13
votes
People are moving to smaller cities in search of affordable houses that don't exist
Link information
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- Title
- Don't Uproot Your Life to Buy a Home in an Affordable City
- Published
- May 23 2019
- Word count
- 1404 words
I think we shouldn't underestimate the effects of deregulation on the housing market either. Cities may be bearing the brunt of the speculation/exploitation of living space but out in the country real estate is also a prime security for the rich.
This is the most convincing theory I’ve heard. It’s a derivative of Baumal’s Cost Disease, only applied to the productivity of investable financial instruments rather than the productivity of labor supply.
This is also why “increase the supply of housing” focused fixes that most market friendly YIMBY types advocate will be inadequate to solving the problem. Supply will never grow fast enough, or in the right places, to actually bring costs down to something we’d call “affordable.” We need to build vast quantities of public housing with price controls on how expensive it can sell for. It’s the only way.
In the US that’s largely a consequence of racially biased policing, poor maintenance, and concentration of abject poverty. These wouldn’t happen if public housing construction was a conscious project for middle class housing rather than a residualist project to shove all the poor people in. Plenty of countries do public housing construction without these problems.
Singapore designs their real estate market to target affordable middle class housing. They build nice, durable flats that are priced for people to buy at a reasonable rate. Those who can’t afford it are given vouchers. Those who don’t need the space are given generous tax incentives to sell and downsize. The result is that despite being one of the densest and richest large cities in Asia the housing prices are surprisingly decent.
This guy is being a little disingenuous I think. On the one hand, your statement is absolutely true. The guy is comparing the largest (by far) city in the entire country to smaller ones. Obviously there won't be as many options.
Then he's pretending that DFW is some tiny, super affordable city. It's the 4th largest in the country. Not exactly a great place to search for cheap real-estate.
I know it may be blasphemous to say, but the whole idea of taking on massive debt in the form of loans for both personal education and housing is something I find extremely problematic. Even credit cards are something that makes me feel queasy. If the majority of the productive capacity of a nation is tied up in paying back loans to corporations that are essentially just sitting there passively sucking up our collective financial future, what are those passive earners investing in? Probably financial instruments that the same people they are putting into financial servitude are priced out of: real-estate and private equity in other corporations.
If worker productivity continues to go up, but the people who actually become wealthy are those continuing to skim more and more off of those actually doing the work, I don’t know how the local and global economy will sustain that. The end-game looks a lot like company stores where workers have no option but to work until they die and own nothing of value.
This is exactly what I was going to say. You can't have affordable housing while housing is treated as an investment. The two are directly at odds with each other because to keep something affordable means that others would have to accept devaluing their investment.
It's also one of the many sources of NIMBYism that's a plague on city growth.
I don't really understand the problem here, the prices of property in the most popular areas is increasing according to the article and these people are turning up their noses to properties they can afford in the areas they want because they either don't like the neighbors or the property needs some elbow grease. If this is all in good faith, then the author of this article and the people in it are entitled brats with zero awareness of how real estate works. At one point they ramble about the properties they're being shown by realtors. Of course a realtor is going to steer you towards a more expensive property, they work on commission. They'll take you out and show you a bunch of crap that's in your price range and then try to get you to spend more on something nicer.