I’m not against this, every time I go to Europe and see people living above the storefronts I think it’s a great idea. Now… I will say I’d rather have the thousands of small business stores rather than these massive box stores but the cat is out of the bag already in the us
I feel like this could get twisted to the dark side by let's say Walmart. Live above Walmart, work at Walmart, buy everything you need from Walmart then get cremated there. Probably while on food stamps because they still don't pay enough.
Yeah, people like Elon Musk are trying to revive the 19th century concept of company towns. Move your employees to the middle of nowhere in Texas, suddenly they're renting your houses, buying stuff from your store and basically never leaving. Quitting/getting fired suddenly involves uprooting your whole family to a completely different state on short notice.
I don't blame them. Society has otherized them to the point that they don't want to be a part of it anymore. Arm the homeless for their safety because they're about to be forced into slavery.
It isn’t paywalled for me, so here’s the text in full:
The long-bemoaned housing shortage may not exist after all. Rather, there’s a shortage of cheap rents and affordable homes, according to a new study.
The peer-reviewed study, published in April in the academic journal *Housing Policy Debate, *found that between 2000 and 2020, the U.S. had a surplus of 3.3 million homes—defying conventional wisdom that the nation is facing a housing shortage.
“We’re sort of an outlier in our analysis, and partly it’s because we’re taking this longer-term perspective,” Alex Schwartz, one of the study’s authors and chair of the master’s program in urban policy at the New School, tells *Fortune. *
The study examined how fast the housing stock grew between the first two decades of the 2000s and compared it with the number of new households formed during that time period. Schwartz and his research partner, Kirk McClure, professor emeritus of urban planning at the University of Kansas, argue that many current studies that examine housing stock—which find that there is a national shortage—don’t go back in time far enough and therefore overlook the large number of homes that were built during the housing boom that stretched from 2000 to 2007.
“The housing bubble that we experienced was a big growth in prices, but also a big growth in production,” McClure tells Fortune.
The collapse of that formerly prosperous real estate market triggered the Great Recession. The study also included the subsequent recovery from the Great Recession that lasted from 2012 to 2020, the year of the pandemic.
Capturing such a long stretch of time makes sure the research doesn’t overreact to short-term ups and downs of the market, McClure and Schwartz argue. “We massively overbuilt the number of housing units we needed, and we are still here in 2024 trying to absorb that massive overbuild in housing,” McClure said.
From 2000 to 2010 the U.S. had a surplus of 4.6 million housing units, while in the following decade there was a shortage of 1.3 million fewer units than population growth would demand. All combined, that nets out to a surplus of 3.3 million homes from 2000 to 2020.
The findings contrast with a plethora of research that points to a widespread shortage of new homes being constructed. Earlier this month, the housing website Zillow published an analysis that showed in 2022 there was a housing deficit of 4.5 million new homes. While a more recent survey from Realtor.com estimated that from 2012 to 2023 there was a shortage of 2.5 million homes.
However, these studies prefer to measure the construction of new homes, while McClure and Schwartz look at vacant homes. That on its own is a complicating factor. As the two cite in their paper, the physical condition of the vacant homes isn’t fully known. Some apartments may be sitting empty because a stubborn landlord refuses to lower the rent; others because they serve as a vacation home for an affluent family, while some may be entirely dilapidated and therefore uninhabitable—doing little to solve the housing crisis.
A housing surplus that still prices out many
But the new finding about overall housing supply levels, which Schwartz says was a surprise, offers some nuance to one of the major problems in the housing market.
“The issue is not so much about aggregate shortfall of housing units, but rather a mismatch between the cost of housing and the incomes of households,” Schwartz said. “Most especially among the lowest-income households, where there really is a mismatch between what they can afford and the number of units that are affordable.”
After this study, economists might debate the level of housing supply available in the U.S., but the core issue appears to remain the same: affordability.
The researchers found a shortage of housing that low- and very low-income families could afford. Low-income families were defined as those with incomes between 30% and 60% of the median in a given market, while very low-income families were those making less than 30% of the median—roughly equivalent to the poverty line, according to the paper.
McClure tries to distinguish between households making around $45,000 a year, which might be on a tight budget, and those making less than $22,000, which are the poorest in the U.S. When assessing the rental markets in 381 metropolitan areas and 526 small towns, the research found that there was an average shortage of about 7,700 units that the very poorest households, making under $22,000, could afford, according to the study.
For those households, which require government assistance to find housing, the absolute highest they could afford to pay for rent is $550. Building new homes and apartment buildings can’t address the shortage for the absolute poorest. McClure explains that no private developer can build a new home or apartment that would be within the price range for the poorest of the poor. “Even if you could build the unit for $0, there is absolutely no way a private developer can build a unit at that [$550] price and survive,” McClure says. “Just the property taxes, insurance, and utility costs are north of that number.”
So the answer is to help them afford the housing that is available. McClure and Schwartz recommend offering more Section 8 housing choice vouchers that subsidize rent payments.
“In many circumstances, it is best to make use of existing stock rather than pay the very large sums needed to add stock to an already ample market,” the paper reads. “Helping low-income households rent existing units is much less costly than building deeply subsidized units with rents affordable to low-income households.”
Building new homes can reduce prices in the long term
But that’s not to say McClure and Schwartz are against building new housing. Cities and towns should look to build “a wider array of housing types,” according to Schwartz, such as smaller units or higher density housing.
The reason new housing inventory will need to be built, even during a surplus, is because rents and home prices can’t be expected to come down on their own. “It’s very unlikely to think that existing households on their own would just reduce their sales price unless they were required to for some reason,” Schwartz said.
Building more housing is also seen as an effective way to lower rents. A seminal piece of research from NYU’s Furman Center found that building more homes actually lowers rents.
New housing developments often raise the fears of gentrification; that existing residents will get priced out of ritzy new apartments in formerly affordable neighborhoods. The Furman Center research contends that the law of supply and demand holds true in the housing market as well.
A widely cited example from 2016 in Auckland, New Zealand, found that when about three-quarters of the city was rezoned to allow for denser housing construction, housing supply increased 4%. Meanwhile, rents for three-bedroom apartments dropped 26% to 33% compared with similar areas, according to a working paper from May 2023.
Other studies have found the effect of new housing isn’t usually as stark as the Auckland example. More often than not, overall rents do still rise when new housing is built, but not as quickly as they would have otherwise.
McClure doesn’t disagree with that research, but notes that it doesn’t address the poorest of the poor. “Alex and I are not looking to lower $2,000 rents to $1,800—that little difference is not enough,” McClure says. “We are truly trying to find ways to rent apartments to people who cannot afford more than $500 a month.”
This is a nothing burger. They even say that the people who are struggling got into too much home to begin with. They made up a whole article about people buying houses that are too expensive for their incomes.
Where are you even getting this shit? Jesus fucking christ, it's hardly hoarding, given that you can readily buy property in a rural area for a tiny fraction of what you could in a city.
Again: if you want to buy property in a rural area--not a suburb of a city--you can buy it for a tiny fraction of what you would pay for the same amount of property, or the same house, in an urban or suburban setting. Take this, for example; if you wanted a house this size, and on this much land in Chicago, you'd be looking at a few million. Or here; yeah, it's in the middle of fucking nowhere, but it's under $100k. I'm pretty sure it's not "hoarding" if no one wants it because it's three hours from Des Moines. If you just want land, then here's 166 acres for $59,000; It's in Imlay, NV, and about two hours from Reno, but that's only $360/acre.
You can't say that people are "hoarding" property when it's not property that anyone wants to buy. That would be like saying I'm hoarding dust bunnies under my desk because I haven't vacuumed in a little over a year.
It's my inference. A big part of why people leave small towns now is because they can't afford the cost of living with the average income they can realistically obtain in said small towns. I've lived in small towns, the relative cost of living can be higher than a city.
Nothing in this comment refutes what I said. You're cherrypicking income from cities with cost of living in rural areas.
100k is affordable in medium sized city with a medium income of 75k but these rural areas have median incomes as low as 25k where it's unattainable.
And no the average person just can't buy land. That's like asking someone to just build their own car. Totally possible, been done before by many people, but not realistic.
And no a remote job isn't the answer because a lot of these remote rural "cheap" places don't have reliable high speed internet. Sometimes they don't have internet at all.
Lastly these areas lack critical services which you'll have to obtain and pay for yourself somehow. Maybe this "cheap" rural house requires a 3 hour drive to see a specialist. Now someone with a chronic illness is paying an extra couple hundred dollars a month to see a doctor. No city sewer or water, time to dig a well and septic tank. The corrupt city relies on tickets as their primary revenue stream, whoops there's another few hundred bucks. Long commute means you gotta hire a babysitter until the evening, that's 10's of thousands of dollars out the window again.
Study after study has shown that living in poor rural areas is MORE expensive than living in "expensive" cities because of the lack of services and economic opportunity.
Employer won't give you a raise, and they're the only major employer in the area so you're screwed? Add that opportunity cost to the cost of a "cheap" rural home.
This doesn't even touch on the quality of life issues. Your kid got hooked on meth because your podunk town is utterly devoid of culture or activities? Well at least you have that 100k "cheap" home. Oh and BTW crime per capita is much worse in rural red states than big scary blue cities.
You've created a title that has absolutely nothing to do with the article. You're acting as though corporations that are buying housing in cities and suburbs are to blame for the deaths of small towns in rural America, and implying that the people that are dying off in rural parts of the country are "hoarding" property. That's simply false.
THIS IS THE POINT. You're taking two completely different things, one of which isn't even covered in the article you posted, and conflating them to act as though they're the same thing.
And no the average person just can’t buy land. That’s like asking someone to just build their own car. Totally possible, been done before by many people, but not realistic.
...What? What are you talking about? The average person can absolutely just buy land. It's exactly the same process as buying a house that's already built, only with a few extra steps, like hiring an architect, and getting a general contractor. You can even use an FHA mortgage--which is the kind of mortgage that most first-time buyers are likely to use--to buy land and get a house built. (You usually can't built it yourself though, unless you're also a contractor; the mortgage bank wants to know that you aren't going to take the money and run, so they want plans, permits, etc.) Most people don't, because vacant land in cities--which is where most people want to live--is ridiculously expensive.
Oh and BTW crime per capita is much worse in rural red states than big scary blue cities.
I'm going to need to see a citation on that. In Georgia, for 2022 the file:///C:/Users/GA1/Downloads/2022%20Crime%20Statistics%20Summary.pdf. The five counties that comprise Atlanta - Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, Gwinnett, and Clayton - are 30.5/1000, 40.25/1000, 17.16/1000, 14.54/1000, and 9.85/1000 respectively. Only Bibb (city of Macon) and Crisp (very rural) counties have worse overall crime rates than DeKalb county. Very few counties have worse crime rates than Fulton. (I tried to look up Illinois, but for some reason the IL State PD's site won't let me see the report.)
And ALL OF THIS IS IRRELEVANT to your claim that the death of small towns is somehow linked to "real estate hoarders".
You've created a title that has absolutely nothing to do with the article.
Right, it's my cheeky editorial. It's a crosspost so of you want to know what the article is really about just read the original tittle.
THIS IS THE POINT. You're taking two completely different things, one of which isn't even covered in the article you posted, and conflating them to act as though they're the same thing.
No I'm not. 70% of all rentals are owned by Mom and Pop landlords. Boomers are 2/3rds of all homeowners. These small towns are primarily occupied by Boomers who greed drove out families from small towns and locals that were actually interested in staying. I can tell you living in a big city I meet lots of small town people and many of them say there were driven out by greedy landlords and had to take better paying jobs in the city.
Elderly people stay in these small towns BECAUSE THEY CAN AFFORD TO. Often because THEY OWN REAL ESTATE. Working families leave BECAUSE THEY CAN'T AFFORD TO STAY even if they would like to.
People like you act like it's some mystery why young people leave and old people stay in small towns even though nominally homes are cheaper. IT'S BECAUSE IT'S NOT ACTUALLY CHEAPER.
These old boomers are entrenched economically so they gut services like schools because they don't need them, enriching themselves further, then wonder why families don't want to stay in a place where they've got to do everything themselves.
What? What are you talking about? The average person can absolutely just buy land.
No the average person can't develop real estate.
I'm going to need to see a citation on that. In Georgia, for 2022 the overall state crime rate is 20.10/1000 people. The five counties that comprise Atlanta - Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, Gwinnett, and Clayton - are 30.5/1000, 40.25/1000, 17.16/1000, 14.54/1000, and 9.85/1000 respectively.
Large blue cities like Chicago have lower crime rates than many Midwestern red cities and towns.
then wonder why families don’t want to stay in a place where they’ve got to do everything themselves.
eh, I strongly doubt that, but they do wonder why all the labor has moved away and no one wants their pittances anymore. then they blame the avocado toast, throw their hands in the air and donate to trump.
Oh noes, why can't we accept money from American people while doing nothing? Why are they dying from poor healthcare, and losing their homes due to many states' lax stance on climate change? It's hurting my profitability!
Housing Bubble 2: Return of the Ugly
Hot