Re:Homelessness is about housing
by epistasis on Friday August 06, 2021 @11:37PM
(#28095467)
Agreed that there should be changes in regulation, but most of that is allowing a lot more construction.
Right now we allow neighbors, particularly wealthy and powerful neighborhoods with the most amenities and the most demand for housing, to stop new housing. This is the core problem.
Housing markets have never delivered for all of society, but right now by constraining them heavily, we are in the worst possible situation. I personally support a robust system of public housing, for all income levels that uses cross subsidy to expand the public housing system and provide for all income levels.
However, being more politically realistic, even allowing young professionals to pay laborers to build new housing, rather than forcing them to pay landlords and drive out lower income people, would be a big improvement over our current system. But even this small change seems politically intractable, unless we move zoning and permitting responsibility to the state level rather than city/county level. This is how Japan has made housing much more affordable, by not local power brokers and land owners act as rentiers.
Right now we allow neighbors, particularly wealthy and powerful neighborhoods with the most amenities and the most demand for housing, to stop new housing. This is the core problem.
Housing markets have never delivered for all of society, but right now by constraining them heavily, we are in the worst possible situation. I personally support a robust system of public housing, for all income levels that uses cross subsidy to expand the public housing system and provide for all income levels.
However, being more politically realistic, even allowing young professionals to pay laborers to build new housing, rather than forcing them to pay landlords and drive out lower income people, would be a big improvement over our current system. But even this small change seems politically intractable, unless we move zoning and permitting responsibility to the state level rather than city/county level. This is how Japan has made housing much more affordable, by not local power brokers and land owners act as rentiers.