Fifty years ago in Ontario, Canada if you were a single adult destitute with no income you would be eligible for general welfare which would pay about $180 a month, when the average rent on 1 bedroom apartment in Toronto was about $150 a month. Today, an adult in the same position gets about $800 while rent is $1300. It used to be possible to afford (slummy) housing at market rates, even for the very poor. Now it is not. It can be viewed either as a housing price issue or an income inadequacy issue.
I live near Boston. Part of the housing supply issue here is the mandate for a certain amount of “affordable housing” in all new developments (I forget the percentage, on the order of 10-20% of new units?). This results in either housing not being built, since the developer would not be able to earn enough on the sale of the building due to below-market rent payments, or the non-“affordable housing” units have to pay above-market rates to subsidize/offset the below-market-rate units.
This drives me nuts, because the goal should be for 100% of housing to be affordable. Stifling development or shifting the unaffordability to different areas of the income distribution do not solve the problem. More housing has to get built. This is a supply-demand issue, as anyone with basic economic knowledge can tell you. There are two ways out: people relocate, or more housing gets built.
Fifty years ago Montreal was the business centre of Canada, now that’s Toronto. That $800 rate might actually be more affordable in a less business oriented city, or even Montreal itself since it’s seen a lot of decline in that time. Having said that, there’s zero debate rents are out of control. I own a triplex and every time a unit turns over and i do my research on rent i get a bit shocked. I’ve found myself legitimately concerned how someone can ask for full “market” rate when i know it’s simply not affordable.
A business center doesn't have to be expensive. That’s made to happen because housing isn’t allowed to be built in sufficient quantity, not a necessary consequence of success.
I think quantity is a valid concern but I also think treating housing as a speculative asset is an issue. Housing serves as a valuable speculative asset precisely because quantity is restricted by a variety of factors, but actually using it as a speculative asset raises prices significantly.
Relative scarcity is the necessary and sufficient condition. Either there's enough housing or there isn't (there's a bit of slack with relocations, house sharing and spare bedrooms but it's largely inconsequential.) That means that supply (i.e. quantity) is enough.
It's true that if it was impossible to speculate on housing, there would be less incentive to create artificial scarcity by e.g. lobbying for restrictive land use policies.
> Relative scarcity is the necessary and sufficient condition. Either there's enough housing or there isn't
This seems like an oversimplification. Speculation affects demand, so the amount of speculation is hidden within “relative scarcity”. If there is no speculation then demand is directly related to the needs and finances of potential occupants. If there is speculation then demand becomes connected to the buying power of the wealthy, and thus demand and prices are likely to be higher.
In particular, the wealthy investing class collectively have way, way more money than the renting class, so the finances of the wealthy class distort housing prices upward in ways which dwarf the supply and demand effects from actual renters moving in and out of an area.
Yes, but this speculation is grounded on the possibility of extracting future rents. Which is an assumption about future relative scarcity.
We’ve all decided that it’s totally fine to artificially limit the supply of real estate. Speculation is the market (correctly, in most cases) betting that that will continue.
I kept rewriting my reply until I started just looking up research. I should go do something else with my day hah but it seems the affect of speculation on price is unsurprisingly complex.
That isn’t quite right. Speculators look for good deals, meaning they look at prices N years from now and try to make money on that. They aren’t pushing prices up just for existing, they are predicting higher prices and acting to take advantage of that. They are looking for second hand property that is undervalued for the horizon they are looking at.
But yes, wealthy people have more capital and leverage to participate in time-displaced arbitrage. Gentrification is a bit more productive, since investors work at making their properties more valuable at least.
> That isn’t quite right. Speculators look for good deals, meaning they look at prices N years from now and try to make money on that. They aren’t pushing prices up just for existing
It’s that correct? Consider NFTs. They are a speculative asset with no recurring revenue attached. The natural price, I think, is zero, but speculators push that price up based on the expected return from future buyers based on predictions of how the market will move. There are no other supply and demand effects, just speculation on sale. Of course there was a bubble but housing is more grounded in reality and real value. Still, it may demonstrate that speculation alone can raise prices.
> Gentrification is a bit more productive
In the dry economic sense of “production” yes, but at the expense of dismantling communities. Perhaps more productive and less destructive would be the approach to housing taken in Vienna. The government buys land and builds affordable housing complexes on it, and once residents stabilize and their income goes up they get to stay in the housing so the buildings become mixed income and they’re pretty nice. Near where I live West Oakland is gentrifying with a wall of corporate owned housing that is replacing the front stoops and back yards of local residents with parking garages and Teslas. It seems almost as though the community is being slowly eaten alive.
> Consider NFTs. They are a speculative asset with no recurring revenue attached.
Housing isn't comparable to NFTs, all logic goes out the door when something doesn't have intrinsic value.
> In the dry economic sense of “production” yes, but at the expense of dismantling communities.
Yes: whenever cities devote resources to "clean up" a neighborhood, they are also doing this. Slums are ugly, but they are also a source of cheap housing; old buildings might not use land very effectively, but they are also a source of cheap housing (and that new dense apartment building that they knocked down the old housing to build is no longer as affordable on a unit basis).
> The government buys land and builds affordable housing complexes on it
This isn't a bad approach, though I'm not sure how it would scale to the USA. The problem with the US is that "affordable" is often a term that is applied to a few hot cities rather than in general. If all the affordable housing is in Mississippi, no one would be interested in taking it, if it is where people want to live, then we will have lots of lopsided unsustainable population movements, if we just somehow even it out affordable housing, then some people are still going to be left out of their preferred location for housing.
Yeah I was trying to reason about the affects of speculation but it turns out that of course there’s plenty of research on the topic, and the affects are broad and complex. Unfortunately I don’t have time to read this right now but you may find it interesting:
For public housing, there is also the approach taken by Singapore. This article discusses both and may interest you. What I think matters most is we understand that it is possible to have more people in stable affordable housing, and we accept nothing less.
The Singapore model only works because they distinguish between citizens and residents. You can’t just move to Singapore one day and buy into public housing the next. It is Austria on an even more narrow scale.
Which is why it gets such a bad rap. Some of it is deserved: speculation can involve taking a scarce resource and making it even scarcer. But even milder forms can look bad, because they show up alongside scarcity, and that whole correlation/causation thing gets people thinking. M
Just saying "speculation" doesn't really paint the picture of what's going on. In 2010-s everyone here blamed foreign speculators hiding in the shadows, but we live in a different, worse, world now.
This country's housing and immigration & temp. resident policies are absolutely out of sync, intentionally. In 2021 they've changed the rules to add hundreds of thousands of people overnight, but did not build anywhere close to the corresponding amount of housing. Then they did it next year again, and again, and again, and they're still doing it, and the next government plans to continue doing it.
This isn't mere speculation. This is deliberate policy to manufacture a housing crisis. To not only keep the pre-existing crisis going, but to deliberately and methodically escalate it. Politicians profit both from their own investment properties and from bribes (ahem campaign contributions, speaking fees, board positions, ...) paid to them by all kinds of businesses who profit from oversupply of labour and undersupply of housing.
"Speculation" implies taking significant risk, often in an under-regulated market. But the current situation is nothing like that – there is barely any risk, when both the supply (zoning & construction) and demand (population growth) sides of the market are heavily regulated with the intent to raise prices. Capital is all you need to reap the profits, pretty much.
Asking as someone not that familiar with Canadian politics, is this "the next government" as in the Liberal one that would replace Trudeau after his resignation, or the (likely) Conservative one that would be in power after the general election?
The latter. Conservatives have shown no serious interest in reducing immigration. Their politicians get all the same profits from the crisis, plus the votes of socially conservative immigrants on top. Canadian politics is full of weird alliances.
And yet most large cities have sections of it that are in total blight with abandoned homes, with windows blown out or plywood covering access holes to prevent intruders.
Much of the problem is that the bourgeois class wants to live in the popular neighborhood, bidding up rents and values in isolated sections of large cities. Meanwhile, large chunks of cities have relatively affordable, but not as attractive neighborhoods with homes that could be converted to house the homeless for a fraction of what it would cost to build new housing.
Just the other day, I heard a news report in my area where they allocated money for homeless at $100,000 per bed in order to add more beds to an existing shelter in the downtown area. Yet this city has neighborhoods with cheap and unoccupied homes that could be bought to house these homeless for much less than 100,000 per bed.
Here in Berkeley and other SF Bay Area cities, we have imposed an "Empty Home Tax" [0][1] at some $ and % per year. As a proponent, I figured it would incentivize people to either rent or sell their unused properties which will house people and get rid of blight. Neither has happened much and these owners just take the hit. Housing as a speculative asset has some pretty terrible consequences.
There is no Y other than 0 which would be allowed under the California Constitution (Prop 13 limits ad valorem property taxes to a fixed 1% of allowed tax basis value, as well as limiting the annual increase in tax basis value, local entities can't add selective additional ad valorem property taxes on top of this), and there is no X which would make them sell which would not be regulatory taking without compensation in violation of the 5th Amendment to the US Constitution (as well as provisions of the State Constitutions.)
> Here in Berkeley and other SF Bay Area cities, we have imposed an "Empty Home Tax" [0][1] at some $ and % per year.
It's not $ and % in Berkeley, its a fixed $3,000 for the first year the unit stands vacant for 182 days or more, $6,000 in the second and subsequent years.
Oakland's measure (which is older) is also a fixed dollar amount (varies by the specific kind of unit, either $3,000 or $6,000 per year), and only applies if the property isn't occupied for at least 50 days in a year.
San Francisco's new one (like Berkeley's, passed in 2023 and would have gone into effect for 2024 with payments in 2025) was struck down as a violation o both the Federal and State Constitution, so until and unless that decision is overturned on appeal, it effectively doesn't exist.
> I figured it would incentivize people to either rent or sell their unused properties which will house people and get rid of blight. Neither has happened much and these owners just take the hit.
Well, the only significant one that is in effect at all (Berkeley's) hasn't had much time to have an impact (it only applies to rental properties with units vacant for more than 182 days in a calendar year, and it went into effect Jan. 1, 2024, with the first payments due in 2025 based on 2024 vacancies.)
I don’t disagree that speculation on a critical resource like housing is a really harmful phenomena. Another concern is when people use housing as a store of value for diversity in their portfolio. These long term “investors” are less likely to care whether their houses are rented or occupied as they have enough wealth to weather the loss of revenue or even fluctuations of the asset prices.
The empty home tax is a great idea, but my guess is the tax/fee is not significant enough to change investor behavior. Or possibly it’s not being enforced at the level it should be?
If you want to do that, you have to first pass a federal Constitutional amendment repealing the 5th Amendment (well, just the part requiring just compensation for takings), or reverse the existing jurisprudence on regulatory takings. And while the current Supreme Court is unusually willing to toss precedent, its ideological alignment is more on the side that would read the takings clause restrictions more expansively, so you're back to an amendment.
> Meanwhile, large chunks of cities have relatively affordable, but not as attractive neighborhoods with homes that could be converted to house the homeless for a fraction of what it would cost to build new housing.
If they are "relatively affordable, but not as attractive" they are probably largely housing people currently, and not available to house the homeless.
If they are "in total blight, with abandoned neighborhoods, with windows blown out", they've probably also been stripped, structurally compromised, and contaminated with hazardous materials, and already sheltering squattors, and would need to be cleared, cleaned up, demolished, and have new housing built, making it a more expensive (excluding whatever differences there are in land costs) effort to use that space for housing than other places which might still require demolition and new construction, but not the clearing effort.
> Just the other day, I heard a news report in my area where they allocated money for homeless at $100,000 per bed in order to add more beds to an existing shelter in the downtown area. Yet this city has neighborhoods with cheap and unoccupied homes that could be bought to house these homeless for much less than 100,000 per bed.
I suspect if you research what the $100,000 covers, much of it is stuff that would still need to be done after buying the units. At least that's been the case most of the times I've seen comparisons like this.
> they've probably also been stripped, structurally compromised, and contaminated with hazardous materials, and already sheltering squattors, and would need to be cleared, cleaned up, demolished, and have new housing built,
Seems like you’re looking for any and all reasons to establish such a high standard for any housing for homeless people that literally sleep on the ground on top of a plastic bag that creating housing for them is too expensive.
In my opinion, this type of analysis is that the root of the problem. There is no perfect solution, but building high quality housing meeting the latest standards of the city planning committee for 1% of the homeless while leaving 99% out on the street is not a useful solution.
I don't think it's people just wanting to live in 'popular' neighborhoods, but safe neighborhoods. In the places you're describing you don't go out after dark, crime is common, and you also get to enjoy things like SUVs slowly cruising around at 1am with sound systems more fit for a stadium than a car.
In places, like most countries in Asia, where crime rates are vastly lower, you'll see far greater levels of socioeconomic mixing with defacto mansions near rather modest houses. The same is also true to some degree in rural areas in the states, where you'll see a trailer on a couple of acres with a truck husk or two in the front yard right beside a house that you'd be more inclined to call an 'estate.'
Transport affects this. Berlin has a pretty extensive network that gets you from any part to any other part in an hour or less. It's thought to be a factor in why the rents rise uniformly instead of rising a lot in the middle.
Windsor? As a nicer Detroit, I thought they might at least benefit from weaker rents considering what’s available across the border. But that’s just a guess, I haven’t lived in that area since the 80s. Here is one source that says a 1 bedroom will set you back $1400: https://www.zumper.com/apartments-for-rent/windsor-on
