaper for owner occupants other than remove government subsidies from non-owner occupants and eliminating zoning rules which limit the number of unrelated occupants in a residential dwelling. I could also increase the property tax on non owner occupants. I wouldn't have to touch any other part of the economy to bring housing prices down.

Let's say there is a 3,000 sf home which is subject to a local zoning law that only allows a maximum of two unrelated people to dwell there. If I remove the zoning restriction, I can let a group of 6-8 people purchase the home together for the purpose of living together cooperatively. That reduces the cost of housing per person.

Let's say that home is owned by a private corporation. If I remove the interest and depreciation deduction from that class of investor and increase the property tax on them as well, that home becomes a less attractive investment for that class and reduces the market demand ... driving the price down.

Let's get the government out of the business of promoting and subsidizing now owner occupant ownership of residential real estate. Its government sponsored feudalism.

True, removing those zoning caps would reduce cost per person. But it does so only by reducing the 'quality' of housing far below what people actually expect or want. We could just as easily ‘solve’ high rents by telling everyone to live 6–8 to a house and call it a day.

That’s not creating affordable housing; that’s lowering living standards. And not much different than saying we've reduced education costs by doubling the teacher:student ratio.

Not that I think removing zoning laws and making the education system more efficient are bad ideas. They just kind of shift the goal posts on the qualitative side from what most think of as remedies.

When living standards reach periodic unsustainable peaks, its intelligent for them to decline.

The Baby Boom during which the average American woman had 3.1 babies was obviously unsustainable. Extrapolate that for a few centuries and the country is overrun with people.

Our path to equilibrium has led us to a point where the standard of living has 40% of women aged 15-44 wishing they could emigrate to another country.

I'm of the opinion that we should allow people the choice of which standard suits them better. If 6-8 young people want to share a 3,000 sf house and leave communally instead of being forced to live at home with mom and dad, I think they should be the judge of the standard that suits them. Not me. Not you. And not their neighbors.

What's your opinion of tiny homes and building tiny home communities? I'd imagine some people would definitely choose a 400sq shack to themselves than sharing a 3k house wtih 6 other people.

I say that because a good friend of mine bought one and she sells romance novels on whatnot from her place and she's definitely seems like a happy camper. They've definitely gotten a lot more popular in the last couple years. But so have RVs

I think they're a wonderful development and a great option.

I like a setting which enables people to share meals.

As a young man, I spent a couple of months in Israel in 1983 volunteering on a kibbutz. Communal rural and agricultural community of ~ 350 people near the border with Gaza.

Essentially a bunch of tiny homes with larger buildings for larger group functions including a community kitchen with commercial cafeteria equipment.

It's not considered high lifestyle according to American standards where people like to have their own home empire. But it's a place where everyone gets what they need and you don't have anonymous people who fall through the cracks living in isolation.

It's a model for what I would encourage the world to evolve toward for a more sustainable existence. There's a lot of efficiency when cooking for 300. You have a lot more mechanisms to avoid waste and the excessive plastic use associated with individual meal planning. Different communities would have different identities and work functions and we could encourage people to circulate through different communities to find those that suit them best.

Cities wouldn't be replaced. You'd still have universities and trade schools, hospitals, places of worship, athletic facilities, entertainment centers. government, transit and industrial hubs.

That's the survivable future. One if which embrace the interconnection with each other. This current existence of going to the grocery and getting whatever the hell you want without respecting the connection of that want with the sustainability of the environment is going to have to end. Lots of people are in stubborn denial of this. People who don't engage in any mathematical analysis related to the limits of our ability to poison the Earth.

The war to be fought is that of personal human liberty vs the survival of the species. Nature is a brutal mf. It will not blink an eye when it comes to steamrolling humans who think they can defy natural limits.

With a universal commodity like housing, on average the people who build, repair, and supply it need to be able to afford it themselves. Sure we can create arrangements like 6–8 people sharing a house that help some groups lower their individual housing cost, but it doesn’t change the underlying reality that housing has to be paid for by the incomes of the people who produce it.

But group-living solutions don’t actually solve the affordability issue. All they would do is shift the burden for who gets outbid on homes, ie, allowing 6–8 individual earners with no dependents to pool their incomes and compete for the same homes that typical married-with-children buyers are trying to buy would push home prices way, way up, not down.

As I said the issue isn't just affordable housing; it’s affordable quality housing. So the only really viable solution would be one where we improve the quality of lower income homes and their neighborhoods without increasing home prices.

And that’s the key point: in lower-income communities, prices are ultimately income-constrained. We can renovate the housing stock, improve infrastructure and schools, clean up the environment, and make the area more livable but unless we also import large numbers of higher income buyers, the selling price can’t rise much because the local population simply doesn’t have the income to bid it up.

In other words, raising quality doesn’t automatically raise prices if the purchasing power in the area doesn’t rise with it. So improving housing quality at the lower end is actually feasible without blowing up affordability.

How does a woman have one-tenth of a baby?

In my opinion, that percentage would drop if they had to name a specific country they would relocate. And given that statistic, how many are actually planning to do so in the near future? Sounds like a 'the grass is always greener...' scenario in many cases.

I don't understand how zoning laws are even constitutional. (But I don't understand lots of stuff tbh)

Unlike commercial or industrial real estate, residential housing is actually a weak investment on its own compated to other asset classes. That’s why virtually every country uses some combination of zoning stability, depreciation rules, predictable permitting, and lending standards to make residential construction even pencil out in the first place.

I'd imagine that tiny homes are here to stay. The demand should keep shooting up.

I think the issue with the communal living is that a lot more people want to live alone and be self reliant as opposed to past generations. Covid accelerated that, and a lot of people really do hate each other now. Marriage down, divorce up, kids down, anxiety up, you could argue that a community kitchen isn't a giant barrier there but people are exceedingly preferring running through In N Out to go to their room to play candy crush and watch porn.

I have no idea what the future looks like but swinging back the other way as opposed to continuing the path that we are on seems grim.

Yeah. Getting 300 randos to break bread together is difficult enough never mind 300 million. The US is the most diverse country in the world in many ways, so peace is best defined as not being at each other's throats or being so hateful. But for some reason we keep going through these ebbs and flows of divisiveness over one thing or another.

Makes sense.

My question though was how is that Constitutional?

I don't know why it would be unconstitutional. There's nothing in the Constitution prohibiting zoning and it gives the states power to regulate land for the public good.

Okay. Thanks.

It's always the same thing .... survival.

The reason swinging back feels so grim is because you have no idea where the current path is taking us.

How much plastic do you think humans can ingest and still function ? How low can testosterone levels go and have still functioning humans ? How much inequality can we handle without a violent revolution ? How high can property insurance climb ? How much can drinkable water supplies diminish ? How much can sea levels rise ? How many global pandemics can we handle ?

Is that what you are John ..... a "rando" ?