How the Cost of Housing Became So Crushing
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- Опубликовано: 24 сен 2024
- Over the past year, frustration over the cost of housing in the United States has become a centerpiece of the presidential race, a focus of government policy and an agonizing nationwide problem.
Conor Dougherty, who covers housing for The Times, explains why the origin of the housing crisis is what makes it so hard to solve.
Guest: Conor Dougherty (www.nytimes.co...) , who covers housing for The New York Times.
Background reading:
• Why too few homes (www.nytimes.co...) get built in the United States.
• A decade ago, Kalamazoo - and all of Michigan - had too many houses. Now it has a shortage (www.nytimes.co...) .
For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily (nytimes.com/the...) . Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.
If governments are going to subsidize lower and middle class housing, it should not be suburbs any more. These are unsustainable per tax vs infrastructure without constant federally funded growth.
You read _Strong Towns_ too, eh?
Less homes being built, less labor to build them, older people no moving into more dense and smaller housing, more singles living alone. Not real difficult to understand but certainly no easy answer.
Harris is specifically addressing these exact problems they've addressed here. It time for corporations to stop the gouging so less subsidies are needed. Trump is focusing his econimc plan on tariffs which are paid for by American companies and absorbed by consumers. Tariffs are not paid for by the exporting country.
But she's not, and this has nothing to do with companies raising prices. Under the Harris-Biden money printing and inflation regimen, prices have skyrocketed (inflation) as the currency is devalued.
Hilarious that only a few years ago that would have been a Republican talking point, about how bad tariffs are.
Tariffs work on the short term because companies HAVE to pay to import their products thus creating a temporary influx in capital…but eventually the gravy train slows significantly because sales drop because the prices have risen. Then MAYBE people would start buying American. Sounds like something trump would come up with.
Amazing that the supreme court allowed for criminalizing homelessness during a housing crisis, isn’t it?
A 25,000 handout to 1st time buyers would be bad because the price of homes would rise based on seller knowing the market is juiced. 🤑. This happened in higher education.
It’s only for first generation home owners so no it won’t rise like that.
@@Daveyjonesviyes it will because it’ll be baked into the price by the sellers/manufacturers. That’s how “capitalism/greed” works.
Maybe, but it's not how economics works.
@@Martcapt on our planet capitalism is the most dominant facet of the finance subset of economics and greed is the downfall of it all.
Stop corporations from buying up all the homes!
This is key.
I am very surprised they did not speak more on this during an episode focusing on the affordability of housing.
Corporations don’t buy up many homes in overall percentage. The vast majority of houses bought for investment are low level landlords that only own a few properties
@@dudehighmrksup thats not what I hear.
@@sannefridolin Look up the stats. Majority bought from “ma and pa” landlords. That fact doesn’t get traction because nobody wants to think their uncle with 5 properties is part of the problem. Much easier to get mad at faceless corporations
The debate between NIMBY and YIMBY started because the equity in people's homes became their largest source and stability of wealth. Then venture and vulture capital heard about it and decided housing was a great place to park their money. At some point we as a society have to take a moral stand and say "hey, your second vacation home and 'X' capital firm's 26,957th single family house isn't more valuable to our economy than a unhoused family which could otherwise be working and contributing if they had the stability"
Furthermore, the status of owning a property is not labor contributed to the economy (but maintenance of it is), and corporate renting units (along with federal subsidies for mortgages) is just a wholesale enormous transfer of wealth from the working to those who own things and own money.
The more building you do the less valuable they become. There is no incentive to build for normal people. If the government pushes building then they need to be sold to the people living in the building. Community ownership and Land Trust. Divesting all private equity from properties from their portfolio will drop prices dramatically.
Why not convert vacant office buildings into apartments? The buildings are already built and city's need those areas to become used more.
Theres a lot of reasons why this is often not economically preferred. It comes down to we build office buildings to different standards that residential units, so they require a lot of rework. That rework stems from things like, office buildings not having openable windows, or only one bathroom ( or more importantly one place to connect sewer pipes )per floor. Due to issues like this, often only about 10-20% of available office space is even convertible.
Both candidates promice more homes. BUT I want to know where large numbers of houses will be built, if we seriously consider the likelihood of Severe Weather events in the West.
And stronger and more frequent hurricanes in the Southeast! Much of Florida is a wetland no more than 6 ft (depending on the tide) above sea level. Basically the Netherlands of the US
Housing is Out of control. Seen it coming for years & politicians ain’t gave 2 F’s.
The government needs to literally build apartment blocks in high demand cities.
Forgive my copy and paste from another comment of mine:
The problem, and how we got here, is the financialization of housing, full stop. We can't solve the housing crisis until we come to terms with the fact that housing can't be both a human right and a vehicle for private investment. It simply can't.
I'm not saying people shouldn't be allowed to own and invest in their OWN home, that's not an issue. The problem is we've allowed the ownership of OTHER PEOPLE'S housing, and it's this practice that's at the very heart of this issue. Residential landlords, big and small, are the entire problem.
We need to move towards a housing system that prioritizes non market, not for profit, housing over privately owned rentals. Housing that is built and then provided at cost + maintenance, without a middleman taking an unnecessary profit off the top. Will this be an easy undertaking? Absolutely not, especially in North America (I'm Canadian) where private ownership of rental housing is seen as some sort of hard law of nature, and any discussion of non market housing gets shouted down by ill informed and uneducated people. These people will call it "communism" or "Marxism" because they don't understand that this type of housing used to be built in greater numbers during the period of widespread affordability everyone always talks about. Governments used to build housing, affordable housing, that people could live in long term. They stopped doing this in the 70's and 80's due to austerity measures and widespread "red scare" panic, and it started us down this path towards the increased privatization and market capture we're now suffering through today.
Co-ops, non profits, social housing, etc. These types of housing are what we desperately need if we want access to housing to become affordable again, and this is the majority expert opinion on this subject. Study after study, and report after report, we see this echoed by experts but it continues to fall on the deaf ears of our politicians and electorate because there's so much money being made by the wealthy by gatekeeping access to housing.
It needs to stop.
We also need to consider the local needs for housing versus where the JOBS are. Corporate consolidation in the 80s, 90s and 2000s have concentrated the good jobs in a handful of metro areas with astronomical housing shortages/housing costs, and very wealthy people who will go to any length to block anything from being built near them. The daycare worker whose work is needed in NY/DC/LA/SF cannot remote-work in from the Rust Belt, is least able to afford a 90 mile mega commute, and can least afford current prices (to own or rent) in these cities. A Harris administration, if elected, must tackle this issue to dramatically increase housing supply in the specific metro areas of greatest need. And doing the right thing for the working and middle class could set up some interesting drama with the wealthiest donor classes in the thriving blue cities.
One thing I asked my state representative about was timber production - we aren't harvesting as much as we likely should be, and increasing those permits could reduce the costs of inputs and cost of transportation to build sites. It feels like better timber harvesting, creating fire breaks and otherwise encouraging the production of inputs like more efficient appliances.
If we can subsidize inputs versus end-buyer housing purchases I think we will see the added benefit in reducing the costs for insurance covering rebuilds. Subsidies / cheaper borrowing just continue to inflate costs of finished new homes while squeezing the labor and inputs for rebuilds and repairs to existing stock - pushing more aging, naturally-affordable housing out of the market.
Housing is my number one issue.. where i live in the last 4 years the avg mortgage in my town went up from $1800 to over $5000! For the same dam house! All of my siblings in Massachusetts own homes and they've all had their equity go up more than a half a million dollars in the last 4 years and they all refinanced at 2.9% me and my little brother however we're just young enough where we were not able to buy a house before the pandemic so we are totally screwed out of it... For example my mom's house in Massachusetts in the second poorest town was worth $65,000 in 2019 she's selling it now for over $300,000 has multiple offers absolutely nothing changed about this house. She bought the house in 1985 for 64,000 and it pretty much stayed at that price until 2020 or at 5X and 4 years Make it make sense!?
Cool story bro, but housing was skyrocketing already before 2008, at least in California and NYC. The long bull run in housing is around 30 years old at least, though it was contained to the coasts in the early phases.
With stagnant wages for 50 years.
After house prices fell in 2008.
They became cheap.
Investing in them was a no-brainer. Prices rose.
Rising prices left a trail of evidence. House prices were an uppy-going thing. This is the sole thing most people look for. They think it’s analysis.
Buying into uppy-going prices lifts prices yet higher and leaves yet more convicting evidence.
It’s ever thus.
All these people who couldn’t find a job after 2008 who could have been part of a nationwide program to build homes.
Yeah but we had excess housing inventory in 2008; the Obama administration actually paid cities to bulldoze vacant buildings. So that would not have been a solution.
The US in the past ~20 years has seen consolidation in industry after industry. And industries that have consolidated are less competitive. Meaning, prices rise.
Capitalism requires competition, but the past 20 years of policies (really 40 years) have driven consolidation, not competition.
I since moved from Massachusetts to Northern New York to go back to farming with my friends from college in the county here the average home price went from $73,000 in 2019 then now it's $142,000 in early 2024. It is still much much more affordable than Massachusetts especially if you make a good income.
There are a few other complexities which are rarely mentioned. For example: our minimum expectations for a home or apartment have inflated dramatically, my first home had a single bathroom, no dishwasher and a single small garage. in that regard, we have an inflation of expectations. We also expect our homes to be safer and the use of materials like drywall have dramatically reduced home fires. and with climate change even homes in Seattle have air conditioning systems. My suggestion is that we be suspicious of solutions based on simple analysis.
Those expectations should keep in line with advancements in manufacturing and increasing efficiencies. It’s also much easier/faster to build a house in 2024 than it was 50 years ago.
How doe you factor in hedge fund and AirBnB ownership of existing housing?
Build higher up to save on land! Build solar panel battery systems into every building! Have shops and medical services on the ground floors.
Easy. Common sense!
We’ve already blown any chance for shovel out subsidies. Print more money. Really? The current interest of the national debt is nearing $1 trillion a year. There’s simply no way we can afford what you’re talking about.
Nice to have known you affordable Kalamazoo
I love listening to The Daily, but this episode didn't quite hit the mark. The housing crisis we're in today is not only born out of the financial crisis and the effect on building. Decades of anti development policy at local levels and zoning feed into it.
Also, demographics and population. The net of Death/birth rates, immigration both documented and not, as well as declining prison populations all exacerbate the housing issue in this country. it will all work itself out over time.
Kalamazoo (area… Go WMUK Broncos) to San Francisco… please let’s get the housing situation addressed !
how are tariffs on lumber at play here? and if there are no jobs with security, how can we the people afford housing?
I don't know if you don't know, or if you're just pretending. This feels like being gaslit by the upper middle class.
I live in house that was built for returning WW2 veterans. Was it built with government subsidy?
There's a massive difference between building post Great depression / world war II and now. Back then there was almost no regulation no zoning no building codes and there was no entrenched majority say 65% of Americans that have most of their wealth tied up in their home equity. So I don't see any possibility where the government could do anything that could bring down house prices significantly and build millions more frankly the majority of Americans are homeowners and they would be absolutely pissed off if all their equity was gone and if more poor people and immigrants lived in their neighborhoods and in their towns. Personally I think you should be able to do whatever you want on your own property more or less as long as you're not hurting someone else so all of these regulations should be gone and then we could actually build but I don't see that happening at all The majority of people I talk to are always mad if there's something new being built They think it's ugly they think it'll cause traffic blah blah blah The only thing that we can really do is to make it so these people have no say in what gets built on someone else's property the way it used to be.
If we make more humans the narcissists will require them to help make things worse.
I got 2 words:
EX…PAT😂
Do we Have to have inflation? Is it part of a growing economy? Can interest rates be fixed at say 2%?
No, every component of free markets says growth is essential. Interest rates of 2% will likely never occur in our lifetime. The easy, low interest money is flowing to boomer retirement. No senior will risk their life savings in the stock market. Instead all of that market money is heading for safe investments.
@@Indrid__Cold So, what is the interest rate and growth rate that is sustainable? If not 2%, is it 2.5%, 3%, 4%. The country seems to want to need a debt balance a lot greater than our GNP, interest rates that are lower allow a larger debt... right? What is the balance of growth and interest rates without the extremes that hurt housing and other key items in the average American consumer? The extremes seem to only help the rich, and hurt the poor, so let's find a way to stop the extremes, by fixing interest rates to growth.
Old people sell your house
Women are dying because of trumps administration. Why are we focused on something NO ADMINISTRATION HAS HELPED ME WITH??? I worked hard. Had excellent credit. Self employed. Still got a house loan. Gimme a break.
Because we can try to solve both instead of focusing on one
The housing crisis not an argument for Trump or Trump's policies but it's not something we can just ignore because some people already own homes. An economy where increasingly people pay 50% of their wages for a place to live, whether it's in Manhattan, NY or Manhattan, KS to live is not stable or sustainable.
America needs immigrants to build our housing and infrastructure. Also need them to pay social security. Yeah fat chance.
Which is why demonizing immigration is shooting your own foot. But hey, short-term political gain over long term societal stability, right?
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How please
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People want to not live where housing is cheap. Film at 11
4:39 It was a demographic change which was predictable for decades. People are born and then want to buy a house 20-30 year later.
Housing is an issue world wide not just in the USA. So far the only place I've seen where rents are not blowing up out of line with inflation is Vienna. Why? a multi tier approach to housing ruclips.net/video/U--G3Uth8pE/видео.html . The only thing they don't mention in this video is how good Vienna public transit is, which helps with job flexibility, isolation. And mixed zoning helps (and other deregulation) too don't do what Denmark did(early on they learned their lesson) or the USA did building housing 20 miles from where people work or shop. The solutions are out there you just have to look beyond your back yard for solutions.