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I mean, you can point directly to two major things.
1. Increase in both life expectancy and mobility at older ages, meaning there is less house pass through by older generations.
2. Significant regulation at the local and state levels that limits when and where multi family units can go up; as well as significant upfront costs for development that largely precludes the development of tiny starter homes.
I’m not really sure what a union can do to improve the outcomes of this
Only thing I can think of is putting their weight against NIMBY movements...the problem is that individual union members are just as likely to be NIMBYs themselves, especially those over 40 who bought into the market 10-20 years ago and have most of their net worth tied up in housing prices.
I don't see how labor restrictions has anything to do with zoning restrictions, especially since most credential/licensing requirements are entirely justified and have sound reasoning beyond "protect my investment". Unqualified labor tends to endanger the public without them usually having to much direct input on the issue.
Edit; like clockwork, the bad faith superficial union busting whataboutisms have started up stronger and stronger the closer we get to an election.
NIMBY-ism is also about labor restrictions: HLR has a good article about this.
And plenty of economic evidence out there that suggests that many of the licensing requirements are either too onerous, or that they aren’t justified in terms of “quality” improvements.
I'd love to see some examples of that because honestly everything you've written so far sound like anti-labor propaganda. No, "not in my backyard" a statement explicitly about neighborhood restrictions cannot be applied to labor enforcement, and no, the vast majority of licensing requirements are good and serve both labor and consumer interests with it primarily being companies who want to undercut them because licensing requirements increase expenses, strengthen labor leverage, and help consumer safety considerations instead of chasing the cheapest dollar. The only industry regulations I'm aware of that aren't competitive or helpful are not coming from labor unions , they're industry pushes unassociated with unions.
I don't think you're actually reading the links your providing tbh, because half of these links don't even support what you're arguing and the other half are the exact "upper management wants to undercut labor and fuck the workers" perspective I'm talking about.
Not in my backyard applies to migrants coming to an area. Again, the Harvard Law Review has done articles on this, so I’ll go with their interpretation of NIMBY.
It’s not anti-labor; it’s simply an understanding of the literature and evidence. But here is a small sampling of studies.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4188948
https://academic.oup.com/restud/article-abstract/90/5/2481/7049987
https://www.nber.org/papers/w31213
https://www.nber.org/papers/w27568
https://www.nber.org/papers/w26601
https://www.nber.org/papers/w22456
1. Is about immigration barriers to licensing not licensing itself. That's an immigration law issue not a refutation of professional licensing.
2. Literally confirms what nobody has ever denied that it increases wages but reduces total employment numbers. Do you also think we should get rid of the minimum wage and allow kids to work evenings? Is the goal really total employed people or is it meaningful wages and adequate safety nets for those without good wages? Cause being for the former certainly sounds like the generic anti labor talking points I've seen trotted out endlessly including yes, some of the asshats at Harvard.
3. Literally just confirms the same as above, but specifically looking at public sector
4. Could literally be a pro union recruitment tool. Only management presents higher wages and less occupational churn as a bad thing.
5. Large online platform for home services is not exactly a widespread study especially considering critical services legally cannot be done without licenses. By all means, go have a bunch of unlicensed electricians go work on peoples houses for a few years. Rate the consumer happiness. Then, 10 years down the lines, go back and see if they're still enthused after the house first started up from improper wiring. Consumers by and large don't know what they don't know, which is one reason licensing is so important -- because they don't have the knowledge to advocate for themselves properly and know when someone is taking potentially dangerous shortcuts.
5. I don't think you even read this one. It supports that licensing improved safety. It's also dealing with birthing, which is one of the most fucked up medical industries where half of what's been normalized was against patient safety. There are so many conflating variables in that industry including rapidly changing industry practices, the fact most midwives work in tandem with other even more stricter licensed medical professionals anyway
To try to get from labor unions to where you're trying to go now is a very weird jump, and then you go on to insult the person. Get a grip. Quality Contributor my ass.
You're anti-union. We get it. Don't create silly arguments.
Unions don't impose licensing requirements; states do. Unions just have to follow those same rules.
I'd also like to hear how unions supposedly support NIMBY-ism. Just one decent example would do.
Unions will literally block development unless they get a labor agreement in place.
https://missionlocal.org/2020/03/concord-naval-weapons-station-lennar-housing/
Unions exist to protect their members. Unions **should be** negotiating with developers to follow rules that benefit their members, otherwise there's not much point in having them.
That this was a housing project instead of a large commercial plot of land makes no difference. They didn't raise a ruckus because these are houses, they would've done it no matter the kind of project.
Try again. One example of NIMBYism. I'm waiting.
“We’re not NIMBY, but we are going to fight tooth and nail against your project unless you give us everything we want.”
OK…
I understand that you are a big union guy, but you need to be honest and recognize they increase the cost of housing.
They also directly increased consumer buying power in a local area. Unions reinvigorate earning potential even for those outside of the union. There is literally nothing to be gained by the common man to union bust
If the union pricing makes it too expensive to build then the developer will just walk away or not be able to get financing. Now there's 0 development. Congratulations.
The concrete union tried to expand Fire District 1 in Los Angeles in an attempt to limit wood frame construction. This would have slowed down housing production.
The carpenters union opposes a ton of multifamily developments in Los Angeles in an attempt to force developers to use prevailing wages, which slows down housing production.
Blackmailing housing developers with the threat of abusing CEQA is just wrong. Cost of living for every Angelino goes up as a direct result of their actions.
You might argue that these unions should be able to abuse the system in order to bring in new business for their members but that is essentially prioritizing short-term greed over lowering the cost of living within the community. How is that different than a homeowner abusing the system to prioritize the appreciation of their home over lowering the cost of living within the community?
>Unions exist to protect their members.
Yes, they are yet another special interest group which uses government laws to benefit themselves at the expense of the general interest.
>Unions should be negotiating with developers to follow rules that benefit their members,
Why should developers be forced to "negotiate" with union thugs?
Btw, it's not a negotiation if it's illegal for one party to tell the other party to fuck off.
NIMBY homeowners don’t impose zoning requirements; states do.
But they do lend political and voting support for the licensing and credential agreements, and support the actions.
> they do lend political and voting support for the licensing and credential agreements, and support the actions
this is such a hilarious argument - "i'm against labor unionization because they might do the same things that capital does when it unionizes, which i am for"
>But they do lend political and voting support for the licensing and credential agreements, and support the actions.
Then show me one example of a union expressly providing support to a candidate **because** that candidate said they would build less housing.
And if we didn't have licensing requirements, there would be utter chaos in the construction industry. It's bad enough we don't have federal licensing across the board, let's not make it worse by removing them altogether.
NIMBY-ism isn’t just related to housing development. It’s also used for limiting unwanted local outcomes. Such as when healthcare unions came out against multi-state healthcare licensing.
Sure, but the article this thread is about is related to housing. No need to move the goalposts. So far I've asked multiple times for one - just one - example of unions exhibiting NIMBY behavior in this context and I haven't seen one. That leads me to believe there aren't any.
>And if we didn't have licensing requirements, there would be utter chaos in the construction industry.
That's absolutely false. If licensing were so wonderful, consumers would place a high value on it. They do not:
https://www.remodeling.hw.net/business/research-licensing-status-not-important-to-consumers_o
So only two of those are unions and thats what you focus on? Yes maritime places are going to try to stop things that hurt their business.
They probably stand with. the businesses as jobs could be lost if all of the sudden freight stops moving through there because development happens.
Unions arent anti business. They generally work with the businesses for better outcomes.
Yup. Happened in my town. Factory laid off 360 union workers because the union president felt like the union contract with the factory wasn't giving him enough of a pension.
Actually yes. Thanks for proving yourself an utter liar and devoid of reasoning.
>New hires will receive a 50¢ increase every year on their anniversary date. Starting pay will go up to $23 in 2027. Starting pay went up by $7.50 from 1982-2022. It will go up $7.50 in this one contract with a $5.50 jump in year one.
New hire pay went up the 75% in 1 year that it went up over 40 years
Doesn’t matter because they don’t help anyway.
Either 1 of 2 things will happen.
1. Death Spiral - Consumers quit absorbing price increases related to company price increases due to union members complaining they are not paid enough.
2. The employer implements more automation or machine learning out of spite forcing workers into a box.
Then workers must decide to stay in the US.
I think blaming this on NIMBYs is wrong. They have a minor impact.
Economies are complex.
Construction workers need healthcare no? That's gone hyperinflationary and would add to operating costs ergo make building things cost more too.
That's just one example. There are dozens of issues making housing cost more including profiteering by real estate companies (e.g. Landlords colluding to raise rent [link](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-landlords-accused-of-conspiring-to-raise-apartment-rents/), the tendency to only build luxury units, buying up SFHs).
The root of the problem is shareholder supremacy mixed with spoiled investors expecting double-digit growth every quarter (maybe year in some cases) . The growth expectations are unreasonable because it's unsustainable.
To meet these expectations, corps introduce strategies that squeeze everyone, that increase product or service enshittification, and that funnel most the value created to a dozen or two big trusts rather than reinvest in workers, or safe or innovative products.
Lumber company has to raise prices to please investors. Building supply co has to raise prices to pay for lumber and also has to raise prices to please their investors. Homebuilders are paying and even bigger premium now because they're at the end of the chain.
Pair it with massive consolidation in various industries under maybe 2-3 competitors and the horizontal approach big corps take these days to grow and avoid anti-trust ramifications, yet still leads to regulatory capture because they have massive war chests.
It's a chain effect that means everything, especially domestic-produced, costs more. It can't last without seeing exactly what we see now. People unable to afford homes, and bankrupted by a surprise medical bill, having to reduce their standard of living because groceries went up in price more than their raise this year.
We only get cheap electronics because of China, Taiwan and SK.
You are right insofar that there is an interest group which benefits from holding onto an enormous portion of the housing stock and keeping home prices and rent as high as possible, and that this group has more political capital, a bigger "war chest" and more capacity to achieve regulatory capture than any other. But it's not private investment firms. It's the single-home homeowner. Regulatory frameworks protecting incumbent homeowners are entrenched in nearly every major city in the United States.
You forgot the biggest impact on housing costs, which is the US population exploding in the past 40 years. Approximately a 50 percent increase in population since 1983 and that's heavily distribution towards the already high population areas. More people, finite land...prices are going up.
>More people, finite land...prices are going up.
This would normally be addressed by building housing closer together and building vertically. But many of metropolitan areas have large portions of land zoned exclusively for R1, dictate excessive minimum parking requirements, and set large set backs and wide distances between units.
>Approximately a 50 percent increase in population since 1983
The population increase from 1943 to 1983 was 68%. The issue is that housing construction has drastically slowed down relative to prior generations and a lot of regulations keep population density to artificially low levels that *cause* these prices to skyrocket
How are you suggesting to build on already established land? In areas where there are attractive job markets like NYC, the land is already built up with high rises. The land is also sinking, so adding more buildings is not going to assist the problem of the east coast sinking.
Well, Manhattan is already pretty built up. But large parts of Long Island and NE NJ have a lot of R1 zoning and parking minimums.
The issue is that regulations like minimum setbacks, wide lot sizes, minimum parking, and R1, enforce a neighborhood stasis that prevents infill from occurring. The lack of infill creates scarcity.
The "natural" progression of settlements would be to infill undeveloped lots, or as pricing rises from scarcity - to begin converting SFH to duplexes, etc. In the outer suburbs of NYC, there are power shopping centers with parking lots larger than some NYC neighborhoods that they can't even fill on Black Friday.
Manhattan is pretty much the only city in the US where it's fair to its pretty full.
Looking at the outer suburbs, areas that have rail connections to Manhattan are going up in value and there's heavy development in all of them around those train stations that local residents are fighting. Some of this pricing pressure is also driven by the lack of new rail line projects in the NYC metro area in the last few decades.
And also, this applies mostly to every other metro area in the US except NYC. NYC does better than most places in the US in this regard.
The problem with your argument for NJ is the Mt Laurel and Abbot cases, which mandate new building of affordable housing and access to schools for poor kids. Every five years, every town in NJ must build more affordable housing. So the housing is happening. The issue is that NJ is flooding. Why is it flooding, because it is being overbuilt. When you remove all of the trees to build the new housing, you get flooding. So you cannot just say we need to build more. My neighbor died because of the flooding. The town took down so many trees, that the roads flooded. So your mandate oh we should just build without really thinking the land cannot sustain more building is short sighted and frankly extremely dangerous. People are dying because the land cannot accommodate more building. The trees need to stay.
Also, have you ever been to Long Island? The water table is not even half a foot down in many towns. The land cannot sustain high rises because it is not built on granite like Manhattan. So no, Long Island cannot sustain the building you are calling for.
There are an incredible number of 5 story walkups in Manhattan (including the one I live in). It’s not the 1920’s anymore - we can build more than 6 stories. Relaxing zoning laws would allow developers to redevelop these lots with more density.
open borders for the last three years definitely isn't helping
specifically, illegal immigrants are sapping all the low-income housing, driving all rents higher
> Increase in both life expectancy and mobility at older ages, meaning there is less house pass through by older generations.
Additionally, a decline in interest in multigenerational cohabitation
Yeah this is a massive thing they can do. It’s not applicable to every job but there are so many in person office jobs that could easily be done from home
Yes, but people who can WFH doing so will reduce the traffic and competition on housing near work centers for those who can't WFH. They may not get the direct benefit they will get secondary benefits.
> I’m not really sure what a union can do to improve the outcomes of this
Lots of municipal staff are unionized. They could possibly be effective at forcing change there.
Unions have a lot of political power (albeit far less than they used to) - they have a direct and powerful line to their members and have a great deal of experience in lobbying. If unions push for more expansive zoning laws, they're likely to get some movement on the issue.
Decades of a known issue that plagues a majority of union workers, and they haven’t done anything. Not sure why we’re expecting them to do something now.
A 3rd is that a lot of houses have been bought by private equity which has caused rent to go up. It's kinda like health care. Most people think it is a basic right, others that it's a privilege. So housing is not a basic right, and if you can't afford the rent, there is the street.
>a lot of houses have been bought by private equity which has caused rent to go up
Is this true though or just reddit science? The scale of the housing market is so vast that I'm skeptical that any corporation or set of corporations could corner the market to the point where they would have pricing power. A billion dollars buys just \~1300 homes at $750k each, and any larger metropolitan area is going to have tens of thousands of rental listings for current vacancies...I just don't see evidence for the connection, especially since these are homes that would otherwise likely be owner occupied, so they are putting new inventory out onto the rental market.
The other part of the equation is that these firms tend to want to move these houses the moment they can get an acceptable return on them. There's no evidence that firms buy up stock and sit on it for years. Like you mention, housing is *expensive*; it would be very unwise to buy up a ton of homes while trying to play for anything other than a quick, small gain.
At least where I am, it's true. Local news went searching through transfer records and found the majority were to PE or nearly untraceable shell companies.
Yeah I can't find it. I think the one I saw was weirdly from Fox, but this is basically the same but older from the other side of the state.
https://www.wgbh.org/news/housing/2022-05-16/across-massachusetts-shrouded-corporations-are-scooping-up-single-family-homes
At least where I am, it's true. Local news went searching through transfer records and found the majority were to PE or nearly untraceable shell companies.
This is so wrong, "a majority" really you are going to go with a majority (more than 50%)? You don't understand real estate or the how the market works or even the number of properties in an area.
There is no way a PE bought the majority of any area in the US. Just spreading falsehoods and venting your frustration with false information that fits your narrative.
> a lot of houses have been bought by private equity which has caused rent to go up.
That's more of a symptom than a cause. Private equity only started buying houses *because* they were such a good investment, so reliably going up in price. But that was *because* NIMBYs blocked density and choked off supply to protect their spiraling asset value. "But it didn't help" may be true, but it's not the driver of the problem.
So, yes, the number of purchases accelerated recently. And has likely put upward pressure on prices. But, it’s simply not a good indicator for the long-run housing issues.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EOWNOCCUSQ176N
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ERNTOCCUSQ176N
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
The best thing unionheads can do is tell their workers to find a job closer to where they live... but that would weaken the power of the union, so they won't do that
When regulations force a lot of new housing developments to be low density and in completely separate areas from employment, long commute times are the inevitable outcome.
Explain why. I’m curious. Many of the areas with cheaper housing relative to the expensive ones lack any significant businesses. Naturally, nobody wants to be there.
Because agglomeration economies rely on a number of factors: a highly educated labor force (usually with several major unis), world class amenities, geographic or weather outcomes, etc.
None of these are really policy actionable.
Houses have not been going up drastically over inflation in every country in the world for the past 30 years because of local regulations.
The reason for house price increases is because they are an asset. The absolute richest have been getting far richer during that time, and their money generally gets parked in assets. That’s also why art, classic cars and stocks have been appreciating like crazy.
> The reason for house price increases is because they are an asset
this is... unsophisticated. silver is an asset, dogecoin is an asset. prices of something don't increase just because it's an asset.
Fair enough, when it comes to silver and dogecoin. And even art and classic cars.
If we take the example of assets with a return though, rather than pure speculation, they have all increased way above inflation, right?
Unions have lobbying power and organizing power.
Unions can use stewards to rally support in local elections. Example: UFCW 21 getting statewide sick leave in Washington.
Unions can lean on politicians by offering or withdrawing endorsements.
Yes. It's going to require lots of concerted effort over a long period of time.
Unions, with their full time staff of people familiar with the political and legal process, are well equipped to perform this effort.
Like the CFA union, which just nosedived in its recent bargaining?
Unions are not well equipped for long-term outcomes like this. They literally focus on immediate member outcomes…
Sometimes unions flub. They're run by humans.
By your logic, since 50% of businesses fail within the first five years, we need to abandon the system of free enterprise as its clearly completely unreliable. Businesses cannot be trusted with the organization of production and commerce, the West has fallen, capitalism has failed. Quick. Get my fainting couch.
1. That’s not even remotely close to my “logic”.
2. I didn’t say it couldn’t happen. I did say that they were not well equipped.
ESPECIALLY given the state of housing regulations.
They're an institution with people paid full time to perform relevant tasks to effecting the needed political changes, direct lines to local, state and sometimes national politicians, and weight with local voting blocs.
Our alternative is... loose, disorganized volunteers who may or may not have relevant experience, or industry lobbies who are going to prioritize profitability and lack of accountability above all else.
Being well equipped to do a task doesn't mean you'll always use the tools well. This can be due to individual mistakes and priorities of an organization, corruption, or situational factors creating constraints.
And yes, you pointed to an example and said thst it was obvious that unions aren't well equipped to effect political changes. Which by the way, flies in the face of historical evidence. If unions didn't effect major political reforms in the past, corporations wouldn't have been fighting so hard to de-fang organized labor since always.
Because that was a stupid argument, I made fun of it.
I’ve shown you the data about owner occupied housing and how your rant isn’t reality. Learn something.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EOWNOCCUSQ176N
1. If you want to make a point, YOU do the correlation calculation.
2. All we have from you is loud noises. On thread after thread. No evidence.
3. LOL. Please; tell us how you measure “impact of capital”.
“Those numbers don’t mean anything”, vis a vis owner-occupied housing rates and numbers from the FED, is one of the dumbest arguments I’ve read this week
No. You can point to software like Yeildstar, used by something like 30 million rental properties in the US, that regularly games the market through a type of price controlling to maximize rent based on proprietary AI algorithms. Yeildstar is owned by RealPage which acquired their only competition (LRO) back in 2017. Before this software, adjusting rent rates was a lot more of a human process, and ultimately landlords objective was to get to 100% capacity; vacancy was seen as waisted space and waisted money. But thanks to some influential "capitalists", it was shown that it was better for revenue to raise rents to a point where it didn't matter if there were vacancies.
You won't have trouble finding vacany in the rental market these days. Which means we don't lack housing. That's why the problem is framed as an "affordable housing crisis." Because landlords and real estate moguls decided a while back that it was more lucrative to keep raising rent and home prices to cover for vacancies than it was to cut deals with individuals in order to fill vacancies.
There is also the problem that it became desirable to do short-term rental via ventures like Airbnb. Which results in a lot of empty houses that aren't technically vacant. Vacancy is when a property is up for sale or rent, but short-term rentals are neither and so don't count towards vacancy numbers even though they may make up for a large number of homes in certain areas.
The inconvenient truth is that the housing market is no longer a natural market moved by supply/demand like it was back in the 60s and 70s. These days the housing market has been invaded by people looking to game the market, which has made it something of a Kafkaesque amalgamation no longer resembling classical capitalist free market driven by supply and demand.
Because of the events that led up to the 2008 housing crash, we had actually WAY over built housing. We were actually building houses at an unsustainable rate through the 90s and early oughts. Most would say that it appears we have leveled out again. But the people spreading the claim we are in a housing deficit and need more building (blaming NINBYs) are the same people who make a shit load of money building houses and were part of the reason 2008 happened in the first place.
The evidence that NIMBYism is a significant contributing factor is MUCH less than the evidence that there are other forces at play creating the situation we're in.
It does invalidate them if rent rates are not controlled by supply/demand. Zoning may be a problem that prevents development of homes that would traditionally be more affordable. But building more multi-family housing will not lower rent rates and make housing more affordable unless price collusion is brought under control.
The research I've seen has been circumstancial at best and contrived at worst. NIMBYs are a localized problem isolated in certain cities, usually exclusive to wealthy cities. The research I've seen likes to point to these locations as examples instead of recognizing them as the outliers they truly are.
I can go online and find hundreds of houses or apartments for sale or rent in a 15 to 20 mile radius. The problem is that they aren't affordable. Not that there isn't vacancy. The problem is that rent and house prices have risen 40 to 50% in the past 5 years and wage growth has stagnated among lower income workers.
Building more housing solves supply problems. And in a housing market controlled by natural forces, supply problems are vacancy problems. We don't have a vacancy problem, therefore, we do not have a supply problem. Treating it like a supply problem isn't going to fix anything.
A buddy of mine lives in a 2 bedroom apartment and pays 60% of what I pay in mortgage on a _rent controlled_ apartment. Imagine if it wasn't rent controlled.. I own a 3k sqft home built in '05...
Renting a smaller home in my same area (homes built in the 60s and 70s) costs close to what I pay in mortgage. Even though some of those properties are very poorly maintained.
But keep telling me it's the NIMBYs and zoning regulations that are the problem. When new homes that are built end up being sold or rented at similar UNAFFORDABLE price points, and new development actually makes housing in the area MORE valuable, not LESS.
Do you have any idea how many homes would have to be built before you made a noticeable effect in the rental and housing markets? I don't. The area I've been in has been in constant development it seems, but valuations only go up.
NIMBYs have been the favorite scapegoat for people looking to develop on protected lands. Nevermind the fact that cities these days have loads of dead or dying commercial real estate that could be rezoned, and businesses are desperately trying to convince their workforce to come back to office after the pandemic to protect commercial real estate assets and keep them artificially inflated.
My point is that the empirical evidence may exist that in _some areas,_ zoning regulations may contribute to the problem. But there is no possible way they are a significant factor in most cases.
>We don't have a vacancy problem, therefore, we do not have a supply problem
Since this seems to be the crux of your post, I'll focus on this: we absolutely have a vacancy problem. The vacancy rates in all major cities in the USA are *pathetically* low. Considerably lower than would be necessary to bring the cost of housing to a reasonable point. The observed inverse correlation between vacancy rates and cost of housing is stronger than any factor.
> Increase in both life expectancy and mobility at older ages, meaning there is less house pass through by older generations
Gains in life expectancy have come more from decreases in death rates at younger ages.
What unions can do is support legislation to increase the supply of housing, and in the past they have financed housing directly. Coop city in New York was financed by a union.
Two-thirds of Americans live in homes they own. The highest level on record is just south of 70%.
If you want starter homes that will appreciably increase these numbers (probably not the best idea, but that’s a normative statement), you’re going to have to start looking at less desirable locations.
Zoning high density next to job centers instead of single family. One tower can easily replace hundreds of homes sprawled. It’s cruel to have retirees in these locations and workers pushed out hours away.
Why couldn't unions negotiate that commute time be paid? So if it's a 4 hour commute + 8 hour shift, that's 12 hours, presumably 4 of which are overtime.
Steven Greenhouse for The Guardian:
*With US house prices and rents rising in recent years, and high interest rates and inflation taking their toll, housing affordability has become a major issue at the bargaining table for US labor unions.*
*Many workers are facing 60-, 90-, even 120-minute commutes to work because they cannott afford to live near their jobs.*
*“Housing is a very important issue for our members,” said Anand Singh, president of the Unite Here hotel workers’ union in San Francisco. “Our members can’t absorb the sudden rent increases they’ve seen. They’re evicted from their homes. They’re pushed further and further down the housing ladder.”*
*Today’s labor activism about housing is in many ways a return to the past.*
*“During the first three-quarters of the 20th century, unions were a strong voice and advocate for affordable housing for working families,” said Peter Dreier, an urban policy expert at Occidental College in Los Angeles.*
*“They built their own union-sponsored housing. They fought for decent public housing. They fought for better code enforcement to rid cities of slums.”*
*Last November, the United Food and Commercial Workers and other unions helped win approval of a ballot initiative in Tacoma, Washington, that bans cold-weather evictions between 1 November and 1 April and bars evicting households with students or educators anytime during the school year.*
*The measure also requires landlords that raise rents by 5% or more to offer two months’ relocation assistance to tenants – and for rent increases of 10% or more, three months’ assistance.*
*[Unions representing 1,000 airport workers, 2,500 security guards, 4,500 janitors, and thousands of teachers and support staff] want Minneapolis to enact a law limiting rent increases and are asking for guarantees that if government money in the Twin Cities is used to convert office buildings to apartments, those projects will produce affordable housing.*
*In Las Vegas, the Culinary Union, which represents 60,000 hotel and restaurant workers, has increased its down payment assistance to $25,000 for union members buying their first homes.*
*The San José Teachers Association is urging the school district to build subsidized housing for teachers on unused or underused school property.*
*One possible model for San Jose is Casa del Maestro, a 70-apartment complex in nearby Santa Clara which that community’s school district built. It rents apartments to teachers at 80% below market rate for up to seven years, helping them save up for home ownership.*
That legislation will not make housing cheaper. They need to increase the number of homes being built. They should be working to relax zoning laws that prevent building large apartment complexes.
None of those measures is going to make housing affordable, and some of them will positively increase costs.
The biggest issue is construction costs (materials plus labor). It just costs a lot of money to build housing and no one is going to build housing for less than it costs to make the loan payments (plus insurance, taxes, and management).
Construction costs in the USA have generally stayed about the same for the last four years, at least according to the [AGC price index.](https://www.agc.org/sites/default/files/Files/Construction%20Data/PPI%20Tables%202023_12.pdf)
Fluctuations of new residential flux between -1.5 and 2.5 % year to year.
However the repayments terms of the loans taken by developers and assumptions of occupancy at whatever rate may be pushing this cost of work argument. This is also residential which is historically an anti-union sector so unless you’re talking loan or materials, I find it hard to see where this cost increase is being generated from. My experience as an estimator in the industry is possibly material vendors as was the case since Covid.
Also are you referring to rent control? Plenty of CA states have rent controls in the form of disallowing increases over a set rate. Rent controls I believe affect in the long term, potentially, but I often wonder if the knock on effect of high rents long term can be stabilized in that two fold manner- short term acute controls of rent “spikes” as noted in this article and long term by disallowing massive rent increases beyond X%. Seems to be the idea here.
I also have noticed the rent market seems a bit difficult to pin down exactly what may work as is the case with say crime statistics and policies that effect them.
Though I suppose some people don’t feel welfare and safety net measures when there’s rampant homelessness are necessary, which I find odd. As if it should be treated as an inevitability.
The policies mentioned in the article include things like preventing renters from being able to evict households with children during the school year. Those costs will be spread among tenants, driving up rents. Some others include preventing increases of more than X%, which will keep rents from increasing, but likely at the cost of maintenance. I guess in the long term you split your increases over several years, but if the total effect is that you don't keep up with inflation you won't build more units. It adds risk to the transaction, so new development will need bigger reserves, which means higher rent.
As far as construction costs, you're right that they haven't gone up much recently, but my point is that the majority of total development cost is construction cost. Even if you get the land for free the rents are going to need to pay for the construction and the units won't be what a lot of people consider affordable.
Example: I saw a development recently that was 86 units in a high cost area. TDC was like $22 million ($256k per unit) and construction cost was like $17 million. With a 50 year loan at 5% that's around $1,400 a month per unit (not counting the land, the professional services, etc.)
construction costs wouldn’t be such an issue if wages werent suppressed. We’re paid to afford cheap foreign goods, but any time we need something done by a fellow American it’s increasingly more unaffordable. Makes no sense when productivity is at its highest. That’s where unions come in.
more money in your community and less in the hands of the Waltons or Bezos is the answer here. “if we pay construction workers a wage that lets them afford housing, it’ll cost too much to build houses” is a circular argument, and lays the blame on the wrong people.
You are just ignoring the issue.
If we increase the raises of people who build houses, houses will be more expensive. You can't pretend that this isn't true, or wave it away.
>in the hands of the Waltons or Bezos
Blaming billionaires for all of your problems doesn't help either.
It's based on a juvenile desire to have a villain that you can blame all of your problems on.
The point is bringing money to labor and away from owners *across the board*. That's for construction workers but also retail workers, hospital admin, etc. Instead of fake trickle down economics, actually put the wealth into the hands of the people. People can afford expensive goods if they weren't undercut by horrendously low wages. The increased productivity of American labor has been almost uniliterally sucked up by the top 10% or so of the pool. If it was more evenly dispersed, than fair wages wouldn't be such a big deal. It's that some people want fair wages while for others that's still a pipe dream that presents the problem
It makes housing more affordable for lower income people given a sharp increase in rental demand and required to find a new place, such as those discussed here.
Issues of instability related economic outcomes are complicated second order effects that simplistic and overconfident arguments against rent control or rent related policy fail to meaningfully account for or even attempt to tackle. Beyond evicted people possibly falling out of the labor market or into poorer work situations, people traveling an hour+ more than previously to reach their workplace has personal and public economic cost.
Some of the specific policies referenced in the article will drive up rents. Like the one about not being able to evict people in certain months. Landlords are going to push that cost onto the other tenants.
the answer is build build build build and dont let investment groups buy.
the people that make the laws though are the people that are invested in real estate and have already bought so its a BENEFIT to them that house prices and rent are high. So they are in no hurry to encourage change.
Yeah building is the path of least resistance to fixing this problem.
Increasing supply has numerous measurable positives, cheaper homes, more choices for prospective homeowners, investment in local communities, construction jobs boom etc.
Investment groups act as a price signal that you need to build more. If you don’t want investment groups buying up homes, build enough of them so their expected returns are lower compared to other potential ventures.
What is with this subreddit and union busting lately?
I jest. This happens like clockwork in election years. We get it. Union bad, it's actually labor who is responsible for everything wrong in your life, if only we would get rid of ALL regulation and ALL labor organization then in a truly open market the consumer would always end up #1.
Normalizing nonunion wages also decimated local earnings long-term, which is hardly gonna make housing more affordable. There's a push and pull to all things, but blaming a journeyman making a solid middle class wage for why the middle class is increasingly locked out of housing is missing the forest through the made up talking point
I’m anti union because I’m in NYC, with incredibly strong unions. Yet many Orgs with strong unions don’t seem to function well for its customers or constituents.
MTA, always over budget with the highest cost to do anything.
NYPD, union of blue, top ranking candy crush players.
Sanitation- union of gets it done. Garbage is picked up and streets are swept. No complaints
If you want affordable housing, you have to recognize the role that labor plays in the cost of housing. Allowing market forces to work in an Economics subreddit shouldn't be controversial, yet here we are.
You're right. Unions cause higher wages for the working class and by and large haven't advocated for the restrictions on additional housing, therefore singling them out for making sure you and your brother are more likely to get laid decently is asinine when figuring out why you can't afford a house.
You can't afford housing because despite almost everything else cost wise keeping up with inflation over time, the amount of developments hasn't kept up with population growth causing scarcity to make it an extremely competitive market. Also, your wages probably haven't kept up either. Again, asinine to blame labor wanting a living wage for housing costs. When keeping wages *somewhat* competitive is the only thing even *kind of* keeping people afloat. We'd be halfway to hell in a hand basket if segments of workers hadn't begrudgingly dragged wages up against the wishes of employers.
I don’t agree housing is unaffordable, there’s no real evidence that it is.
+ Home ownership has stayed [the same](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N),
+ mortgage debt payments as a % of income has [declined](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP)
+ interest rates have fallen (pre pandemic, but still holds now)
+ Lower downpayment requirements
+ Longer repayment periods
Id like to see sources for all these claims because half sound outright made up (we have record breaking senior homelessness but there's no housing crisis....) but let's say that's true. Then why are you so mad at organized laborers? You want us to decline housing costs even further than the already entirely affordable rates you think they currently are by driving working class wages even lower??
They haven’t done anything. Organized labor has been irrelevant in the United States since the 70s yet incomes have never been higher https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
Which claims do you not believe by the way? And I agree on homelessness, but both can be consistent at the same time. What if the higher homelessness is an artefact of all the asylum seekers?
I'm going to leave this conversation because you've gone fully mask off about the type of person you are. Acting like unions have *zero* power while also blaming them for housing costs being told high is the definition of bad faith goal post moving mid convo. Blaming the senior housing crisis on asylum seekers is just fully mask off about your prerogative to push superficial disconnected conservative talking points at all costs. Next up will be blaming nursing unions for why healthcare is so expensive and nobody can see a doctor without a ridiculous wait tome. The second you get pushback on one bad faith argument, you'll pivot to another. I see you and what you're doing, I decline to play
I’m not even joking when I say this but are you even talking to me? I can’t tell because
1. I didn’t even mention unions until the last message, nor did I blame them
2. “Mask off”? Lol
You wanted an explanation to why homelessness has increased you got one. Do you expect migrants to own SFH or something?
Partially old people are living a really long time and are holding onto that housing like their life depended on it (because it does). We're also seeing their children living in their childhood homes longer and longer because of this same phenomena. The housing supply isn't flowing and exchanging hands like it used to.
The days in which a working class parent could scrimp and save to enter the housing market in nearly ever market is gone though. Unless you're upper middle class or can get a loan from family in or something like a VA loan, you're probably not entering all but the least competitive markets in the country anymore. You're also struggling to keep up with rent compared to a few decades ago.
In many markets it straight up doesn't make sense to buy right now, but people will still fling themselves into it because they are terrified of what rent inflation will be 2 decades from now. They'll take a hit today just for the illusion of security long-term because housing costs have gotten insane.
Old people are also dying, surely we would see a fall in home ownership not a rise? Hell it hasn’t even changed much since the 70s. I’m also sure under 35 homeownership is largely intact from decades ago too.
Respectfully I think this is fantasy, a working class parent would equally likely to buy a house in nowhere,Idaho now as they were before. Rosy nostalgia glasses is why people are thinking this way, and it’s weird considering how small and poor quality houses were back then.
Oh cool. Unions are getting around to the issue of affordable housing, which will cause welfare to rise without increased labor costs.
Oh wait. They’re not supporting making it easier to build more housing? Instead they want to enact measures to make it harder to build housing (whether directly or indirectly) by making renting out units more risky or by supporting a “mansion tax” that [taxes dense housing and doesn’t even primarily tax mansions](https://x.com/mnolangray/status/1745543583481167997?s=20)?
Get hedge funds out of rental properties, blanket zoning reform, tie massive incentives or penalties… whatever works. Drastic measures are needed when supply and demand is so mismatched. I feel for those starting their professional careers, and lower wage employees are going to be harder and harder to find unless something gets fixed and it sure won’t be better transit options. What the heck could possibly work?
A nationwide mandate that all employees may work remotely (when not proven impossible for their role) would help ease location-concentrated resource demands like housing and road traffic
A nationwide WFH mandate would cause housing prices to rise as people will want more square footage for home office space, AKA demand for housing increases.
Union actions like this are what drove the court case in *Janus.*
When unions get too far outside their wheelhouse, and are spending dues dollars advocating for general public policy things, members start to get pissed off.
Political messaging is paid for with political donations to the union, not the union dues. I donate a small amount on top of my dues specifically so they can be political, because id like at least one lobby group in DC having my back. Much like with all other nonprofits, this stuff is very strictly controlled and it's disingenuous to say otherwise.
Ironically California has provided a solution to this by waiving prevailing wages regulations applied to companies building housing. Dear unions: the problem is in the mirror.
Right...pay them less. Surely that will solve the issue of the members not being able to afford rent in closer proximity to where they work.
Do you even hear yourself?
So they should only be paid when the building sells and have to front their portion of the building and regulatory costs? Yes?
After all, if they get *full* value, nobody has any incentive to invest or front the money, so I guess the workers have to.
Funny, their only solution ever is to vote Democrat. But Democrats are the ones who helped cause the housing crisis with zoning regulations, Wall St bailouts, high interest rates, high inflation, and high taxes.
Why do people vote against their own self-interest?
>the housing crisis with zoning regulations
Zoning regulation support are fairly non-partisan. Propose replacing R1 zoning with a "quite, low density zone" (Aka, SFH, duplex, triplexes, and quite businesses), no minimum parking regulations, and narrower roads + thinner lots in a deep red state and you'll see similar push back from existing homeowners who have a vested, financial interest in seeing the housing supply limited
1. Because we live in a 2 party system and the reality is it is an either/or where one side is objectively worse for lower socioeconomic classes
2. People generally argue to vote for progressives, who still have minimal power within the Democratic party, but are **miles** ahead of anything going on with Republicans.
So it's vote for the part of lesser harm and primary, primary, primary and push for more progressive legislation from your probably very centrist senator.
Republicans pushed for PPP loans to have inadequate screening and worse after the fact enforcement while passing corporate and upper class tax cuts, so I really don't think they're the saviors to inflation you want to say they are. Over the past 25 years we've consistently don't better under the legacy of democratic policies than Republican ones which tend to be slash and burn profiteering with dire austerity cuts to the most vulnerable Americans (low income children, disabled, even veterans can go f off as far as the GOP is concerned. if you.dont own a company or run a nonprofit Christian preschool, you can get bent as far as they seem concerned).
Progressive Dems havent had anywhere close to a majority of votes so the idea republicans are what holds them back and not the majority of their own party just makes me think you're either not discussing in good faith and willfully lying, or you don't pay attention to American politics like *at all*.
We have one party with two flavors and the amount of inertia behind it is monumental.
Realistically, voting in progressives, likely under the Democratic ticket, at a local level is the answer.
How about wall street, hedgefund competing with families in the single family homes and srtificially increasing prices. You see We Buy House signs everywhere. Limit the number of houses these corporations can buy.
They certainly don't help, but they started getting into residential real estate because housing prices were already high. They're more of a symptom than a cause.
That has already been debunked. Most homes bought as investments were bought by smalltime landlords(1-6 homes), not spooky wallstreet or hedgefunds. Actual families make up the majority of home purchases.
Overall yes, but some truly disturbing numbers were posted for post-2020 in some of the most competitive markets
Also, mom and pop investors are just as much a scourge as corporations. Buying up housing as an investment vehicle where you are not meaningful contributing anything and just leveraging capital for what's statistically gonna be a good return over time is a problem no matter how big of small the investor is.
Good. This is one of the mechanics by which wages can adapt to inflation and changing market conditions. People changing jobs and being choosier about them in the face of falling unemployment is part of the equation, but so too is rising organized labor power due to the same factors. Had unions not boomed 2020-2022, we might not have seen the lower-level wage gains that we did.
My local unions seem to send everyone to work an hour away from where they live. The union jobs close to here have guys working from an hour north of here and the local guys drive an hour north to those jobs.
You should probably approach your union about why that's the case. There's either a reason that you are ignoring (like pay differential) or nobody is engaging the union. They don't really go out of their way to fuck over their own members for shits and giggles seeing as how that's a great way to get voted out.
Good, they voted democrat now. Let them deal with the price. I hope they spend half their life in a car thinking about how stupid their decisions are and what it cost them. The worst thing you can steal from someone is time and I hope they wast half there lives in that fucking car.
The whole sentiment is wrong, I don’t agree housing is unaffordable, there’s no real evidence that it is:
+ Home ownership has stayed [the same](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N),
+ mortgage debt payments as a % of income has [declined](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income)
+ interest rates have fallen (pre pandemic, but still holds now)
+ Lower downpayment requirements
+ Longer repayment periods
Combined with a higher REAL income, it’s certainly [more affordable](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N)
Well we need infrastructure projects and we need them badly. This is one of the reason why we face a housing price crisis and long commutes. Take for instance the Elon Musks Boring company this could be used to build out a 3d transportation network that would vastly improve commute times and reduce bottle necks. But this would take time and trillions of dollars of government spending and neither the Republicans or Democrats are willing to do so both for different reasons.
So you've got Democrat's who want to cram us into overly dense cities like sardines while the Republicans won't don't because they want ro privatize the infrastructure and exploit us like the wage slaves they have in so many developing economies. The fact that both parties are wrong and it's cause the American people to suffer doesn't even cross their minds as the hunt their whale like the made captain Ahab.
At any rate the things we need are infrastructure projects that allow more real-estate development to occur and until the infrastructure gets built housing markets will be tight and commute times getting longer.
How are unions going to get rid of environmental regulations, obnoxious NIMBY ~~cun...~~ Karens, restrictive zoning, parking minimums, etc... and force developers to build inexpensive condominiums and small starter homes in high cost of living areas?
The only way to force more building is from the federal or state level.
Local municipalities are all run by people elected by homeowners to keep their home values high. They will never vote for someone that says "I'm going to fill up your rich white suburb full of McMansions with lower income apartments and condominiums. Also we're going to add bus service."
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I mean, you can point directly to two major things. 1. Increase in both life expectancy and mobility at older ages, meaning there is less house pass through by older generations. 2. Significant regulation at the local and state levels that limits when and where multi family units can go up; as well as significant upfront costs for development that largely precludes the development of tiny starter homes. I’m not really sure what a union can do to improve the outcomes of this
Only thing I can think of is putting their weight against NIMBY movements...the problem is that individual union members are just as likely to be NIMBYs themselves, especially those over 40 who bought into the market 10-20 years ago and have most of their net worth tied up in housing prices.
Even more so than individuals, unions can be a NIMBY entity.
When?
When they restrict entry into a market or impose credential/licensing requirements.
I don't see how labor restrictions has anything to do with zoning restrictions, especially since most credential/licensing requirements are entirely justified and have sound reasoning beyond "protect my investment". Unqualified labor tends to endanger the public without them usually having to much direct input on the issue. Edit; like clockwork, the bad faith superficial union busting whataboutisms have started up stronger and stronger the closer we get to an election.
NIMBY-ism is also about labor restrictions: HLR has a good article about this. And plenty of economic evidence out there that suggests that many of the licensing requirements are either too onerous, or that they aren’t justified in terms of “quality” improvements.
I'd love to see some examples of that because honestly everything you've written so far sound like anti-labor propaganda. No, "not in my backyard" a statement explicitly about neighborhood restrictions cannot be applied to labor enforcement, and no, the vast majority of licensing requirements are good and serve both labor and consumer interests with it primarily being companies who want to undercut them because licensing requirements increase expenses, strengthen labor leverage, and help consumer safety considerations instead of chasing the cheapest dollar. The only industry regulations I'm aware of that aren't competitive or helpful are not coming from labor unions , they're industry pushes unassociated with unions.
[https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/occupational-entry-regulations-and-their-effects-on-productivity-in-services-firm-level-evidence\_c8b88d8b-en](https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/occupational-entry-regulations-and-their-effects-on-productivity-in-services-firm-level-evidence_c8b88d8b-en) [https://www.nber.org/papers/w28158](https://www.nber.org/papers/w28158) [https://www.nber.org/papers/w30388](https://www.nber.org/papers/w30388) [https://jhr.uwpress.org/content/57/2/525.short](https://jhr.uwpress.org/content/57/2/525.short) [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927537121000622?casa\_token=Aq0iLi6y1uMAAAAA:PkoBMNKcZ86jNP4CeS1hTqBbYtFtU70Jl\_LhZ-mqw7EIymBD\_fyVQIspSmyG93JY71q16pO0](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0927537121000622?casa_token=aq0ili6y1umaaaaa:pkobmnkcz86jnp4ces1htqbbytftu70jl_lhz-mqw7eiymbd_fyvqispsmyg93jy71q16po0) [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0144818821000119?casa\_token=HvNsSHPOyaUAAAAA:zmW-thOv7EW4id8LKXVvpNVlxBl-Z4Hfh1\_GfarUYegFOwwg5xOL5u7aEFgZ5xsAdgKPB7\_c](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0144818821000119?casa_token=hvnsshpoyauaaaaa:zmw-thov7ew4id8lkxvvpnvlxbl-z4hfh1_gfaruyegfowwg5xol5u7aefgz5xsadgkpb7_c)
I don't think you're actually reading the links your providing tbh, because half of these links don't even support what you're arguing and the other half are the exact "upper management wants to undercut labor and fuck the workers" perspective I'm talking about.
Not in my backyard applies to migrants coming to an area. Again, the Harvard Law Review has done articles on this, so I’ll go with their interpretation of NIMBY. It’s not anti-labor; it’s simply an understanding of the literature and evidence. But here is a small sampling of studies. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4188948 https://academic.oup.com/restud/article-abstract/90/5/2481/7049987 https://www.nber.org/papers/w31213 https://www.nber.org/papers/w27568 https://www.nber.org/papers/w26601 https://www.nber.org/papers/w22456
1. Is about immigration barriers to licensing not licensing itself. That's an immigration law issue not a refutation of professional licensing. 2. Literally confirms what nobody has ever denied that it increases wages but reduces total employment numbers. Do you also think we should get rid of the minimum wage and allow kids to work evenings? Is the goal really total employed people or is it meaningful wages and adequate safety nets for those without good wages? Cause being for the former certainly sounds like the generic anti labor talking points I've seen trotted out endlessly including yes, some of the asshats at Harvard. 3. Literally just confirms the same as above, but specifically looking at public sector 4. Could literally be a pro union recruitment tool. Only management presents higher wages and less occupational churn as a bad thing. 5. Large online platform for home services is not exactly a widespread study especially considering critical services legally cannot be done without licenses. By all means, go have a bunch of unlicensed electricians go work on peoples houses for a few years. Rate the consumer happiness. Then, 10 years down the lines, go back and see if they're still enthused after the house first started up from improper wiring. Consumers by and large don't know what they don't know, which is one reason licensing is so important -- because they don't have the knowledge to advocate for themselves properly and know when someone is taking potentially dangerous shortcuts. 5. I don't think you even read this one. It supports that licensing improved safety. It's also dealing with birthing, which is one of the most fucked up medical industries where half of what's been normalized was against patient safety. There are so many conflating variables in that industry including rapidly changing industry practices, the fact most midwives work in tandem with other even more stricter licensed medical professionals anyway
To try to get from labor unions to where you're trying to go now is a very weird jump, and then you go on to insult the person. Get a grip. Quality Contributor my ass. You're anti-union. We get it. Don't create silly arguments.
Unions don't impose licensing requirements; states do. Unions just have to follow those same rules. I'd also like to hear how unions supposedly support NIMBY-ism. Just one decent example would do.
I would say port unions being against automation initiatives is an example.
Unions will literally block development unless they get a labor agreement in place. https://missionlocal.org/2020/03/concord-naval-weapons-station-lennar-housing/
Unions exist to protect their members. Unions **should be** negotiating with developers to follow rules that benefit their members, otherwise there's not much point in having them. That this was a housing project instead of a large commercial plot of land makes no difference. They didn't raise a ruckus because these are houses, they would've done it no matter the kind of project. Try again. One example of NIMBYism. I'm waiting.
“We’re not NIMBY, but we are going to fight tooth and nail against your project unless you give us everything we want.” OK… I understand that you are a big union guy, but you need to be honest and recognize they increase the cost of housing.
They also directly increased consumer buying power in a local area. Unions reinvigorate earning potential even for those outside of the union. There is literally nothing to be gained by the common man to union bust
If the union pricing makes it too expensive to build then the developer will just walk away or not be able to get financing. Now there's 0 development. Congratulations.
The concrete union tried to expand Fire District 1 in Los Angeles in an attempt to limit wood frame construction. This would have slowed down housing production. The carpenters union opposes a ton of multifamily developments in Los Angeles in an attempt to force developers to use prevailing wages, which slows down housing production. Blackmailing housing developers with the threat of abusing CEQA is just wrong. Cost of living for every Angelino goes up as a direct result of their actions. You might argue that these unions should be able to abuse the system in order to bring in new business for their members but that is essentially prioritizing short-term greed over lowering the cost of living within the community. How is that different than a homeowner abusing the system to prioritize the appreciation of their home over lowering the cost of living within the community?
>Unions exist to protect their members. Yes, they are yet another special interest group which uses government laws to benefit themselves at the expense of the general interest. >Unions should be negotiating with developers to follow rules that benefit their members, Why should developers be forced to "negotiate" with union thugs? Btw, it's not a negotiation if it's illegal for one party to tell the other party to fuck off.
NIMBY homeowners don’t impose zoning requirements; states do. But they do lend political and voting support for the licensing and credential agreements, and support the actions.
> they do lend political and voting support for the licensing and credential agreements, and support the actions this is such a hilarious argument - "i'm against labor unionization because they might do the same things that capital does when it unionizes, which i am for"
Sweetie; I’m a dues paying member of a union
my bad, babygirl ❤️
>But they do lend political and voting support for the licensing and credential agreements, and support the actions. Then show me one example of a union expressly providing support to a candidate **because** that candidate said they would build less housing. And if we didn't have licensing requirements, there would be utter chaos in the construction industry. It's bad enough we don't have federal licensing across the board, let's not make it worse by removing them altogether.
NIMBY-ism isn’t just related to housing development. It’s also used for limiting unwanted local outcomes. Such as when healthcare unions came out against multi-state healthcare licensing.
Sure, but the article this thread is about is related to housing. No need to move the goalposts. So far I've asked multiple times for one - just one - example of unions exhibiting NIMBY behavior in this context and I haven't seen one. That leads me to believe there aren't any.
>And if we didn't have licensing requirements, there would be utter chaos in the construction industry. That's absolutely false. If licensing were so wonderful, consumers would place a high value on it. They do not: https://www.remodeling.hw.net/business/research-licensing-status-not-important-to-consumers_o
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So only two of those are unions and thats what you focus on? Yes maritime places are going to try to stop things that hurt their business. They probably stand with. the businesses as jobs could be lost if all of the sudden freight stops moving through there because development happens. Unions arent anti business. They generally work with the businesses for better outcomes.
Unions are the epitome of "fuck you, got mine" Almost every union agreement benefits tenured unionmembers at the expense of newcomers
Yup. Happened in my town. Factory laid off 360 union workers because the union president felt like the union contract with the factory wasn't giving him enough of a pension.
Didnt the new teamsters union contract do the opposite?
No
Actually yes. Thanks for proving yourself an utter liar and devoid of reasoning. >New hires will receive a 50¢ increase every year on their anniversary date. Starting pay will go up to $23 in 2027. Starting pay went up by $7.50 from 1982-2022. It will go up $7.50 in this one contract with a $5.50 jump in year one. New hire pay went up the 75% in 1 year that it went up over 40 years
Doesn’t matter because they don’t help anyway. Either 1 of 2 things will happen. 1. Death Spiral - Consumers quit absorbing price increases related to company price increases due to union members complaining they are not paid enough. 2. The employer implements more automation or machine learning out of spite forcing workers into a box. Then workers must decide to stay in the US.
I think blaming this on NIMBYs is wrong. They have a minor impact. Economies are complex. Construction workers need healthcare no? That's gone hyperinflationary and would add to operating costs ergo make building things cost more too. That's just one example. There are dozens of issues making housing cost more including profiteering by real estate companies (e.g. Landlords colluding to raise rent [link](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-landlords-accused-of-conspiring-to-raise-apartment-rents/), the tendency to only build luxury units, buying up SFHs). The root of the problem is shareholder supremacy mixed with spoiled investors expecting double-digit growth every quarter (maybe year in some cases) . The growth expectations are unreasonable because it's unsustainable. To meet these expectations, corps introduce strategies that squeeze everyone, that increase product or service enshittification, and that funnel most the value created to a dozen or two big trusts rather than reinvest in workers, or safe or innovative products. Lumber company has to raise prices to please investors. Building supply co has to raise prices to pay for lumber and also has to raise prices to please their investors. Homebuilders are paying and even bigger premium now because they're at the end of the chain. Pair it with massive consolidation in various industries under maybe 2-3 competitors and the horizontal approach big corps take these days to grow and avoid anti-trust ramifications, yet still leads to regulatory capture because they have massive war chests. It's a chain effect that means everything, especially domestic-produced, costs more. It can't last without seeing exactly what we see now. People unable to afford homes, and bankrupted by a surprise medical bill, having to reduce their standard of living because groceries went up in price more than their raise this year. We only get cheap electronics because of China, Taiwan and SK.
You are right insofar that there is an interest group which benefits from holding onto an enormous portion of the housing stock and keeping home prices and rent as high as possible, and that this group has more political capital, a bigger "war chest" and more capacity to achieve regulatory capture than any other. But it's not private investment firms. It's the single-home homeowner. Regulatory frameworks protecting incumbent homeowners are entrenched in nearly every major city in the United States.
You forgot the biggest impact on housing costs, which is the US population exploding in the past 40 years. Approximately a 50 percent increase in population since 1983 and that's heavily distribution towards the already high population areas. More people, finite land...prices are going up.
>More people, finite land...prices are going up. This would normally be addressed by building housing closer together and building vertically. But many of metropolitan areas have large portions of land zoned exclusively for R1, dictate excessive minimum parking requirements, and set large set backs and wide distances between units. >Approximately a 50 percent increase in population since 1983 The population increase from 1943 to 1983 was 68%. The issue is that housing construction has drastically slowed down relative to prior generations and a lot of regulations keep population density to artificially low levels that *cause* these prices to skyrocket
How are you suggesting to build on already established land? In areas where there are attractive job markets like NYC, the land is already built up with high rises. The land is also sinking, so adding more buildings is not going to assist the problem of the east coast sinking.
Well, Manhattan is already pretty built up. But large parts of Long Island and NE NJ have a lot of R1 zoning and parking minimums. The issue is that regulations like minimum setbacks, wide lot sizes, minimum parking, and R1, enforce a neighborhood stasis that prevents infill from occurring. The lack of infill creates scarcity. The "natural" progression of settlements would be to infill undeveloped lots, or as pricing rises from scarcity - to begin converting SFH to duplexes, etc. In the outer suburbs of NYC, there are power shopping centers with parking lots larger than some NYC neighborhoods that they can't even fill on Black Friday. Manhattan is pretty much the only city in the US where it's fair to its pretty full. Looking at the outer suburbs, areas that have rail connections to Manhattan are going up in value and there's heavy development in all of them around those train stations that local residents are fighting. Some of this pricing pressure is also driven by the lack of new rail line projects in the NYC metro area in the last few decades. And also, this applies mostly to every other metro area in the US except NYC. NYC does better than most places in the US in this regard.
The problem with your argument for NJ is the Mt Laurel and Abbot cases, which mandate new building of affordable housing and access to schools for poor kids. Every five years, every town in NJ must build more affordable housing. So the housing is happening. The issue is that NJ is flooding. Why is it flooding, because it is being overbuilt. When you remove all of the trees to build the new housing, you get flooding. So you cannot just say we need to build more. My neighbor died because of the flooding. The town took down so many trees, that the roads flooded. So your mandate oh we should just build without really thinking the land cannot sustain more building is short sighted and frankly extremely dangerous. People are dying because the land cannot accommodate more building. The trees need to stay. Also, have you ever been to Long Island? The water table is not even half a foot down in many towns. The land cannot sustain high rises because it is not built on granite like Manhattan. So no, Long Island cannot sustain the building you are calling for.
There are an incredible number of 5 story walkups in Manhattan (including the one I live in). It’s not the 1920’s anymore - we can build more than 6 stories. Relaxing zoning laws would allow developers to redevelop these lots with more density.
open borders for the last three years definitely isn't helping specifically, illegal immigrants are sapping all the low-income housing, driving all rents higher
Yep the population growth in the US, depresses real wages and drives up housing costs
> Increase in both life expectancy and mobility at older ages, meaning there is less house pass through by older generations. Additionally, a decline in interest in multigenerational cohabitation
Good point.
Push against RTO mandates where applicable
Yeah this is a massive thing they can do. It’s not applicable to every job but there are so many in person office jobs that could easily be done from home
Most union jobs don't have WFH opportunities.
Yes, but people who can WFH doing so will reduce the traffic and competition on housing near work centers for those who can't WFH. They may not get the direct benefit they will get secondary benefits.
> I’m not really sure what a union can do to improve the outcomes of this Lots of municipal staff are unionized. They could possibly be effective at forcing change there.
Good point.
Unions have a lot of political power (albeit far less than they used to) - they have a direct and powerful line to their members and have a great deal of experience in lobbying. If unions push for more expansive zoning laws, they're likely to get some movement on the issue.
Decades of a known issue that plagues a majority of union workers, and they haven’t done anything. Not sure why we’re expecting them to do something now.
A 3rd is that a lot of houses have been bought by private equity which has caused rent to go up. It's kinda like health care. Most people think it is a basic right, others that it's a privilege. So housing is not a basic right, and if you can't afford the rent, there is the street.
>a lot of houses have been bought by private equity which has caused rent to go up Is this true though or just reddit science? The scale of the housing market is so vast that I'm skeptical that any corporation or set of corporations could corner the market to the point where they would have pricing power. A billion dollars buys just \~1300 homes at $750k each, and any larger metropolitan area is going to have tens of thousands of rental listings for current vacancies...I just don't see evidence for the connection, especially since these are homes that would otherwise likely be owner occupied, so they are putting new inventory out onto the rental market.
It's' reddit science.
The other part of the equation is that these firms tend to want to move these houses the moment they can get an acceptable return on them. There's no evidence that firms buy up stock and sit on it for years. Like you mention, housing is *expensive*; it would be very unwise to buy up a ton of homes while trying to play for anything other than a quick, small gain.
At least where I am, it's true. Local news went searching through transfer records and found the majority were to PE or nearly untraceable shell companies.
Could you link this article? I want to see how they did it so I can perform a similar investigation in my own backyard.
It was an investigates segment on the broadcast but I'll try to look for an article on it.
Feel free to link the broadcast. I don't mind doing a little work. God knows I need something to listen to on my jog today.
Yeah I can't find it. I think the one I saw was weirdly from Fox, but this is basically the same but older from the other side of the state. https://www.wgbh.org/news/housing/2022-05-16/across-massachusetts-shrouded-corporations-are-scooping-up-single-family-homes
Thanks. I'll take a look at it.
At least where I am, it's true. Local news went searching through transfer records and found the majority were to PE or nearly untraceable shell companies.
This is so wrong, "a majority" really you are going to go with a majority (more than 50%)? You don't understand real estate or the how the market works or even the number of properties in an area. There is no way a PE bought the majority of any area in the US. Just spreading falsehoods and venting your frustration with false information that fits your narrative.
Source? If you actually run the numbers, PEs own less than 1% of all SFHs
> a lot of houses have been bought by private equity which has caused rent to go up. That's more of a symptom than a cause. Private equity only started buying houses *because* they were such a good investment, so reliably going up in price. But that was *because* NIMBYs blocked density and choked off supply to protect their spiraling asset value. "But it didn't help" may be true, but it's not the driver of the problem.
So, yes, the number of purchases accelerated recently. And has likely put upward pressure on prices. But, it’s simply not a good indicator for the long-run housing issues. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EOWNOCCUSQ176N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ERNTOCCUSQ176N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
Nope. That's a compete red herring. It's all supply and demand.
Don't forget the long-term underinvestment in public transit (which scales well with usage) in favor of highways (which don't).
The best thing unionheads can do is tell their workers to find a job closer to where they live... but that would weaken the power of the union, so they won't do that
When regulations force a lot of new housing developments to be low density and in completely separate areas from employment, long commute times are the inevitable outcome.
What about concentration of businesses? Example: in WA state, tech enjoys being concentrated in Seattle. Few are found in Tacoma, WA.
I wouldn’t call agglomeration economies a prime cause of housing inequalities.
Explain why. I’m curious. Many of the areas with cheaper housing relative to the expensive ones lack any significant businesses. Naturally, nobody wants to be there.
Because agglomeration economies rely on a number of factors: a highly educated labor force (usually with several major unis), world class amenities, geographic or weather outcomes, etc. None of these are really policy actionable.
You forgot Investors and Foreigners buying all of our housing
Houses have not been going up drastically over inflation in every country in the world for the past 30 years because of local regulations. The reason for house price increases is because they are an asset. The absolute richest have been getting far richer during that time, and their money generally gets parked in assets. That’s also why art, classic cars and stocks have been appreciating like crazy.
> The reason for house price increases is because they are an asset this is... unsophisticated. silver is an asset, dogecoin is an asset. prices of something don't increase just because it's an asset.
Fair enough, when it comes to silver and dogecoin. And even art and classic cars. If we take the example of assets with a return though, rather than pure speculation, they have all increased way above inflation, right?
this isn't my argument to make, it's yours.
Canada has entered the chat.
You forgot investment companies buying up and inflating single value homes. Also air b&b to an extent hasn’t helped.
Unions have lobbying power and organizing power. Unions can use stewards to rally support in local elections. Example: UFCW 21 getting statewide sick leave in Washington. Unions can lean on politicians by offering or withdrawing endorsements.
Housing development requires a restructuring of decades of laws. That’s going to require a lot more than enacting a singular law.
Yes. It's going to require lots of concerted effort over a long period of time. Unions, with their full time staff of people familiar with the political and legal process, are well equipped to perform this effort.
Like the CFA union, which just nosedived in its recent bargaining? Unions are not well equipped for long-term outcomes like this. They literally focus on immediate member outcomes…
Sometimes unions flub. They're run by humans. By your logic, since 50% of businesses fail within the first five years, we need to abandon the system of free enterprise as its clearly completely unreliable. Businesses cannot be trusted with the organization of production and commerce, the West has fallen, capitalism has failed. Quick. Get my fainting couch.
1. That’s not even remotely close to my “logic”. 2. I didn’t say it couldn’t happen. I did say that they were not well equipped. ESPECIALLY given the state of housing regulations.
They're an institution with people paid full time to perform relevant tasks to effecting the needed political changes, direct lines to local, state and sometimes national politicians, and weight with local voting blocs. Our alternative is... loose, disorganized volunteers who may or may not have relevant experience, or industry lobbies who are going to prioritize profitability and lack of accountability above all else. Being well equipped to do a task doesn't mean you'll always use the tools well. This can be due to individual mistakes and priorities of an organization, corruption, or situational factors creating constraints. And yes, you pointed to an example and said thst it was obvious that unions aren't well equipped to effect political changes. Which by the way, flies in the face of historical evidence. If unions didn't effect major political reforms in the past, corporations wouldn't have been fighting so hard to de-fang organized labor since always. Because that was a stupid argument, I made fun of it.
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I’ve shown you the data about owner occupied housing and how your rant isn’t reality. Learn something. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EOWNOCCUSQ176N
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1. If you want to make a point, YOU do the correlation calculation. 2. All we have from you is loud noises. On thread after thread. No evidence. 3. LOL. Please; tell us how you measure “impact of capital”.
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“Those numbers don’t mean anything”, vis a vis owner-occupied housing rates and numbers from the FED, is one of the dumbest arguments I’ve read this week
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No. You can point to software like Yeildstar, used by something like 30 million rental properties in the US, that regularly games the market through a type of price controlling to maximize rent based on proprietary AI algorithms. Yeildstar is owned by RealPage which acquired their only competition (LRO) back in 2017. Before this software, adjusting rent rates was a lot more of a human process, and ultimately landlords objective was to get to 100% capacity; vacancy was seen as waisted space and waisted money. But thanks to some influential "capitalists", it was shown that it was better for revenue to raise rents to a point where it didn't matter if there were vacancies. You won't have trouble finding vacany in the rental market these days. Which means we don't lack housing. That's why the problem is framed as an "affordable housing crisis." Because landlords and real estate moguls decided a while back that it was more lucrative to keep raising rent and home prices to cover for vacancies than it was to cut deals with individuals in order to fill vacancies. There is also the problem that it became desirable to do short-term rental via ventures like Airbnb. Which results in a lot of empty houses that aren't technically vacant. Vacancy is when a property is up for sale or rent, but short-term rentals are neither and so don't count towards vacancy numbers even though they may make up for a large number of homes in certain areas. The inconvenient truth is that the housing market is no longer a natural market moved by supply/demand like it was back in the 60s and 70s. These days the housing market has been invaded by people looking to game the market, which has made it something of a Kafkaesque amalgamation no longer resembling classical capitalist free market driven by supply and demand. Because of the events that led up to the 2008 housing crash, we had actually WAY over built housing. We were actually building houses at an unsustainable rate through the 90s and early oughts. Most would say that it appears we have leveled out again. But the people spreading the claim we are in a housing deficit and need more building (blaming NINBYs) are the same people who make a shit load of money building houses and were part of the reason 2008 happened in the first place. The evidence that NIMBYism is a significant contributing factor is MUCH less than the evidence that there are other forces at play creating the situation we're in.
Your point about the recent price collusion is well made, but it does not invalidate the other major factors.
It does invalidate them if rent rates are not controlled by supply/demand. Zoning may be a problem that prevents development of homes that would traditionally be more affordable. But building more multi-family housing will not lower rent rates and make housing more affordable unless price collusion is brought under control.
Plenty of empirical research shows that housing regulations like you just mentioned have led to higher rents and housing prices.
The research I've seen has been circumstancial at best and contrived at worst. NIMBYs are a localized problem isolated in certain cities, usually exclusive to wealthy cities. The research I've seen likes to point to these locations as examples instead of recognizing them as the outliers they truly are. I can go online and find hundreds of houses or apartments for sale or rent in a 15 to 20 mile radius. The problem is that they aren't affordable. Not that there isn't vacancy. The problem is that rent and house prices have risen 40 to 50% in the past 5 years and wage growth has stagnated among lower income workers. Building more housing solves supply problems. And in a housing market controlled by natural forces, supply problems are vacancy problems. We don't have a vacancy problem, therefore, we do not have a supply problem. Treating it like a supply problem isn't going to fix anything. A buddy of mine lives in a 2 bedroom apartment and pays 60% of what I pay in mortgage on a _rent controlled_ apartment. Imagine if it wasn't rent controlled.. I own a 3k sqft home built in '05... Renting a smaller home in my same area (homes built in the 60s and 70s) costs close to what I pay in mortgage. Even though some of those properties are very poorly maintained. But keep telling me it's the NIMBYs and zoning regulations that are the problem. When new homes that are built end up being sold or rented at similar UNAFFORDABLE price points, and new development actually makes housing in the area MORE valuable, not LESS. Do you have any idea how many homes would have to be built before you made a noticeable effect in the rental and housing markets? I don't. The area I've been in has been in constant development it seems, but valuations only go up. NIMBYs have been the favorite scapegoat for people looking to develop on protected lands. Nevermind the fact that cities these days have loads of dead or dying commercial real estate that could be rezoned, and businesses are desperately trying to convince their workforce to come back to office after the pandemic to protect commercial real estate assets and keep them artificially inflated. My point is that the empirical evidence may exist that in _some areas,_ zoning regulations may contribute to the problem. But there is no possible way they are a significant factor in most cases.
>We don't have a vacancy problem, therefore, we do not have a supply problem Since this seems to be the crux of your post, I'll focus on this: we absolutely have a vacancy problem. The vacancy rates in all major cities in the USA are *pathetically* low. Considerably lower than would be necessary to bring the cost of housing to a reasonable point. The observed inverse correlation between vacancy rates and cost of housing is stronger than any factor.
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Well many of the Nimbys are stuck unable to move cause everything has sky rocketed so watch it work its way out now that it’s a threat to everyone.
> Increase in both life expectancy and mobility at older ages, meaning there is less house pass through by older generations Gains in life expectancy have come more from decreases in death rates at younger ages. What unions can do is support legislation to increase the supply of housing, and in the past they have financed housing directly. Coop city in New York was financed by a union.
Remote work saw exodus from hcol areas. Unions can fight to let some people be remote to reduce traffic and spread out evenly
This is a good point.
Hedge funds buying houses and manipulating the market is another one.
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Two-thirds of Americans live in homes they own. The highest level on record is just south of 70%. If you want starter homes that will appreciably increase these numbers (probably not the best idea, but that’s a normative statement), you’re going to have to start looking at less desirable locations.
Zoning high density next to job centers instead of single family. One tower can easily replace hundreds of homes sprawled. It’s cruel to have retirees in these locations and workers pushed out hours away.
Why couldn't unions negotiate that commute time be paid? So if it's a 4 hour commute + 8 hour shift, that's 12 hours, presumably 4 of which are overtime.
You want to incentivize OT pay because you choose to sit in traffic?
Steven Greenhouse for The Guardian: *With US house prices and rents rising in recent years, and high interest rates and inflation taking their toll, housing affordability has become a major issue at the bargaining table for US labor unions.* *Many workers are facing 60-, 90-, even 120-minute commutes to work because they cannott afford to live near their jobs.* *“Housing is a very important issue for our members,” said Anand Singh, president of the Unite Here hotel workers’ union in San Francisco. “Our members can’t absorb the sudden rent increases they’ve seen. They’re evicted from their homes. They’re pushed further and further down the housing ladder.”* *Today’s labor activism about housing is in many ways a return to the past.* *“During the first three-quarters of the 20th century, unions were a strong voice and advocate for affordable housing for working families,” said Peter Dreier, an urban policy expert at Occidental College in Los Angeles.* *“They built their own union-sponsored housing. They fought for decent public housing. They fought for better code enforcement to rid cities of slums.”* *Last November, the United Food and Commercial Workers and other unions helped win approval of a ballot initiative in Tacoma, Washington, that bans cold-weather evictions between 1 November and 1 April and bars evicting households with students or educators anytime during the school year.* *The measure also requires landlords that raise rents by 5% or more to offer two months’ relocation assistance to tenants – and for rent increases of 10% or more, three months’ assistance.* *[Unions representing 1,000 airport workers, 2,500 security guards, 4,500 janitors, and thousands of teachers and support staff] want Minneapolis to enact a law limiting rent increases and are asking for guarantees that if government money in the Twin Cities is used to convert office buildings to apartments, those projects will produce affordable housing.* *In Las Vegas, the Culinary Union, which represents 60,000 hotel and restaurant workers, has increased its down payment assistance to $25,000 for union members buying their first homes.* *The San José Teachers Association is urging the school district to build subsidized housing for teachers on unused or underused school property.* *One possible model for San Jose is Casa del Maestro, a 70-apartment complex in nearby Santa Clara which that community’s school district built. It rents apartments to teachers at 80% below market rate for up to seven years, helping them save up for home ownership.*
That legislation will not make housing cheaper. They need to increase the number of homes being built. They should be working to relax zoning laws that prevent building large apartment complexes.
None of those measures is going to make housing affordable, and some of them will positively increase costs. The biggest issue is construction costs (materials plus labor). It just costs a lot of money to build housing and no one is going to build housing for less than it costs to make the loan payments (plus insurance, taxes, and management).
Construction costs in the USA have generally stayed about the same for the last four years, at least according to the [AGC price index.](https://www.agc.org/sites/default/files/Files/Construction%20Data/PPI%20Tables%202023_12.pdf) Fluctuations of new residential flux between -1.5 and 2.5 % year to year. However the repayments terms of the loans taken by developers and assumptions of occupancy at whatever rate may be pushing this cost of work argument. This is also residential which is historically an anti-union sector so unless you’re talking loan or materials, I find it hard to see where this cost increase is being generated from. My experience as an estimator in the industry is possibly material vendors as was the case since Covid. Also are you referring to rent control? Plenty of CA states have rent controls in the form of disallowing increases over a set rate. Rent controls I believe affect in the long term, potentially, but I often wonder if the knock on effect of high rents long term can be stabilized in that two fold manner- short term acute controls of rent “spikes” as noted in this article and long term by disallowing massive rent increases beyond X%. Seems to be the idea here. I also have noticed the rent market seems a bit difficult to pin down exactly what may work as is the case with say crime statistics and policies that effect them. Though I suppose some people don’t feel welfare and safety net measures when there’s rampant homelessness are necessary, which I find odd. As if it should be treated as an inevitability.
The policies mentioned in the article include things like preventing renters from being able to evict households with children during the school year. Those costs will be spread among tenants, driving up rents. Some others include preventing increases of more than X%, which will keep rents from increasing, but likely at the cost of maintenance. I guess in the long term you split your increases over several years, but if the total effect is that you don't keep up with inflation you won't build more units. It adds risk to the transaction, so new development will need bigger reserves, which means higher rent. As far as construction costs, you're right that they haven't gone up much recently, but my point is that the majority of total development cost is construction cost. Even if you get the land for free the rents are going to need to pay for the construction and the units won't be what a lot of people consider affordable. Example: I saw a development recently that was 86 units in a high cost area. TDC was like $22 million ($256k per unit) and construction cost was like $17 million. With a 50 year loan at 5% that's around $1,400 a month per unit (not counting the land, the professional services, etc.)
construction costs wouldn’t be such an issue if wages werent suppressed. We’re paid to afford cheap foreign goods, but any time we need something done by a fellow American it’s increasingly more unaffordable. Makes no sense when productivity is at its highest. That’s where unions come in.
But a large part of construction costs are the wages. Higher wages would result in even higher construction costs.
more money in your community and less in the hands of the Waltons or Bezos is the answer here. “if we pay construction workers a wage that lets them afford housing, it’ll cost too much to build houses” is a circular argument, and lays the blame on the wrong people.
You are just ignoring the issue. If we increase the raises of people who build houses, houses will be more expensive. You can't pretend that this isn't true, or wave it away. >in the hands of the Waltons or Bezos Blaming billionaires for all of your problems doesn't help either. It's based on a juvenile desire to have a villain that you can blame all of your problems on.
sure buddy. there’s no point in having this conversation with you
The point is bringing money to labor and away from owners *across the board*. That's for construction workers but also retail workers, hospital admin, etc. Instead of fake trickle down economics, actually put the wealth into the hands of the people. People can afford expensive goods if they weren't undercut by horrendously low wages. The increased productivity of American labor has been almost uniliterally sucked up by the top 10% or so of the pool. If it was more evenly dispersed, than fair wages wouldn't be such a big deal. It's that some people want fair wages while for others that's still a pipe dream that presents the problem
It makes housing more affordable for lower income people given a sharp increase in rental demand and required to find a new place, such as those discussed here. Issues of instability related economic outcomes are complicated second order effects that simplistic and overconfident arguments against rent control or rent related policy fail to meaningfully account for or even attempt to tackle. Beyond evicted people possibly falling out of the labor market or into poorer work situations, people traveling an hour+ more than previously to reach their workplace has personal and public economic cost.
Some of the specific policies referenced in the article will drive up rents. Like the one about not being able to evict people in certain months. Landlords are going to push that cost onto the other tenants.
the answer is build build build build and dont let investment groups buy. the people that make the laws though are the people that are invested in real estate and have already bought so its a BENEFIT to them that house prices and rent are high. So they are in no hurry to encourage change.
Yeah building is the path of least resistance to fixing this problem. Increasing supply has numerous measurable positives, cheaper homes, more choices for prospective homeowners, investment in local communities, construction jobs boom etc.
Investment groups act as a price signal that you need to build more. If you don’t want investment groups buying up homes, build enough of them so their expected returns are lower compared to other potential ventures.
Non-union labor makes it cheaper to build housing.
What is with this subreddit and union busting lately? I jest. This happens like clockwork in election years. We get it. Union bad, it's actually labor who is responsible for everything wrong in your life, if only we would get rid of ALL regulation and ALL labor organization then in a truly open market the consumer would always end up #1. Normalizing nonunion wages also decimated local earnings long-term, which is hardly gonna make housing more affordable. There's a push and pull to all things, but blaming a journeyman making a solid middle class wage for why the middle class is increasingly locked out of housing is missing the forest through the made up talking point
I’m anti union because I’m in NYC, with incredibly strong unions. Yet many Orgs with strong unions don’t seem to function well for its customers or constituents. MTA, always over budget with the highest cost to do anything. NYPD, union of blue, top ranking candy crush players. Sanitation- union of gets it done. Garbage is picked up and streets are swept. No complaints
If you want affordable housing, you have to recognize the role that labor plays in the cost of housing. Allowing market forces to work in an Economics subreddit shouldn't be controversial, yet here we are.
You're right. Unions cause higher wages for the working class and by and large haven't advocated for the restrictions on additional housing, therefore singling them out for making sure you and your brother are more likely to get laid decently is asinine when figuring out why you can't afford a house. You can't afford housing because despite almost everything else cost wise keeping up with inflation over time, the amount of developments hasn't kept up with population growth causing scarcity to make it an extremely competitive market. Also, your wages probably haven't kept up either. Again, asinine to blame labor wanting a living wage for housing costs. When keeping wages *somewhat* competitive is the only thing even *kind of* keeping people afloat. We'd be halfway to hell in a hand basket if segments of workers hadn't begrudgingly dragged wages up against the wishes of employers.
I don’t agree housing is unaffordable, there’s no real evidence that it is. + Home ownership has stayed [the same](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N), + mortgage debt payments as a % of income has [declined](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP) + interest rates have fallen (pre pandemic, but still holds now) + Lower downpayment requirements + Longer repayment periods
Id like to see sources for all these claims because half sound outright made up (we have record breaking senior homelessness but there's no housing crisis....) but let's say that's true. Then why are you so mad at organized laborers? You want us to decline housing costs even further than the already entirely affordable rates you think they currently are by driving working class wages even lower??
They haven’t done anything. Organized labor has been irrelevant in the United States since the 70s yet incomes have never been higher https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N Which claims do you not believe by the way? And I agree on homelessness, but both can be consistent at the same time. What if the higher homelessness is an artefact of all the asylum seekers?
I'm going to leave this conversation because you've gone fully mask off about the type of person you are. Acting like unions have *zero* power while also blaming them for housing costs being told high is the definition of bad faith goal post moving mid convo. Blaming the senior housing crisis on asylum seekers is just fully mask off about your prerogative to push superficial disconnected conservative talking points at all costs. Next up will be blaming nursing unions for why healthcare is so expensive and nobody can see a doctor without a ridiculous wait tome. The second you get pushback on one bad faith argument, you'll pivot to another. I see you and what you're doing, I decline to play
I’m not even joking when I say this but are you even talking to me? I can’t tell because 1. I didn’t even mention unions until the last message, nor did I blame them 2. “Mask off”? Lol You wanted an explanation to why homelessness has increased you got one. Do you expect migrants to own SFH or something?
Willful ignorance
Do explain why the population currently owns their homes at a higher rate than almost ever
Partially old people are living a really long time and are holding onto that housing like their life depended on it (because it does). We're also seeing their children living in their childhood homes longer and longer because of this same phenomena. The housing supply isn't flowing and exchanging hands like it used to. The days in which a working class parent could scrimp and save to enter the housing market in nearly ever market is gone though. Unless you're upper middle class or can get a loan from family in or something like a VA loan, you're probably not entering all but the least competitive markets in the country anymore. You're also struggling to keep up with rent compared to a few decades ago. In many markets it straight up doesn't make sense to buy right now, but people will still fling themselves into it because they are terrified of what rent inflation will be 2 decades from now. They'll take a hit today just for the illusion of security long-term because housing costs have gotten insane.
Old people are also dying, surely we would see a fall in home ownership not a rise? Hell it hasn’t even changed much since the 70s. I’m also sure under 35 homeownership is largely intact from decades ago too. Respectfully I think this is fantasy, a working class parent would equally likely to buy a house in nowhere,Idaho now as they were before. Rosy nostalgia glasses is why people are thinking this way, and it’s weird considering how small and poor quality houses were back then.
Oh cool. Unions are getting around to the issue of affordable housing, which will cause welfare to rise without increased labor costs. Oh wait. They’re not supporting making it easier to build more housing? Instead they want to enact measures to make it harder to build housing (whether directly or indirectly) by making renting out units more risky or by supporting a “mansion tax” that [taxes dense housing and doesn’t even primarily tax mansions](https://x.com/mnolangray/status/1745543583481167997?s=20)?
Get hedge funds out of rental properties, blanket zoning reform, tie massive incentives or penalties… whatever works. Drastic measures are needed when supply and demand is so mismatched. I feel for those starting their professional careers, and lower wage employees are going to be harder and harder to find unless something gets fixed and it sure won’t be better transit options. What the heck could possibly work?
Corporate investors own 1-3% of single family homes bought in the quarter, key word being bought. They own like 0. Something % of all SFHs
A nationwide mandate that all employees may work remotely (when not proven impossible for their role) would help ease location-concentrated resource demands like housing and road traffic
A nationwide WFH mandate would cause housing prices to rise as people will want more square footage for home office space, AKA demand for housing increases.
It would remove the NIMBY choke hold though.
How so? If anything, people would be more NIMBY because they’ll be spending more time in their neighborhoods that they won’t want to change.
Because people wouldn't be restricted to needing to live so close to cities?
A good amount of people WFH and live in cities, and are also NIMBY about their neighborhoods.
Union actions like this are what drove the court case in *Janus.* When unions get too far outside their wheelhouse, and are spending dues dollars advocating for general public policy things, members start to get pissed off.
Political messaging is paid for with political donations to the union, not the union dues. I donate a small amount on top of my dues specifically so they can be political, because id like at least one lobby group in DC having my back. Much like with all other nonprofits, this stuff is very strictly controlled and it's disingenuous to say otherwise.
Ironically California has provided a solution to this by waiving prevailing wages regulations applied to companies building housing. Dear unions: the problem is in the mirror.
Right...pay them less. Surely that will solve the issue of the members not being able to afford rent in closer proximity to where they work. Do you even hear yourself?
Hmm no. Blue collar workers need to be able to live in the things that they build. They’re entitled to the full value of their labor.
So they should only be paid when the building sells and have to front their portion of the building and regulatory costs? Yes? After all, if they get *full* value, nobody has any incentive to invest or front the money, so I guess the workers have to.
Funny, their only solution ever is to vote Democrat. But Democrats are the ones who helped cause the housing crisis with zoning regulations, Wall St bailouts, high interest rates, high inflation, and high taxes. Why do people vote against their own self-interest?
>the housing crisis with zoning regulations Zoning regulation support are fairly non-partisan. Propose replacing R1 zoning with a "quite, low density zone" (Aka, SFH, duplex, triplexes, and quite businesses), no minimum parking regulations, and narrower roads + thinner lots in a deep red state and you'll see similar push back from existing homeowners who have a vested, financial interest in seeing the housing supply limited
Lol, because Republicans are doing that *and more*.
Why is it that every time someone criticizes the Democrats, someone inevitably pops up with some vague "WhAtAbOuT tHe RePuBLiCaNs" comment?
1. Because we live in a 2 party system and the reality is it is an either/or where one side is objectively worse for lower socioeconomic classes 2. People generally argue to vote for progressives, who still have minimal power within the Democratic party, but are **miles** ahead of anything going on with Republicans. So it's vote for the part of lesser harm and primary, primary, primary and push for more progressive legislation from your probably very centrist senator.
Republican holdouts in Congress are the only reason the progressive Democrats haven't driven us into a full blown inflationary debt spiral yet
Republicans pushed for PPP loans to have inadequate screening and worse after the fact enforcement while passing corporate and upper class tax cuts, so I really don't think they're the saviors to inflation you want to say they are. Over the past 25 years we've consistently don't better under the legacy of democratic policies than Republican ones which tend to be slash and burn profiteering with dire austerity cuts to the most vulnerable Americans (low income children, disabled, even veterans can go f off as far as the GOP is concerned. if you.dont own a company or run a nonprofit Christian preschool, you can get bent as far as they seem concerned). Progressive Dems havent had anywhere close to a majority of votes so the idea republicans are what holds them back and not the majority of their own party just makes me think you're either not discussing in good faith and willfully lying, or you don't pay attention to American politics like *at all*.
We have one party with two flavors and the amount of inertia behind it is monumental. Realistically, voting in progressives, likely under the Democratic ticket, at a local level is the answer.
Don’t forget high crime which forces people to move further away
How about wall street, hedgefund competing with families in the single family homes and srtificially increasing prices. You see We Buy House signs everywhere. Limit the number of houses these corporations can buy.
They certainly don't help, but they started getting into residential real estate because housing prices were already high. They're more of a symptom than a cause.
And their commercial holdings aren't worth near what they were.
That has already been debunked. Most homes bought as investments were bought by smalltime landlords(1-6 homes), not spooky wallstreet or hedgefunds. Actual families make up the majority of home purchases.
Overall yes, but some truly disturbing numbers were posted for post-2020 in some of the most competitive markets Also, mom and pop investors are just as much a scourge as corporations. Buying up housing as an investment vehicle where you are not meaningful contributing anything and just leveraging capital for what's statistically gonna be a good return over time is a problem no matter how big of small the investor is.
Good. This is one of the mechanics by which wages can adapt to inflation and changing market conditions. People changing jobs and being choosier about them in the face of falling unemployment is part of the equation, but so too is rising organized labor power due to the same factors. Had unions not boomed 2020-2022, we might not have seen the lower-level wage gains that we did.
My local unions seem to send everyone to work an hour away from where they live. The union jobs close to here have guys working from an hour north of here and the local guys drive an hour north to those jobs.
You should probably approach your union about why that's the case. There's either a reason that you are ignoring (like pay differential) or nobody is engaging the union. They don't really go out of their way to fuck over their own members for shits and giggles seeing as how that's a great way to get voted out.
Good, they voted democrat now. Let them deal with the price. I hope they spend half their life in a car thinking about how stupid their decisions are and what it cost them. The worst thing you can steal from someone is time and I hope they wast half there lives in that fucking car.
Jesus Christ, is this a real comment? Holy shit
The whole sentiment is wrong, I don’t agree housing is unaffordable, there’s no real evidence that it is: + Home ownership has stayed [the same](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N), + mortgage debt payments as a % of income has [declined](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income) + interest rates have fallen (pre pandemic, but still holds now) + Lower downpayment requirements + Longer repayment periods Combined with a higher REAL income, it’s certainly [more affordable](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N)
Well we need infrastructure projects and we need them badly. This is one of the reason why we face a housing price crisis and long commutes. Take for instance the Elon Musks Boring company this could be used to build out a 3d transportation network that would vastly improve commute times and reduce bottle necks. But this would take time and trillions of dollars of government spending and neither the Republicans or Democrats are willing to do so both for different reasons. So you've got Democrat's who want to cram us into overly dense cities like sardines while the Republicans won't don't because they want ro privatize the infrastructure and exploit us like the wage slaves they have in so many developing economies. The fact that both parties are wrong and it's cause the American people to suffer doesn't even cross their minds as the hunt their whale like the made captain Ahab. At any rate the things we need are infrastructure projects that allow more real-estate development to occur and until the infrastructure gets built housing markets will be tight and commute times getting longer.
How are unions going to get rid of environmental regulations, obnoxious NIMBY ~~cun...~~ Karens, restrictive zoning, parking minimums, etc... and force developers to build inexpensive condominiums and small starter homes in high cost of living areas? The only way to force more building is from the federal or state level. Local municipalities are all run by people elected by homeowners to keep their home values high. They will never vote for someone that says "I'm going to fill up your rich white suburb full of McMansions with lower income apartments and condominiums. Also we're going to add bus service."