First cities are not closed systems. Places like LA and the Bay Area have a built up demand that exceeds housing. The new housing would have to be added at an extremely high right to keep up with that demand otherwise the city just grows rather than becomes cheaper. When a city simply grows, the cheaper units never flow down to the bottom of the market as someone else will move in who lives outside the city and was previously priced out of the mid-tier housing. We see the same type of thing when designing transportation systems in a city. Adding in a new road can actually increase traffic as it ends up encouraging more people to drive who otherwise wouldn't have.

Also the housing market is not a singular market. The type of person who would live in a 3 bedroom luxury condo is not the same type of person who would live in an SRO hotel that shares a bathroom. Most people have a small window of what housing they consider acceptable and what budget they can afford. When a city gentrifies and knocks down SRO housing and replaces it with luxury condos (something that has happened a lot in both LA and the Bay Area over the last couple decades), the available units at the bottom of the market decreases in favor of the top of the market. That doesn't result in everyone in the city just moving up one rung on the housing ladder. Competition for the affordable units is now even higher because there are less of them available.

“Never” is too strong.

It happened to me in New York. I negotiated down my rent on account of nearby buildings with better amenities opening at slightly higher but similar enough pricing, net effective.

Meanwhile, Brooklyn and San Francisco were busy blocking all new construction, thereby forcing their restaurant workers to compete with millionaires.

You said yourself that the new construction had slightly higher pricing meaning your unit was in the same basic market as the new construction and also implies you likely were not shopping at "the bottom of the market". Do you think you would have been able to negotiate your rent down if the new building was in an entirely different class and was charging 2x or 3x your rent?

Yes. What do you think people bidding for ultra-lux housing do if they don’t have supply?

In New York, the ultra-wealthy have penthouses. In San Francisco, they have rows of townhouses. Which one do you think displaces more affordable housing?

Start here: San Francisco, for very specific geographic and regional reasons, will not have sufficient housing in the next century, and it will continue to have growing homeless populations. Solve for a 50-year horizon.

Some of the densest cities on the planet are on islands. San Francisco is on a peninsula. It is a low density city with tons of infill potential. That densification potential, together with slow population growth in the developed world, makes the problem perfectly tenable. (That said, homeowners would lose money. So not holding my breath.)

In the short term they would. And in the long term, they would gain wealth but lose their iron grip on the city. Never underestimate the seductiveness of power. As long as San Francisco’s renters believe density is impossible or will price them out, homeowners (specifically, about half a dozen families) will retain their lock on the city.

You mean, "for very specific political and cultural reasons". There's nothing in San Francisco's geography that most world cities haven't solved.

I don't really see this as a gotcha. Those would-be new arrivals to the city don't materialize out of thin air. Presumably they left some other place behind, and their migration is freeing up housing stock wherever they leave behind. The underlying dynamic is still the same. New housing increases low-end affordability by soaking up mid-end demand for old housing stock.

Maybe you build housing in the Bay Area, and all it does is bring in new people who pay the same market rate. But that migration will free up housing stock in Ohio. The only difference is that instead of helping the house poor in your local area the policy helps the house poor in flyover country. Unless you place a lot more moral weight on helping Californians than Midwesterners, what's the difference?

The difference is that housing costs take up a much higher percentage of wages in California than Ohio and as a result there are many many more homeless people in California than Ohio.

Sure, if you want to take a holistic view of the entire planet, the people have to come from somewhere and there is a finite demand for global housing. However that just isn't a practical way to look at it when the problems are localized. Different cities and regions have varying levels of desirability. It makes sense to build housing in those cities and regions for a wide spectrum of the population. The solution shouldn't just be "if you are poor, move to Ohio".

[0] https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf

[1] https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...

You don't need to go as far as Ohio, just a commuter suburb.

The U.K. hasn’t built 300k+ homes per year (or anything like that) since the government stopped building houses - the private sector has never picked up the slack. And the result is hugely increased prices.

Is the difference that council housing is in a large part publicly funded? Difference in the permitting process?

I don't know how to describe this but sometimes people say things that drive an agenda which from a first glance support the agenda but when you dig deep down into the details you realize that there is a second message that completely contradicts the actual agenda the comment pushes.

For example, "induced demand" is something that happens on roads because they are free to use by any road user. By building wider roads you make it very cheap to drive both in terms of congestion and money. Public transport costs money, is space efficient and slow. Driving a car is inefficient, convenient, fast and when you consider the "better service" it is worth the additional cost. Therefore people will stop using public transport and start driving cars, because roads are free.

This almost contradicts the agenda because housing isn't provided for free, you have to pay for it and you have to pay a huge premium for inefficient but convenient housing (single family homes). Of course, the problem is that there is a subsidy that encourages inefficiency similar to free roads, namely property tax freezes. An old single family home may have a lower tax burden than a new apartment. It's effectively a subsidy to homeowners that haven't moved out. However, the real contradiction lies in the fact that the argument hasn't been against property tax freezes, instead the criticism is aimed at new construction, which does not suffer from the subsidy problem.

The existence of SRO hotels and similarly "special" dwellings are symptoms of severe housing deficit yet they're portrayed as necessary. There's no reason that the bottom of the housing market needs to be specially gimped, especially when LA is paying $2600 per month for a tent. In a less starved & dysfunctional market, old and adequate housing stock can satisfy that role.

You're alluding to "induced demand," which does not claim that adding a new road increases traffic. When it becomes "cheaper" (in terms of time) to drive, more people will start driving, but the cost of driving (time to get from A to B) still goes down.

This is basic economics, except with time instead of money. Adding a new road is a positive supply shock, which causes demand to rise until equilibrium, but the new price is going to be below the old price.

See: https://youtu.be/6dwSIO_Slhc?t=236, except imagine the supply shock is in the other direction.

In reality people are stubborn. We chase sunk costs and we repeat inefficient behavior because it is habit. People therefore won't necessarily choose to drive based on an evaluation of that individual trip. They will base it on things like whether they own a car, whether they have an unlimited pass for their local mass transit system, and simply what they did the last time they made the same trip. Therefore traffic can actually exceed where it was before as new and improved roads can lead to people buying more cars and people being less reliant on public transit.

https://www.thecgo.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Can-We-Bui... (Pages 8-10)

I used to live in San Luis Obispo, CA. There's a house in the middle of town that clearly used to be an enormous beautiful mansion. It looks like it belongs on a plantation. It's still beautiful, but it's now 9 funky apartments.

Street view: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.2749914,-120.6611941,3a,75y,...

>Was it switched to 9 apartments because the place fell down market as it aged or was it retrofitted because there is very little market for a single family house like that in SLO?

Definitively, I would have to invite my extended family to fill the building.

>Also are we even sure those individual apartments are truly down market?

They definitively cost less than renting the entire building, which is what stickfigure's anti-apartment stance would mandate.

> It certainly doesn't look like a "slum" like you mentioned in your first comment.

Of course not, it can't look like a slum because the exterior hasn't changed. We are running into a problem here. The classification or living arrangement is apparently the deciding factor behind the "character of the neighborhood" and whether it is a slum. How can that be? Well, maybe it's not the building or the architecture or the zoning and so on, maybe it's the inhabitants that turn the place into a slum? You certainly can't see them from the outside.

We also run into another problem, if there are "evil" people that turn neighborhoods into slums by their mere presence then how do you distinguish between slum people and non slum people? It should be impossible in practice. Of course, there is a reliable(in the sense that it is self fulfilling) visual proxy for that.

Only if people actually live in those houses, and they're bought by people living in the cheaper houses right now who then move up in to the new housing stock.

If people buy the new houses as investments and leave them empty most of the year then it has no impact on the rest of the housing market, or if people from outside buy them and move to the city then it just increases the population of the city with no effect on the lower social strata. This is precisely what happens in places like London. There's a boom in house building but it's often apartments bought by foreign investors (allegedly for money laundering... ).

Directly building more social housing would have a far greater impact than trying to affect cheap housing stock by 'trickle down' methods.

I do see your point about foreign investors though, they will view the house as a bank account, one that won't lose money, and will probably appreciate, and is safe from the corruption (or corruption investigations) of their home country. And they have money they need to put somewhere, so why not there?

But even they would probably prefer someone to be living in it and paying them in the meantime, because that improves the return by a lot, and doesn't put the principal at risk.

Let's also not forget the housing crisis saw a lot of money pouring into bad investments. Assuming people only make wise investments is naive. The market is crazy right now with people paying over asking and waiving inspections. A lot of people are going to ride that train over the cliff.

Those returns are underwritten by voters rejecting new housing. If that political landscape changes, the incentives for landholders evolve.

Political NIMBYism probably does play some part along with the pandemic, but again, that doesn't mean these investors are paying attention to that. There is a gold rush on at the moment.

Currently living in zone 2 north-east London and house prices have seemed pretty flat for the last couple of years. Flats have had a surge due to current stamp duty holiday... and prices outside London seem to have increased a lot with people anticipating a permanent move to remote/hybrid working.

Taxes on empty properties aren't high, but you still need to consider maintenance... and there's an opportunity cost of leaving a house empty rather than renting it out.

Just interested in your data - thanks!

Update: found https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/pretty-vacant in one of your sibling posts - was that what you were referring to? I just read it (on my phone, so might have missed it), but didn't see any numbers for investment returns here... and there was a fairly-extensive section talking about London property being used for money-laundering instead - is that what you're referring to?

About once every 2 weeks his son pops by to make sure the house has not burned down or had a pipe burst.

I don’t know the details as I'm a renter but from speaking with a few Realtors they mentioned the companies the worked at did this.

Even if we buy the exotic premise that investors would buy houses and leave them empty - generating zero rental income for these greed driven people - as an investment, we still have to explain why they would only do this with new housing stock.

Why can't you do the same trick with existing housing?

Where I live the housing prices are expected to go up roughly 15% this year. So someone buying a house for 600k can expect to sell it for 690k making 90k. That is 7500 USD a month. If you wanted to make that much money from rent you would have to squeeze 4 or 5 tenants into the property. It is simply not worth the hassle trying to rent buildings out when house prices go up at such a high rate

It's not either/or, which is why I'd assume the parent poster called it weird. That investor could make the appreciation and of top of it could make the rental income. So it is weird, from their perspective, to leave it empty. If they're flipping real estate for profit (as opposed to buying a home to live) why reject the extra income.

Also, selling a rental property with a solid history of rental income tends to be better than one with a history of sitting empty. Although that probably doesn't apply to mansions.

Make $7500/month from house value increase, and also, say, $4k from rent.

This increases the resale value since the house is generating income to the buyer.

Fortunately, this is already a metric that is tracked, called the vacancy rate. And what we see is, that in in-demand cities, that have high rents, the vacancy rate is pretty low.

So, if the vacancy rate is 5%, that means that if you build 100 houses, then 95 of them are going to be lived in. Yes, it sucks that those other 5 houses are not lived in, but those extra 95 houses, in our example, are still a good thing.

> This is precisely what happens in places like London

It is really not. A quick google search shows that the vacancy rate is as low as any other major in-demand city.

So yes, the rich do leave I think more places empty in some places because they can afford to and because the economic calculation is not simple. If you rent and want to end the rental later you end up in a bad spot.

Ok, this is a nice story that one could make up. But once again, my point is that vacancy rate is something that is already tracked.

In San Francisco, the vacancy rate is about 3.5%.

So, in other words, regardless of whatever story you are making up about parents, or rent control or whatever, the actual data shows, that the vacancy rate is very low, and therefore not much of a problem.

I know someone who sublet an extra room to someone, a year later her wonderful lease was destroyed, landlord sued her and the women never paid a dime, could not be evicted, claimed she felt unsafe and got a restraining order against the person actually paying rent etc so they ended paying rent on two places, one to live in and one for the women.

I mean - this stuff does turn you off renting a small bit.

That said, supply is REDICULOUSLY constrained around here, red tape is nuts, minimum requirements crazy, affordability payments high etc. So yeah, no question that there is artificial scarcity.

Manhattan https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/american-h...

Seattle https://www.seattleweekly.com/news/luxury-apartments-whos-bu...

Melbourne https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/ghost-tower-warn...

Boston https://bostonagentmagazine.com/2018/09/11/study-bostons-new...

Vancouver: The article claims that there is ~5% vacancy rate. This is actually below the normal rate for vacancies in the US. Condos have a higher vacancy rate, but the article offers a reasonable explanation.

Manhattan: Ultra-luxury home vacancies aren't the same as luxury apartment buildings. Most people are not buying $5-$10 million condos. And even if the buildings are unsold, they aren't necessarily unoccupied.

Seattle: Again focuses on "foreign investors" and unsold apartments. No concrete data on how many those apartments are actually empty.

Melbourne: > Prosper Australia project director Karl Fitzgerald said, based on the water data, Melbourne's actual vacancy rate was closer to 7 per cent.

7% is on the high-end of vacancy rates, but if you reduced that down to 5% then the effect on prices would still be low.

Boston: No data on vacancy rates. Again, sale != occupancy. There are plenty of property management companies that build out luxury apartment buildings and directly rent to people.

The real issue is lack of housing, which can be fixed by letting developers build more housing, including high-end housing.

The Manhattan article links to https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/realestate/new-york-decad... which says "Nearly half of new condo units in Manhattan that came to market after 2015... remain unsold, according to a December analysis of both closed sales and contracts" and "7,050 new condo units available for sale in Manhattan in January [2020]"

Melbourne: "Docklands... 17 per cent consuming no water in 2013" and "12.4 per cent of Cardinia and Clyde homes reported no water use."

Boston: "12 of Boston’s newest and biggest luxury developments could remain largely empty despite having sold most of their available condo units to buyers."

Manhattan: Unsold != unoccupied.

Melbourne: Now we're cherrypicking districts that have less than 15,000 residents total in a city of 5 million in one specific year? This is essentially p-hacking to support a non-existent narrative.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinia,_Victoria

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyde,_Victoria

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands,_Victoria

Boston: "could remain largely empty." This is speculation. Where is the data?

"Wealth investment leaves an estimated 125,000 homes in London without anyone living in them."

There are 268,385 empty homes in England according to the government (people get a tax break in most parts of England if they own a property that is unoccupied and unfurnished so its quite easy to track empty homes), and half of them are luxury houses in London.

I'm not saying that's definitely the case everywhere, but I am saying it's worth considering.

Also, the report doesn't tell us how many non-vacant homes there are in their survey area, so we have to guess. London reportedly has 3.59 million dwellings, so 25,000 vacant homes would only represent 0.7% of homes being vacant. Even if you use the higher 125,000 number, that's still only 3.5% of all homes. That's a fairly low vacancy rate, and about right for a city.

Even after the pandemic, housing officials report a 3.4% vacancy rate, which is the highest in eight years. https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/london-apartment-vacancy.... Before that, it was only at 1.8%. That's extremely low.

You can tax vacant homes, but in general, those taxes have a very small effect on housing prices. It's far, far more effective to allow people to build more housing, including luxury housing.

If the economy cannot consume all the products the suppliers produce you need to encourage consumption.

If you perfectly hit the balance (unlikely but in theory possible) then you need to do... nothing, neither savings nor consumption increases.

It depends on what your economy needs.

But the thing is, we don't even need to build more housing. There are more than 30 times more vacant homes [0] than there are homeless. It makes the most sense to redistribute resources more effectively and efficiently. We should be looking at our system as a whole when it clearly doesn't distribute necessary resources effectively (e.g. food insecurity, wealth inequality, homelessness when there are 30 times more vacant homes than there are homeless, etc.)

[0]: https://247wallst.com/housing/2019/09/30/there-are-over-17-m...

Usually they are where there is a housing surplus, because population in the area has declined.

I predict offering the people in my Oakland neighborhood shantytowns housing in abandoned rustbelt towns will not find many takers.

[0]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-06/why-is-ho... [1]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-homelessness-housing/... [2]https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-46891392

We do not uh have the luxury of building luxury housing only then waiting 40 years for it to eventually become affordable.

Someone who studied this in Toronto by overlaying nighttime photos to find units where the lights are literally never on: https://www.movesmartly.com/articles/condo-units-sitting-emp...

https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/musne8/dispro...

https://www.blogto.com/real-estate-toronto/2021/02/real-esta...

This is just another symptom of the major lack of housing in the US, and needs to be solved as well, but it highlights how difficult it is to alleviate homelessness when there are other casualties of the housing market as well. By all means, build as much housing as soon as possible, but some of it will probably need to be specifically targeted at homeless or poorer populations.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/04/a-majority-...

price = F(supply, demand) therefore demand = G(price, supply) and supply = H(price, demand)

Still, we need to remove barriers that prevent middle-class housing from being built, such as parking minimums and other bureaucracy.

San Francisco has ~400k housing units. If you build a million more, prices will go down very sharply.

When there is more housing units than people who want to live there, prices go towards zero, whether they're "luxury" or not.

I mean the idea is correct, but I don't think we can depend on the private market to deliver on this concept.

Don't get me wrong SF badly needs more housing and needs to approve tons more, I'm just saying there are limits to the outcome. At some point for profit developers will not build because they can't make a return.

Now if we had a not for profit government agency that steadily built housing regardless of the market conditions, say they were working toward a vacancy rate goal, now that could create surplus housing.

You might see friction there though in the private market would pull back.

Most people understands it does it if you add a million units, but for some reason they can't grasp that each new unit contributes.

I was not predicting anyone would build a million units overnight, certainly not accidentally.

> At some point for profit developers will not build because they can't make a return.

SF has been very near this point for decades. Because new construction is mostly illegal, and if not extremely expensive and slow. Because of explicit policy from the SF BoS.

If housing construction were legalized in SF, say by adopting the regulations of Houston or Tokyo, there would be an enormous construction wave in the city. No one can predict to what level, but after that has transformed the city we can take stock and see if any other measures need to taken.

But I don't see SF doing anything of the kind without at least a decade of hesitation. The city is far too conservative to change.

Unfortunately as the Tiktaalik mentioned, we have a housing shortage now. So the trickle-down economics of luxury housing won't work for at least a generation.

Also, all the actual luxury housing that ends up being built is bought by wealthy investors buying their third or fourth property. Just look at the housing market in London.

> Throughout all of American history, new housing has almost exclusively been relatively expensive housing.

Eichlers and Craftsman homes were targeted squarely at the middle class of their time. Now in the Bay Area, the price of a "middle class" home is probably skewed to something around $1,000/sqft, but I don't know if middle class wages can actually afford that.

[0] - https://cityobservatory.org/how-luxury-housing-becomes-affor...

And no, “all” the luxury housing is not being bought by investors. Even in places where this is a problem it is nowhere near “all”. Investors can also just buy existing housing. Once again, what you anti-housing folks are claiming as a problem of building new housing, is a problem that is going to happen anyway and will be even worse if we don’t build new housing.

People living a $1mil shithole aren't going to be moving into a $2mil luxury home. You need to find the buyer that can afford a $2mil luxury house. This is why the problem takes so long to work out. Prices are inflated, and luxury homes will be inflated even more - the people that would normally buy them aren't going to be able to move and afford them. Combine this with how people can just sit on homes rather than sell them, it's gonna take a real long time for prices to make their way down.

Anecdote time

I’m nowhere near rich, but we recently upgraded from a condo to a house and kept our condo. Our intention is to rent it out until our kid is old enough to move out and give it to them.

What data are you basing this claim off of? Many people (especially young people in finance and tech) move every few years, and some of them want luxury apartments. That reduces the demand for cheaper housing stock. A 25 y/o moving to SF isn't going to buy an apartment and stay there for their entire life.

This is not a rhetorical question, by the way. I'm genuinely curious as I've never been to LA or spent significant time in parts of the US where this problem is at its worse. I live in the midwest and there are plenty of places I could buy or rent here if I needed - cheap and expensive - but I'm lucky enough to have a decent place now so I can be picky about the next one.

It can be hard to immediately see that there is a shortage of something like housing, because it’s rare that people will actually end up without housing because there isn’t enough to go around. But this is because people will rationally choose to live further and further from their jobs and commute longer and longer distances as the shortage drives prices up near their workplace, rather than choosing to go without housing.

Luckily, I haven't had to move in a while, but it was bad enough that when I got my place, I signed for it purely based on the opinion of a friend who could go see it for me. If I had waited the extra week to come home from the trip I was on, it almost certainly would not have been vacant.

    The best way to lower the cost of housing is to 
    increase the supply of housing. And the best way 
    to do that is to unleash developers whatever is 
    most profitable whenever and whoever they want 
    without government regulation and NIMBY activists 
    getting in their way. 

I spent quite a few years living in a "trendy" area where housing developers crammed as much housing into it as possible. The results were not pretty. Very easy to create an environmental and quality-of-life nightmare which is particularly unfair to those already living in the area, with no say over what becomes of it.

The goals of housing developers are not necessarily aligned with that of society.

because cheap housing falls from the sky. It trickles down, yknow. Some people get rich first, then we all profit from their breadcrumbs. There's a god, and god is just. Jeez.