Would you listen to me ranting about evil nimbyists preventing any form of urban development and thus blocking economic growth?
Would you call me asking me to help you with an unexpected problem?
Can I stop by your place just to hang out a bit, without any particular reason?
Would you pick me up from an airport tomorrow if I ask you to?
Will I come to you if I have a wild business idea? Or will you come to me to brag about your recent promotion?
No, we are not friends. We don't even know each other. You need to spend some time with a person for at least couple of hours a day for about half a year to become friends.
> You need to spend some time with a person for at least couple of hours a day for about half a year to become friends
The only place this would happen for me is work. But that's no longer possible because all my coworkers at my new job are WFH.
It happened in school and college, after that it's only ever happened at work that I spend "a couple of hours a day for about half a year" with anyone.
Even if joined some kind of club, that would be either a couple of hours a month or at best, a couple of hours a week, not a couple of hours a day.
Another way to become friends is to experience something extraordinary together. In fact, for me this is way more effective than spending several hours a day with a colleague in the same room.
Traveling brings people closer (that could be arranged through meetups), doing intense social work (also possible through meetups)...
If it's that fragile, then is it a friendship? It's more of an acquaintance, except on HN we don't know who you are.
We probably don't know your name, so I don't even know it counts as an acquaintance, unless you're famous externally and have linked that to your HN username, or have used it as your name. And even then we know it in the same way as a roll call in a crowded lecture room or business meeting, and not as the individual.
I think classic online forums did provide scope for building up social connections, but I think the Reddit-inspired social news sites, including HN, simply do not.
I think part of the reason behind such frail friendships is that, thanks to social media, and parasocial relationships with online personalities, like YouTubers and Twitch streamers, many might feel they are participating in a social group or experiencing social situations already. The reality is that most often in the new online social world, you are a consumer of the relationship but not actually a participant.
With that safety net, someone has to first accept a level of risk they don't currently need to, and they also have to meet that same risk barrier for someone else. So people are unwittingly trading more two sided, genuine social interactions, for shallow, one sided interactions.
That is, at best, an ephemeral acquaintance. I would have no problem doing anything on that list with my actual friends. Well, except for going to a pub- all of my friends are sober. If I had a friend who went to pubs, I'd go with them though.
I am commenting in support of optimism and to counterweight pessimistic outlook.
Humanity indeed faces a lot of problems. Each of them have many possible solutions (The only one unsolvable is a heat death of the universe).
Thing is, the solutions usually may be divided into two categories: technical and societal.
For example, for the horse manure problem in big cities there were two possible solutions: invent a car, or limit the number of horses in the city.
The thing is: technical solutions are always cool. They open up new possibilities, the one which could not be foreseen. Technical solution also creates new problems, that require solutions of their own. Societal solutions always suck. Societal solution is to make people do less of the thing that causes trouble. The problem therefore kind of resolves, but the life become more boring and less free. Such solution does not bring new possibilities, does not advance life, but there is no risks of unforeseen new problems.
Examples of the problems and possible solutions:
Global worming: limit consumption and consumerism - or - perform climate engineering (spray high albedo particles in stratosphere, send controllable aluminum foil mirrors to the orbit, install more solar cells and wind turbines
Cancer, Alzheimers, heart diseases, obesity, etc.: live "healthy life", eat boring non-tasty grass, die 5 times a week at the gym, don't eat most awesome sugar, don't dring amazing coke, don't smoke, don't enjoy, don't ... - OR - Concentrate on solving the cause of those illnesses, that is the ageing. Treat ageing as a disease and fund anti-ageing research.
"Overpopulation": Make people believe that earth is dying and they shouldn't have children - OR - Build habitat (O'Neil cylinders) on the orbit thus opening virtually endless living space
Nuclear war: Pacify a horrible dictator, leave him "ways to retreat" - OR - build habitats on the orbit; atomic explosions in space won't do much damage at all (there is a constant atomic explosion already there, called Sun).
Hunger: Not a problem, earth agriculture is overproducing; the real problem is horrible dictators and the lack of new land that people can escape to from that dictator.
I'm not sure if I agree on the dichotomy of technical vs. social solutions.
Where would you place something like efforts to increase a population literacy rates? It's not a new technical advantage, but it doesn't suck or limit possibilities. If anything, it creates them, since a literate population is one you can teach to drive, where employers can assume literacy for training purposes, where governments can give information to their people in writing, where people can read their own religious texts without intermediaries, etc.
Nothing will change while the homeowners have more political power than the renters.
Even in the cities where the renter population is bigger than the homeowners, such as in Seattle, half of the votes come from people of > 65 years old (all of whom are homeowners, likely more than one home). Young people simply won't vote at all.
There is very little incentives for the young people to vote. Even if you cancel all the regulations right now and allow for unlimited constructions in the cities like Seattle, SF of NY, one will need about 10 years or longer to build enough apartments for the price to go back to affordable (which is 2-3 years salary of an average worker in the area). So the after-next generation will profit from the effort of the current renter generation.
Nevertheless, I think young generation needs to engage in the politics with the uncompromised goal to crush the housing price, to prevent the economic collapse of the "rich" world and prevent entire Earth from sliding into the dictatorship. Such is life.
I don't think mandating voting really helps that much. At best, you'll get people to vote for the candidate with the (D) or (R) next to their name. What we need is for people to be more informed. Fewer than 20% of people can name their state legislatures, let alone their stances.
Mandatory voting doesn't fix all the problems, but it's better than the alternative. Instead of campaigns focusing on "go vote" you get campaigns focusing on the actual voting.
I often watch architecture videos with houses from australia. Lots of properties built more or less to look like contemporary style stock photography. No wonder your houses are expensive, they are built for luxury investment
While I completely agree that Pelosi does this with insider knowledge, she and her husband also seem to be investing based on the hype they hear from people around them. Why else would the Pelosi's have taken such a bath on Roblox?! They had to have known shit is going bad over there, but they lost a LOT of money on that one...
So yeah, they do insider trading, but they are sometimes also the dupes in these deals. Look at their history. They make money, yes, but they lose a lot to stupid investments too, ones they obviously made because some Steve-Jobs-wannabe got a meeting with them and fired their reality distortion ray.
One thing that's missed in the renter vs homeowner thing is that the rules of election systems favors the homeowner too. Renters move more and will need to register to vote over again and the added inconvenience will stop plenty from even bothering.
A commonsense way to describe what you just said is that homeowners are more stable and stationary and therefore more invested in the long-term future of their communities than renters are, which is an argument that urbanists laugh at, but one that seems very clearly to be true.
I think people basically know this, if they're allowed to be honest with themselves. Nobody who ever lived in a college dorm and then spent a "magical year" in NYC and then bought a house in a suburb thinks they were just as invested in those first two places as they are in the third.
Even if this is true, those communities always have the class of people moving through and that class deserves a vote, even if the individuals within it are changing. For instance, take a university town with population of 100k, 25k of whom are students. The students themselves come and go, lasting about 4 years each, but it still makes sense that 25% of the vote each election should go to the student community overall. This doesn't happen for a variety of reasons, but some of them are the sorts of artificial barriers like voter registration that depress the vote of these sorts of communities.
As long as people can't afford to buy they're "less invested" so no reason to address housing affordability... In the modern housing market that's a self fulfilling prophecy.
> How about that principle of one person, one vote.
Reality, in my view, is absolutely chock-full of contradictions. I believe in the principle of one person, one vote; and I believe that what I said above happens also to be true. The dialectic doesn't care that we might wish things were simpler or more straightforward.
In a world with stable rents, renters also become long term residents and invested in the community. If someone’s only “invested” financially I doubt that they have the community’s interests at heart.
There will always be transients, students, travelers, and so on. In a world where most people rent and renters are indistinguishable from owners, renting will cease to be a signal that those people are present, but they won't disappear. They'll just be harder to identify.
The idea that municipal governance should intentionally disadvantage "transients, students, travelers, and so on" is appalling to me. This directly feeds into wealth inequality and the cycle of poverty. I get that people will want to protect their privilege, but I have no respect for it.
I would encourage you to try to read those words without any of the baggage often implied. The reason I chose the examples, "dorm room" and "magical year in NYC," above is that those both apply directly to me. If someone in my neighborhood in NYC would have said to me, "you don't really care deeply about this place, you're just going to be here for a year or two and then settle down somewhere else," they wouldn't have been entirely wrong.
I will note that Washington state makes this very straightforward; universal mail-in voting with real easy registration has definitely led to me, a disorganized young person, voting when I wouldn't have otherwise.
If you are free and able to vote but won't do it, it's hard for me to feel too much pity for your situation.
I started voting when I was 16 (my birth country allows that) and voted on every single election until I immigrated to the US - and then voted on every US election since becoming a citizen.
Some people find it difficult to vote, for reasons I suspect disproportionately affect renters. Where people must be registered with their home address in order to vote, renters are at more risk of being unregistered at election time, because they move home more frequently. People experiencing economic hardship (who are more likely to be renters) are less likely to make time for voting (especially if polling stations are congested or at inconvenient locations) or for prompt electoral registration.
I dunno, having election day be a holiday seems like a poor solution as plenty of people do work holidays and probably the same people who have trouble finding time to vote.
Mostly, I don't think we should be encouraging a ton of people to all show up at the same place at the same time. That's just asking for long lines and other issues.
I think it'd be much better to just drag voting out of the course of a month and actually encourage people to not show up on election day. Or to just vote by mail more, I haven't been a poll since I was a child (and back then we had levers!) but from what I hear now half the time you're just filling out a mail ballet in person now.
> plenty of people do work holidays and probably the same people who have trouble finding time to vote
It's a country with 300 million people, there's plenty of people for anything. I'd wager that in percentual terms, the absolute majority would benefit from an election day holiday.
It isn't in Canada either mostly I'd say because there's no set date. The government can lose a confidence vote and an election can be called at anytime (a date set in the future not immediate). But we do get a paid hour or two off work to go vote that's law.
The US has a mix of dates. All elections are effectively at the state or local level. Primaries are all over the calendar. General elections for President are all on the same Tuesday in November.
So, a national holiday really only makes sense for those presidential election years. Or, we could declare "first Tuesday after first Monday in Nov" as an annual holiday, and many states would likely line up their fall elections on that date. Primaries would still be a mess, but they always will, as they're not always open elections anyways (some states require party membership or declared party affiliation to vote in primaries).
Not being able to vote electronically is also really weird since ballots are only paper at the edge. Yes there are downsides, just like when you mail-in you give up non-repudiation, but the fact that it's not even an option is crazy. I personally would be more than happy to give up my personal ability to vote anonymously if I meant I could just sign up for a vote.gov account at the BMV, login, vote and be done with it.
I absolutely do not want electronic voting. I legitimately believe that system would be kept behind a black box, and would be far too likely and liable to be cheated and gamed. At least with a huge stack of paper that is stored for an approved number of years there is an option for independent verification.
How about vote by email? Go to a vote.gov, fill out your ballot, it gives your a PDF you can review, you email that to your board of elections, they reply with a "got it!", and they're counted like all other mail-in ballots on election night.
Same process, just s/USPS/SMTP/. But if that's fine, why make the user jump through the email hoop? Hell, digital ballots would give you stronger guarantees for verifying your vote. Publish all the ballots publicly and base the final tally for digital votes on that public ledger. Every voter will have a code they can use to pull up their specific ballot and see that it's correct. And since the codes are public that's not actually enough to prove it was yours (yay non-repudiation).
No cryptography, no hashes, no zero trust proofs. The internet is only used to move a document from A->B and security model could be explained to the least technical person since it's a direct analogue of how you would do it IRL.
I'm convinced that people afraid of electronic voting are either hucksters that like the status quo or people who've been convinced by them.
if you're worried about voting being a black box, it already kind of is. what proof did you get that your last vote was accounted for properly? who counted it?
if you're worried about "hacking" you're not paying quite enough attention. We have secure systems that exist. At least as secure as a fuckton of snail mail managed by tens of thousands of the worlds most insecure asset, people.
I like your system. Ping me if there's ever an open codebase and I'll contribute.
The Indian system is a hybrid model - you vote through an electronic machine which also prints out a confirmatory paper vote that you can confirm through a porthole and which drops into a strongbox. In case of conflict or concerns, the paper votes can be tallied.
No it's not. From the start the US was intended to be oligarchical - hence the franchise originally only being extended to white landowning males. There has always been a strain of politics dedicated to keeping barriers up to enfranchisement.
I have anecdotally heard from some Republicans in Washington that they do not bother to vote, especially in non-presidential election years, as they feel that a Democrat will win the election anyway.
This is visible in county-level voting rates. The counties east of the Cascade mountains tend to be more conservative than the counties west of the Cascades, or areas surrounding metros like Spokane, and they also tend to have lower voter participation rates.
> The whole point is that you need to compare it to other states to make any sense of the data
I disagree with your assertion. Even so, alistairSH's conclusion: "We'd do well as a country to allow nationwide mail-in voting." like it was solution to solving lack of voting from renters, when cherry-picking data gets us 12 points at best. It might be part of a solution, but it's demonstrably not a majority difference.
All this presumes every possible vote is equally valid.
1 - No national election day holiday, so wage-earners often have to forgo income to vote.
PSA: You can register as a poll worker and work election day to guarantee you have time to vote. There's a high chance that your work will give you the time off to go work as a poll worker without it eating into your PTO (and you get paid to boot!).
> There's a high chance that your work will give you the time off to go work as a poll worker without it eating into your PTO (and you get paid to boot!).
As an ex-linecook, LOL, there are too many assumptions baked in here to be in the realm of reality for working class jobs
I'm curious as to what the solution in this case is then. If election days were holidays, wouldn't the same people still have the same issues with employers? Do shift workers not work on holidays?
Realistically, how would that work for these same group of people? They'd have to know well in advance that they would need postal ballots and complete and return them in advance of election day. Would shift workers working multiple jobs be best served by mail-in voting? tbf I'm not sure if there is a better way, but it seems relying on mail-in ballots helps some people and alienates a different group of people.
I was imagining the ballots would be auto-shipped based on voter rolls (which get updated with DMV records in many states - this should also be mandatory).
So, check mail box as normal. Receive ballot. Research candidates (or not) and fill out. Drop in the mailbox. Not much different than paying paper bills.
Who were you imagining would be alienated by mail-in voting?
We could do mandatory extended timeframe/hours in-person voting but that costs a lot more (paying to staff the sites, rent locations because you can't just borrow a school cafeteria for a day like we do now, etc).
Are you suggesting mail-in ballots as a universal option that covers everybody? That seems unfeasible logistically. Does any large country offer universal mail-in ballots?
I think mail-in ballots best serve voters in an environment where they are the norm, rather than the exception. For example, the campaign cycles, like debates, that target the large segment of undecided voters right before election day. The mail-in voter has to be more informed about candidates and policy than an average voter to come to an equivalent informed decision about their vote weeks before the average voter. Yes, if the goal is to simply increase voter turnout, universal mail-in ballots are probably great. I wonder if that best serves the voter, though - hence my question.
My familiarity is with the Indian electoral system, which is highly regarded (at least within the country). Mail-in ballots are an option for a subset of people, but they make up for it by making polling booths readily accessible - your booth is just a short walk away. Election days are holidays, but I'm sure it still impacts workers in similar ways. Still, voter turnout is usually not too bad. Expanding mail-in voting has been discussed as an option for the very large floating population of migrant workers, but we don't have a solution yet. The logistics of offering universal mail-in ballots for a country approaching 1.4 billion is daunting. Already, the General Elections need to be spaced out over several weeks to allow electoral officials and poll workers to cover the entire country.
Are you suggesting mail-in ballots as a universal option that covers everybody? That seems unfeasible logistically. Does any large country offer universal mail-in ballots?
Yes, universal. Oregon (USA) has used universal vote-by-mail for many years now. It's widely considered one of the best systems in the US. Voter rolls are updated by the DMV (or via state websites), everybody receives a ballot by mail prior to the election. Voters can return the ballot by mail, at a drop-box, or they can choose to vote in-person. Voters don't have to vote any earlier - as long as the ballot is post-marked by election day, it will be counted.
I was curious on the data on this. I mean difficulty voting certainly is a major narrative and passes the smell test but the survey in this article suggests 3/4’s of non voters say it is easy to vote:
This is however contrasted by the confusing bit that not being registered was the biggest reason people didn’t vote, above apathy and political disengagement.
Well, I get a form every year from my town to confirm my particulars. I sign it and send it back. I guess if I weren't registered I'd go down to the town hall and do so. If I couldn't for some reason, I assume I could call the town clerk, and they'd send me a form in the mail. When I go into Cambridge around election time, I frequently see various tables set up to register people.
Obviously registering (and voting) is harder for some people than others but registering to vote is not, in general, an arduous process.
>I guess if weren't registered I'd go down to the town hall and do so.
What if your job wouldn't let you off during the town hall's regular hours? What if you don't have transportation? What if you don't have the necessary forms of identification?
> I assume I could call the town clerk, and they'd send me a form in the mail
What if you're not already registered and cannot just fill out a form to send in? What if you have to provide proof of residency in the form of a bill in your name and current address that matches your ID? What if you don't have an ID because you can't get to the DMV because you can't get time off work to go get it, or you don't have transportation, or you don't have internet access to set an online appointment with the DMV, or your credit is bad enough that the bills are only in your roommate's name to avoid headache with those companies?
I guess my point is, it's very flippant to just say, "well it's easy for me, so it's probably pretty easy for everyone else, so it must be apathy as the only solution."
> I guess my point is, it's very flippant to just say, "well it's easy for me, so it's probably pretty easy for everyone else, so it must be apathy as the only solution."
Right but the data suggests that apathy is the primary reason. I think we should make it easier to vote, but it’s not empathy if the people you’re trying to empathize with don’t actually feel that way.
As I wrote, it's doubtless harder for some than others. But, yes, I do think in general most people who don't get registered would probably (for perhaps understandable reasons) decide that it's too much of a burden to vote as well. If it's literally impossible for someone to get registered, it's probably equally impossible to vote anyway.
We probably need some service (an app or a site) that gives clear instructions on how, where and when to register.
Yes, it is harder for renters, but it is designed to be harder. This is to prevent renters from having political power and making homeowner's houses more expensive. One more reason to fight, from my point of view.
We have all that and more. There are even groups that seek people out to teach them to vote. When you file a change of address with the post office, they send you a packet with all kinds of moving resources including how to re-register. In addition, a really quick Google search gives you all you need to know to register and vote. I don't understand why some people pretend the process is difficult. If people still aren't voting it's due to lack of interest, not because it's confusing or difficult.
55% of Americans have hourly jobs, most of which do not control their hours. There are many polling places, particularly in underserved communities, where it can take multiple hours to get to vote. Elections are nearly always held on workdays. So if you are a single parent working an hourly wage job from 8am to 6pm and the polls close at 7pm, would you vote? The voting process is difficult in America for some people and easy for others.
While I'm a big fan of vote by mail, it's not the only thing. Having early voting options would also help that hypothetical person as they can vote in person on a day they don't work.
The vast majority of states have no excuse absentee voting and/or early in-person voting options. In addition, employees are legally required to allow time off to vote, though in the overwhelming majority of states, the early voting options make this unnecessary.
If people want to participate, they have many options.
I've found that if you need to argue edge cases (single parent, hourly schedule that almost completely overlaps poll hours, no absentee, no early voting or mail-in, and an employer that violates law) as you have in your post, you do not have a compelling argument.
I don't get why there's a "process" at all. In Canada, when I change my address with the CRA (our version of the IRS), my voter registration gets updated automatically. Why is there a separate step in the US? I've also voted when my CRA address was out-of-date at the time, and this was fine too as long as I brought government-issued ID or a recent bill sent to my new address.
Like most things in the USA, voting is a local matter, not federal. It would be prohibitive for the post office to manage this across 50 states with differing rules.
States in the US have more atonomy than states in most of the rest of the world. So much so that it often doesn't make sense to compare national US figures to national figures in other nations - education being a good example - https://learn.uvm.edu/blog/blog-education/vermont-eighth-gra...
But the same applies to voting. The federalist system under which the US operates allows communities and localities the flexibility to operate in a manner consistent with local needs and values.
Why stop there? Perhaps government employees should go door to door and record my vote for me. Sending something in the mail is unreasonably difficult.
Because this would actually save the government and thus taxpayers 100+ million dollars a year?
A change of address is informing the government you moved and happens millions of times a year. Automating it doesn't just save citizens 10’s of millions of hours per year it also saves all the effort by all these different agencies when people communicate the same information to multiple agencies.
Would it though? The agencies are at different levels - local vs. federal. In addition, you are notifying the post office you have moved, not the government. Your federal notification is basically to the IRS, and not everyone pays income tax, so integration there would not work. Also, not all taxpayers are eligible to vote - another complication.
You have oversimplified the details of this sort of integration and conflated local vs federal institutions. The best way to do this change would be through your state's BMV/DMV, and many states already update your registration (or offer to) when you submit an address change there.
Registration and voting are easy and well documented in every state in which I've lived or researched.
Federal and state agencies communicate all the time. It’s much easier going from the federal level down to the state level and local level.
It’s not that it takes a lot of effort per person to update the DMV and voter records it’s dumb specifically because most government agencies are automatically updated. So essentially this is just wasting 330 million peoples time for absolutely zero benefit.
You're probably correct in many (or even most) cases, but I still believe that it's too difficult for some people, for two reasons:
1) Some people are under more stress than others, and are less able to summon the effort to vote. Admittedly, this does also include people in rather different circumstances, such as elderly homeowners who become unwell at election time (especially after the postal vote deadline).
2) Voting arrangements aren't uniform between countries (or even within one country), and travelling some distance to a polling station and then queuing to vote is a burden some voters might experience much more than others.
The vast majority of states offer a multitude of early voting or absentee/mail in voting options. As far as uniform regulations between counties, who cares? Each person is only supposed to vote once, and in a single county. Learn your local regulations (easy as this is well documented) and follow them.
Further, you won't ever come up with a system that is 100% inclusive, secure, reliable, and economical. That should never be the goal since it's not achievable or necessary. Covering 99% of cases is good enough.
Well, you can't vote where you don't live. The large problem is the lack of appropriate land taxes in high cost municipalities. And you can't vote to change that until you live there, and once you live there, you are much less incentivized to vote against your self interests.
Most of the laws regarding property taxes are set at the state level, not the municipal level. In California, a voter in Modesto can influence tax rates in San Francisco. Local votes only control minor things like special additional school district assessments.
Even in other states which lack property tax caps, the basic framework within which tax rates are set is controlled at the state level. For example, some economists have proposed replacing property taxes with land value taxes but it would be impossible for a single city to do so without enabling state legislation.
Interesting. I assumed counties/cities are relatively free to set property tax rates according to their budget, and the city needing to compete with other cities is what keeps them relatively in line.
That may be how things work in California, but it definitely does not work like that everywhere in the US. For example, here in NJ, property taxes are partly set by the state, but the schools portion is set my the county and township.
Yeah, here in IL property tax is 100% local (state law sets limits and requirements only). And everything is an independent government body with taxing authority.
The city collects its taxes, the school district collects its taxes, the library collects its taxes, fire district, road department, forest preserve, etc. None of them can tell the other to do anything - they are all independent with independent funding. The county has its own taxes, but also has the function of actually providing the payment, billing and distribution services. So you only have to make a single payment.
By the way, property taxes in Florida work nearly the same as California and they don't have any problem building lots of housing.
> If you are free and able to vote but won't do it, it's hard for me to feel too much pity for your situation.
What if I vote, but people with interests aligned with mine tend not to? What if those people not voting are acting as rationally as the people who vote frequently?
Consider these two groups, who get the same number of votes, live under the government for the same amount of time, but rationally have different incentives to vote:
Home-owner:
* Bob moves in, lives there ten years.
Renters:
* John moves in, lives there two years, moves out.
* Phil moves in, lives there two years, moves out.
* Mike moves in, lives there two years, moves out.
* Jess moves in, lives there two years, moves out.
* Fred moves in, lives there two years, moves out.
If we assume these people are self-interested, Bob will, on average, vote more than the renters, because Bob values future-Bob's well-being more than John values Fred's. It's only through the altruism of John, Phil, Mike, and Jess that Fred will get to benefit from a government that accounts for his interests.
It's also true that each renter has an incentive to vote for things of short-term value and to discount long-term benefits, so maybe it's okay that Bob ends up more represented. But "John isn't voting as much as Bob" isn't a case of John being less responsible than Bob. It's that they legitimately have different incentives.
> so maybe it's okay that Bob ends up more represented
In this example, I'd say it is very legitimate that the Bob has over time more influence how local things are run, since he's a long-time local that has to live with it. All the others are transients that come and go.
Collectively, the others live with it for the same amount of time. Their incentives are lower to improve things locally, but the impact on them is the same.
Haha I am still not a citizen, so can't vote myself. I was trying to encourage my friends, but they were often too busy. They would vote for Hillary (or even for Trump), but never for a local mayor.
Sometimes I am considering running myself for a local government after getting my citizenship, with the only goal: drop housing price at my city for at least 70%. Once achieved - retire from politics :).
Q1: Yes, there is. Once a professional politician sees more activity from renters, they will include the renter's interests into their agenda
Q2: Yes, obviously there is a positive correlation. This is exactly why renters need to fight: stakes are against them. Current status quo is in favor of homeowners; it will not be possible to change it while being passive. Renters and homeowners have conflict of interests, there is inevitable fight.
Q3: I think blaming is the call for fight. If renters want better deal, they need to fight. Is it most constructive? I don't know, this is the best I can come up with. Does it reinforces the status quo? No, I think inactivity reinforces it.
I'm sorry but your answer to Q1 is extremely naive. There is no way that activity from renters will even remotely approach the power of those who own property in politics. The latter group can lobby and make campaign donations, the former can't exactly...
The best thing you'll get is a campaign promise to do something about it, but not much action. The only way something will actually be done about it is if the effects of it become economically catastrophic or people start rioting en masse.
> no way that activity from renters will even remotely approach the power of those who own property in politics
Can speak to New York politics. Tenants' associations have massive sway. I've canvassed elections where a single building's tenants' association could predictably swing the outcome.
They also ally with developers when advantageous, e.g. to continue building housing stock. (Their divergent interests explain much of our affordable housing policies' idiosyncrasies.) This combination of activism and pragmatism beats the well-funded candidate every time in local politics because their elections are decided by margins of hundreds or even tens of votes.
> latter group can lobby and make campaign donations, the former can't exactly
Donations, at the local level, are a threat to incumbents through enabling primary challengers. And tenants' associations absolutely lobby. The problem is renters in most cities are some combination of disorganized, disengaged and/or ideological to a dogmatic degree.
The latter group can unionize like the tenants union of Washington[1]. Unions can lobby on the behalf of their members and make campaign donations based on their dues. While their power may not be as great as the amount of individual homeowners who can independently donate a union is a good mechanism here for renters to advocate for affordable housing. Here in Seattle there are multiple unions that have lobbied to local city council members for increased tenants rights such as 6 month notice for increase in rent[2]. _Things_ are being done about the problem at the local level across the country through unionization of renters and workers.
Local politicians will often discount or ignore the opinions of people they see as renters rather than homeowners, in part because when a renter moves, they often leave the district.
I saw this recently in a fight over parking regulations - all the homeowners wanted strictly regulated street parking in neighborhoods, but none of the renters did. Both parties showed up to the council meeting discussing the regulation. Guess who won? Adding insult to injury, existing laws give owners a process for obtaining extra parking passes for guests, while renters get no such option and need to take a bunch of documents to city hall to get a pass when they move in. For street parking.
You have an incredibly naive impression of representative democracy and capitalist political economy. US politicians serve the rich, not only because they are the rich but also because they need the donations to even be able to run. This isn’t a mere hiccup but rather the entire point of the design.
Yes, in my experience, the naïve interpretation is right 80% of time and it is always best to start from a naïve explanation of a process.
US politicians serve the rich only because they think that donations will help them win. Make the donations irrelevant - "rich" will loose the political power. How to make the donations irrelevant - go to vote, especially if you are poor and powerless. Convince your friends to vote. And not for a president, but for a local mayor, city council, judge etc.
I think young generation needs to engage in the politics with the uncompromised goal to crush the housing price
At least where I live, the “bank of mom and dad” either use their home equity to help their kids buy OR the kids are banking on getting the family home when they die.
We’re in too deep now. We basically painted ourselves into a corner where the economic engine is so intertwined with rising home prices that nobody wants the gravy train to end.
My best guess is tenancy laws change to be more and more in favor of tenants (SF, NYC) securing near permanent housing for current renters and massively disincentivizing an increase in supply of new rental units., completely screwing over those that come later.
Basically kicking the can down the road another few decades.
Biggest problem IMO is that "young generation" is already split among ideological lines(myself included), and kind of hard to imagine a concentrated "young vs old" movement that wouldn't at some point devolve into infighting.
Definitely not that simple. To use your same argument though, it’s not just homeowners - it’s homeowners and aspiring homeowners. Which is nearly everyone.
The longer I live the more I am finding the universe is working on extremely simple few principles; their relations create complexity.
Aspiring homeowners will never become homeowners if the price is exclusionary.
Take SF: with average salary of 75-79K, the apartment cost starts from 1.1M. Only 8% has salary > than 100K, that makes the remaining 92% the "aspiring" homeowners.
They will stay "aspiring" for the rest of their life. The only think they (or rather, "we") can do - make sure that post-zoomer generation don't have to be "aspiring" for their entire lives.
It's a laudable goal but I have serious doubts about its achievability in cities that are already overpriced. Every single incentive leans in the direction of keeping prices high since not only would lower prices cost homeowners money but would also possibly cut into tax revenues and could financial ruin people who purchased under these high price regimes.
It's a bit of a ratchet. Once the prices go high, it's very hard to turn back. The only way out is probably to inflate the currency until a loaf of bread is $15 but housing is reasonable again, or for the state or federal government to offer some kind of huge tax write-off for depreciating home values. The latter is unlikely given the financial crunch faced by governments.
>Every single incentive leans in the direction of keeping prices high since not only would lower prices cost homeowners money but would also possibly cut into tax revenues and could financial ruin people who purchased under these high price regimes.
Not really. The way out is higher density. What we care about isn't land price, it's housing price - in other words, how much does it cost for people to get as much housing as they need. Lowering housing costs and rising land costs are perfectly compatible if you don't artificially restrict lots to 1 unit as most of the country has done.
Or raise rates. That's actually affecting housing prices. No one can sell at the price they wanted because no one wants a loan this crazy. Unfortunately this will have other consequences.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they managed to crumble their economy which brought the value of housing down with it? They had a massive housing boom before the "Lost Decades". Japan is no stranger to asset prices rising out of control.
That said, when I have looked at Tokyo pricing it has always been in line with high priced North American cities, only configured differently. The difference in configuration means that the sticker price is often lower, but you are getting less for that lower price. Apples to apples the prices have always shown to be in the same ballpark.
I know I’m just ranting into the wind, but I wish it was illegal/ban-able to bring up the Bay Area (and NYC and Austin) in high-level discussions of the American real estate market.
It just kills the discussion because it’s such an outlier.
I would not be a popular king, but it’s better to be feared than loved, I guess. I do understand what site I’m on.
> They will stay "aspiring" for the rest of their life.
They have a very viable option, which is to leave SF and go somewhere else where they can stop aspiring and afford to actually become homeowners if that's what they want.
I speak from first-hand experience, although in my case it was Manhattan not SF. I very badly wanted to live in Manhattan but no matter how I sliced the numbers, there was no way. Too expensive.
I didn't remain "aspiring" for the rest of my life though. I gave up on that dream and moved and bought a house elsewhere. It's worked just fine.
At a certain point, if landlords strangle renters it can make hiring hard (workers can’t afford Cost of living if rents are too high), thus making the business environment uncompetitive.
Will the business community have more power than landlords?
Importing immigrants in Canada requires that the employer provide suitable housing for the imported workers, so that brings us back to the earlier comment.
All this is true, but you missed a crucial piece, addressing your "need to engage" - political energy capacity coming from the young. I'll be more than glad to be proven wrong, but I don't think young people have driven any sort of political change in the west for at least the last 20 years. There are many cases where they get used as a lever, but actual movements like "occupy wallstreet" got squashed fairly fast.
100% accurate. While popular society takes small steps forward in regard to social and political changes, the actual politics has not changed from when I was a kid.
There are more politicians willing to admit they support gay people, I guess. But that's about it. Deep down where it counts - fiscal policy - nothing changes.
> Nothing will change while the homeowners have more political power than the renters.
Homeowners and renters of course have the exact same politica power, one vote each.
If renters are for whatever reason choosing to not exercise that power, what can one do? They are free to vote, please do.
That said, I always vote and not once has there been anything on the ballot on whether to build more in my town, so it's not like it matters on that front.
I think you are more than exaggerating.
Thinking of someone who's 65 now and owns several homes, these people are utter fools. How much would money put into houses 40 years ago when they bought, and put into stocks at the same time, would make? You don't even need to google up to know the answer.
SP500 would make 96x with dividends reinvested and 37x without. Median home price is not even 10x, and the median home has increased in size 1.5x in the meantime, plus required upkeep.
Fix to housing problem is nothing but financial education for people.
Actually, you do need to google up if you want to look at an actual data analysis. I mean, you aren't even counting the rental income in your comparison. If you look at the rate of return on everything from 1870-2015, equity markets and housing actually provide somewhat similar returns [0]. Equity markets are far more liquid though so I choose them personally.
The equivalent to rental income is "with dividends reinvested". Dividends are the cash flows from owning a stock, just like rent is the cash flow from housing. So the 10x capital appreciation from housing is equivalent to the 37x capital appreciation from the S&P 500.
You and anovikov reach different conclusions because you're looking at different time scales. You're citing returns from 1870-2015; he's citing returns for the last 40 years, 1980-2020. The comment and paper you linked itself explains why: housing and equity returns were very comparable from the period 1870-1945, but equities significantly outperformed from 1945-present. I would bet on suburbanization as the cause: the U.S. embarked on a massive homebuilding project from 1945-2000, which kept supply high and prices relatively low during that period. Returns to housing since 2009 (when the bottom fell out of the homebuilding market) have much more closely matched equities.
OK, so returns from 1870 to 2015 are same for housing and stocks. Which again proves that there's nothing morally wrong about housing prices, if these investments are replaceable, one can always invest in stocks to save up to buy housing (at least on average, that is).
On the contrary, housing shouldn't appreciate. It's bad for the economy as a whole, and especially for young people, for homes to be an appreciating asset. Housing should be a commodity, not an investment.
10-20 years seems fine. It doesn't have to happen overnight. To fast would create chaos and make it into new lame situations for people.
Gradual rent control with a point system works just fine.
Personally I would like to see renting [gradually] changed into lease/buy. That I've paid the value of the house 3 times now (and the construction cost 7 times) could mean I own at least some of the house? Doesn't seem unreasonable.
Add to this the upcoming social security and Medicare crises, the constant rise in healthcare prices driven by elder care, and a shrinking population that needs to support more retirees.
We're in a weird place in the US where young people are unwilling to flex any political power to stop elder people from financially taking advantage of them.
I think a lot of young people just are ignorant about the situation coupled with the rise of populists on the left and the right, there's always some abstract other to blame without a focus on concrete problems and possible solutions.
Whenever I talk to my young friends about Social Security's trust running dry in a decade they just handwave it away with stuff like: the government will just print more money or blame jeff bezos
As a young person (28), I think it’s because we feel powerless in the face of what is to come.
Young people have no power because we largely are in the renter and working classes; while the home and business owners fight against every mention of renter protections, increased housing, worker protections, etc.
Not to mention we see the world we are growing up into is quickly becoming more and more inhabitable while living with the truth that the fossil fuel industry has been lying about climate change for 50 years.
Who are the populists you’re talking about? I can only think of Bernie and Yang. Trump isn’t a populist.
We aren’t ignorant either. We are a product of the social media machine and a decreasing faith in educational institutions. I think a lot of people are too scared of the future so they don’t think about it. Blaming an abstract for political problems has been a thing for long as politics as been around.
The millennials are the largest voting block in the US. What is everyone else supposed to do when the group with the most voting power "feels" powerless? I sure hope millennials are just late bloomers. Where are the great political leaders, engineers, scientists, artists and writers from the millennial generation? All these future problems are hard but solvable when there are people working to solve them.
> the group with the most voting power "feels" powerless?
It seems like a strange thing to have powerless concerns about as voting only selects a representative. In my experience, the most likely candidates are all reasonably suited to the job, leaving it to matter little who ultimately wins. Even if you are powerless it is not that big of a deal, being the most inconsequential part of the process.
The real work happens after the vote has taken place when you have to start engaging with the selected representative on the regular to make your perspective known. It is guaranteed that you didn't elect a mind reader. It is not clear if the younger generations are aware of that. This may be why they feel powerless.
It my youth the message was always "contact your local representative", but in recent times that message has changed to "how could <insert political figurehead> do this to us?" There is some apparent degree of learned helplessness at play; perhaps because greater media exposure gives us insights into places with strong dictatorships and we project their conditions upon ours.
Invariably, those with enough land ownership ties will ultimately run into municipal issues that will require approaching council, at very least forcing a deeper understanding of government upon them. This may also help explain why those who own things are apparently more engaged politically.
Young people often vote against their own economic self interest because the major political parties successfully leverage splitter social issues. Young voters are no different from old voters in that regard.
Break out what "homeowners" actually is. It's increasingly becoming these shell companies and entities like Blackrock. We need to ban that shit immediately. The deed of a house should have a fucking person's name on it, not a company's.
Investment firms buying homes is a symptom, not a cause. The only reason they do that is because local government artificially inflate the value of homes through supply restrictions.
In all seriousness, no. The way you multiply housing count is by making buildings taller and closer together, not by spreading them further out. This is how we used to build cities before cars and roads ruined them.
It's because most people don't want to live in small boxes stacked on top of each other. The market responded to what people wanted and it was larger single family homes with yards and living space. An automobile to get you to other places for shopping and entertainment. This is what most people people want.
I agree though that a lot of suburbs are just wastelands and I would consider them to be depressing places to live. But people seem to love them for some reason. A lot of these places don't even have sidewalks but I guess it makes sense as there isn't really anywhere to walk to.
I love how people seem to feel they can enforce their views of how a city should be build on others.
The fact of the matter is very clear.. we have so many detach houses because that is what people WANT.
For some odd reason there is a subset of the population who feel entitled to dictate how OTHERS should live. These people go on and on about "increasing density" while ignoring that some don't want to live like this.
The current state of affairs in the US is that, in most towns, detached single-family housing is the only thing you are legally allowed to build. When you buy land the local zoning board tells you what can be built on that land, and these zones are extremely fine-grained. Thus, the people who want detached houses are the ones who are dictating how others should live.
There is a huge demand for denser urban arrangements, because people would like to live closer to where they work and don't want to drive cars. This is why smaller houses in urban centers go for more money than larger houses in suburbs. This is an arbitrage opportunity for anyone with the capital to buy houses at the periphery of those urban centers and demolish or renovate them to house more people. Except that's illegal, so instead the market is stuck pricing by convenience, and you get a society that demands it's working class spend two or more unpaid hours of their lives each day driving from the suburbs into the city.
Historically, the transition to suburban home ownership as the default mode of living was also something dictated by elites rather than organically decided upon. To explain this we need to talk about cars, because suburbs and cars are basically a package deal. It is extremely inconvenient to live in the suburbs without owning a car, and cars do not work in cities where they have to compete for limited road space against pedestrians and public transit.
So the car companies demanded that the laws and cities change to make their business work. We invented the """crime""" of jaywalking[0] just to make cities more convenient to access in a large vehicle. Car companies even bought up and destroyed public transit, turning efficient streetcar and rail systems into buses that had to compete for road space with individual riders, and often lost. This meant more people having to buy back their freedom[1] by moving to the suburbs and buying cars to get to the job they used to walk to.
Had this decision not been made through top-down power and social engineering[2], the suburbanization of America would have been far more limited. We can see this in much of Europe and Asia, where attempts to level and rebuild cities in Henry Ford's divine image were resisted at every turn.
[0] "jay" is old-timey derogatory slang for rural farmers, roughly equivalent to today's "hick".
[1] I should point out that this freedom was an illusion because road capacity is far more limited for cars than it is for people. Suburbs will inevitably jam their streets and highways in ways that dense urban spaces cannot.
[2] As in, engineering society to work a certain way, not defrauding someone out of their login password
i love it when people make statements liek "you are projecting" yet dont fully understand them.
What it means to be projecting?
According to Karen R. Koenig, M. Ed, LCSW, projection refers to unconsciously taking unwanted emotions or traits you don't like about yourself and attributing them to someone else. A common example is a cheating spouse who suspects their partner is being unfaithful.
I've not taken any of my views and projected them anywhere.
you simply look around, and you can find TONS of so called "Social justice warriors" demanding more public transit, more density..
Usually under some "Stop urban sprawl" mantra - who gives them the right to enforce how others want to live?
Then each renter will become a homeowner, they will feel very comfortable, have 4 kids, and now you will need 4x more units.
Then their kids will have 4 kids, and you'll need 16x more units with respect to where you started.
Few generations after you have a much deeper problem that the one you started with. Now you live in a country with a population of over 1 billion, where protests cannot be controlled anymore and now you need a totalitarian regime with a massive surveillance and censorship apparatus to keep things under control.
The alternative is that everyone is stressed out and feels the pressure of a system that is over capacity.
Have you heard of Earth day? In 2022, it was April 22. It means that by April 22 we already consumed our environmental budget for the full year.
If we continue like this it's not going to be long until there's mandatory population control.
>> Then each renter will become a homeowner, they will feel very comfortable
Not sure about the entire comment, but the above line is the clutch item. Once a renter turns into a homeowners, things change drastically. In the US you are typically highly leveraged once you buy a home. That means a 20% drop in home value wipes out all your equity. So once you buy into the system (esp with leverage) you have a huge incentive now to perpetuate the system that once enslaved you. Now you become the prison guard. Sadly, even the prison guard is in the prison of debt for many years, thus has to maintain the jail.
Reminds me of this [1] post yesterday that because sedans can only fit 2 car seats parents don’t have a third child because they can’t afford a bigger car.
Maybe, parents are having less kids because they can’t afford to move to a place with an extra bedroom.
If you go camping and have limited amount of food rations, water, etc, you will make sensible decisions about how to consume the supplies you have. This is very similar.
I find it funny that I agree with you in some ways that others might not.
For example, I agree people should ditch the dumb super hero movies and do something better. Maybe garden or learn to weld or something.
But I completely disagree with you that humans are destroying the planet in an unsustainable way.
Sure, there are huge challenge and excesses, but the human spirit should also bring solutions.
Particularly in the face of both energy and water shortages, we should be building coastal nuclear plants.
Not only do they provide clean energy, but they basically function as desalination plants.
That and it's pretty glib to make people "uncomfortable" so they don't procreate. Especially when here in the US we barely even have population growth.
If we are not destroying the planet as you claim, then animal species would be flourishing. In reality, insects, fish, and many species of animals, especially animals above certain weight, they're all dying off and going extinct.
As we humans advance, we destroy the habitat of other species. As industrial agriculture expands, we consume all the topsoil (soil with microorganisms, worms, etc. in it.), we extract dietary micronutrients from it, we pump all of the groundwater, kill all the pollinators and insects, then cause collateral damage to all migratory species that cross those territories.
We dump trash everywhere, we pollute the atmosphere, we pollute the oceans, we make the oceans more acidic, we are raising the temperature of the planet, our industrial plants dump toxic chemicals everywhere... and the list goes on and on and on.
You, on the other hand, are heavily influenced by an alternate reality which is a combination of television and Internet content, documentaries, and uplifting stories about how some experimental technology 50 years away from mass production that is prohibitively expensive and makes things 1% better for the environment, while things get 10% worse each year. You are completely out of touch with reality and the hunter gatherers from the future hunting contaminated vermin will hate you.
Keep telling yourself that. The environmental impact of the human population at large, which is growing consistently, has nothing to do with you by any means!
The millions of marine animals drowning in single use plastic bottles will concur with you.
It is very good for productivity when many jobs are concentrated in one location.
This unlocks the possibility for serendipitous connections. It is awesome when you can meet a founder, a leading engineer, an investor, a designer and a PR person in a coffee line, forming a new company before finishing your morning coffee.
Talents concentrated in one place gives significant boost to their productivity. This is called a "proximity bonus" in video games; building dependent factories in the nearby slots gives them the productivity boost. This is what US is missing by being nimbyistic.
I think we should return to the 1950s ideas of a futuristic cities and invest in building giant arcologies, where entire Earth population can move if they want to, and where the least paid McFastFood worker would afford to buy a minimum apartment.
China has this in spades, where you can build a (hardware) product and source everything needed from the same city. And not just distributors of those parts, the actual manufacturers are all right there building what you need.
Run out of anything and it's just a 20 minute drive to go grab more from the factory.
Can you really meet them if they're scattered over a multi-million city? I find the opposite. A digestible size (< 500k?) city where everyone-knows-everyone opens more opportunities. While in megapolis multiple bubbles may be doing same thing, but not aware about each other at all.
But even here in just-over-500k city people are already resorting to Zoom calls from one's office/home (or lake-side getaways) over meeting in coffeeshop.
I find it easier in the bigger city; but I might be biased as I lived in a big city most of my life.
What I meant is an ability to be within the reach of any other person within an hour.
Using zoom for 3 years now (for obvious reasons) - I find it inferior to the private in-person communication. Problem that you need to schedule a meeting, which adds some formality and is usually harder, while you can have a pleasant chat with even a rich and powerful person while accidentally meeting them in a hall. For scheduling a zoom call, you need to find an excuse. To chat in a hall with someone - you don't need and excuse.
> What I meant is an ability to be within the reach of any other person within an hour.
Is that all that significant? I live rurally and can be within reach of any other person in two different large cities (along with some smaller ones) within an hour. Under some circumstances, I can be at a shared meeting place in one of those cities before a person who lives in said city can get there. The highway is incredibly efficient.
Moreover, such proximity to the city – but also off the beaten path – seems to make it an attractive place for the rich and famous to have homes. I run into household names at the small town coffeeshop quite regularly.
What is significant, however, is the the city is much more amenable to wealth concentration. That small town coffeeshop might see 100 customers in a day, while a coffeeshop in a dense city can draw on thousands of customers, allowing a coffeeshop empire to be established. The small town coffeeshop will never be able to grow the same way.
> I think we should return to the 1950s ideas of a futuristic cities and invest in building giant arcologies
Ugh, I hope not. The 50s was the most infantile era, completely preoccupied with convenience and efficiency and big things that go wrooar. The vision of the future in the 50s was so cringey.
I'm not so sure about this, i believe the optimal curve for city population looks like the optimal stress response, after a certain level having more is just detrimental. There should be enough people where opportunities arise but no so much that your mind is too influenced by noise where you can't accurately make good decisions.
Have more futuristic optimism. We are doing quite well on the climate. We will prevent it once we get fully to solar and then build CO2 scrubbers using solar energy. Energy percentage that come from renewables is more than 10x higher than anticipated 10 years ago.
And don't call it a "collapse": a change is not necessary to the worse, sometimes it is to the better.
I'm a bit less optimistic than that. I think we will be forced to start atmospheric spraying, and hopefully use that bandaid to fix the underlying wound.
In theory it will stop warming, which may cause many people to take that as "Well, looks like we can go back to burning fossil fuels!".
High modernist city planning from the 1950s and 60s was a disaster. No, we should go back to the organic cities of the 1910s and 20s, with their mixed-use, medium density streetcar suburbs.
You are conflating densely populated cities and areas with high concentration of jobs. They are not the same. And as an aside, SF/SV are not even dense by global standards. You can live in an actually dense city and enjoy your serendipity while working remotely.
People often ask me: why am I always preaching life extension and immortality research?
Here is why: so you can be 41, 441, 1041 and still have millions years ahead.
Once 41 years old no longer means you wasted your youth away, you will be able to concentrate on one thing per day and don't feel tragic if this thing fails.
unfortunately the life expectancy once we remove aging is only about 1000 due to eventual death from trauma . Once we remove death due to aging, nearly every death will be relatively sudden and unexpected.
The houses in USA are already made almost from the cardboard. You can not call a bunch of "two by four" wooden planks nailed together a modern home.
If we do really care about people not being homeless as we claim we do, I suggest as a first step we cancel all the construction regulations. Temporarily. For the next 20 years. Then, extend the cancellation indefinitely.
2x6 framing is much more common, to allow for thicker (and thus more effective) insulation.
TBH, it is incredibly amusing that you diss the (well regulated) wood framing and then propose eliminating all construction regulation.
The cost of building homes and other buildings isn't significantly impacted by regulation at this point; most structural elements are standardized such that it would cost more to use non-conventional materials.
Some significant costs are simply fixed. Grading land, digging basements, foundation, well and septic in rural areas- these things could only be done cheaper in the short term. Taking shortcuts in almost all cases would wind up with a building needing significantly costly repairs much earlier and represent a terrible ROI.
I was trying to argue that building from wood framing is a terrible idea to start with. Wood easily degenerates with time, and without proper maintenance, won't survive even 200 years. Besides, even a car can get through the wall if it runs into the building.
The city I grew up in (Kiev) builds only from reinforced concrete, bricks and stone. Somehow, the 2-bedroom apartment can cost 50-100K and such building can still be profitable.
Another data point: the commercial building are build with the concrete.
Therefore, I think that the materials price is not a significant cost in the house; neither is the labor. Current average US home price is $400K; or 5-10 average yearly salary in the area. Other countries build houses as cheap as 30-40K from high-quality materials. This brings me to the conclusion, that the difference must be the regulations, either zoning or construction.
BTW, in many countries, if a person can't afford to buy a house, they buy a land and build themselves. My current understanding that in US you need licenses to perform almost any construction work.
I went through the process of planning building a home. The total cost would have been in the 250k range.
The only time that a decision in the planning was made due to regulation was to defer putting living space above the garage. The division between garage and living space has higher requirements for flame retardants in the event that a car were to catch fire, so we put it off to keep costs down.
Because we were building in a rural area, we had the option to stick with a gravel driveway, which I suppose zoning in most cities would prohibit.
Otherwise, costs were entirely dominated by materials, labor, and the general contractor getting his cut. There is only so much you can do to eliminate costs of, say, a roof when you still have to have one.
> BTW, in many countries, if a person can't afford to buy a house, they buy a land and build themselves. My current understanding that in US you need licenses to perform almost any construction work.
This is only true for plumbing and electrical work, and even that varies by state. Typically, the only real requirement is that the work can pass an inspection.
I have done a lot of work on the house I currently live in, up to and including building a masonry heater.
This is very encouraging to hear, thank you for sharing this!
I am considering building my house (being my own general contractor and doing as much work myself as possible), but I was discouraged by the extreme number of regulations that seem to forbid anything, with just obtaining permits taking years and costing ~25K. Perhaps I was looking at the wrong state.
The 250K range that you cite is about 5 years of my current income. I honestly think I can build the house myself faster than saving those money and paying a professional.
Mind you, that number predates the crazy surge in lumber prices the past few years. From what I hear, lumber started coming back down, but I don't know how much.
State construction code is generally pretty easy to meet- it is a dense, but not unintelligible read.
Where you will likely have issues will be zoning restrictions in the US, especially in larger cities and suburbs- as you mentioned, getting permits can be spendy.
On the other hand, there are added costs to living in the country as well. Septic systems can end up being expensive if the topography and soil conditions aren't favorable. Likewise, drilling a well for water can also run $10-20k, depending on how far you are above the water table.
You might not have access to natural gas, which means longer term spending more money on propane for heat and cooking (unless you live in the south).
Internet and cell options will be one, maybe two choices, and woe be to you of your only option is satellite internet (except maybe starlink I suppose).
The last thing you want to do is rush into it. Research, research, research. Ask questions, and consider paying a local contractor for consultation before you start.
A properly built wood framed house can last 500 years. The key is moisture control.
US home prices are high due to the property value, not the value of the structure. Wood framing only contributes to 10-15% of the cost of a home.
You don't necessarily need a license to build, you just need a permit. If you're going to live in the house you're building, you can do the electrical and plumbing yourself (which typically needs a licensed worker).
This is only partly true. Home values have skyrocketed due to near zero interest rates- people can buy more home when paying less in interest, so more people can buy.
Where I live, this has resulted in long wait times for contractors, shortages in materials (lumber more so than most) to become significantly more expensive, and- as you mentioned- land priced jumping up quite a bit.
Also, even if you intend on living in the house, states vary. Between MN and WI, one allows plumbing, the other allows electrical, but neither allows you to do both (I forget which is which).
The notion that markets price accurately seems poorly supported on evidence.
In the case of housing:
- A chief cost of labour is itself housing, largely in the form of rents (in the economic sense), most especially of land and fiancing (interest), though also through the burdon of zoning and construction codes which further limit supply and flexibility. I'm not a fan of eliminating all regulation by any means, but there's a distinct difference between effective and ineffective or burdensome regulation. Note that the usual deregulation argument of "just let the market sort it out" is what I'm attacking principally in this comment.
- Natural resource pricing in particular is exceptionally inaccurate. The entire concept of "nonrenewable resources" is equivalent to "the market price supports use at rates greater than those of formation". This applies across numerous raw resources, from timber to topsoil, but most especially to fossil fuels which are consumed at a rate 5 million times that of their formation. That's equivalent to saying that the incorporated time cost is too low by a factor of millions.
- Negative externalities such as pollution, and climate change is a form of pollution, are also under-priced. This is usually seen in terms of direct energy use of housing and commercial space, but it's also present in indirect energy usage, most especially transportation. Denser and more energy-efficient designs would greatly reduce total energy use without reducing quality of life (a/k/a "economic utility").
Traditionally, construction relied heavily on locally-sourced materials. The catacombs of Paris and Rome (amongst other cities) were created in the process of quarrying stone for use in construction of the buildings above. Stone, adobe, half-timbered construction, and similar designs all incorporate locally-accessible and abundant materials, or where nonabundant materials (especially timber) are used, rely on cheaper infill materials outside structural members.
Yes, modern construction affords greater hazard protections (major cities don't regularly burn down or collapse entirely in earthquakes or hurricanes), but often through methods that while economically feasible given the market distortions I'm describing here, are not especially ecologically viable.
Another element of traditional construction that's somewhat poorly appreciated is that buildings were often little more than structural shells. Beginning around 1875, structures themselves began to be networked, not only with streets as they'd long been, but with utilities: water, gas, sewerage, electricity, telephone, cable, and more recently Internet service. Of these, water is probably one of the most destructive long-term, as introducing indoor plumbing creates humidity and moisture issues which can degrade the most robust of structures rapidly if poorly controlled. Fire is more immediately destructive, yes, but water acts over time.
The question is one of balancing one-time construction with ongoing maintenance and repair costs. Modern housing can last a century or more, which is a pretty good return. There are cultures which practice more frequent rebuilding (notably Japan). What happens long term, and whether or not humanity proceeds on a high-tech or lower-technology path isn't clear. Whichever course lies ahead, structure and landscape are likely to see major changes.
Despite I am extremely fiscally conservative, I don't think that "all" the regulations are bad. Neither I think that the market left to itself is always efficient.
The point I am trying to make through the thread, is there is a homeless catastrophy. When I am showing my family or friends in Ukraine some photos taken in Seattle, LA or san francisco, they don't believe me this is US.
In a time of an acute crisis, as now with housing, the radical measures must be taken. The problem must be attached from as many directions as possible. The simplest step is to eliminate the regulations. Sure some of the regulations are useful, sure some housing may end up of low quality, use too much resources, and even harm environment. However, in the situation when 100K people or more have no housing, the priority must be to supply enough houses over everything else.
I would agree that many regulations should be liberalised. Taking and relaxing those, especially those that directly affect density, should be a top priority. (California is trying, with ... limited success.)
I think what you'll find though is that even that step is ferociously resisted. A key reason for this is actually market-based, though it's not the transactional market but the asset market: scarcity increases value.
And this works for numerous established players within the system: individual homeowners, yes, but far more so, institutional property-holders and the financial institutions with asset portfolios based on real estate holdings.
Land-value tax advocates will argue that you can solve this problem by taxing land. The obvious problem is obvious: the same interests violently resist any asset tax increases as well. In some jurisdictions, most famously California, property taxes are constitutionally limited (by 1977's Proposition 13).
I've been thinking of possible end-runs around this, and have been thinking of the possibilities of related taxes or regulations which might have similar effects.
Vacant-property / second-property taxes (or fees, to get around the tax limitation) are one possibility. Direct taxation, or changes in asset valuation toward reserve holdings for banks and financial institutions, might be another. Requiring mortgages to be held over time, or limiting resale/bundling could have a strong impact, perhaps. All of this would reduce returns or increase holding costs of real-estate-based assets, should act as a land tax, and would tend to increase the pressures to make more intensive utilisation of land for housing, which is of course what will solve the problem.
I strongly recommend reading Shane Phillips, The Affordable City. He's been thinking about this for a while and studying the problem far more closely than I. The book is a set of suggestions / actions for improving the housing situation.
I fully agree, the housing is scarce seemingly because many want it to be scarce.
I do think it is a political issue. Thus my support for full regulation removal: if ones press for it, the actual consensus may be closer to liberalization.
Thanks also for sending the links. I have not read those, and so I don't feel I can keep a productive discussion before I read the books.
It's absolutely a political issue, and a long standing one.
If it makes you feel better, I've skimmed Phillips's book briefly but not read it in depth. It's an instruction manual.
What's required here really is some sort of political engineering.
Another insightful source, and one I've read (and re-typed), is Bernhard J. Stern's "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations". It's from 1937, but neatly captures numerous instances of, and the dynamics driving, such resistance.
I can send a PDF or ePub if you'd prefer, username <at> Protonmail. Content is not copyrighted to the best of my knowledge (US government publication, no copyright notice).
I think the core physical concerns could be addressed (in a different dialog).
Disclaimer: I've been homeless (never on the streets) and my mother died on the streets of SF.
The bigger concern is where do you park these people? The first qualifier that comes into play is: is the homeless person temporarily distressed or are they "broken" for life. In the disclaimer I gave I was of the former category and my mother was among the latter.
So this solution is meant for the latter group -- the ones who are never going to "contribute to society" again. This qualifier isn't meant to punish or demean, but to recognize that it's not necessarily cruel to move these people to remote locations (where land is cheap). But to do so humanely requires that the housing be better than tarp on a cyclone fence and affordable.
I still think cardboard could be repurposed in a safe and economical manner to aid in providing this shelter. Just like nobody would build a house how of wood without providing environmental protection this would do so as well.
Creating such homesteads would be far more cost efficient than the current efforts to sweep homelessness under the carpet.
The more intriguing question is: if one could create "free" communities such as these how would abuse of same be minimized? That is, ensuring that only the truly needy be admitted. And more interestingly, how could one establish communities like this that "bad people" don't "take over" the complex.
I'm stupidly hopeful enough to believe that these are problems that have satisfactory answers but I don't have them at the moment.
Current regulations effectively forbid to build horrible ugly high-rises that can house 50,000 people in each. Currently, it is only profitable to build luxury houses that nobody can afford.
However, the horrible ugly high-rise has the only one advantage: it is cheap, and everyone can afford it. Even a homeless guy that manage to found a crappy -paying job through his heroic effort.
I only see one way to end homelessness: make housing 20x cheaper than it is now. And that would not be possible without cancelling all housing regulations.
> As we all know, N_homeless = N_people - N_homes.
This is not even close to true. It’s regularly recognized that for many people, homelessness is rooted in disabilities, mental health issues, substance abuse issues, or other problems that hurt their ability to keep and maintain a home even if they had one.
It’s not at all a pure supply issue, although supply plays a big role in certain geographic areas. It’s a complex problem.
Keep in mind that even if you own a home, maintenance, utilities, and taxes are expensive.
I have to insist the formula is still correct in principle. Yes, there are many causes for homelessness. However, shall you magically fix all the problems you named, some people will have to remain on the streets if N_people > N_homes.
Once N_people < N_homes, only then it is possible to fix the rest of the problems efficiently.
Regarding substance abuse for example: Shall I happen to lose my home, I would have to use the named substances to soothe a terrible shame and misery associated with my new status. I could only think of fighting my harmful addictions if I can see the way out. Currently though, with number of houses almost constant, if you manage to pull a homeless person out of the streets, there will be another person priced out of their home.
Today's medicine is focused to treat the diseases, refusing to admit that people at 70-80 years old die not from disease, but from the old age.
Everybody but a few enthusiasts refuse to treat ageing instead of cancer or heart diseases. People in general refuse to treat ageing as a disease, thinking it is something natural.
I would not want a couple more miserable years on earth, I want a few million years of a healthy young life.
"Be fine with dying of old age or else you're a villain" is this weird, fundamental, Christian part of our common mythos/ethics/stories. The evil villain seeks immortality. The kindly old witch or wizard or Pope dies peacefully because it is right.
Aging is bad. We might be able to fix it. There are a thousand downsides and challenges that come with a solution to old age, but that doesn't mean leaving aging in place is better.
Why did you feel the need to slam this as “Christian?” There’s nothing in Christianity that speaks against medicine or trying to extend life. The only thing that is different for Christians is they believe death is not the final end, and thus have less reason to be afraid. They still don’t want to die.
Would you be comfortable slamming other religions in the same causal way? If not, why not?
Hacker News is US-centric. The US is Christian-centric (religiously and culturally). And there has been a truly bizarre push almost entirely among evangelicals recently to just accept mortality where its absolutely not needed (e.g., during the pandemic).
Well, particularly early Christianity hero-worshipped martyrs, and seeing as how death brought about union with Christ, there is no tradition of prizing life in the body above death.
There's a long tradition of wealthy people with various delusions of having the secrets to defeat death, from Steve Jobs to Howard Hughes and beyond. The Christian tradition scoffs at that because it always fails, and exposes the fragility of even massive earthly wealth, where the Christian priority would be to reject the riches of this world in order to build wealth in the next. That doesn't seem so weird to me.
If there is a tiger chasing you, wouldn't you try to escape or fight? Or just give up and let the tiger eat you? It is natural, tiger also want to eat, right?
They're not suicidal. But they have this big inconsistency in their ethical framework.
I mean, if an elder gets into a car accident, shouldn't we try to save them? If a fire starts in a nursing home, shouldn't the residents be evacuated and the fire put down? How come that everyone understands the importance of saving lives, but some flip 180 degrees on it if the cause looks "natural" enough and the victim is old enough?
No, my point is that I personally am very afraid of death, and would fight death from the selfish reasons.
People who support the notion of death seem not to constantly fear it themselves, but view it as something hypothetical, that they wouldn't have to face themselves in the near future (likely several decades).
I don't think I particular fear death. Fear of death is a monkey brain thing. I don't want to die because I enjoy living. But if I had the choice between dying immediately or living for a few more minutes while being pushed through a meat grinder, I think I, and everyone alive, would choose to die immediately. It's not too difficult to imagine torture and pain so horrific that even monkey brain prefers death.
Human brain can make that judgment wherever it wants. I think the general case that shitty medical routes are just not worth it is often true.
> There are a thousand downsides and challenges that come with a solution to old age, but that doesn't mean leaving aging in place is better.
Sure, not by default, but on the merits of those downside, you probably should conclude that it is in fact better to have people age. Especially if it serves to only be available to the rich and powerful. That's just a shortcut to utter dystopia.
I think most people would think that a poor person under the rule of a despotic king is still better off alive than dead. So how come that, if the king were to live for hundreds of years, that poor person would suddenly be better off dead?
I feel this line of reasoning boils down to, "if we can't have perfect equality, everyone should die".
You're assuming that the poor person gets immortality too. That's generous. Or even if they do, that they live in conditions that don't result in them dying from unnatural causes. Or just kill themselves because life is awful.
From its earliest days, following the edicts of Jesus, Christianity encouraged its devotees to tend the sick. Priests were often also physicians. According to the historian Geoffrey Blainey, while pagan religions seldom offered help to the infirm, the early Christians were willing to nurse the sick and take food to them, notably during the smallpox epidemic of AD 165-180 and the measles outbreak of around AD 250; "In nursing the sick and dying, regardless of religion, the Christians won friends and sympathisers".[6]
Following the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, leading to an expansion of the provision of care. Among the earliest were those built ca. 370 by St. Basil the Great, bishop of Caesarea Mazaca in Cappadocia in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), by Saint Fabiola in Rome ca. 390, and by the physician-priest Saint Sampson (d. 530) in Constantinople, Called the Basiliad, St. Basil's hospital resembled a city, and included housing for doctors and nurses and separate buildings for various classes of patients.[7] There was a separate section for lepers.[8] Eventually construction of a hospital in every cathedral town was begun.
Christian emphasis on practical charity gave rise to the development of systematic nursing and hospitals after the end of the persecution of the early church.[9] Ancient church leaders like St. Benedict of Nursia (480-547) emphasized medicine as an aid to the provision of hospitality.[10] 12th century Roman Catholic orders like the Dominicans and Carmelites have long lived in religious communities that work for the care of the sick.[11]
Some hospitals maintained libraries and training programs, and doctors compiled their medical and pharmacological studies in manuscripts. Thus in-patient medical care in the sense of what we today consider a hospital, was an invention driven by Christian mercy and Byzantine innovation.[12] Byzantine hospital staff included the Chief Physician (archiatroi), professional nurses (hypourgoi) and orderlies (hyperetai). By the twelfth century, Constantinople had two well-organized hospitals, staffed by doctors who were both male and female. Facilities included systematic treatment procedures and specialized wards for various diseases.[13]
Medieval hospitals in Europe followed a similar pattern to the Byzantine. They were religious communities, with care provided by monks and nuns. (An old French term for hospital is hôtel-Dieu, "hostel of God.") Some were attached to monasteries; others were independent and had their own endowments, usually of property, which provided income for their support. Some hospitals were multi-functional while others were founded for specific purposes such as leper hospitals, or as refuges for the poor, or for pilgrims: not all cared for the sick.
When and where the first hospital was established is a matter of dispute. According to some authorities (e.g. Ratzinger, p. 141), St. Zoticus built one at Constantinople during the reign of Constantine, but this has been denied (cf. Uhlhorn, I, 319). But that the Christians in the East had founded hospitals before Julian the Apostate came to the throne (361) is evident from the letter which that emperor sent to Arsacius, high-priest of Galatia, directing him to establish a xenodochium in each city to be supported out of the public revenues (Soxomen, V, 16). As he plainly declares, his motive was to rival the philanthropic work of the Christians who cared for the pagans as well as for their own. A splendid instance of this comprehensive charity is found in the work of St. Ephraem who, during the plague at Edessa (375), provided 300 beds for the sufferers. But the most famous foundation was that of St. Basil at Cæsarea in Cappadocia (369). This "Basilias", as it was called, took on the dimensions of a city with its regular streets, buildings for different classes of patients, dwellings for physicians and nurses, workshop and industrial schools. St. Gregory of Nazianzus was deeply impressed by the extent and efficiency of this institution which he calls "an easy ascent to heaven" and which he describes enthusiastically (Or. 39, "In laudem Basilii"; Or. fun. "In Basil.", P.G., XXXVI, 578-579).
Dude. Nobody has the slightest idea how to effectively treat "aging". The billionaires that engage in that fantasy might be pushing the state of the art a little bit, sure, but they do it from a starting position of absolute ignorance, and their efforts are mostly in vain.
It's like that old joke about a group of PMs that have "invented the general AI". Now all that's left to do is for some researchers and engineers to create it.
There are some ideas, in fact. They are not very well developed, though, because such research is very expensive, and even the very educated people on this side fiercely fighting the idea that extending people's life is a good thing.
Until the general public accepts the necessity of the age-related research, there won't be any effective mechanism for age reversion.
NIH yearly budget is 35B dollars. Half of that they spend on cancer research, the other half divides between the other diseases. Age research is a tiny fraction of this budget.
Until NIH spends at least 1/3 of their annual budget on fighting aging, there won't be any significant progress.
You could achieve more life by reactivating more regeneration, but DNA replication is costly when you do it over and over again, damaging telomeres.[1]
And uncontrolled regeneration can give you tumors [citation needed], so there is no easy path other than your own genetics or having a good lifestyle.
Telomeres are only one part of the equation, and they likely natural mechanism for controlling the cell differentiation. My understanding they resemble natural breaks that prevent cells to divide uncontrollably where they shouldn't.
I doubt they are the primary cause of ageing.
I prefer the theory explaining ageing as an epigenome misregulation that David Sinclair describes.
Is it fair to future generations who are yet to be born to write off the possibility of their ever being born because we're selfish and want to live forever? There is some limit to the number of humans we can support on earth, so if everyone is living millions of years (or more realistically let's say hundreds of years) we would have to drastically cut the world's reproduction rates.
Maybe I'm overthinking it, but I feel like that is the classic hubris of mankind to aspire to become gods. We want to control nature and life, yet our limited knowledge prevents us from understanding the ramifications of our actions until it is too late. (Under a White Sky is an interesting read on the subject)
> I feel like that is the classic hubris of mankind to aspire to become gods
Gods were invented by people who refused to admit their ignorance of things they couldn't understand or explain.
Every year the list of unexplainable things gets shorter and shorter. Maybe we'll never be able to explain everything, but I do believe it's within reach to understand the aging process to the point of being able to reverse or even halt it. It may not happen in our lifetimes, and the society that figures it out may not be able to deal with the ramifications properly, but they will learn over time. Just as we've done with scientific and technological advancements in the past. Sometimes you can't figure out how to deal with something until you have to deal with it.
> I feel like that is the classic hubris of mankind to aspire to become gods. We want to control nature and life, yet our limited knowledge prevents us from understanding the ramifications of our actions until it is too late.
But we are becoming gods. The problem isn't with the aspiration, the problem is that we currently suck at being gods and need to get better at it.
Aging is natural the same way heart disease and cancer are natural. Some people get unlucky and develop cancer at a young age, but we don't throw up our hands and say whelp it's just nature.
We should treat aging the same way. Some people's bodies fail them at 80, but others live to be 100+. If we develop good treatments there's no reason that everyone can't live to be 100 in relatively good health.
> Aging is natural the same way heart disease and cancer are natural
How are heart disease and cancer not natural?
Aging is also slightly different in that it's how our bodies are supposed to work as far as I understand it, which is not very well (Possibly as a cancer prevention mechanism).
The parent isn't claiming that; they are pointing out that heart disease and cancer are just as natural as aging. We spend a lot of effort to cure heart disease and cancer, so why not do the same with aging?
Ageing is natural and harmful. Hunger is natural and harmful. Earthquakes, hurricanes, plaque are natural and harmful. We should mercilessly fight all of those, and ensure either of those maladies cause people to die.
I feel the extension of young and healthy life (ideally to infinity) is a number one priority.
Surprisingly, people almost always strongly oppose when I just start expressing my views. I never understood this.
Wouldn't it be nice to see Mars colonized and terraformed? Wouldn't it be great to see the completion of a Dyson swarm and using 100 % of the Sun energy for some ultra-mega-project we can't even fathom yet? Wouldn't it be cool to see the spectacular Betelgeuse star going supernova show in 10 000 years? Wouldn't it be awesome to witness full Milky Way galaxy colonization?
If I would ever become an Earth dictator, I'd use all available resources to fight ageing :).
Even if we cure all illnesses and find a way to halt ageing at 25, and we got rid of car accidents (the biggest accidental killer) and suicide (the biggest deliberate killer), the remaining types of accident and homicide would probably still give humans a mean lifespan in the order of a few thousand years — I doubt I’d be bored of life after a mere few thousand years.
Hundreds of thousands of years would be utterly unpredictable given how big the scale change is (fun though the idea of star-lifting is), but a few thousand years is definitely still in the range of learning to master skills that I admire others demonstrating.
Not dying from aging in not the same as being immortal though. You could still die from a car accident for example, and there is of course the option to kill oneself (even if I'd consider that a tragedy.)
This is if biological aging could be _fully_ fixed, the first steps are rather to live a healthier life a bit longer.
I would expect people to live until they got bored.
I don't have the exact number, but without aging, we'd statistically only live until ~1000 on average before getting hit by a bus or choking on a bite of steak.
I was hypothesizing similar conclusion as in the article.