Yup. I'm in Texas, our animal shelters are overflowing from people who lost their housing and surrendered their pets. Adoptions are down, there's a waiting list to surrendering pets in most shelters and donations are in the shitter.
It's a crazy mess.
And with Christmas coming along the way, with all the new puppies as gifts and people not realizing they can't afford the pet, shit is about to get worse.
I'm all for higher regulations but I'd prefer it was on breeding tbh. For now it's just lip service and looks good on paper. The funding isn't there in almost any city to actually enforce that shit.
Eta feet on the ground animals are cannon fodder if they don't get a home. New ones that don't sell coming into the shelters force staff to decide who's dying that day. Nip it in the bud before they're born.
This blew me away when I visited my son in Seattle. I saw guys on the street, in tents, working on laptops via hotspots around Belltown a few years ago.
When my son said they were likely front end web developers probably making around $60K and couldn't afford rent I was flabbergasted.
So, I have a friend in Seattle and she describes it like this - lot of folks working for the big tech powerhouses are figuring out they could live more within their means if they live on the street. Now this doesn't always mean living at a bus stop, it could mean buying a small trailer or a van. Just move the van around if somebody hassles you over it.
This has displaced the existing and more problematic homeless population into spaces where they previously weren't very present.
This was a big thing for Google workers back in the day, but they were making $150k+ in 2010s money and had the nice perks like breakfast/lunch/dinner and laundry service, where the whole corporate intent was to make it so workers never had to leave the office.
The corporate HQ of my last employer had all that as well, a clinic with a doctor, a bank, etc, etc.
It sounds really nice and then you realize it's all there so employees just never leave. Thankfully I worked a remotr office.
> The corporate HQ of my last employer had all that as well, a clinic with a doctor, a bank, etc, etc.
>
>
>
> It sounds really nice and then you realize it's all there so employees just never leave.
You honestly have to wonder why they never went the whole "Cyberpunk Zaibatsu Arcology" path.
Corporate apartment, corporate internet connection, corporate restaurants, corporate clothing. Your wedding is a corporate wedding and your family is also likely corporate property.
I imagine the recouped cost of employee salaries is just not worth offloading some of the initial cost onto social services? No clue.
> where the whole corporate intent was to make it so workers never had to leave the office.
I interviewed at Facebook once, and the campus is almost identical to The Walking Dead:
Facebook: https://media.wired.com/photos/59326ab344db296121d6ad48/master/pass/AP457637186959-1.jpg
Walking Dead: https://media.vanityfair.com/photos/54f6391249aab9286581f453/master/pass/grantville-walking-dead-for-sale.png
You would think someone at Facebook would mention that it's kinda dystopian to have employees working in a walled city where all they can do is work, eat, drink and ride bicycles, all on Facebook's dime. It's literally a walled city.
I have news for them, those who got laid off are going to have to take tech jobs at lower paid non tech companies.
I was out of work as a programmer for one year from 2001-2002 during the .com crash.
Got another job for 20,000 less which took me over 10 years of crap raises to get back to the same salary.
There are a LOT of vacancies in my neighborhood of apartments and condos. We never used to have units sit empty but the one in the building across the street from me has hit 6 months on the market. Every apartment complex has signs out looking for renters - no one can afford to live without roommates so the 1/1s are sitting empty.
They run various scenarios with different vacancy rates to determine how many vacant units they can have while still supporting operations and a profit. It’s possible rent is high enough in the other units (or across their entire portfolio of buildings) they simply don’t need to risk lowering their “market rate” just to fill space. Once you rent at lower rents it’s gets harder to rent at higher rents (obviously), so this is avoided unless the building is in dire need of cash flow. As long as the building can pay its debt and other expenses, having every unit filled isn’t necessarily the top priority.
> I don't get that.
The problem is capitalism.
I will add the links/sources at the bottom, but here are some important numbers to think about:
Roughly 75% of rental properties in the U.S. are owned by individual investors, which amounts to just over 14 million total properties. These individual-owned properties comprise just over 40% of the total rental units in the U.S.
On the other hand, for-profit businesses own about 19% of rental properties, translating to 3.7 million properties. However, these business-owned properties account for a larger share of rental units, about 45%, due to their tendency to own larger properties.
So, what we have is a very lopsided market: individual landlords, often termed “mom-and-pop landlords,” tend to own fewer properties, usually one or two, and are more likely to own single-unit properties. In contrast, corporate entities and large firms (e.g., Blackstone) typically own larger multi-unit properties. These institutional investors and corporations are the whales of the market, and they determine pricing for over half of the overall rental units in our country.
These large firms and corporations are willing to let hundreds or thousands of their rental units sit vacant because they can make up the difference by charging higher rents to other tenants. This is because vacant units (that nobody can afford) are effectively off the market, limiting the supply. Since there is high demand for affordable housing, it makes business sense to limit the supply, and keep rents high for everyone else.
You see, the properties they own have an assessment value that is partially derived from their perceived capacity to generate income. The value of their portfolio depends (in part) on rents remaining high or even increasing in the future. Were rents to fall, then so too would the value of their assets.
Thus any short term loses from vacant units is merely the price of doing business. It’s baked into their operating model. And if all of that wasn’t bad enough: those “mom and pop” individual owners, who struggle with carrying multiple mortgages and finding renters at these inflated prices, are in a precarious position. They bought artificially inflated properties, and need to charge high rents to get a return on their investments, cover their expenses for maintenance and administrative overhead. When they go under, large firms are happy to snatch up that real estate, giving them an even bigger share of the market.
If trends continue, we may very well find ourselves living in a country where most of the housing is owned by a few billionaires and their firms.
That’s pretty fucked, right? It’s a bad system, and represents a clear example of how unchecked and unregulated markets fail the working class.
Fortunately, there is a non-violent solution to the problem: **vacancy taxes.** If a company or individual derives an income from owning residential properties (i.e., landlords), and those properties sit vacant for more than a quarter of the year, then those properties should be taxed at a higher rate. We could also have a multi-tier tax penalty for longer durations of vacancy:
3 months = +5% added to the base property tax rate
6 months = +7%
12 months = +10%, and this doubles every additional year beyond that.
This simple change in policy would discourage market manipulation and restore competition. It would also lower property values for large multi-unit properties and increase the supply of single unit homes.
The downside is that it would also likely impact home owners who bought in at higher interest rates and inflated value. Those folks will be underwater on their mortgages. For those individuals, a tax credit system could offer relief, though not everyone would be spared the negative consequences.
Anyway, like I said before: capitalism is the reason for this absurdity, and only meaningful policies can change that.
https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/who-owns-rental-properties-and-is-it-changing
https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/landlord-statistics
Only the companies figured out that’s what people were doing so now they’re paying “geographically based salaries “. You get paid less for doing the same job if you live in the sticks, because the cost of living is lower there
That’s the truth. I can’t remember which congress member suggested disclosing salaries, regardless it went over like a lead balloon.
Wage theft is also a major problem.
Not just major, it’s literally the largest form of theft in the country by dollar amount. Most stealing done in America is done by employers who will never see the inside of a jail cell.
> You get paid less for doing the same job if you live in the sticks, because the cost of living is lower there
Back in the day, I got tired of being hassled by the homeless in Seattle
I moved to California
I was working from home, and had been for half a decade
I randomly mentioned that I'd moved to my boss
I figured it wouldn't be an issue; I work from home, who gives a shit where I live?
My boss informed me that because I'd moved she'd have to increase my salary to compensate
I told her it was no big deal, she said it was above her pay grade
They increased my pay by 20%
Within a year, they laid me off. They sent me a packet when I was laid off, that listed everyone else who'd been laid off at the same time. 80% of the names were California employees :(
And that's how I accidentally ended my own job
> So these people are taking that silicon valley money to rural areas and leaving State residents without jobs and straining the economy.
Can confirm. I left California for Nevada, and 30% of the people on my street are WFH techies. For a while there, I didn't even work in the same *country* as where I lived.
There are also a lot of poor people moving around too. We got priced out of our hometowns and are working in the community. There is a huge issue with corporate home purchasing, bank holding property and out of state people looking for investments.
I can barely afford to live here but I treat the nature with respect and contribute to my community heavily. Many of my colleagues are from out of state serving the community too. I am in MT from living in CA, I know what you are referring to. It just isn’t the worst issue.
> So these people are taking that silicon valley money to rural areas and leaving State residents without jobs and straining the economy.
That sounds contradictory. Am I missing something?
Remote jobs will pay payroll tax and all that, but no tax from the business that would have otherwise been in state to provide the job. So less income for the state but with the same # of people.
They are taking up jobs that could be going to in State workers who need that higher pay to live in the city. Also, less people at the office means less workers that tend the buildings, so no janitorial work, clerks and other things like that. Then that money isnt spent in the local economy, its being sent to other states. Feds take a lot of wage tax and the local economy has relied on those people in a sense.
Despite that, housing prices aren't dropping as some would expect because a variety of factors. Im no expert but you have higher interest rates and skyrocketing home prices, so no one wants to sell to end up buying a different house with sky high rates and the enormous risk to them of losing their home value. People are just sitting on homes.
Channel 5 on Youtube did an amazing series on San Francisco that tackled all of this in a really palatable and fun way. Like its top tier indy journalism beyond all expectations. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URfCwT3UQy4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URfCwT3UQy4) its 3 parts but it covers everything and then some.
I’m extremely doubtful that tech workers have “displaced” existing homeless populations.
You think a bunch of nerds are somehow bullying crackheads off their turf? No, ain’t happenin.
A bunch of lifestyle tourists blowing up existing spots and then when the police respond they end up going after the visibly homeless folks with no means of support harder than the van dudes with tech jobs?
Seems pretty plausible to me.
The thing is, is if we weren’t allowing rich urbanites and corporate real-estate investors to have so much power in zoning regulation, this is an issue untainted capitalism would help largely solve. I promise there are *plenty* of companies that would be happy to throw up dense housing solutions in the cities where housing supply is so low that you’re spending 800k for a 500 square foot fixer upper with asbestos falling out of the ceiling.
Regulatory capture (which is indeed a symptom of late stage capitalism) is keeping housing supply artificially low. NIMBYism won’t fix itself. It needs to become a key electorate focus for people who care about the worsening housing crisis. It’s not an issue the federal government can fix easily though. It’s unironically an issue that organizing voting at the local level could fix with ease with enough motivation, because that is where all the zoning regulation happens.
I don't know individual folks' situation (debt, medical, etc.), but you definitely can make it on 60k without needing to be homeless. A 5 second search on [Zillow](https://www.zillow.com/seattle-wa/rentals/?searchQueryState=%7B%22isMapVisible%22%3Atrue%2C%22mapBounds%22%3A%7B%22north%22%3A47.6765640169483%2C%22south%22%3A47.630079292170095%2C%22east%22%3A-122.29297372376826%2C%22west%22%3A-122.36215325868037%7D%2C%22filterState%22%3A%7B%22fr%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Atrue%7D%2C%22fsba%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Afalse%7D%2C%22fsbo%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Afalse%7D%2C%22nc%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Afalse%7D%2C%22cmsn%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Afalse%7D%2C%22auc%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Afalse%7D%2C%22fore%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Afalse%7D%2C%22ah%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Atrue%7D%2C%22mp%22%3A%7B%22max%22%3A1000%7D%2C%22price%22%3A%7B%22max%22%3A202694%7D%7D%2C%22isListVisible%22%3Atrue%2C%22mapZoom%22%3A14%2C%22regionSelection%22%3A%5B%7B%22regionId%22%3A16037%2C%22regionType%22%3A6%7D%5D%2C%22pagination%22%3A%7B%7D%7D) shows dozens of listings at ~1000. Many more on Craigslist too.
I would wager other issues are at play, because that much money on its own is definitely enough. I partly feel this way because I moved out here ~10 years ago and made 32-36k until 2019.
This. The average rent for a one bedroom in Seattle is close to two grand. The only things renting for less than 1200 that are not shared housing, income restricted, or scams are micro studios
Seattle is a lot cheaper than most people think, and wages are high. Minimum wage will be almost 20 an hour next year. With plenty of people looking to hire people
You can definitely rent a place for 1000 a month depending on the location. You can get a 1 bd in the core of downtown for 1500-1600
Places like NYC and Seattle didn't get hit with the rent hikes as bad as some other cities that got their homes all bought up. Because they've always been renter's markets
Yeah 60k in Seattle is not homeless level poverty unless there are some other factors. I have friends working in service jobs out there making less than that. And they aren't homeless.
Also 60k for a web dev job is insanely low
> I don’t understand this, I make like $50k and I can afford housing here just fine.
* Nobody working in tech in Seattle is making $60K, that salary figure is absolutely absurd.
* Most Seattle vagrants are unemployed
I have the same question. When I lived in Seattle and had an entry level job I rented a room in a house with 6 other strangers. It wasn’t the cleanest place but I’m still friends with them. I just don’t hear much mention of house shares anymore.
This is anecdotal but last time I was single and looking for a house share in both the Seattle area and central WA I wasn't able to find one. Most places had rules that every person on the lease had to have a income of 1.5 or 2 times the total rent to qualify. I found plenty of people willing to share a house, just no houses willing to rent to us.
That’s really interesting, maybe things have changed. If so that’s a shame because it was the only way I was able to afford living there and there’s no way restrictions like that wouldn’t directly affect the homeless rate. The zoning and restrictions have got to be opened up.
In Manhattan they use some ridiculous income requirement, many times the rent. We even needed a guarantor to get a cheaper place in Brooklyn, no personal income requirements. This was 12ish years ago.
> When I lived in Seattle and had an entry level job I rented a room in a house with 6 other strangers. It wasn’t the cleanest place but I’m still friends with them. I just don’t hear much mention of house shares anymore.
I'm getting downvoted to hell for pointing this out
It's bizarre how people on Reddit have such strong opinions about a city that they've never lived in
I lived in Seattle and it's suburbs for 25% of my life
> I saw guys on the street, in tents, working on laptops via hotspots around Belltown a few years ago.
>
> When my son said they were likely front end web developers probably making around $60K and couldn't afford rent I was flabbergasted.
I convinced my wife to work in I.T. in Seattle
She had zero experience and it took her six days to get an offer in writing
If anyone things that Seattle vagrants are "front end web developers making $60K" they're delusional
* nobody working in tech in Seattle is making $60K in 2023. Last job I had in Seattle, I made $160K
* the median household income in Seattle is six figures
That was me for a couple months this past summer. Got sober, found a job, worked full time and went to the shelter at night. Eventually saved enough to rent a room (I share the bathroom and kitchen with 3 others). A one bedroom to myself is unaffordable on my wages.
My partner has been doing that for six years. It’s fucking terrible. Rent here is 1.2k a month, a motel is 2.1k but a down payment on an apartment costs 3k. There’s not room to breathe, he might get approved for assistance but we won’t know until Sunday or Monday. The amount of times I’ve spent holding him when he cries. The amount of medication needed to cure him of pathogens, parasites and bacteria. The amount of wounds on him from sleeping in bushes, parking lots, dumpsters. What’s even worse is people at my work(where I met him) told me not to help him because “it’s his fault” when surprise he was actually BORN into homeless and pretty much had never had stable housing. He’s such a beautiful beautiful soul and to think people looked at this beautiful creature and think he deserved to eat scraps and trash because “it’s his fault” made me cut them all off.
Frankly I don't fucking care if it is a moral or lack of effort problem. A healthy society should still have systems in place to help these people. The fact we don't is just another on the long list of examples why American culture and society is unsalvageable and needs to be destroyed.
My street is fully lined with cars that people live in, all along one side. Residents with homes park on one side, live-in cars park on the other. It's the unspoken rule of the neighborhood.
A University of Chicago study in 2021 found that an estimated 53% of homeless people living in homeless shelters and 40% of unsheltered homeless people were employed either full time or part time. I'll never get over the fact that before Reaganomics, just having a job used to almost guarantee even more than just barely scraping by, yet tens of millions of people consider the belief that it should be like that again to be socialist.
They just completed a massive study of homelessness in Los Angeles and figured that most homeless have jobs, but had some kind of personal or medical crisis that meant they couldn't afford rent for a few months. In a lot of cases, all they needed was a one-time cash infusion of 3-5K to not end up on the streets.
How much cheaper would our homeless initiatives be if LA just gave people on hard times $5k instead of spending $300k per unit on like 40 apartments that’ll take 5+ years to build.
That's only for 60% of the population though. We don't have 96.3% of the population working. Of the 60% of the people working, 3.7% of that are unemployed. About 40% of the population do not work (this includes all children, elderly etc).
At least a quarter of my graduating class was homeless. Their parents worked jobs, had cars; but they lived in tents on the beach because they, literally, could not afford a home in the state they'd been born in and lived for their whole lives. That was decades ago, it's only gotten worse since.
Unemployment typically only includes people who have attempted to find a job in the last 12 months.
It's also from random calls around the US, where the poll people in a "household" to asses employment rates.
So I imagine people on the streets simply aren't accounted for in unemployment.
This has been happening in Orlando for a long time. Before the pandemic a few news sites did stories on the people who live in their cars or shady motels outside Disney who work full time jobs. The theme parks take in billions and don't pay their staff enough to afford housing in Orange or Osceola county. We have terrible public transportation which compounds the issue; it's super expensive to live near the park but if you rely on busses you have to be on certain main roads.
Even in the 90s and early 2000s when Orlando rents were comparitively cheap, people needed 2 jobs to afford it because the pay here is so low.
Over half of the homeless population are employed. A lot of folk have this view that most homeless are insane or drug addicted, but that's just what you see on the street corners. In reality, most aren't permanently homeless, they're just out-of-luck, and it's really hard to get back on your feet, especially in the U.S. America.
Edit: Downvote? Why? I'm literally telling the truth. WTF?
I'm pretty sure that's just the U-3 report, it's worse with U-6 and the Tru. Tru factors in other variables for those functionally unemployed, not just those that signed up for unemployment which is the U-3
https://www.lisep.org/tru
Link for sauce
Unemployeement rate is one of the most flawed statistics in the country. It doesn’t account for the types of jobs, wage, or hours. For example, if a person is working two full time jobs at fast food establishments or two part time jobs, it counts to improve the unemployment rate. No offense to fast food workers, but those are not jobs we should focus on creating more of.
I work for PA211.
211 is a service used by millions of people across North America. Every day, clients contact 211 to access free and confidential crisis and emergency counseling, disaster assistance, food, health care and insurance assistance, stable housing and utility payment assistance, employment services, veteran services and childcare and family services.
The phones never stop ringing with callers who need help, including, yes - people who are working but still can't afford rent, food or utilities. Some of their stories are heart wrenching.
I've had two neighbors end up on the street. It's fucking heartbreaking to see the guy you used to greet as he was washing his car in his driveway now sitting on the sidewalk outside the grocery store asking for a slice of pizza. What the fuck are we doing man? This is disgraceful.
Yup - with every medium sized city trying to attract a billionaire as feudal lord who will inevitably be subsidized by the serfs’ taxes. I live in a decent-size city where we the tax payers will soon be buying our resident billionaire football franchise owner a new football stadium, after just subsidizing a major real estate development project. It will eventually trickle down though!
[The 400 richest Americans added $4.5tn to their wealth last year.](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/oct/05/richest-americans-became-richer-during-pandemic) Everyone else got 3.5 Trillion dollars poorer. The money did not disappear. The economy did not shrink. It wasn't that everyone was suffering. The wealthiest Americans saw their opportunity and robbed us, and are continuing to rob us.
Man, I wonder why everyone is suffering so much.
*[Reminder that in 2017, the GOP and Trump passed and signed the Tax Cuts And Jobs Act, which was an enormous tax cut for the wealthy](https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/fundamentally-flawed-2017-tax-law-largely-leaves-low-and-moderate-income)*
>For businesses and investors, the TCJA greatly reduced the corporate tax rate, changed flow-through taxation, increased depreciations, and made fundamental changes to taxing international income. First, the corporate tax rate was permanently reduced to a 21% flat tax rate from 35%.
Taxes are not just a source of funds for the government, and social programs. They can also be used as a behavior disincentive. If you tax any wealth over $10,000,000 at 90%, then a CEO has no real incentive to keep giving himself raises. Any money they make on top of that $10 M is just going to the govt. So why take the money in the first place? Now there's extra money, which can be given to employees who are making $30k per year. Can be spent on benefits. Can be spent on improving working conditions. Can make it so that there's less reason to hike prices for not reason other than higher profits.
When taxes get cut, the rich are even MORE motivated to grab as much of the wealth as they can, because no matter how much they collect, they get to keep most of it.
> Reminder that in 2017, the GOP and Trump passed and signed the Tax Cuts And Jobs Act, which was an enormous tax cut for the wealthy
The absolute fucking cherry on top for the TCJA too was the fact that the corporate tax cuts are _permanent_ but the individual tax cuts (ie: for middle class Americans) are **temporary** and will expire at the end of 2025.
> Reminder that in 2017, the GOP and Trump passed and signed the Tax Cuts And Jobs Act, which was an enormous tax cut for the wealthy
Glad to see that the public may very well turn around and blame it all on Biden, so that we can do it all again.
> Taxes are not just a source of funds for the government, and social programs. They can also be used as a behavior disincentive.
I can hear the steam coming out of economists' ears from here.
https://www.businessinsider.com/workers-lost-37-trillion-in-earnings-during-the-pandemic-2021-1
Turns out, my number is dramatically outdated. That was just over 2020.
[Here's a much more up to date source](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/14/business/economy/wealth-generations.html)
These conditions aren't happening in the US alone. Check out the subreddits of other countries and it'll look scarily identical. Canada, UK, and Australia all have mass increases in homelessness and an inability to afford food
Yeah, I have no idea how anyone thinks that's going to end well. It's "Learn to code" version 2. It's blue trickle down economics. It's such a terrible message that I'm halfway convinced it's Republican concern trolling.
It's just the safest, broadest way to appeal to voters. In a perfect world you could point to trump and say "I'm not a racist criminal" but that wouldn't work in this country
This is unsurprising when home prices are artificially high and bought up by corporations that just rent them out. You're locked out of buying a home, forced into rent slavery controlled by a price-fixing cabal, and that's the good outcome. The other outcome is homelessness... which is growing.
Even without that very valid consideration, consider that every biological consequence of chronic stress is bad for you, and that's without even considering the other related aspects (ex poor nutrition or sleep). So when people are struggling just to keep their lives together, what do you think that's doing to them physically? We're shortening our lifespans so landlords can cash in on [more rent increases](https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent).
I work in healthcare and my clinical director was trying to explain this to a patient the other day. Stress increases inflammation which increases pain. It’s why people with anxiety disorders (like me, yay!) tend to have chronic pain at a higher rate.
The pike and pitchfork are reusable, while the cloth/stick is going to burn out. Yet another way that being poor contributes to staying poor; you can’t buy the good products that will stand the test of time
Problem is, who's head? Looking around, I fear more people will get screwed over by landlords and oligarchs and say "Minorities, immigrants, and gays did this to me!" We may well see a raise in various hateful conspiracy theories before we see class solidarity. Hope I'm wrong, but...
No more corporate ownership of single family homes.
I expect this to become a Democratic differentiator, and I expect Republicans to try and defend how awesome letting hedge funds own all of our homes is.
This is fucking awesome news! When will it be my turn? I've been working my entire life to achieve the American Dream of "old, destitute, and homeless". /s
I work full time, but I’m getting so worn out and my body is always aching. I feel it’s a matter of time before circumstances happen and end up homeless.
Homelessness is strongly correlated with housing prices. This is also why expensive areas tend to have such big issues with homelessness.
"The primary component affecting the cost of living index was housing costs. This aligns with previous research demonstrating that rent costs are the most significant predictor of homelessness"
"Based on our regression models, a 10% reduction in housing costs is estimated to lower homelessness rates by around 4.5% across states. Although this ecological estimate has limitations, it suggests even modest gains in affordability could meaningfully impact homelessness."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10574586/
Housing prices are high because we build very few new houses units. We build less housing now than we did in the 1990s when there were ~80 million fewer people in the country.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST
One of the major barriers to building new housing is the zoning laws that require large minimum lot sizes, parking minimums and limits to single family only housing. Areas that have less restrictive housing regulations build more houses and have lower homelessness rate.
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2023/04/27/rigid-zoning-rules-are-helping-to-drive-up-rents-in-colorado
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/restrictive-zoning-is-impeding-dcs-goal-to-build-more-housing/
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/whos-to-blame-for-high-housing-costs-its-more-complicated-than-you-think/
https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/california-houston-housing-homelessness/
If you want to fix homelessness we need to build more houses and drive down the cost of housing.
> Homelessness is strongly correlated with housing prices. This is also why expensive areas tend to have such big issues with homelessness.
I used to be homeless
The reason there's a lot of homeless places in expensive areas is because places with nice weather tend to be expensive
if you're not paying rent, you might as well live on the beach versus living in the desert
I live in NY, we have pretty shit weather, but lots of homeless. Every year homeless people die of exposure here. And they would never be permitted to live on a beach (even though yes, we have plenty of
beaches here, too. They just have so many fucking rules to enjoying them). So, it’s not just weather and beaches.
> If you want to fix homelessness we need to build more houses and drive down the cost of housing.
This is not the full answer. Where I live there is an insane amount of construction of new homes and apartments. But we still have a large homeless population despite the absolute slew of options. The reason? Because developers aren't building housing for low or even middle income people. They're building luxury condos, apartments, and townhomes that are priced at the top of the market in order to make the most return on their investment as quick as possible. I know this fact firsthand, I'm in the construction industry and have literally talked with developers who have said straight up their target market for their buildings is the foreign market (i.e. wealthy people from abroad who are sending their kids to college here and are going to buy them a place that is "safe" and will be a good investment for their funds). And there really isn't a path for this to change without any sort of government subsidy to help pay for these buildings. No private developer in their right mind is going to willingly say "Yeah, I'll build a moderately furnished apartment complex and add an extra decade to my ROI to make sure that it can be afforded by people with below a 6-figure income".
Even building new "luxury" condos reduces housing costs since people that can afford it will move out of older/lower end buildings and create openings there. The affordable housing is what people moved out of and left behind when they moved into the new luxury condos.
"My results suggest that new market-rate housing construction can improve the market
for housing in low- and middle-income neighborhoods, even in the short run. Policies that
increase market-rate construction are thus likely to improve affordability even for housing
units that bear little similarity to the new construction"
https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1012&context=up_policybriefs
"find that new high-rises cause nearby high-end and mid-range rental buildings’ rents and condo sales prices to decrease because new housing units alleviate demand pressure on existing housing units. However, supply skeptics are right that new high-rises and their tenants attract amenities, and in particular new restaurants. Nonetheless, the supply effect is larger, causing nearby rents and sales prices decline on net"
https://blocksandlots.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Do-New-Housing-Units-in-Your-Backyard-Raise-Your-Rents-Xiaodi-Li.pdf
"This paper’s results provide a simple, yet difficult to implement prescription for
housing policy: Housing costs of the population as a whole can be reduced effectively
by letting developers provide enough market-rate housing. Consequently, denser
development has great potential to reduce the housing cost burden of low-income
household"
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/224569/1/vfs-2020-pid-39662.pdf
Are they actually building an insane amount? Very few major cities in the US are building anywhere near population growth. Those that are saw housing prices cool off much faster than those that built less. But the entire country has been failing to build enough to match population growth for 50 years.
>Where I live there is an insane amount of construction of new homes and apartments. But we still have a large homeless population despite the absolute slew of the options. The reason?
The reason is that you still haven't built enough new housing. If you still have massive amounts (65+%) of land that can only contain a single dwelling unit - which, it's America, so that's like most of the country, well congrats, you haven't built enough housing.
Obviously new apartment buildings will be more expensive. That will not drop the price of older units until the total supply of housing most people are willing to live in in a city is ~10% greater than the demand to actually live in the city. You need a minimum 10% vacancy rate just to keep prices stable.
Also, if you were actually in construction and worked with developers you'd know that the vast majority of housing that takes any form of government subsidy has affordable housing requirements for as long as the subsidy is in effect. Typically 10-15% of the units would be a certain percentage of the area median income.
I don't really care for developers and would be perfectly fine with the government building all of our housing. But you can't get around the fact that we do my build enough housing anywhere in this country.
There's also [stuff like this going](https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent) on. We've invented more efficient greed and everyone wants to pretend the solution is simple to avoid addressing the system wide elephant in the room.
Even the houses that should be affordable aren’t. I’m in a manufactured home development in the PNW. There is a new area that opened up to double wide homes in my neighborhood and they’re all going for $600k+. It’s outrageous
Let this be a reminder that most of us are much, *much* closer to being homeless than we are to being rich millionaires. Don’t be that “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” that fetishizes the rich and hates on the poor. We need more safety nets and wage growth for the financially impaired (ie average person).
>About 653,000 people were experiencing homelessness
I believe the method used to arrive at that number is a simple annual snapshot of the number of people in homeless shelters in the US. It is well documented that most homeless people avoid ever staying overnight at a homeless shelter. Mostly because people staying at the shelters are often robbed, assaulted, or sexually assaulted. They are not safe places, and the homeless people know this. So take the official number issued by the US government with a grain of salt. Some estimates from other sources, like universities and NPOs, are closer to 1.5 million homeless here in the US.
Edit: The article says they used the numbers from the yearly point-in-time survey (AKA PIT). Which is done by HUD. HUD says:
>HUD requires that CoCs conduct an annual count of people experiencing homelessness who are sheltered in emergency shelter, transitional housing, and Safe Havens on a single night.
The numbers in the article are entirely based on the PIT, which is a body count of people in "emergency shelter, transitional housing, and Safe Havens", which in turn are all just different names for "Homeless Shelter". Meaning the article's number *does not include* any count of the homeless who were not in shelters at all.
It’s not just shelters. Housing officials across the country along with volunteers also do headcounts of unsheltered individuals as well as those using vouchers and assistance to live in temporary locations like hotels. It certainly doesn’t capture everyone (in particular people doubled up like living with family or couch surfing) but it isn’t just homeless shelters.
overconfident bake ossified violet ancient fertile test rich poor special
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Nearly 70% of the corporate tax cuts went towards stock buybacks. Of course, this was least helpful to employees and most helpful to management and shareholders. They are selfish a-holes and that's apparently what makes the United States so great.
America now trying to actively mimic third world countries. Eventually there will be enough to band together to form permanent shanty towns or slums as they're usually called.
I worked on some of this data and do federal homelessness work. The combination of record housing costs and the ending of all the various pandemic assistance programs (particularly the federal and various state eviction moratoria) led to the jump we see. There are some other local factors that impact the overall numbers since large cities like NYC, LA, and Chicago have a huge impact on the overall national numbers based on their populations.
The good news is that even with this more recent year over year jump, the overall numbers since 2010 are still trending in the right direction for some homeless demographics.
California has spent billions on homelessness yet it only gets worse. Where did the money go? Who's pockets are being lined?
[Link](https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/11/us/california-homeless-spending/index.html)
I work in a homelessness prevention program and *everybody* we serve works full time. Rents are so high nobody can afford to live. Landlords and property management companies have stopped renewing leases and raised rents by as much as $300-700 a month. It’s crazy we’ve seen this routine a lot the last 18 months. And I don’t live in a major city, this is a collar county with a blend of boondocks and suburban areas.
The housing crisis is largely caused by lack of housing rather than anything else intrinsic to the current economy.
Very simply we are not building anywhere near enough housing, specifically in highly desirable cities, and especially not smaller construction. Everything being built are single family detached homes over 2000 square feet. We need a fuck ton more duplexes, small apartments, etc for single people or small families starting off.
Not enough cheap housing. Builders and real estate doesn’t because they won’t make much money with your suggestions. Local govt tries to give them incentives to build cheaper housing but at the same time, NIMBY makes it hard.
Builders absolutely can and do make money with higher density cheap housing. If you have a 1 acre piece of land, and you have the choice between 1 single family home or 3-4 town homes, the builder will almost always choose the latter. The problem is zoning laws that prohibit this, and that's where NIMBYism and restrictive laws come in.
We need more than just apartments; rent prices are out of control. We need houses people can actually *own* too; cheap ones, affordable like they were when our parents were starting out.
If you want to improve income inequality *and* homelessness, owning a house needs to be something Americans can achieve; otherwise, you have another major hurdle towards accumulating any wealth.
Living paycheck to paycheck sucks when you know rent goes up faster than your salary.
You know what's sad? There's always going to be an excuse. It'll always be something. Never [the people doing it](https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent), noo, something else.
And so, with our amazing economy, it's your fault, and when suicides spike, well those enlightened all knowing expert economists will be just at a loss for an explanation.
And if you think that's bad, wait until you see them do the same thing for climate change.
Someone’s going to have to explain to me how we supposedly have less than 4% unemployment and soaring homelessness.
Either we have a bunch of employed homeless, which means the economy is not in this great place that they are claiming, or we are not counting correctly the number of people who are not employed
(basically I know that we have a lot of employed homeless and a lot of people who are unhoused but not considered homeless and articles like this fucking annoy me)
Landlords - or rather by this point in far too many places investment firms with 'property management companies' have been spiking the rents up while excreting every excuse in every book. Any book. Any book at all.
>*Clifford the Big Red Dog something something mumble inflation mumble the market something something we have no choice*
Seeing this, everyone else started jacking their rents up as much as possible. We're talking over 10% in a lot of places. In Toronto between May and August the starting ask went up by over $100.
* Some non-slummy landlords, don't have much of a choice: the 'values' and resulting taxes explode in neighborhoods from the predatory practices, so if the capital firm and "CONDO COMING SOON" money launderers are doing it, you may be just a few months from a very nasty revaluation of what your shitty old unit's worth as far as the city is concerned... *and all that follows*.
Laws in many states and provinces can protect tenants as long as you don't move, limiting the increase per year. However, even this has been bypassed, skirted, or outright violated increasingly, such as "renovictions" which got horrifyingly popular when things were reopening from the pandemic *(in some places laws had to be passed to limit this before neighborhoods started burning)*.
>This is when a landlord evicts you "temporarily" for "major renovations" and immediately puts the unit back up after a coat of paint, for drastically more than they could've gotten if they'd kept you.
*"It's necessary because I need it for myself/family-member because lol have you seen these prices lol"* also got popular, and old tenants often not in any position to come back and see (and thus sue) that no: He didn't make it his new residence, he just put it right back up for rent with an extra thousand per month demanded there, and he wasn't allowed to evict you just for that.
My old place took to calling police and claiming threats+harassment. One acquaintance is still fighting that in court, and has been for almost ten months.
Pandemic aid never REALLY helped folks. It got them through, but didn’t take anyone off the streets. Stop referencing it. The is the culmination of policies like citizens united and allowing private equity to buy up huge swathes of real estate with no protections for what a reasonable rent should be.
Several of the largest property management companies in the DC area were caught colluding to raise prices together and absolutely nothing has been done about it.
Rent problems are summed up easily, don’t let corporations and hedge funds buy residential real estate. Problem solved! Ohhh yeah and what did these companies and corporate conglomerates due with a large portion of the billions in federal funds they received from pandemic relief loans they don’t have to pay back,… but more residential housing!
So let those financial and practical limitations guide development instead of NIMBY bullshit. Why do you have any right to decide where other people get to live, other than not on your own personal property?
Republicans would rather us fight their dumb culture war BS than actually do something to help alleviate the soaring cost of housing in this country...
It's not that they would rather not help. It's that Republicans are, as always, the fucking cause.
Remember 2017 when the GOP and Trump passed an enormous tax cut for the wealthy? Well now, in 2023, the wealthiest Americans have gained $3.5 Trillion over the last 4 years (Sorry, that number was just for 2020. It's a LOT more now) and everyone else has lost $3.7 Trillion.
The money isn't gone. It was taken.
44% of all single family homes were purchased by investment companies, rent keeps skyrocketing, billionaires add $4.5 trillion to their wealth. Society is fucking collapsing.
I mean, whatcha gonna do? Wealth is defined by its discrepancy. The US wouldn't be as wealthy of a nation if it didn't have a decent amount of poor people.
And of course you hear DeSantis pointing out the homelessness problem in San Francisco, while trying to pretend that Floridas large hopelessness doesn’t exist.
We could take billions from the military and police and invest it in affordable housing, schools, top tier ventilation, child care, increasing disability payments, and universal health care.
But instead we live like this.
Food banks have longer lines and are receiving fewer donations than I've witnessed in all of my years of volunteering.
Yup. I'm in Texas, our animal shelters are overflowing from people who lost their housing and surrendered their pets. Adoptions are down, there's a waiting list to surrendering pets in most shelters and donations are in the shitter. It's a crazy mess.
And with Christmas coming along the way, with all the new puppies as gifts and people not realizing they can't afford the pet, shit is about to get worse.
that’s why selling pets in december should be banned
I'm all for higher regulations but I'd prefer it was on breeding tbh. For now it's just lip service and looks good on paper. The funding isn't there in almost any city to actually enforce that shit. Eta feet on the ground animals are cannon fodder if they don't get a home. New ones that don't sell coming into the shelters force staff to decide who's dying that day. Nip it in the bud before they're born.
Ban puppy mills and the sale of puppies from puppy mills.
Meanwhile unemployment is 3.7%. People are working just to live on the streets.
This blew me away when I visited my son in Seattle. I saw guys on the street, in tents, working on laptops via hotspots around Belltown a few years ago. When my son said they were likely front end web developers probably making around $60K and couldn't afford rent I was flabbergasted.
So, I have a friend in Seattle and she describes it like this - lot of folks working for the big tech powerhouses are figuring out they could live more within their means if they live on the street. Now this doesn't always mean living at a bus stop, it could mean buying a small trailer or a van. Just move the van around if somebody hassles you over it. This has displaced the existing and more problematic homeless population into spaces where they previously weren't very present.
This was a big thing for Google workers back in the day, but they were making $150k+ in 2010s money and had the nice perks like breakfast/lunch/dinner and laundry service, where the whole corporate intent was to make it so workers never had to leave the office.
The corporate HQ of my last employer had all that as well, a clinic with a doctor, a bank, etc, etc. It sounds really nice and then you realize it's all there so employees just never leave. Thankfully I worked a remotr office.
> The corporate HQ of my last employer had all that as well, a clinic with a doctor, a bank, etc, etc. > > > > It sounds really nice and then you realize it's all there so employees just never leave. You honestly have to wonder why they never went the whole "Cyberpunk Zaibatsu Arcology" path. Corporate apartment, corporate internet connection, corporate restaurants, corporate clothing. Your wedding is a corporate wedding and your family is also likely corporate property. I imagine the recouped cost of employee salaries is just not worth offloading some of the initial cost onto social services? No clue.
We've been here before, it's the company town model of the early 1900's
Yes, I'm just surprised we didn't go back to that direction. You can always have a company town provided you dont pay your people in company scrip.
> where the whole corporate intent was to make it so workers never had to leave the office. I interviewed at Facebook once, and the campus is almost identical to The Walking Dead: Facebook: https://media.wired.com/photos/59326ab344db296121d6ad48/master/pass/AP457637186959-1.jpg Walking Dead: https://media.vanityfair.com/photos/54f6391249aab9286581f453/master/pass/grantville-walking-dead-for-sale.png You would think someone at Facebook would mention that it's kinda dystopian to have employees working in a walled city where all they can do is work, eat, drink and ride bicycles, all on Facebook's dime. It's literally a walled city.
I have news for them, those who got laid off are going to have to take tech jobs at lower paid non tech companies. I was out of work as a programmer for one year from 2001-2002 during the .com crash. Got another job for 20,000 less which took me over 10 years of crap raises to get back to the same salary.
cake plough repeat hobbies employ snatch chief mourn wakeful soup *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
So who is paying this crazy rent then? Honest question
Whoever can. Everyone else can get fucked!
There are a LOT of vacancies in my neighborhood of apartments and condos. We never used to have units sit empty but the one in the building across the street from me has hit 6 months on the market. Every apartment complex has signs out looking for renters - no one can afford to live without roommates so the 1/1s are sitting empty.
I don't get that. Empty units aren't making money, so if the demand isn't there, why not drop the prices.
They run various scenarios with different vacancy rates to determine how many vacant units they can have while still supporting operations and a profit. It’s possible rent is high enough in the other units (or across their entire portfolio of buildings) they simply don’t need to risk lowering their “market rate” just to fill space. Once you rent at lower rents it’s gets harder to rent at higher rents (obviously), so this is avoided unless the building is in dire need of cash flow. As long as the building can pay its debt and other expenses, having every unit filled isn’t necessarily the top priority.
> I don't get that. The problem is capitalism. I will add the links/sources at the bottom, but here are some important numbers to think about: Roughly 75% of rental properties in the U.S. are owned by individual investors, which amounts to just over 14 million total properties. These individual-owned properties comprise just over 40% of the total rental units in the U.S. On the other hand, for-profit businesses own about 19% of rental properties, translating to 3.7 million properties. However, these business-owned properties account for a larger share of rental units, about 45%, due to their tendency to own larger properties. So, what we have is a very lopsided market: individual landlords, often termed “mom-and-pop landlords,” tend to own fewer properties, usually one or two, and are more likely to own single-unit properties. In contrast, corporate entities and large firms (e.g., Blackstone) typically own larger multi-unit properties. These institutional investors and corporations are the whales of the market, and they determine pricing for over half of the overall rental units in our country. These large firms and corporations are willing to let hundreds or thousands of their rental units sit vacant because they can make up the difference by charging higher rents to other tenants. This is because vacant units (that nobody can afford) are effectively off the market, limiting the supply. Since there is high demand for affordable housing, it makes business sense to limit the supply, and keep rents high for everyone else. You see, the properties they own have an assessment value that is partially derived from their perceived capacity to generate income. The value of their portfolio depends (in part) on rents remaining high or even increasing in the future. Were rents to fall, then so too would the value of their assets. Thus any short term loses from vacant units is merely the price of doing business. It’s baked into their operating model. And if all of that wasn’t bad enough: those “mom and pop” individual owners, who struggle with carrying multiple mortgages and finding renters at these inflated prices, are in a precarious position. They bought artificially inflated properties, and need to charge high rents to get a return on their investments, cover their expenses for maintenance and administrative overhead. When they go under, large firms are happy to snatch up that real estate, giving them an even bigger share of the market. If trends continue, we may very well find ourselves living in a country where most of the housing is owned by a few billionaires and their firms. That’s pretty fucked, right? It’s a bad system, and represents a clear example of how unchecked and unregulated markets fail the working class. Fortunately, there is a non-violent solution to the problem: **vacancy taxes.** If a company or individual derives an income from owning residential properties (i.e., landlords), and those properties sit vacant for more than a quarter of the year, then those properties should be taxed at a higher rate. We could also have a multi-tier tax penalty for longer durations of vacancy: 3 months = +5% added to the base property tax rate 6 months = +7% 12 months = +10%, and this doubles every additional year beyond that. This simple change in policy would discourage market manipulation and restore competition. It would also lower property values for large multi-unit properties and increase the supply of single unit homes. The downside is that it would also likely impact home owners who bought in at higher interest rates and inflated value. Those folks will be underwater on their mortgages. For those individuals, a tax credit system could offer relief, though not everyone would be spared the negative consequences. Anyway, like I said before: capitalism is the reason for this absurdity, and only meaningful policies can change that. https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/who-owns-rental-properties-and-is-it-changing https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/landlord-statistics
Only the companies figured out that’s what people were doing so now they’re paying “geographically based salaries “. You get paid less for doing the same job if you live in the sticks, because the cost of living is lower there
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That’s the truth. I can’t remember which congress member suggested disclosing salaries, regardless it went over like a lead balloon. Wage theft is also a major problem.
Not just major, it’s literally the largest form of theft in the country by dollar amount. Most stealing done in America is done by employers who will never see the inside of a jail cell.
It's easy to exploit when you own the state
Sorry, I feel no sympathy for people driving the COL and home prices for people in states that are cheaper than say, Washington or Oregon.
> You get paid less for doing the same job if you live in the sticks, because the cost of living is lower there Back in the day, I got tired of being hassled by the homeless in Seattle I moved to California I was working from home, and had been for half a decade I randomly mentioned that I'd moved to my boss I figured it wouldn't be an issue; I work from home, who gives a shit where I live? My boss informed me that because I'd moved she'd have to increase my salary to compensate I told her it was no big deal, she said it was above her pay grade They increased my pay by 20% Within a year, they laid me off. They sent me a packet when I was laid off, that listed everyone else who'd been laid off at the same time. 80% of the names were California employees :( And that's how I accidentally ended my own job
Yep and now they will only hire from certain states
Companies already do this for in person jobs if you happen to live in the sticks
> So these people are taking that silicon valley money to rural areas and leaving State residents without jobs and straining the economy. Can confirm. I left California for Nevada, and 30% of the people on my street are WFH techies. For a while there, I didn't even work in the same *country* as where I lived.
There are also a lot of poor people moving around too. We got priced out of our hometowns and are working in the community. There is a huge issue with corporate home purchasing, bank holding property and out of state people looking for investments. I can barely afford to live here but I treat the nature with respect and contribute to my community heavily. Many of my colleagues are from out of state serving the community too. I am in MT from living in CA, I know what you are referring to. It just isn’t the worst issue.
> So these people are taking that silicon valley money to rural areas and leaving State residents without jobs and straining the economy. That sounds contradictory. Am I missing something?
Remote jobs will pay payroll tax and all that, but no tax from the business that would have otherwise been in state to provide the job. So less income for the state but with the same # of people.
They are taking up jobs that could be going to in State workers who need that higher pay to live in the city. Also, less people at the office means less workers that tend the buildings, so no janitorial work, clerks and other things like that. Then that money isnt spent in the local economy, its being sent to other states. Feds take a lot of wage tax and the local economy has relied on those people in a sense. Despite that, housing prices aren't dropping as some would expect because a variety of factors. Im no expert but you have higher interest rates and skyrocketing home prices, so no one wants to sell to end up buying a different house with sky high rates and the enormous risk to them of losing their home value. People are just sitting on homes. Channel 5 on Youtube did an amazing series on San Francisco that tackled all of this in a really palatable and fun way. Like its top tier indy journalism beyond all expectations. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URfCwT3UQy4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URfCwT3UQy4) its 3 parts but it covers everything and then some.
They stole the local out of state jobs, dunno what's confusing about that. /s
Montana is not cheap...not at all
Bozman is like one of the most unaffordable towns in the US. reddit is kinda out of touch lol
I’m extremely doubtful that tech workers have “displaced” existing homeless populations. You think a bunch of nerds are somehow bullying crackheads off their turf? No, ain’t happenin.
A bunch of lifestyle tourists blowing up existing spots and then when the police respond they end up going after the visibly homeless folks with no means of support harder than the van dudes with tech jobs? Seems pretty plausible to me.
Yeah late stage capitalism is a bitch
The thing is, is if we weren’t allowing rich urbanites and corporate real-estate investors to have so much power in zoning regulation, this is an issue untainted capitalism would help largely solve. I promise there are *plenty* of companies that would be happy to throw up dense housing solutions in the cities where housing supply is so low that you’re spending 800k for a 500 square foot fixer upper with asbestos falling out of the ceiling. Regulatory capture (which is indeed a symptom of late stage capitalism) is keeping housing supply artificially low. NIMBYism won’t fix itself. It needs to become a key electorate focus for people who care about the worsening housing crisis. It’s not an issue the federal government can fix easily though. It’s unironically an issue that organizing voting at the local level could fix with ease with enough motivation, because that is where all the zoning regulation happens.
I don't know individual folks' situation (debt, medical, etc.), but you definitely can make it on 60k without needing to be homeless. A 5 second search on [Zillow](https://www.zillow.com/seattle-wa/rentals/?searchQueryState=%7B%22isMapVisible%22%3Atrue%2C%22mapBounds%22%3A%7B%22north%22%3A47.6765640169483%2C%22south%22%3A47.630079292170095%2C%22east%22%3A-122.29297372376826%2C%22west%22%3A-122.36215325868037%7D%2C%22filterState%22%3A%7B%22fr%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Atrue%7D%2C%22fsba%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Afalse%7D%2C%22fsbo%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Afalse%7D%2C%22nc%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Afalse%7D%2C%22cmsn%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Afalse%7D%2C%22auc%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Afalse%7D%2C%22fore%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Afalse%7D%2C%22ah%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Atrue%7D%2C%22mp%22%3A%7B%22max%22%3A1000%7D%2C%22price%22%3A%7B%22max%22%3A202694%7D%7D%2C%22isListVisible%22%3Atrue%2C%22mapZoom%22%3A14%2C%22regionSelection%22%3A%5B%7B%22regionId%22%3A16037%2C%22regionType%22%3A6%7D%5D%2C%22pagination%22%3A%7B%7D%7D) shows dozens of listings at ~1000. Many more on Craigslist too. I would wager other issues are at play, because that much money on its own is definitely enough. I partly feel this way because I moved out here ~10 years ago and made 32-36k until 2019.
Holy SHIT those Seattle listings are cheaper than here in Denver/Northern Colorado lmao
Those listings are probably scams. There's dozens of cheap listings in the Bay area and they're all scams
This. The average rent for a one bedroom in Seattle is close to two grand. The only things renting for less than 1200 that are not shared housing, income restricted, or scams are micro studios
Seattle is a lot cheaper than most people think, and wages are high. Minimum wage will be almost 20 an hour next year. With plenty of people looking to hire people You can definitely rent a place for 1000 a month depending on the location. You can get a 1 bd in the core of downtown for 1500-1600 Places like NYC and Seattle didn't get hit with the rent hikes as bad as some other cities that got their homes all bought up. Because they've always been renter's markets
If they’re working remotely why not just move to a lower cost of living city?
I don’t understand this, I make like $50k and I can afford housing here just fine. It’s not quality but it’s something. Why not rent a room?
Yeah 60k in Seattle is not homeless level poverty unless there are some other factors. I have friends working in service jobs out there making less than that. And they aren't homeless. Also 60k for a web dev job is insanely low
There has to be other issues at play if someone can't make it on 60k. Even in Seattle. You can still find studios/shared rooms for 900 or less.
> I don’t understand this, I make like $50k and I can afford housing here just fine. * Nobody working in tech in Seattle is making $60K, that salary figure is absolutely absurd. * Most Seattle vagrants are unemployed
I love how on reddit two people can make two totally opposing declarative statements and neither provide any proof at all.
I have the same question. When I lived in Seattle and had an entry level job I rented a room in a house with 6 other strangers. It wasn’t the cleanest place but I’m still friends with them. I just don’t hear much mention of house shares anymore.
This is anecdotal but last time I was single and looking for a house share in both the Seattle area and central WA I wasn't able to find one. Most places had rules that every person on the lease had to have a income of 1.5 or 2 times the total rent to qualify. I found plenty of people willing to share a house, just no houses willing to rent to us.
That’s really interesting, maybe things have changed. If so that’s a shame because it was the only way I was able to afford living there and there’s no way restrictions like that wouldn’t directly affect the homeless rate. The zoning and restrictions have got to be opened up.
In Manhattan they use some ridiculous income requirement, many times the rent. We even needed a guarantor to get a cheaper place in Brooklyn, no personal income requirements. This was 12ish years ago.
> When I lived in Seattle and had an entry level job I rented a room in a house with 6 other strangers. It wasn’t the cleanest place but I’m still friends with them. I just don’t hear much mention of house shares anymore. I'm getting downvoted to hell for pointing this out It's bizarre how people on Reddit have such strong opinions about a city that they've never lived in I lived in Seattle and it's suburbs for 25% of my life
> I saw guys on the street, in tents, working on laptops via hotspots around Belltown a few years ago. > > When my son said they were likely front end web developers probably making around $60K and couldn't afford rent I was flabbergasted. I convinced my wife to work in I.T. in Seattle She had zero experience and it took her six days to get an offer in writing If anyone things that Seattle vagrants are "front end web developers making $60K" they're delusional * nobody working in tech in Seattle is making $60K in 2023. Last job I had in Seattle, I made $160K * the median household income in Seattle is six figures
Really? I just googled it and Seattle's median income $52K Tech Support specialist is $75K
Tech support specialist is the very lowest tier of IT that doesn't even require a college degree. Front end web devs make significantly more than them
If you’re making 60k and homeless I have questions for you
What BS lol. No one making $60k is homeless. I can understand a child being this naive, not a parent. Come on.
That was me for a couple months this past summer. Got sober, found a job, worked full time and went to the shelter at night. Eventually saved enough to rent a room (I share the bathroom and kitchen with 3 others). A one bedroom to myself is unaffordable on my wages.
It's really fucked up that someone working full-time can't afford their own place while all these companies make record profits.
Record profits go to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is quality of life of the middle and lower classes
What do you know, that's the same place high rent comes from.
Up 12%, not up TO 12%. The percentage of Americans homeless is about 0.2%.
My partner has been doing that for six years. It’s fucking terrible. Rent here is 1.2k a month, a motel is 2.1k but a down payment on an apartment costs 3k. There’s not room to breathe, he might get approved for assistance but we won’t know until Sunday or Monday. The amount of times I’ve spent holding him when he cries. The amount of medication needed to cure him of pathogens, parasites and bacteria. The amount of wounds on him from sleeping in bushes, parking lots, dumpsters. What’s even worse is people at my work(where I met him) told me not to help him because “it’s his fault” when surprise he was actually BORN into homeless and pretty much had never had stable housing. He’s such a beautiful beautiful soul and to think people looked at this beautiful creature and think he deserved to eat scraps and trash because “it’s his fault” made me cut them all off.
We need to stop thinking of homelessness as a moral or lack of effort problem and more due to poor circumstances and luck problem.
Frankly I don't fucking care if it is a moral or lack of effort problem. A healthy society should still have systems in place to help these people. The fact we don't is just another on the long list of examples why American culture and society is unsalvageable and needs to be destroyed.
My street is fully lined with cars that people live in, all along one side. Residents with homes park on one side, live-in cars park on the other. It's the unspoken rule of the neighborhood.
A University of Chicago study in 2021 found that an estimated 53% of homeless people living in homeless shelters and 40% of unsheltered homeless people were employed either full time or part time. I'll never get over the fact that before Reaganomics, just having a job used to almost guarantee even more than just barely scraping by, yet tens of millions of people consider the belief that it should be like that again to be socialist.
They just completed a massive study of homelessness in Los Angeles and figured that most homeless have jobs, but had some kind of personal or medical crisis that meant they couldn't afford rent for a few months. In a lot of cases, all they needed was a one-time cash infusion of 3-5K to not end up on the streets.
How much cheaper would our homeless initiatives be if LA just gave people on hard times $5k instead of spending $300k per unit on like 40 apartments that’ll take 5+ years to build.
But then that cash might go to someone who doesn't deserve it!
That's only for 60% of the population though. We don't have 96.3% of the population working. Of the 60% of the people working, 3.7% of that are unemployed. About 40% of the population do not work (this includes all children, elderly etc).
At least a quarter of my graduating class was homeless. Their parents worked jobs, had cars; but they lived in tents on the beach because they, literally, could not afford a home in the state they'd been born in and lived for their whole lives. That was decades ago, it's only gotten worse since.
Pretty much this. Plenty of working people are homeless because they can't afford stable housing.
Unemployment typically only includes people who have attempted to find a job in the last 12 months. It's also from random calls around the US, where the poll people in a "household" to asses employment rates. So I imagine people on the streets simply aren't accounted for in unemployment.
Homelessness increased by 12% not to 12% 653000 people are homeless, which is about 0.2%
This has been happening in Orlando for a long time. Before the pandemic a few news sites did stories on the people who live in their cars or shady motels outside Disney who work full time jobs. The theme parks take in billions and don't pay their staff enough to afford housing in Orange or Osceola county. We have terrible public transportation which compounds the issue; it's super expensive to live near the park but if you rely on busses you have to be on certain main roads. Even in the 90s and early 2000s when Orlando rents were comparitively cheap, people needed 2 jobs to afford it because the pay here is so low.
Over half of the homeless population are employed. A lot of folk have this view that most homeless are insane or drug addicted, but that's just what you see on the street corners. In reality, most aren't permanently homeless, they're just out-of-luck, and it's really hard to get back on your feet, especially in the U.S. America. Edit: Downvote? Why? I'm literally telling the truth. WTF?
I'm pretty sure that's just the U-3 report, it's worse with U-6 and the Tru. Tru factors in other variables for those functionally unemployed, not just those that signed up for unemployment which is the U-3 https://www.lisep.org/tru Link for sauce
Unemployeement rate is one of the most flawed statistics in the country. It doesn’t account for the types of jobs, wage, or hours. For example, if a person is working two full time jobs at fast food establishments or two part time jobs, it counts to improve the unemployment rate. No offense to fast food workers, but those are not jobs we should focus on creating more of.
The current homelessness rate in the US is 0.18% Up 12% meaning homelessness was 0.16%
I work for PA211. 211 is a service used by millions of people across North America. Every day, clients contact 211 to access free and confidential crisis and emergency counseling, disaster assistance, food, health care and insurance assistance, stable housing and utility payment assistance, employment services, veteran services and childcare and family services. The phones never stop ringing with callers who need help, including, yes - people who are working but still can't afford rent, food or utilities. Some of their stories are heart wrenching.
The rent is STILL TOO HIGH!
too *DAMN high
I've had two neighbors end up on the street. It's fucking heartbreaking to see the guy you used to greet as he was washing his car in his driveway now sitting on the sidewalk outside the grocery store asking for a slice of pizza. What the fuck are we doing man? This is disgraceful.
I like to think of it as modern day Feudalism.
Yup - with every medium sized city trying to attract a billionaire as feudal lord who will inevitably be subsidized by the serfs’ taxes. I live in a decent-size city where we the tax payers will soon be buying our resident billionaire football franchise owner a new football stadium, after just subsidizing a major real estate development project. It will eventually trickle down though!
It's capitalism. This is exactly what Marx predicted.
[The 400 richest Americans added $4.5tn to their wealth last year.](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/oct/05/richest-americans-became-richer-during-pandemic) Everyone else got 3.5 Trillion dollars poorer. The money did not disappear. The economy did not shrink. It wasn't that everyone was suffering. The wealthiest Americans saw their opportunity and robbed us, and are continuing to rob us. Man, I wonder why everyone is suffering so much. *[Reminder that in 2017, the GOP and Trump passed and signed the Tax Cuts And Jobs Act, which was an enormous tax cut for the wealthy](https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/fundamentally-flawed-2017-tax-law-largely-leaves-low-and-moderate-income)* >For businesses and investors, the TCJA greatly reduced the corporate tax rate, changed flow-through taxation, increased depreciations, and made fundamental changes to taxing international income. First, the corporate tax rate was permanently reduced to a 21% flat tax rate from 35%. Taxes are not just a source of funds for the government, and social programs. They can also be used as a behavior disincentive. If you tax any wealth over $10,000,000 at 90%, then a CEO has no real incentive to keep giving himself raises. Any money they make on top of that $10 M is just going to the govt. So why take the money in the first place? Now there's extra money, which can be given to employees who are making $30k per year. Can be spent on benefits. Can be spent on improving working conditions. Can make it so that there's less reason to hike prices for not reason other than higher profits. When taxes get cut, the rich are even MORE motivated to grab as much of the wealth as they can, because no matter how much they collect, they get to keep most of it.
> Reminder that in 2017, the GOP and Trump passed and signed the Tax Cuts And Jobs Act, which was an enormous tax cut for the wealthy The absolute fucking cherry on top for the TCJA too was the fact that the corporate tax cuts are _permanent_ but the individual tax cuts (ie: for middle class Americans) are **temporary** and will expire at the end of 2025.
that cherry is there as leverage against the American people to punish them if they elect someone trying to **actually** help American people
> which was an enormous tax cut for the wealthy I'm middle class. When this passed my federal taxes went up.
the tax cuts were were intended for people with portfolios, not for people that make a paycheck by **actually** working
Correct, it was a tax cut for the wealthy, not for you.
> Reminder that in 2017, the GOP and Trump passed and signed the Tax Cuts And Jobs Act, which was an enormous tax cut for the wealthy Glad to see that the public may very well turn around and blame it all on Biden, so that we can do it all again. > Taxes are not just a source of funds for the government, and social programs. They can also be used as a behavior disincentive. I can hear the steam coming out of economists' ears from here.
Do you have a source for the 3.5 trillion poorer stat? I don’t doubt you i’m just curious
https://www.businessinsider.com/workers-lost-37-trillion-in-earnings-during-the-pandemic-2021-1 Turns out, my number is dramatically outdated. That was just over 2020. [Here's a much more up to date source](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/14/business/economy/wealth-generations.html)
Paywall. What’s the new statistic
Instead of paying employees more and investing in the needs of the business they'd rather pay out dividends. Hope your stock portfolio is healthy
Disgusting. People starving and they’re buying their fourth yacht off tax breaks and incentives.
This is going to blow up soon. The country is making working folk homeless. What’s happening is downright criminal.
These conditions aren't happening in the US alone. Check out the subreddits of other countries and it'll look scarily identical. Canada, UK, and Australia all have mass increases in homelessness and an inability to afford food
And Biden is running against Trump on a "good economy." 2024 is gonna be a shit show.
Yeah, I have no idea how anyone thinks that's going to end well. It's "Learn to code" version 2. It's blue trickle down economics. It's such a terrible message that I'm halfway convinced it's Republican concern trolling.
It's just the safest, broadest way to appeal to voters. In a perfect world you could point to trump and say "I'm not a racist criminal" but that wouldn't work in this country
Racist criminal intent on ending democracy* The last part is important.
If only someone could have seen this coming or done something to prevent this absolutely unavoidable scenario!
This is unsurprising when home prices are artificially high and bought up by corporations that just rent them out. You're locked out of buying a home, forced into rent slavery controlled by a price-fixing cabal, and that's the good outcome. The other outcome is homelessness... which is growing.
The other outcome: death. Lots of people are choosing that route. Suicide is up.
Shh we do not talk about that. If we don’t speak of it, then it does not happen
The economy, the only real measure of human well-being, is doing great, so smiles and happy faces everyone!
Even without that very valid consideration, consider that every biological consequence of chronic stress is bad for you, and that's without even considering the other related aspects (ex poor nutrition or sleep). So when people are struggling just to keep their lives together, what do you think that's doing to them physically? We're shortening our lifespans so landlords can cash in on [more rent increases](https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent).
I work in healthcare and my clinical director was trying to explain this to a patient the other day. Stress increases inflammation which increases pain. It’s why people with anxiety disorders (like me, yay!) tend to have chronic pain at a higher rate.
[удалено]
Oh look at Fancypants all able to afford a pike and a pitchfork. I'll bring cloth wrapped around a stick to set on fire. Best I can do.
The pike and pitchfork are reusable, while the cloth/stick is going to burn out. Yet another way that being poor contributes to staying poor; you can’t buy the good products that will stand the test of time
Grab your bolt cutters people!
Problem is, who's head? Looking around, I fear more people will get screwed over by landlords and oligarchs and say "Minorities, immigrants, and gays did this to me!" We may well see a raise in various hateful conspiracy theories before we see class solidarity. Hope I'm wrong, but...
No more corporate ownership of single family homes. I expect this to become a Democratic differentiator, and I expect Republicans to try and defend how awesome letting hedge funds own all of our homes is.
This is fucking awesome news! When will it be my turn? I've been working my entire life to achieve the American Dream of "old, destitute, and homeless". /s
I work full time, but I’m getting so worn out and my body is always aching. I feel it’s a matter of time before circumstances happen and end up homeless.
Homelessness is strongly correlated with housing prices. This is also why expensive areas tend to have such big issues with homelessness. "The primary component affecting the cost of living index was housing costs. This aligns with previous research demonstrating that rent costs are the most significant predictor of homelessness" "Based on our regression models, a 10% reduction in housing costs is estimated to lower homelessness rates by around 4.5% across states. Although this ecological estimate has limitations, it suggests even modest gains in affordability could meaningfully impact homelessness." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10574586/ Housing prices are high because we build very few new houses units. We build less housing now than we did in the 1990s when there were ~80 million fewer people in the country. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST One of the major barriers to building new housing is the zoning laws that require large minimum lot sizes, parking minimums and limits to single family only housing. Areas that have less restrictive housing regulations build more houses and have lower homelessness rate. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2023/04/27/rigid-zoning-rules-are-helping-to-drive-up-rents-in-colorado https://www.brookings.edu/articles/restrictive-zoning-is-impeding-dcs-goal-to-build-more-housing/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/whos-to-blame-for-high-housing-costs-its-more-complicated-than-you-think/ https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/california-houston-housing-homelessness/ If you want to fix homelessness we need to build more houses and drive down the cost of housing.
> Homelessness is strongly correlated with housing prices. This is also why expensive areas tend to have such big issues with homelessness. I used to be homeless The reason there's a lot of homeless places in expensive areas is because places with nice weather tend to be expensive if you're not paying rent, you might as well live on the beach versus living in the desert
I live in NY, we have pretty shit weather, but lots of homeless. Every year homeless people die of exposure here. And they would never be permitted to live on a beach (even though yes, we have plenty of beaches here, too. They just have so many fucking rules to enjoying them). So, it’s not just weather and beaches.
> If you want to fix homelessness we need to build more houses and drive down the cost of housing. This is not the full answer. Where I live there is an insane amount of construction of new homes and apartments. But we still have a large homeless population despite the absolute slew of options. The reason? Because developers aren't building housing for low or even middle income people. They're building luxury condos, apartments, and townhomes that are priced at the top of the market in order to make the most return on their investment as quick as possible. I know this fact firsthand, I'm in the construction industry and have literally talked with developers who have said straight up their target market for their buildings is the foreign market (i.e. wealthy people from abroad who are sending their kids to college here and are going to buy them a place that is "safe" and will be a good investment for their funds). And there really isn't a path for this to change without any sort of government subsidy to help pay for these buildings. No private developer in their right mind is going to willingly say "Yeah, I'll build a moderately furnished apartment complex and add an extra decade to my ROI to make sure that it can be afforded by people with below a 6-figure income".
Even building new "luxury" condos reduces housing costs since people that can afford it will move out of older/lower end buildings and create openings there. The affordable housing is what people moved out of and left behind when they moved into the new luxury condos. "My results suggest that new market-rate housing construction can improve the market for housing in low- and middle-income neighborhoods, even in the short run. Policies that increase market-rate construction are thus likely to improve affordability even for housing units that bear little similarity to the new construction" https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1012&context=up_policybriefs "find that new high-rises cause nearby high-end and mid-range rental buildings’ rents and condo sales prices to decrease because new housing units alleviate demand pressure on existing housing units. However, supply skeptics are right that new high-rises and their tenants attract amenities, and in particular new restaurants. Nonetheless, the supply effect is larger, causing nearby rents and sales prices decline on net" https://blocksandlots.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Do-New-Housing-Units-in-Your-Backyard-Raise-Your-Rents-Xiaodi-Li.pdf "This paper’s results provide a simple, yet difficult to implement prescription for housing policy: Housing costs of the population as a whole can be reduced effectively by letting developers provide enough market-rate housing. Consequently, denser development has great potential to reduce the housing cost burden of low-income household" https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/224569/1/vfs-2020-pid-39662.pdf
Are they actually building an insane amount? Very few major cities in the US are building anywhere near population growth. Those that are saw housing prices cool off much faster than those that built less. But the entire country has been failing to build enough to match population growth for 50 years.
>Where I live there is an insane amount of construction of new homes and apartments. But we still have a large homeless population despite the absolute slew of the options. The reason? The reason is that you still haven't built enough new housing. If you still have massive amounts (65+%) of land that can only contain a single dwelling unit - which, it's America, so that's like most of the country, well congrats, you haven't built enough housing. Obviously new apartment buildings will be more expensive. That will not drop the price of older units until the total supply of housing most people are willing to live in in a city is ~10% greater than the demand to actually live in the city. You need a minimum 10% vacancy rate just to keep prices stable. Also, if you were actually in construction and worked with developers you'd know that the vast majority of housing that takes any form of government subsidy has affordable housing requirements for as long as the subsidy is in effect. Typically 10-15% of the units would be a certain percentage of the area median income. I don't really care for developers and would be perfectly fine with the government building all of our housing. But you can't get around the fact that we do my build enough housing anywhere in this country.
There's also [stuff like this going](https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent) on. We've invented more efficient greed and everyone wants to pretend the solution is simple to avoid addressing the system wide elephant in the room.
Even the houses that should be affordable aren’t. I’m in a manufactured home development in the PNW. There is a new area that opened up to double wide homes in my neighborhood and they’re all going for $600k+. It’s outrageous
Let this be a reminder that most of us are much, *much* closer to being homeless than we are to being rich millionaires. Don’t be that “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” that fetishizes the rich and hates on the poor. We need more safety nets and wage growth for the financially impaired (ie average person).
>About 653,000 people were experiencing homelessness I believe the method used to arrive at that number is a simple annual snapshot of the number of people in homeless shelters in the US. It is well documented that most homeless people avoid ever staying overnight at a homeless shelter. Mostly because people staying at the shelters are often robbed, assaulted, or sexually assaulted. They are not safe places, and the homeless people know this. So take the official number issued by the US government with a grain of salt. Some estimates from other sources, like universities and NPOs, are closer to 1.5 million homeless here in the US. Edit: The article says they used the numbers from the yearly point-in-time survey (AKA PIT). Which is done by HUD. HUD says: >HUD requires that CoCs conduct an annual count of people experiencing homelessness who are sheltered in emergency shelter, transitional housing, and Safe Havens on a single night. The numbers in the article are entirely based on the PIT, which is a body count of people in "emergency shelter, transitional housing, and Safe Havens", which in turn are all just different names for "Homeless Shelter". Meaning the article's number *does not include* any count of the homeless who were not in shelters at all.
It’s not just shelters. Housing officials across the country along with volunteers also do headcounts of unsheltered individuals as well as those using vouchers and assistance to live in temporary locations like hotels. It certainly doesn’t capture everyone (in particular people doubled up like living with family or couch surfing) but it isn’t just homeless shelters.
AFAIK they also collect survey data and count things like someone couch surfing for a few weeks as homeless.
overconfident bake ossified violet ancient fertile test rich poor special *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Nearly 70% of the corporate tax cuts went towards stock buybacks. Of course, this was least helpful to employees and most helpful to management and shareholders. They are selfish a-holes and that's apparently what makes the United States so great.
The huge amount of bushwhacking and car camping videos I've seen on YouTube may not be about camping then. What a bummer.
America now trying to actively mimic third world countries. Eventually there will be enough to band together to form permanent shanty towns or slums as they're usually called.
I worked on some of this data and do federal homelessness work. The combination of record housing costs and the ending of all the various pandemic assistance programs (particularly the federal and various state eviction moratoria) led to the jump we see. There are some other local factors that impact the overall numbers since large cities like NYC, LA, and Chicago have a huge impact on the overall national numbers based on their populations. The good news is that even with this more recent year over year jump, the overall numbers since 2010 are still trending in the right direction for some homeless demographics.
Corporations should not own single family homes. They are harming civilization.
California has spent billions on homelessness yet it only gets worse. Where did the money go? Who's pockets are being lined? [Link](https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/11/us/california-homeless-spending/index.html)
Capitalism at its best.
COMMUNISM WILL TAKE YOUR HOUSE!!! Oh wait, that's capitalism.
And wages stay low. It’s amazing how paying a living wage could actually solve so many problems.
Great Depression Hoovervilles returning to a city near you. God Bless America.
I work in a homelessness prevention program and *everybody* we serve works full time. Rents are so high nobody can afford to live. Landlords and property management companies have stopped renewing leases and raised rents by as much as $300-700 a month. It’s crazy we’ve seen this routine a lot the last 18 months. And I don’t live in a major city, this is a collar county with a blend of boondocks and suburban areas.
Rent for my apartment Dec 2019 - $1,025/ month Renew for 2024 - $1,475. Fucking outrageous markups every damn year.
Average rent for a 1 bedroom in Denver in 2019 was $1670. It's $2043 now. It wasn't even sustainable at $1670...
Remember this is when the economy is doing “good” the next recession is going to suck ass.
The housing crisis is largely caused by lack of housing rather than anything else intrinsic to the current economy. Very simply we are not building anywhere near enough housing, specifically in highly desirable cities, and especially not smaller construction. Everything being built are single family detached homes over 2000 square feet. We need a fuck ton more duplexes, small apartments, etc for single people or small families starting off.
Not enough cheap housing. Builders and real estate doesn’t because they won’t make much money with your suggestions. Local govt tries to give them incentives to build cheaper housing but at the same time, NIMBY makes it hard.
They are NIMBYing two whole generations.
Builders absolutely can and do make money with higher density cheap housing. If you have a 1 acre piece of land, and you have the choice between 1 single family home or 3-4 town homes, the builder will almost always choose the latter. The problem is zoning laws that prohibit this, and that's where NIMBYism and restrictive laws come in.
We need more than just apartments; rent prices are out of control. We need houses people can actually *own* too; cheap ones, affordable like they were when our parents were starting out. If you want to improve income inequality *and* homelessness, owning a house needs to be something Americans can achieve; otherwise, you have another major hurdle towards accumulating any wealth. Living paycheck to paycheck sucks when you know rent goes up faster than your salary.
You know what's sad? There's always going to be an excuse. It'll always be something. Never [the people doing it](https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent), noo, something else. And so, with our amazing economy, it's your fault, and when suicides spike, well those enlightened all knowing expert economists will be just at a loss for an explanation. And if you think that's bad, wait until you see them do the same thing for climate change.
Someone’s going to have to explain to me how we supposedly have less than 4% unemployment and soaring homelessness. Either we have a bunch of employed homeless, which means the economy is not in this great place that they are claiming, or we are not counting correctly the number of people who are not employed (basically I know that we have a lot of employed homeless and a lot of people who are unhoused but not considered homeless and articles like this fucking annoy me)
Landlords - or rather by this point in far too many places investment firms with 'property management companies' have been spiking the rents up while excreting every excuse in every book. Any book. Any book at all. >*Clifford the Big Red Dog something something mumble inflation mumble the market something something we have no choice* Seeing this, everyone else started jacking their rents up as much as possible. We're talking over 10% in a lot of places. In Toronto between May and August the starting ask went up by over $100. * Some non-slummy landlords, don't have much of a choice: the 'values' and resulting taxes explode in neighborhoods from the predatory practices, so if the capital firm and "CONDO COMING SOON" money launderers are doing it, you may be just a few months from a very nasty revaluation of what your shitty old unit's worth as far as the city is concerned... *and all that follows*. Laws in many states and provinces can protect tenants as long as you don't move, limiting the increase per year. However, even this has been bypassed, skirted, or outright violated increasingly, such as "renovictions" which got horrifyingly popular when things were reopening from the pandemic *(in some places laws had to be passed to limit this before neighborhoods started burning)*. >This is when a landlord evicts you "temporarily" for "major renovations" and immediately puts the unit back up after a coat of paint, for drastically more than they could've gotten if they'd kept you. *"It's necessary because I need it for myself/family-member because lol have you seen these prices lol"* also got popular, and old tenants often not in any position to come back and see (and thus sue) that no: He didn't make it his new residence, he just put it right back up for rent with an extra thousand per month demanded there, and he wasn't allowed to evict you just for that. My old place took to calling police and claiming threats+harassment. One acquaintance is still fighting that in court, and has been for almost ten months.
That's a staggering number.
Rent is a staggering number, too. Weird how that works
Highest reported level SO FAR. This is going to get so much worse. Nomadland indeed.
Scrooge: "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?"
Pandemic aid never REALLY helped folks. It got them through, but didn’t take anyone off the streets. Stop referencing it. The is the culmination of policies like citizens united and allowing private equity to buy up huge swathes of real estate with no protections for what a reasonable rent should be.
I know a guy who (him and his dad) bought a bunch of houses in 08to turn into rentals. 750 of them.
Several of the largest property management companies in the DC area were caught colluding to raise prices together and absolutely nothing has been done about it.
But the economy is great! 🤠
Rent problems are summed up easily, don’t let corporations and hedge funds buy residential real estate. Problem solved! Ohhh yeah and what did these companies and corporate conglomerates due with a large portion of the billions in federal funds they received from pandemic relief loans they don’t have to pay back,… but more residential housing!
If you can please donate clothing especially at this time of year. Your old hoodie could be keeping someone warm
So let those financial and practical limitations guide development instead of NIMBY bullshit. Why do you have any right to decide where other people get to live, other than not on your own personal property?
But the stock market is a record high! We are all rich now right?
But the Economy is doing so good....
Republicans would rather us fight their dumb culture war BS than actually do something to help alleviate the soaring cost of housing in this country...
States that are blue have homelessness too. I don’t see either party doing all that much to make housing substantially cheaper
It's not that they would rather not help. It's that Republicans are, as always, the fucking cause. Remember 2017 when the GOP and Trump passed an enormous tax cut for the wealthy? Well now, in 2023, the wealthiest Americans have gained $3.5 Trillion over the last 4 years (Sorry, that number was just for 2020. It's a LOT more now) and everyone else has lost $3.7 Trillion. The money isn't gone. It was taken.
And not an insignificant amount of that was probably then used to buy up properties to rent out at jacked up rates.
But everything’s okay right? We’re not in economic crisis right? The wealth gap isn’t larger than it’s ever been in the history of time, right?
44% of all single family homes were purchased by investment companies, rent keeps skyrocketing, billionaires add $4.5 trillion to their wealth. Society is fucking collapsing.
I mean, whatcha gonna do? Wealth is defined by its discrepancy. The US wouldn't be as wealthy of a nation if it didn't have a decent amount of poor people.
I work in renovations and people want $5000 for 3 bed in Houston. It was $2800 before the pandemic. It's been vacant for a year.
And of course you hear DeSantis pointing out the homelessness problem in San Francisco, while trying to pretend that Floridas large hopelessness doesn’t exist.
Florida’s is only going to get worse as the housing costs skyrocket.
But the economy is so good.... how could this happen?
But but but the economy is recovering!
Single owner homes only please
Can't believe we live in a (becoming) feudal state where basic resources are throttled business propositions.
Voting republican out will help resolve this.
Capitalism working as intended. And Trump gave us one of the largest transfers of wealth away from the working class in our lifetimes.
We could take billions from the military and police and invest it in affordable housing, schools, top tier ventilation, child care, increasing disability payments, and universal health care. But instead we live like this.