Even two years of covid couldn't do it.
My jurisdiction gave free money to everyone that lost their job/income, with far more liberal eligibility criteria than unemployment insurance had, at fixed amounts conveniently we’ll above the monthly rental costs for most.
Kept the rental market propped up.
As an analogy to the dead internet hypothesis I present the dead real estate market hypothesis. Increasingly it's just investors buying and selling properties from each other.
And it's not just a hypothesis. China built enough homes to house its population twice over, yet it's not reflected in the prices. All because everyone and their grandma is investing in real estate.
Yes, but this is reflected in China's vacancy rate: 22% by some estimates.
In the US, home vacancy rates are sub-1%.
Not saying people aren't treating homes as investments, but it seems clear we also have a supply issue.
"Real Estate is Investment" should naturally lead to overproduction as investment-only properties get built to satisfy that demand—as we see in China. In the US, we don't see that.
Property taxes in the US mean you can't speculate so easily on property (you lose ~1% value a year). But they have 99 year leases instead, but everyone thinks the government will let you renew those with minimal fees.
China had massive home overproduction because the goddamned totalitarian government told builders to build or else. It was not market forces.
How do you suppose we do that in the US? Especially with this administration?
In the US, builders don't build 100 starter homes because it is more profitable and easier to build a couple McMansions and sell them for crazy prices. THOSE are the homes that get built as "investments". No builder will benefit from producing a large supply of homes, so they don't. The market will not self correct.
Exempt or lighten planning requirements for affordable housing construction. California is going in this direction now.
There are other levers like subsidized financing for developers building homes targeting a certain price range as well as favorable tax treatment of those profits.
A lot of these have would probably have some bipartisan support.
Lots of people taken advantage of this here. It is a pressure release valve available to those who can't afford commercial construction or boomers wanting 5x the real value they paid for their home. You can build whatever you can afford without oversight so long as it's only for your family. Most people end up just dragging in budget prefab, but you get the odd earth bag house, shipping container, one man shop carpenter, or just rich people with weird design ideas not allowed elsewhere.
Of course the naysayers have screamed bloody murder about everyone dying in a fire, but this has been law for 2 decades now and none of the apocalyptic prophecies came true.
In the US, the largest amount of government land is held by the Feds and they keep increasing the limits on what the land can be used for year after year. Figure out how to make new home building key to government finances like in China and you will INSTANTLY have the problem solved and even have over supply.
Some say there's little demand but that's horse shit. People snap up much worse desolate land around me to homestead for mucho dinero. Building a house with your own hands on public or unowned desolate lands is the most essential of basic human fulfilments. The youth cannot afford the already built homes nor their construction, so they ought to be able to take matters in their own hands.
To build a starter home I not only had to go to bumfuck Egypt with the most libertarian zoning anywhere near jobs I can find, i also had to rule out the 9/10 of properties with practically irrevocable covenants made by self righteous boomers back in the 80s who already built their pig farm shithole and don't want their precious livestock living near anything but a mansion.
Then I had to find a rare loophole around code compliance and inspections so I could DIY it on weekends and not be subject to weekday inspections. Most codes want stuff like an expensive egress window even though no one living in the house is bigger than a much smaller sliding window, and it goes on infinitum.
Then I had to find a place they hadn't outlawed water yet through a grandfathered well, and finally get buddy enough with the power company to actually get them to run power without royally fucking me with arbitrary requirements. Almost the entire system is designed around grandfathered protectionism while kicking the next generation in the teeth with entirely different and constrained rules voted on by people who who live in places that don't even conform to the requirements imposed on you, which of course gives them a free artificial value boost as well.
For example in some countries, many students share a house. Whereas in other countries, every student will have a whole house to themselves.
In some places, children will get their own house at 16. In others, children, parents, and grandparents are all sharing one house.
The people who actually take care of a community aren't "entitled" for wanting to be part of it.
That's homeowner vacancy rate. Rental vacancy rate is around 6.9%:
This is because a ton of them are in the Chinese equivalent of like Boise, Idaho where demand is fairly low. People want to live where the high paying jobs are.
Better example: northern Alaska.
Additionally, since 2004, there’s a law that allows local authorities to take over empty homes and sell them, to make sure they are used for housing
Not sure what the effects have been of either
And secondly... Are the second vacation homes really the problem? I'd guess the problem begins around 3rd or 5th, not the second one, which is a fairly common and usually also a good thing to have - for both the owner and the society.
I'm not sure if you mean owning one primary home and two vacation homes, or one primary home and one vacation home when you mention a "second vacation home," but either way this strikes me as out of touch.
In 2024, US home ownership rate is 65.6%. (https://www.bankrate.com/homeownership/home-ownership-statis...)
In 2022, 4.6% of housing was comprised of second homes. (https://eyeonhousing.org/2024/09/the-nations-stock-of-second...)
4.6% of 65.6% is 3%, meaning _at most_ 3% of Americans own a second home (but this doesn't account for citizens that own 3 or more homes, so the actual percentage is even lower.)
I don't consider that to be common. I also wonder: why is it a good thing for society (or even most homeowners?)
We already have speculation tax in Canada.
They tried this in China. People would just get divorced so each partner had their own home. It turns out you can easily find someone in your family to "buy" a house as well.
Its the same thing as taxes. No one is stopping you from making up fake receipts. But you don't do that because its fraud.
One thing missing - renters cannot homestead their apartment and so the funds that own the apartment have to charge more rent to cover taxes on those apartments.
Commercial real estate is generally illegal anywhere dense housing is also illegal.
While the supply of house units per capita is at the record-high levels.
Reality: housing is cheap, abundant, and high quality. Just not near the downtown cores of large cities.
Of course, variation exists
Im happy to trade that for having to spend an hour in car/train a few times a year to see a show or museum.
I would take a pay cut to work closer to home.
Ditch the suburbanite identity politics and start advocating for the development of shows and museums in your local area that you could walk to, instead of taking your money away from your economic center at the benefit of oil companies (bc let's be real, suburban identity sells car dependence and even if you take the train, all the cultural momentum from the propaganda shaped your life decisions to move there and what's that train run on?).
It's not for everybody but it's not an oil scam either.
Your situation is a completely irrelevant red hearing for the discussion we are having. You are actually rural, and are describing an actually rural life—not a suburban rural identity & not an urban suburban identity.
If you don’t even have state or county roads, like no paved roads going anywhere near where you are and there’s nothing around and there’s no police around and everything else you described then that’s not at all what I am responding to. Because what you describe sounds to me like you don’t have anything within walkable distance, and I was directly responding to somebody who says that they have shit they can walk to.
You are living an actual rural life because you are outside the range of services provided, relying on yourself instead and in terms of my own personal Urbanist Theory that’s exactly how it should be.
For this conversation, we're talking about the cores of tier 1 cities where the high paying jobs are most abundant. I considers a location suburban if they are predominantly single-family homes and if many of them commute into the Metro for work.
I'm going to ignore all that identity politics stuff because frankly I don't understand what you were trying to say there
I do implore you to attempt to reengage your brain, despite the the mental anguish it will require to actually comprehend what somebody was saying to you when it conflicts with an identity you don’t know that you hold.
When I moved to US, I chose to live pretty much as far as I can from the nearest large city that wouldn't be considered straight up "rural" (although we do have a bunch of farms around here). And the reason is because I don't want to live in what is, in effect, a giant human anthill.
It’s OK to admit that you don’t actually know or maybe that you even have learned something today, but I did actually do a research paper with how and why we came to live in suburbs as a core point of research, and guess what? It was a result of master planned communities by white supremacists and their oil and motor industry buddies.
Most of the best old suburbs in America were built organically through bit by bit demand around street cars, not car cars. Then the motor industry executives and oil industry executives got together and lobby the government to create the crime of jaywalking, to buy up all the street cars and remove them from American cities, to build out the highway system, and to change zoning laws, to encourage if not outright force the building of car dependent American suburbia.
Do not get me wrong streetcar, suburb, designed suburbs are fantastic, walkable compact, wonderful wonderfully tight communities. But today in today’s world this year of our Lord 2025? Today those street car suburbs are urban compared to the car dependent suburban sprawl that we have now.
Personally I find city people the most boring and socially/culturally stunted because they think a cultivated/curated 'mall like setting of stuff' = culture. They also tend to think buying access to art/culture because they have money = having artist style/culture. The music scenes/art scenes are overly (often self) curated pap.
Lots of cities 'diverse' districts are just... suburbs... that the cities absorbed.
Even for things like 'exotic' foods I routinely find bombed out suburban strip mall restaurants to be superior and less 'catered' to American Paletes than places in cities that have to be more generic because they serve such a large population.
I also have personally found when I have been lonely in life, being lonely in the city is the worst kind of loneliness.
Looking out my window, I can't even see another house. If I twist my neck, I can see a neighbor's barn about half a mile away, though.
It is sprawling, car-dependent, low-density development I can't abide, the kind of cul-de-sac-ridden suburbs the US has been building around its urban fringes for the last 80-odd years. It feels suffocating to be surrounded by mile after mile of other people's stuff, with nowhere to go but strip malls and nothing to do but drive from one parking lot to another. People talk about wanting a house with a yard, but when that yard is the only place you can be without justifying your presence there by participating in some transaction, it can feel like a very confining space indeed.
Given equal cost of a home, most people would prefer to live in a city. Especially if you look globally, cities are absolutely trampling suburbs with demand. Yes, people in the suburbs often chose that preferentially, but there are less people in suburbs.
In America, suburbs are disproportionately popular. I’m guessing that has more to do with civics than preferences. Most of suburbanites I know in America either live near their suburban job, or express some fear/distrust of various aspects of city life - and it’s mostly related to cars and transportation.
My point is that if you remove jobs and pay from the current incentives, city demand would decrease dramatically.
I agree that if you remove zoning, many areas of single family homes would be built up if they are in and around urban cores. That isnt new demand, but existing demand, not able to be expressed by current law.
However, my point is that if your [random small town] job paid the same as NY or SF, you would see a flux out of those cities to the small towns.
WE are describing two different situations.
> you would see a flux out of those cities to the small towns
Having actually tried this, hated it, and moved back, I am skeptical.
This mistakes the price one person can pay for a piece of land with the price many people can pay to to use the same land. A single family home does rent for more money than a condo if they are on the same block in the city.
A major reason zoning exists is because with out it you'd have developers and investors out-bidding the homeowners to redevelop plots of land as they became available.
It's a collective response to the power of $$$ in a free market.
Even if all of those condo purchaser who would buy a unit in the building that replaced a single home would've preferred a single home, they didn't have a direct say in that lot being turned into condos. The person with the most money did.
And of course, they couldn't have all fit there. But I am skeptical of "enough people with money want to live in your area now" as being a sufficient justification to say that local control has to be eliminated. Why favor the future richer potential-resident over the current resident? (I would extend this broadly, for incumbency protections for renters and owners alike - why is it an inherent good for an existing area to get denser forever? Why not encourage less centralized development? Why would "the people with the most money should get to decide how this area is developed?" the best plan?)
People work minimum-wage jobs and choose to live in cities. These individuals are not preferencing a city for the wage, but rather the lifestyle, access to amenities, the lower cost options it offers, car-free life, etc.
I think it's super disingenuous to claim that people only live in cities for work. There are tons of social options in cities, tons of civic amenities, and tons of lifestyle differences that draw people to a city.
> their perfectly natural tendency to want as much space/land/house as they can afford
Is this a natural tendency? I don't think this "natural" tendency holds true globally, and I'm even skeptical it actually holds true in America, where suburbs are unusually popular.
> I'm quite confident the majority of suburbanites would strongly prefer living on 20 acres if they could still get to work in 20 minutes and the grocery store in 10.
I'm quite confident that the majority of people (ie city dwellers, which are the majority of humans) would preferentially prefer the access and amenities of a city home at the expense of 20 acres. Which is the reality we see globally.
But it's of course a ridiculously illogical claim that people would prefer rural living if only it had all the benefits of city living. What are the benefits people derive from the hypothetical 20 acres? What does it even mean in this context, because it's incompatible the whole premise of this argument. People prefer "grocery store in 10 [minutes]" more than 20 acres, and that's why cities exist.
People working minimum wage jobs have very little choice in their lives and certainly can't afford to move arbitrarily.
> I think it's super disingenuous to claim that people only live in cities for work. There are tons of social options in cities, tons of civic amenities, and tons of lifestyle differences that draw people to a city.
All of which is available to people that don't live in the city. We have various forms of transportation options. Hell I once flew halfway across the country just to catch KMFDM in concert. At no point during that trip did I feel the urge to move to Denver.
> I'm quite confident that the majority of people (ie city dwellers, which are the majority of humans) would preferentially prefer the access and amenities of a city home at the expense of 20 acres.
I'm dead-ass certain that's your own biases speaking. Of course we could settle this if either of us can be assed to put together a poll and go flog it on social media. Want to co-author a paper?
Not really. It is a big difference between having mat 30 min to gym, school, whatever or whatever and not even needing a car and having to drive almost an hour to get anywhere. It is difference between "I can and will actually do it" vs "nope, cant do it".
> Hell I once flew halfway across the country just to catch KMFDM in concert.
That is definitely not something an average person would do on the regular.
Man if you think adult humans are that helpless I really don't know what to tell you. They aren't, but apparently you'd need some convincing.
> That is definitely not something an average person would do on the regular.
Sure, it's a pretty extreme example. It's nothing for folks to drive up the eastern seaboard between Atlanta and Baltimore to catch shows though. Anyway point stands, none of the entertainment and cultural experiences that folks who are stuck in major urban areas use to tout the experience are denied to folks who don't live in the city.
It is not about being helpless. It is about day having certain amount of hours, you needing minimum 8 of them for work, another 8 for sleep and showering, then another time for cooking, cleaning, putting kids to sleep, ensuring they do homework and simply being at home supervising them. If your kids cant engage in hobbies without you driving them there and back, then congratulation, you just spent 3 hours driving and waiting.
Additional 3 hours a day needed to get to work, back from work, to gym and from gym are a time you simply cant use for anything else.
> none of the entertainment and cultural experiences that folks who are stuck in major urban areas use to tout the experience are denied to folks who don't live in the city.
Sure, it is just that they require more effort, time and money to get there and back. So much, that you just wont do it on the regular.
It is numbers game. Its not about what any single wants best, but how many times you can sell people their 2nd choice using the same land.
Some dream of living in a condo in the city, some of a rural ranch house. I don't think anybody dreams of a rural condo.
This already happened during Covid, and no country substantially de-urbanized. In fact, urban real estate prices skyrocketed.
The only cities where prices stayed flat or went down were highly over-priced places that people hated living anyway (like the Bay Area).
That is very different than a Tier 1 city.
It's funny that cities various 'interesting districts' are normally just suburbs that the city absorbed. But yeah, suburbs are just awful places without their own culture or interest (unless absorbed, then they are a distinct interesting district).
Big cities pay top performers the most, by far, but median incomes tend to be quite a bit lower than small town/rural areas. If you are a professional sports star or F500 CEO, the city is unquestionably the place to be†, but for the normal person who will end up in a drab job the money often isn't there. Many will accept the low pay due to being temporarily embarrassed CEOs, of course.
† Although knowing some of these people, they tend to live rurally as well, having the means to be able to live in both settings. The rich rarely live in just one place.
Where I live in the Suburbs of Des Moines, McDonalds starts at $16/hour. There are rural towns not far away where they start at $14, and I know rural towns farther out where you start at $10 (McDonalds isn't in these towns so it isn't a full comparison but that is the closest I can give). Where I live apartments can be had for under $1000/month so it is feasible for someone working at McDonalds to live on that wage. In the more rural areas apartments might be $500/month but you are making less plus the local grocery stores are more expesnive than the Aldi you could walk to from the apartment (thus meaning you don't need a car though crossing the highways isn't exactly safe).
Of course the real issue is people pick where to live based on factors other than cost of living. They care where their families live.
I expect the median income is often higher in rural areas because, while there is little on the high end, there is more mid-tier opportunity. In the big city if you don't make it into the big leagues, only the dregs are left. Cities amplify the extremes. In rural areas, the $30 per hour jobs are willing to hire any warm body that shows up.
Of course, rural is a difficult categorization as it is a catchall for everything that is left. A rural area with a strong agricultural sector, for example, is nothing like a rural area that is not much more than barren wilderness. In the former, there is a lot of money to be made, comparatively, while in the latter the McDonalds at the highway rest stop may be the only business there is for hundreds of miles. We are definitely talking about a certain kind of rural here.
That is true of anywhere, but employment metrics (e.g. unemployment rate) tend to look a lot better in these rural areas. The average Joe has a better chance of finding a job, and a higher paying job at that, in these rural areas. Something that hasn't gone unnoticed, of course. Population data since the mid-2000s shows relative decline in large urban areas and relative growth in small towns, although all area types are seeing population growth.
It won't be a superstar job, but Average Joe isn't getting that kind of job no matter where he is located. He may think so while in his temporarily embarrassed CEO state, but in the end he never does. Only a small segment of the population reach those heights. A SV tech salary is quite unusual.
> If you are a farmer
A farmer is, by very definition, a business owner. That may be beyond our discussion, but certainly those farm businesses are hiring anyone they can get, and paying a pretty penny for it. Those farm jobs are an opportunity for most anyone.
> so working at a cafe for minimum wage may be all you can get.
Cafe workers tend to be tipped, so it is far from a minimum wage job. I have the books for an industry-adjacent small town restaurant in front of me and the workers are making around $50/hour all in (maybe even more; I don't usually see the cash tips).
McDonalds isn't in that realm, but only foreign workers who come with some binding to the business, limiting their options, with a willingness to sacrifice to come into the country ever end up there.
As you get older, especially if you are married and have kids, usually the trade-off skews strongly towards having a big house, and then you will balance the distance side of the equation.
Also, not all suburbs are created equal, and this is even more true outside the US.
If someone else does all the maintenance, dusting and vacuum cleaning, maybe. Other then that, actual swimming pool for doing laps or actual water park with slides is kind of better in most cases. There are some people who would use that large house or would be using their backyard swimming pool often ... but most just dont.
> As you get older, especially if you are married and have kids, usually the trade-off skews strongly towards having a big house, and then you will balance the distance side of the equation.
Someone with kids appreciates not having long drive to and from work, those take away from time with kids. And someone with kids over 7 years including kids themselves appreciates presence ability to do go to sport clubs, music clubs, libraries, school or whatever else without parent having to drive them each time.
There is some advantage to big house in remote place with kids, but it also causes you and the kids to be more isolated from everything else.
I know farmers who think nothing about hunting off their back porch - and why not their gun doesn't have the range to kill a neighbor so they don't have to worry about missing their shot. I know people who shoot guns in the suburbs, but they have done extra work to create a safe range in their house (and generally only safe for the lowest power rounds). The denser your living the less viable having a safe space to shoot is.
There are things that are only possible in a dense city. You need a lot of people to have enough interest to support a symphony orchestra. There are a lot of niche stores that can only make it in a dense city because that is the only way to get enough people interested in that niche to support a store.
If you live in LA or San Diego, you can live close to the beach and go there all the time. Most people there don't, but if that's important to you, you can achieve it.
If you live in Vancouver, BC or Seattle, you can ski in the winter and hike in mountains outside of cell phone reception in the summer AFTER WORK, never mind every weekend.
I assume most american cities have gun clubs. If the attraction to shooting a gun can be satiated with target practice, that can be a decent compromise. (Of course if the attraction is feeling like a frontiersman by shooting straight off your porch, that's a different thing. I can understand it even if I don't share it)
This is not possible with every city and every hobby, but that ends up kind of becoming the point. The cities that have this overlap become even more in-demand. It's why housing is so expensive in places like YVR and SFO.
Reference to Ricardo's law of rent: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent
Does anyone have a source that actually shows that this was a factor?
It's also created big windfalls - due to easy distribution/sales for online stuff - for more than enough people to drive up prices in many of the most-already-in-demand regions.
Ye olde rich person historically has traditionally addressed the "there are different pros/cons to the city than rurally" dilemma by having multiple properties. Which of course only eats into supply more. Is the percentage of people able to do that now higher or lower than it was when a country home required full-time live-in staff?
I'm really not surprised real estate prices continue to rise when building new units is often an extremely expensive, risky process that in some areas can be stopped at any time with literally no reason required
And in many cities breakneck construction activity is happening still real estate is getting very expensive.
This seems rather simplistic reason to me.
Colleges pay rent. Colleges pay salaries to people who pay rent. All those go up with high real estate prices. Further, even if the college owns a land, the money they earn on that land has to compete with what a developer who is willing to tear it down and put up a residential building which now earns higher rent or sale price.
I don’t think all the increase comes down to high real estate costs but it’s clear that high real estate costs can easily raise prices downstream across nearly every area.
Positional goods cease to be so if you substantially increase their supply - this is why Rolex, Gucci, etc are constantly worried about knockoffs.
That's difficult, for all sorts of reasons. NIMBYs protecting their investment is one aspect, but the maths of density, transport infrastructure and travel times is another big deal.
Walkable, interesting downtowns AND big floorplans AND low taxes AND abundant supply within a short travel time is a tough set of constraints.
Since second job is sold as "freedom from household drudgery" and GDP booster it can't really be challenged.
and
https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/household-size-and-the-h... which goes into more detail
Nope. It becomes slightly further from the record high numbers, but still better than at any time before 90-s.
At this point, the misery caucus is just grasping at straws. In a couple of years, the housing inventory will make even that metric irrelevant, but the price of housing will still be going up.
> The solution is to remove the very much existent density and other supply restrictions
Nope. The solution is the opposite: preserve the SFH at all costs and shut down the misery caucus. Build new cities, not new density. Create jobs outside of dense hellscapes.
Because the reality is that NOT A SINGLE CITY has lowered the housing sale prices by increasing the density of existing areas. Not a single one in the US, Europe, or Japan.
Yeah, can you then point out an example of a city where densification worked to decrease the housing sale prices?
Tokyo? Nope. Seattle? Definitely nope, even though its housing inventory grew by 25% within 12 years. Moscow? Nope.
If it's so "round Earth", then there must be some early metrics that can indicate the success of densification railroading in places where it's been tried?
For example, Minneapolis went full cookoo nuts by abolishing parking requirements and the SFH zoning in 2019. They gave out the city to be screwed up by developers. How's it faring now? Oh, the price growth not only not slowed down, it ACCELERATED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS33460Q
Do you know Mark Twain's definition of "insanity"?
You point at few absolute price decreases which is true but don't take into account multiple variables (like population increases, inflation, tax policy) or understand higher order derivatives. In which case you've got no business arguing in these threads.
Can you point out the shortage on this graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1koDH ?
We do NOT have a housing crisis. Not even close. Housing is more affordable and of better quality than ever.
We have a DENSITY crisis. People are forced by economic forces to move to relatively few unaffordable locations.
> You point at few absolute price decreases which is true but don't take into account multiple variables (like population increases, inflation, tax policy) or understand higher order derivatives. In which case you've got no business arguing in these threads.
What "higher order derivatives"? I read most of the new research on urbanist policy. And so far everything I've seen confirms what I said.
Just stop. I’m not gonna “research” 1+1 for you.
And it's not like I'm saying anything controversial. Even urbanists admit that density increases don't lead to lower prices: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-might...
Because of government subsidies. (If you were willing to pay $100k for college and the government will give you $50k, now the college can charge $150k. Yes that's simplistic but it's the crux.)
> healthcare getting expensive
Healthcare is doubly removed from price feedbacks - patients don't pay for doctors, insurance companies do. Patients don't even pay for insurance, employers do.
Not too mention that the number of new doctors in the US is artificially constrained.
> day care getting expensive
can't help you on this one
> streaming services getting expensive
Streaming services started out undercutting cable prices. That's no longer necessary so the price is stabilizing. Plus now they are expected to produce their own content.
Expecting everything to have the same root cause is unrealistic.
> In economics, the Baumol effect, also known as Baumol's cost disease, first described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s, is the tendency for wages in jobs that have experienced little or no increase in labor productivity to rise in response to rising wages in other jobs that did experience high productivity growth.
Stuff that's made in China gets relatively cheap, so stuff that's not made in China gets relatively more expensive.
In pre-internet times, people shared real estate. Bars, restaurants, church, etc. Their discretionary income went into the fees, offerings, etc. to make these places comfortable. With the rise of the internet, people started preferring to stay home to use the internet. All that discretionary income once spent on fuelling those third places is now competing for each own's individual domain, thus driving up the price where individuals are found.
Two years of COVID exacerbated things because even those who still got out of the house from time to time were forced to stay home, so what remaining money was still funnelling out to activities outside of the home was entirely redirected into individual real estate.
Also, I’m pretty tightly involved in the local bar and hospitality scene, and most places are doing just fine — not quite pre-COVID levels at a number of places, but some are busier than ever.
The real estate bubble, if we are to call it that, goes back to the early 2000s at least. Pre-COVID, implying somewhere around 2019, isn't telling. For what it is worth, the housing price data I have in front of me shows that prices have come back down to nearly pre-COVID levels as well, so that more or less tracks anyway.
How does it compare to the 1990s? The landscape has definitely changed here. A couple of decades ago there were three busy bars mere steps from my place. Now, there isn't a single bar in town. Those closures brought consolidation to bars found in the next town over, which saw them thrive there, but now the decline is staring to become visible there too. The next, next town over is probably busier than ever as a result with even more consolidation slowly starting to take place, I can believe you there, but that doesn't imply general strength of the industry.
The media regularly reports on the dying death of the third place. Your local experience may not be providing an accurate picture.
Airbnb, easy and cheap travel, remote work, property management firms, remote surveillance and access control, etc. And also declining household sizes (many more people living alone) which is seemingly a result of internet/social media/mobile devices.
The thing is, the managerial class is pushing for a return to the office, trying to reinstate the former balance.
in my opinion is the same with every price augmentation in the last 20 years. The Internet helped make fake offers that drove price high.
snd yes blablabla the invisible hand of the market…
the invisible hand of the markt is if all speculators work for the same goal on a market with scarcity they dont compete. See prices of Art. its all fake
It was only two years though. An industry can hold off and fight back in that time.
If you have prime real estate in the center of a city but that is undeveloped, currently developing it increases your tax. In a land value tax system, that land would presumably be taxed higher, but tax would not increase if it is developed, therefore incentivizing the owner to actually use it.
It feels like a way to force these people out of the towns and family homes they've grown up in, in favor of some rich guy or corporation. They can be strong-armed out by increasing their property value around them past a point they can afford the taxes.
If someone is lucky enough to win the lottery by buying a pot of land for cheap and then seeing its value rise astronomically, they would be given the option to defer their tax payments until the sale of their profit when they realize their gains.
Obviously, there is still a large incentive for them to move sooner rather than later, but they would not be forced out of their home. I think this would be much fairer than the status quo as it would increase the incentive for them to move.
Ultimately, it is not an efficient use of land to have someone keep their single family home in the middle of high-rises like you see in the movie up. We've got a homeless crisis and random parking lots or low density is making it worse. There needs to be a compromise here. Deferred payments lets you balance the scales in a way that would be fair to all.
I would expect a land tax to do the complete opposite and reduce the value of land by half or more, which would do quite bad things to the finances of homeowners, most of whom were born before 2000.
Because they can't afford it.
Also my belief is that people don't do anything anymore because nobody gets really bored anymore. Boredom is a powerful motivator to make plans, set up clubs, find interests, meet people etc.
Now you just swipe through instagram for a few minutes and boom, no more boredom.
Going to a club is cheap, in most you only pay for drinks which a bit more expensive than in a pub, but it's not breaking the bank.
Here in Italy you can go to a club and spend less than 10€s for the night if you don't have to eat.
I'll say what the issue with clubs are: plenty of people never got there to have fun but to meet people and get laid. Now dating apps have removed the need for youth to go to clubs.
So "can't afford it" isn't an explanation for the decline in rave culture, even if it might be a reason kids don't go out to clubs today.
And before that, it was grunge rock. But now, check out the prices for Pearl Jam tickets!
Why is it shocking? The Internet is the current Big Thing that's upending everything the way previous Big Things (steam engine, movable type, etc) did. And real estate prices are one of the central coordination mechanisms for arranging things in the physical world.
It seems to me that every single generation changed and there needs not be an external reason for that other than young people wanting to do things the way they see fit, which normally is anything different from what their parents see as ideal.
And specifically their appetite for the risk/discomfort that goes along with living in realtime physical moments with other people.
Human beings are awkward as hell, but that's what laughter and tolerance are the bridges for.
The risk/discomfort lasted just that night. Nowadays everyone is posting everything everywhere. No wonder youngsters don’t want to risk it.
This is a form of social cooling in my opinion.
With everyone posting everything, and everyone's digital history recorded (if anyone cares to archive or dig it up), everyone would have skeletons in their closet.
I was hoping that would make society more tolerant and willing to accept faults in people.
In actuality, it just seems to have produced an industry of digital cleaners that the wealthy can afford, while everyone else gets fucked.
But then, that's why I limit my posting on social media outside of HN.
Most people are simply not that virtuous, because by definition the vast majority of the population has to have mediocre virtues or be in that ballpark range.
So ‘radical transparency’ reveals as much negative as positive, on average.
But the next step was how society would change (or not), suddenly realizing that most people are simply not that virtuous. Certainly not as much as their previously perception-dominant "best face" made them seem to be.
Instead of accepting that, we seem to still be taking pot shots at leaders or prospective leaders for faults.
Or... maybe Trump's twice electability is an indicator that most people are willing to overlook things, now.
The general population can just not care about a ‘next step’ on average…?
They are not overlooking things. They are looking at things and like what they see. There is segment population for which a credible accusation is seen as a good thing about a guy.
There's a whole separate realm of social circle snapchatting (networking).
Not to mention swiping in dating apps.
Yet I can't help but wonder if people also said the same about the telephone (which enabled socialization without colocation) and television (Which enabled entertainment as a passive indirect consumption)
I realize of course that the internet, and mobile (and eventually VR/AR) is Yet Another Step Further.
But...like every step does it not also come with benefits for some at the expense of others?
For example, I simply can't believe that true extraverts are simply going to be resigned to giving up all these physical moments - they will continue to seek out and create and participate in-person spaces.
To me, the problem is less about the way that we do or do not socialize, and rather the monumentally addictive nature of online and app spaces, and the fact that the companies in charge of them have no other motivation at his point it seems than to just push it all to the limit.
Our feeble caveman brains cannot handle the dopamine roulette that is the TikTok/Instagram/Twitter feed. We have no immunity to it, so the only solution is artificial restrictions like screentime. Then again, we've had to reckon with that with plentiful calories too as we trended towards universal obesity and have STARTED to turn it around (but not succeeded yet). And that took decades.
Every generation struggled with something. Our grandparents were choked by smog. Our parents had polluted waterways and lead in everything. We are engulfed in microplastics and addictive technology. Our children will wreckon with the effects of climate change.
Through all this, humanity continues to grow, invent new technology, and raise both the floor for existence and the ceiling for prosperity.
The worst thing we can do now is to give up on the next generation or on the future of humanity. Optimism is our obligation and responsibility.
Absolutely. There were periods of time in history when there was significant opposition to television. Hence the coining of terms like "boob tube", "idiot box", "idiot's lantern", "cultural wasteland", etc. You can see a bit more of some of that (although not with a primarily historical focus) here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_aspects_of_television#N...
EDIT:
For yet more on this topic:
https://behavioralscientist.org/history-panic-entertainment-...
https://20thcenturyhistorysongbook.com/song-book/the-fifties...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimina...
Exactly. Bad things can and do become normalized and then unremarked upon. Some people confuse that phenomenon with those things actually being good.
People often have clearer eyes at the transition.
Because the principle of capitalism that shall not be said d is that the value of a human life is zero
... The second unspoken principle of capitalism is that the environment is worth zero
Finally, the third is that the human race is worth zero
I'd say they were probably right. Pre-solo-consumptive technology, people on average were better socialized.
It's inherent in the nature of improved consumptive and interactive experiences to smooth off the pain points.
Unfortunately many of those same pain points are also intrinsic to realworld, realtime interaction. And doing them more proficiently is a skill that one can learn and improve (or not).
There were a lot more letters before the telephone. In London, the mail would be picked up and delivered up to twelve times per day. Within the city, you could have back-and-forth conversations through the mail within a single day.
Just because the younger generation are doing things differently it doesn’t make them wrong, in my generation it was sending text messages that was wrong because we weren’t talking on the phone. Before that it was talking on the phone rather than going to people’s houses.
I’ll also add what my psychologist told me.
Social skills aren’t innate in humans, we have to be taught them. Smaller family sizes and greater distances from extended family mean these aren’t taught by older siblings/cousins/etc like the used to and parents aren’t filling the gap, which means standards of social interaction are changing much more rapidly.
Yes, but that also doesn't mean change can't be bad or in the wrong direction.
What you describe isn't neutral, and it's pretty clearly not good.
It's different but I think it's wonderful.
I actively work to learn how to do the same, and it's like having an extra-sense. The ability to backchannel while also doing face-to-face adds elements to communication that people who don't do it fail to catch.
(I'm 49 if it matters)
Technology combined with oligarchy is really leading to a demographic and social disaster. I think the iron placenta and designer babies are the only things that will prevent population collapse. Well, age extension will probably kick in too.
It's a race between us killing the worlds biosphere and us fading away to nothingness right now. I think there's plenty of population momentum to kill off the planet
The Internet is the most recent technology that is enabled a small number of individuals to become vastly wealthy alongside, of course, a certain lax style of government. As wealth inequality increases, more of the money in the economy becomes tied up in wealthy people’s investments and savings, which inflates asset prices.
Surprisingly often, it's both.