A fairly simplistic view. No discussion of zoning, regulations etc that are employed regardless of the local ruling party. No discussion either that the average single family home has grown tremendously in size since the 50’s. I’d be curious if any builder would even construct a community of modest three bedroom, one bath homes, maybe with a carport. I doubt it.
Thanks for this GREAT overview of mid-century housing policy and the forgotten history of Joe McCarthy and Lustron! I am all for smaller lot sizes and a total ban on foreign investors buying up homes for their portfolios - this was part of Harris's agenda, so where is Trump on this matter, since as you say, the national bully pulpit is a great place to encourage and reshape local zoning, state laws, national bans, etc.
But I gotta take issue with an unfair distinction between "the genuine poor" (I'm guessing this is inner-city African Americans) and "the forgotten middle" (I'm guessing this is the white working class). Last I checked, these were BOTH groups of US citizens with every right to safe, affordable housing and a living wage. The only reason my (white) family (and maybe yours?) didn't wind up in a housing project was access to decent salaries - that's all anyone (black, white, urban, small-town) needs to get out and stay out of America's public housing, and we need national policies (like reindustrialization and immigration limits) that ensure good outcomes for all. Thank you again!
“The demand crunch of the twenty-first century is caused not by a rush of American men returning home from war but by the arrival of tens of millions of immigrants, legal and illegal, who compete against Americans for a housing stock that still has not been meaningfully expanded.”
The housing crisis in the places where it is most acute is caused by two factors:
1. There is no land - capital is so efficient and there is so much of it that any piece of property is so burdened that it cannot be cost-effectively built.
2. The gilded carapace - Anywhere desirable (the good cities like SF and NYC and the good burbs like Buckhead and Marin) have become self-defending aesthetics.
Immigrants are such a non-factor that it is laughable.
If you want to solve the housing problem, you need to do two things:
1. Get money out of land speculation, both by punitively taxing underdeveloped property and by banning corporate or financial ownership of homes.
2. Recapture land, by making land uninheritable and untransferrable. You die, and land reverts to the municipality for recycling.
Building housing can be modestly profitable, but owning it cannot.
I agree with you that immigrants are a scapegoat in the article, but your last point on making land uninheritable? I can't think of a worse proposal. Even if you exclude family farms from that, you still destroy family traditions, locality, community. Utterly ridiculous.
First off, it will never happen, so it is academic.
Second, family farms could certainly be managed as heritable. You can deed restrict to productive farming and the community can establish heritability of stewardship.
What you have to break is the cycle of trapped land. Land has to circulate, and it cannot be ever-increasing value or it always consolidates. The child of a farmer should not have any special rights to land wealth. If they want to farm, it is reasonable they should have an allowance to do so, but if they sell it for condos, they don’t get a windfall, as the parent farmer did not create the condo-potential.
There is no solution to housing that doesn’t start with a solution on land. The rest is just posturing.
A fairly simplistic view. No discussion of zoning, regulations etc that are employed regardless of the local ruling party. No discussion either that the average single family home has grown tremendously in size since the 50’s. I’d be curious if any builder would even construct a community of modest three bedroom, one bath homes, maybe with a carport. I doubt it.
I’m sure that Mamdani and Weaver’s innovations in NYC will make a great example for the US as a whole and cause housing to flourish everywhere!
Hahahahaa
Fascinating stuff! Thank you for making this engaging and accessible.
Thanks for this GREAT overview of mid-century housing policy and the forgotten history of Joe McCarthy and Lustron! I am all for smaller lot sizes and a total ban on foreign investors buying up homes for their portfolios - this was part of Harris's agenda, so where is Trump on this matter, since as you say, the national bully pulpit is a great place to encourage and reshape local zoning, state laws, national bans, etc.
But I gotta take issue with an unfair distinction between "the genuine poor" (I'm guessing this is inner-city African Americans) and "the forgotten middle" (I'm guessing this is the white working class). Last I checked, these were BOTH groups of US citizens with every right to safe, affordable housing and a living wage. The only reason my (white) family (and maybe yours?) didn't wind up in a housing project was access to decent salaries - that's all anyone (black, white, urban, small-town) needs to get out and stay out of America's public housing, and we need national policies (like reindustrialization and immigration limits) that ensure good outcomes for all. Thank you again!
If immigrants caused the rise in housing prices, are they also causing a rise in other things we buy, say, iPhones, burritos, and aspirin?
As the Illegals go him, housing prices are stabilizing or trending down
This is partisan hogwash:
“The demand crunch of the twenty-first century is caused not by a rush of American men returning home from war but by the arrival of tens of millions of immigrants, legal and illegal, who compete against Americans for a housing stock that still has not been meaningfully expanded.”
The housing crisis in the places where it is most acute is caused by two factors:
1. There is no land - capital is so efficient and there is so much of it that any piece of property is so burdened that it cannot be cost-effectively built.
2. The gilded carapace - Anywhere desirable (the good cities like SF and NYC and the good burbs like Buckhead and Marin) have become self-defending aesthetics.
Immigrants are such a non-factor that it is laughable.
If you want to solve the housing problem, you need to do two things:
1. Get money out of land speculation, both by punitively taxing underdeveloped property and by banning corporate or financial ownership of homes.
2. Recapture land, by making land uninheritable and untransferrable. You die, and land reverts to the municipality for recycling.
Building housing can be modestly profitable, but owning it cannot.
Denying the economics of supply and demand is not a good look.
That is precisely my point.
I agree with you that immigrants are a scapegoat in the article, but your last point on making land uninheritable? I can't think of a worse proposal. Even if you exclude family farms from that, you still destroy family traditions, locality, community. Utterly ridiculous.
Why?
First off, it will never happen, so it is academic.
Second, family farms could certainly be managed as heritable. You can deed restrict to productive farming and the community can establish heritability of stewardship.
What you have to break is the cycle of trapped land. Land has to circulate, and it cannot be ever-increasing value or it always consolidates. The child of a farmer should not have any special rights to land wealth. If they want to farm, it is reasonable they should have an allowance to do so, but if they sell it for condos, they don’t get a windfall, as the parent farmer did not create the condo-potential.
There is no solution to housing that doesn’t start with a solution on land. The rest is just posturing.