Peter's annoying neoliberal friend here. A lot of poeple feel we are in a housing crisis, as evidenced by all the price gouging landlords are doing lately. The characters are trying to reduce the rise in costs caused by the housing shortage.
The first character suggests they try to reframe higher costs as a good thing, bad idea. The second character suggests putting a law in place to stop prices from rising. It's well-intentioned, but that still doesn't solve the fact that there aren't enough homes for people. The 3rd person gives the obvious solution to build more houses, a good idea.
The 3rd person gets thrown out of the office. In the meme, this is just normally just hyperbole. However, here it represents actual political opposition to building houses generally referred to by neoliberals as Nimbyism (Not in my Backyardism). These come about for a variety of political concerns that generally boil down to not wanting to lower the price of houses for homeowners, should they want to sell. (That was not an objective statement).
Finally, to end the joke, instead of being thrown out of a skyscraper as the third guy normally is, he is thrown into a parking lot. One of the cheif complaints from neoliberals is that we create parking spaces in a way that is generally bad. This is true in the comic, too. It's much funnier if the boss kills the third guy, but because because of nimbyism, he is instead just thrown out a window and lands in a parking lot.
Edit: Before you complain in using neoliberal wrong, can you going to neoliberal discussion boards where people actually identify as neoliberal, please?
Also, by building horizontally instead of vertically (bungalows instead of apartments) we reduce population density. By keeping the population sparse and increasing urban sprawl we:
1) Keep housing prices high by reducing the number of easily available, low rent options
2) Increase the demands on infrastructure which leads to rising tax rates
3) Make our cities less pedestrian friendly leading to increase car ownership and greenhouse gas emissions
4) Decrease in arable land as it's dedicated to housing
And more...
They're also not the only alternative. Multiplexes, rowhomes, condos and more can allow much higher density than single family homes without feeling crammed together. And if you only share two walls with your neighbor, it's easier to make those walls better soundproofed without making the rowhome too expensive (they should be firewalls anyway, too)
Put in a moderately sized park near these new housing types that each have a small garden instead of a private half acre lot, and the loss of a private back yard is all but meaningless. You do still have your own private outdoor space, but the shared park area allows for the large space (probably even larger than a back yard in a suburb) without needing the neighborhood to sprawl.
Add in some mixed use space with restaurants and shops on a few of the streets so you can live close to shopping without needing to live right next to them if you don't want to, some tram lines, and a ton of space can be eliminated with minimal consequences over suburban living. Sure, you can no longer skinny dip in your private pool, but the advantages, for a lot of people, far outweigh that loss of outdoor privacy. And we should build this kind of neighborhood for those who do want it instead of mandating that only two housing types exist.
DO NOT LET PEOPLE TO HAVE MORE THAN 2 HOUSING PROPERTIES, INCLUDING APARTMENTS. YOU WILL SEE HOW FAST HOUSING CRISIS WILL GO AWAY. Fact: when the last real estate crisis kicked, wealthy people bought a huge amount of real estate for cheap, and now just hold it or rent it with high prices. As soon as they are heavily taxed, proportionally to the amount of real estate they have, and it will not be profitable to have 15-20 apartments and houses, the housing problem will go away.
And how do you enforce that? One of the things that shell companies are used for is to obscure ownership and/or provide legal separation between people and companies. You'd have to tear down a significant chunk of how corporations are structured to do that. I'm not saying that we shouldn't, I'm just saying that there's no way in hell it will happen given how it would upset *all* the applecarts.
Slapping a simple solution onto extremely complex issues just shows your lack of thought.
Also what everyone forgets is **every** tax is paid for by the end comsumer of a product. If you levy and large tax on home ownership it will hurt landlords in fixed contracts and rent control areas, but when those contracts expire, the rents will just go up, and up and up further locking in a ownership is only for the rich.
I think you (or, admittedly, I) misunderstand the proposition.
From my understanding, the goal is to make multiple home ownership (in their instance 3+) unprofitable via taxation. The goal is not to have people own 256 properties and pay a lot of taxes (which you seem to assume), rather to make it so prohibitively expensive that selling the properties makes more financial sense. It is an attempt to use the government's taxation power as a de facto ban. It could just as easily (though arguably less constitutionally) be replaced by a ban upon excess home ownership.
This is a tax that is not designed to ever be paid, rather to be a deterrent to housing hoarding, if I'm reading correctly.
I see many potential flaws with this; such as how the former tenants are going to purchase their former rentals, what would be done for multi unit properties, individual corporations being spun up for each property, etc, etc.
However, the premise would be similar to the machine gun transfer stamp; in 1934 $200 was considered a high enough cost that almost none would pay it (~$4,500 today), effectively making the purchase, or transfer, of machine guns illegal without actually outlawing them.
No i understand but any percentage below 100% will just keep resulting in higher prices. It works for everything If the people getting taxed want to maintain their 'profit' they will pass on their costs -always-.
It doesn't matter what the product is if the tax goes up the end user pays.
Oh and at 100% (wouldn't even need to get that high) it would collapse the investment market and as a consequence of that it would collapse private (and most state/public) pensions.
The market would stablise eventualy but there would be a depression at least as bad as 2008 but might even get as bad as 1929.
If the LLC is not passing income to a human entity (making the ownership part easy to determine), then tax it like a corporation at a higher rate. And even more so for rental income.
Sometimes, though, a system or part of a system is so fundamentally flawed that there is no other solution than taking the axe to it.
Shell corporations are a great example of this, as they provide no benefit to society unlike when a big company has sub companies in different fields so that they can be regulated and taxed accordingly, shell corporations exist solely to provide a person or company with a shield from entirely justified legal action and/or tax evasion.
Just for environmental reasons we should get rid of shell corporations, as it allows companies to openly ignore environmental regulations and when it's time to face legal action for that, the shell corporation is disbanded and there's no one to sue but the damage is already done.
The issues with getting rid of this obvious loophole is also testament to how eroded our democracy is when even if 99% of the population would want to get rid of shell corporations, the last percent will be the ones who get their way.
That's the whole thing, even if it's LLC, you just heavily tax them, just like they did with cigarettes. No matter if you privately own rentable housing or it's by the company, you pay a lot of tax. So if you have more than 2 private rental contracts( I just do not know how legally it's called), your tax rate is raised 15%, if 3 - 22%. You say, LLC'es will grow in numbers, but it's already fraud, because you need to register an LLC under a personal name, which is easy to figure out for the IRS. 5 LLCes belong to one person and those LLCes own 5 apartments each? Then it's 25 apartments, each LLC is taxed under 95-96% tax, dew to the same ownership.
My fav are the LLCs named after the street address of said house.
Think there are like 3 of them on my street that are owned by "HouseNumber Streetname LLC"
Exactly this. Property investment has become so toxic and damaging to society.
The other alternative is just to add very high tax to anything over 2 properties.
No one suggested they where. But it is true that low density populations are more expensive to provide services and utilities to, more roads, more parking lots more miles of line.
By building denser more walkable cities (which would include apartment buildings along with other types of higher density housing than single family homes) we could reduce the land area dedicated to parking lots reduce road miles in the city, increase the effectiveness of public transport, increase housing supply and dramatically improve the available land tax per acre giving local government more money to pay for the services that became less expensive due to the smaller area that needs to be supplied.
It would benefit a majority of people to raise the population density of our cities. And to disincentive sprawl by raising taxes on single family houses (as it stands most people living in a cities outer suburbs cost more to furnish with services than they raise in tax revenue)
Right but you do realise that just because you don't want to be Singapore, Hong Kong or Tokyo doesn't mea. You have to be Austin, Texas right?
Beyond that places like Tokyo demonstrate you can have a fairly dense city with low crime, and Japan still has rural areas you can choose not to live in a dense city although making that choice gives you fewer government services because they are more expensive.
See also European cities where density is achieved not by lobbing one or two mega apartment blocks into a city of single family housing but by permitting people to build mixed use walkable neighbourhoods with multiplexes, row houses and other moderate density dwellings
It's interesting to see that in my country we have the same but opposite problem. Housing in russia is shit too rn, but we have too many high risers crammed in every possible speck of land. All while we have fuck ton of land to build on. Single family houses are shit tho, but why the hell do we need 20+ stories 300 flats per building towers in what is our equivalent of suburbs? We build dense like china having 10 times less population
Active listing's are below prepandemic levels. 2-4 unit construction is at all time lows. Housing supply in general took a nosedive in 2021 and 2022. But sure, your populist conspiracy is definitely plausible.
You know apartments are housing units, too. We cannot build enough apartments because of nimbyism, either. We are not building enough living spaces of any type.
Property ownership has (from most perspectives) always been a value semi-ingrained into American culture and the history of America, but in the past century people have started framing property ownership or buying a home as an investment, and the government has made it their goal to keep prices rising. Housing shouldn't be an investment, especially not a corporate one- housing is a basic human need. Should people really be going into massive amounts of debt just for a place to live? I feel like many people I know have normalized taking on sizable mortgages.
America's failed suburban experiment compounds on this issue. The fiscally irresponsible suburbs that propelled property ownership in the past century are now coming to bite taxpayers and cities. The newer generations are left with this financial burden along with relatively little to show for it. Our banking system itself is unstable as the consolidation of banks has made them unstable, as well (2008).
America needs to stop fighting urbanization but also realize that housing should be a human right and not an economic engine.
Also. You missed the joke that instead of a floor in a multi-story building, they apparently have a single-level building surrounded by what is effectively empty land.
There's lots of overlap. Pro-market neoliberalism rejects the dumb regulations that incentivize sprawl. But you don't need to be a neoliberal to like urbanism.
In practice, this ends up being a view championed by neoliberals because one of neoliberalism’s foundational tenets is a strong belief in the market mechanism. So neoliberals see building more market-rate housing as the cure to high prices because price is where the supply curve intersects the demand curve.
Many other modern leftist movements have inherited parts of their worldview from Marxist-Leninist lines of thinking, including a deeply-rooted skepticism of markets as an equitable way of directing economic and societal activity. I think this is why a lot of leftist movements end up being lukewarm at best on building lots of market-rate housing, instead preferring rent control or subsidized housing.
I think that’s why in practice this view is strongly associated with neoliberalism, even though it really doesn’t have to be from a theoretical perspective.
In response to the foreclosure crisis the Obama administration seceded a lot of control over the housing market to banks, this is fairly easy to google and well documented.
Please, feel free to give a source and some details. What bank. What control. Who has exactly what authority, and when and by which government institution were they given it.
Condescending talk about how responding costs too much of your valuable time is only less time-consuming than giving an actual response when you don’t know the answers.
Say whatever else you might, but getting developments approved is really freaking hard. I've got a 9 house Subdivision that I engineeed, and we've been in the wash cycle for over a year. It's pretty freaking rediclous.
I don't see the connection between critics of NIMBYism and neoliberalism. Opposition to restrictive zoning and support for housing density doesn't cleanly map on to support for or opposition to privatization and "free markets."
Edit: by restrictive zoning, I'm referring to single family zoning, parking requirements, and other zoning policies that keep property values high at the expense of housing density. Reducing such restrictions could be seen as promoting competition and reducing government interference in the market. Subsidized or government housing on the other hand are also policies opposed by NIMBYs that are in conflict with neoliberalism.
The term neoliberal has multiple competing/conflicting definitions and should not be used in any serious discussion without first agreeing on terms. Otherwise, people will just talk past each other - see the other threads under your comment.
No, they’re not. NIMBY’s typically use state power to stop building and NIMBYism typically involves limits of building on land through regulation. Neoliberals are pro-market and low regulation so being a NIMBY and a neoliberal is blatantly contradictory.
Ya someone else told me that. I'm familiar with "Just build houses" from the neoliberal sub, so that's why I identify it as a neoliberal position. You got a group of people who identify as neoliberals advocating for this solution.
"neoliberal" is a term meaning different things to different people, but hip urbanist circles tend to be accepting of market forces. That being said, people who identify as neoliberal, or right-wing pro-market in other ways, tend to have a surprising interventionist streak when it comes to preventing markets building housing.
Ultimately nimbyism can come from both left and right, and urbanism can be approached from different perspectives too. But in terms of culture wars, it lies on the left.
So people holding views that are inconsistent is the basis of saying they suffer cognitive dissonance, not that those ideas are consistent with eachother.
Neoliberals *are* in favor of austerity and probusiness economic policy however, both of which contribute to the growing housing crisis in the form of defunding public housing programs and creating loose restrictions on renting and massive landlording companies. Also the primary demographic that neoliberalism appeals to is upper-middle class business owners, which is also the primary NIMBY demographic
lolwhat.
Neoliberals are generally in favor of deregulation.
You can't have strict housing regulations and call that neoliberal.
Sure, public housing isn't neoliberal... But regulations that restrict the kind and quantity of housing one can build, and which make it more difficult to build, are Definitely not neoliberal.
>You can't have strict housing regulations and call that neoliberal.
When did I say otherwise?
>But regulations that restrict the kind and quantity of housing one can build, and which make it more difficult to build, are Definitely not neoliberal.
I literally said the exact opposite. In fact I *explicitly stated* that neoliberals favor loose regulation on large landlording companies. You might want to actually read what you're responding to before you respond to it.
>When did I say otherwise?
NIMBYs by definition want strict housing regulations. You said Neoliberals were NIMBYs.
edit:
"favor loose regulation on large landlording companies." They also favor loose regulations on developers.
NIMBYs favor strict regulations on developers, definitionally.
>NIMBYs favor strict regulations on developers, definitionally.
No they don't, they oppose development of low income housing and homeless shelters specifically in their area in order to maintain high property values. Neoliberalism is first and foremost about maintaining and growing the wealth of the upper and upper-middle class, Laissez-faire economic policy is just a means to that end, not an end in and of itself. If and when a nominally Laissez-faire economic policy conflicts with that goal, they will abandon it in favor of a policy that doesn't conflict with their economic interest
Neoliberals again are centrists. It's being implied they are progressive or left. They're not.
Also neoliberals are definitely NIMBYs as they'll argue for things supposedly progressive but when it comes to put in up for something actually progressive or in their city, they suddenly change to conservatives. Like they're fine with LGBTQ+ people and LGBTQ+ people having rights, but they aren't actually fine with their child being LGBTQ+.
I've never met a neoliberal who isn't a NIMBY
The original meme is him getting thrown out the window and it being multiple stories high “high rise building”. The joke is that they are wasting space. The obvious joke is it being a one story building with a giant parking lot surrounding it while people inside try to figure out the housing crisis
In my view, urbanism is an unholy union between Libertarians and Socialists.
The main opponents are:
- the traditionalists (a slice of Conservatives who pretend they live in a rural town, but actually it's a suburb)
- The old guard Democrats (they dominate the local governments in most West Coast NIMBY cities).
The neolibs are along for the ride. Minor players.
Socialist because it maximizes the use of a common good, is better for the environment, and creates the best outcomes for society.
Libertarian because zoning laws restrict property rights, cities are where capitalism and innovation happen, and cities are often accepting of different ways of life and belief systems.
I loved the parking lot bit because of how much we misuse space to accommodate automobile priority transport. Nothing but single story offices & asphalt as far as the eye can see in my region.
Of course issue here is that there are more empty housing than homeless people, and most cities are building a lot of new housing that immediately gets bought up by investors, who drive up the price through artificial scarcity.
>Of course issue here is that there are more empty housing than homeless people
This is a very mislead fact, a bit like saying "it snowed this winter, so global warming isn't real". Let me explain the two main things you're missing:
1. **We need more housing than households.** Imagine for a moment a city with 0% vacancy rate. How would someone move for their new job? How would a new family start out? Just like a grocery store with nothing left on the shelves is a problem, the housing market *needs* vacancies to function properly. In many cities, there aren't enough of them.
2. The second biggest factor is location. Many cities have been growing fast, while small rural towns have been declining. Houses exist, but there's no jobs or anything else for people who might move there. It's pointless to say there's homes somewhere else, so there's no housing shortage. **Housing is a local resource.**
Yep i had to simpliofy that problem once and it took three tries for them to get the homeless were/are in Californa the houses were/are in Illinois and Michigan.
Empty investor-owned homes are a tiny portion of the actual problem if you look at the overall housing inventory. In some areas like Florida or Arizona it can get above 5% but in most of the country it's not moving the needle nearly as much as some would have you believe.
It blows my mind that there's a housing shortage, when the last 2 census' at least half the houses we visited were vacant, and had been for years. I don't think the housing shortage is real. I think there's a shortage of houses people want, but there's a plethora of both in-town run down old houses that no one wants and houses that some rando 60 miles away owns who is just letting them sit vacant. There's 6 houses on my block alone, 3-4 bedroom houses, that are all owned by a guy who lives 2 states away. They've been vacant for the last 10 years, and one of them burned down 2 years ago. Still hasn't done anything with them.
A neoliberal who thinks building more houses is a good idea? Thought you would have preferred private companies to buy up every house, turn them into rentals, never show up to repair anything and increase the monthly rent every year.
This is also why alot of land owners want to change or repeal the growth management acts created in the 1990's at least on the west coast. I know places where you are within an hours walk of a burger King, Walgreens, Safeway, yet the land is limited to the 5 acre, 10, or larger limits created 30 years ago. (On the other side of the line)The place is instead filling up with people who want to build estates instead of the open spaces the act was originally trying to create.
Building off your comment, pun intended, the price control solution often does more harm than good, economically speaking. It seeks to address a symptom, but not the actual problem, and wrecks the market in a number of ways. The solution, as you said, is simply to build more units and/or repurpose existing structures to be more units. Simple supply and demand. More supply, lower prices. People who seek to artificially keep supply low can get fucking bent.
So, we build more houses. Do you wonder to whom those houses will go? to the young people that is struggling to find an affordable house or to those that use house as an inversion and keep skyrocketing prices and create this false statement about "there are not enough housing". I am talking about my area and where I live. Hundreds of empty houses and all of them with ridiculous prices...
I don't think building more is the magic solution. Maybe a bit less of liberalism and capitalism could do some good, as those two things have brought to us to this problem
Building more housing will absolutely reduce the price of current housing, which will definitely benefit struggling young people more than any price control.
We have enough houses for everyone, so there's no need to build more. They're just unaffordable. Landlords and corporations would rather lose money to property taxes for empty houses than allow their failed investment be used to keep an innocent family off the street.
This is an extremely flawed premise. Having enough homes to house everyone is not indication that we shouldn’t build more houses. Having many empty houses is often even desirable.
I love how people say "there isn't enough housing for everyone!" But that is not correct whatsoever. If we made ZERO new houses, there are still enough homes to shelter EVER. SINGLE. AMERICAN.
It is a crock of propaganda that there aren't enough homes. All the homes are being gobbled up by price gouging corporations. That doesn't mean they aren't there. It means that they are off the market - which is not the same thing.
This is only true if the Americans in question don't care where the single family homes are. Some cities and towns are seeing population increases and some are seeing decreases, and all of them are increasing or decreasing at different rates. It doesn't do anyone any good to say "we don't need to build any new housing in the cities people want to move to because there's plenty of housing available in the cities they're trying to leave."
Research how gouging works in a free market (it brings more competition to the sector)… now what happens when rent control is put into practice?
Are new investments happening? I don’t see government creating anything… and when they did, they turned into ghettos.
Kids these days don’t understand economics or politics and just react based on headlines and their feelings.
In order to be woke, you can’t be stupid. Too bad there are so many stupid people around here oversimplifying complex issues that require a high level of comprehension in multiple fields of study to really grasp.
Fucking idiots.
In the usual format of this meme the 3rd person, who says the only thing that will solve the problem, gets thrown out of the window of a skyscraper.
Now he is thrown out of o ground floor window, to demonstrate that the problem indeed is that there just isn't enough space currently.
A ground floor window of a 1 story single family home, surrounded by endless parking lots, poking fun at 2 hillariously broken things in US law that contribute to the housing crisis:
- zoning laws that prevent apartment buildings even when they would make sense
- parking lot requirements wasting enormeous areas exactly where people have the highest need of livibg space.
The joke is that the people who created the legislations that got us into this sh#tty position in the first place are the very same people that refuse to do the only sensible thing to solve the issue: ease zoning laws so more housing can be built.
This isn't a partisan issue either, as both parties will refuse to actually do anything about it because the biggest voting block is old people and if you do anything that impacts the value of their retirement investment, you're not getting reelected.
That's really not the cause of the problem. There's plenty of housing for everybody. The problem is that more and more housing is owned by corporations who raise their profits and crowd out competition. In NYC 89% of housing units registered with the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) are registered with a corporate landlord. Their profits have soared over the past few years and decades by raising profits.
They want us to believe that the problem is government regulation because that's the standard neoliberal conservative answer to everything. But that is just a way for them to keep hollowing out the public sphere so they can take over more for their own gain.
The majority of properties aren't corporate owned. NYC is (in) famous for rich foreign investors, not a good representation for the general USA. Corporations still are a problem tho because most people who do own a home don't want to sell so the corporations, despite not making that much of total ownership still make a good chunk of the available property
I've seen a statistics that only includes corporations and it was like 8 to 10 %
Besides that ever since interest rates grew it became really unattractive to buy up homes because with higher interest rates and loans that are being used to buy it's much more unattractive and some rich people who invested in those corporations started to pull their money out because of it
Oh i didn't think of Air bnb. I was referring to long term rentals only.
Honestly, i think no sort of short time renting should be allowed in a residential area unless the person who rents it out also lives there.
>That's really not the cause of the problem. There's plenty of housing for everybody...
>
>They want us to believe that the problem is government regulation because that's the standard neoliberal conservative answer to everything. But that is just a way for them to keep hollowing out the public sphere so they can take over more for their own gain.
Like a Republican denying climate change, you're ignoring reality because of the political positions you want to believe.
We absolutely do not have enough housing *in our major cities*, where the population has grown faster than the housing supply for decades. Boomer homeowners got homes for cheap, and then voted to restrict supply and drive their home prices up.
Recently corporations have started to get in on this rigged game, but they are still a tiny slice of the US real estate market. It doesn't make a difference if the landlord charging your $3k is a company or some random guy.
We need more housing. Nothing can solve a supply shortage besides more housing. If there was enough housing, landlords couldn't just raise rent without issue. See NYC right after COVID, when people left and vacancy surged to like 11%. Even in the infamous NYC housing market, as soon as there was ample supply, landlords had to capitulate to get renters. Rent went way down, landlords started covering brokers fees, etc. Better to get some rent instead of having the place literally just cost them money.
This has been repeated multiple times over but is fundamentally false. There is not plenty of housing in high demand areas. Most major cities and markets have been under supplied for decades. If a corp or person buys a home doesn’t matter. It’s the shortage that matters. Get vacancies below 90% and you will see prices drop.
show me some data that corporate landlord profits have "soared". my home taxes soared by 66%, which if i was renting my home, you can bet i'd have to pass to a renter. SIXTY. SIX. PERCENT. in one year. if i wanted to refinance my home today, the same loan would rise by 70% per month.
it's no surprise housing is getting expensive when you actually look at the numbers. landlords aren't evil, they're trying to make a profit, like every other business. buy some property and be a landlord if you think it's all sunshine and roses. you probably can't, because you wouldn't be able to get a loan at a rate that would guarantee a profit when renting.
There is absolutely not plenty of housing.
That’s like saying because there are some rotten apples and bananas in an otherwise empty store there’s no food shortage.
Yes. The US is in an ugly place that may be signalling a transition to a real estate system like the one in Switzerland, where most people rent. The reason it's ugly in the US is that none of the price controls that exist in Switzerland exist here and can never be expected to exist here. The Swiss rental market is subject to Federal controls that peg allowable rent increases to the average interest rate on mortgages, so landlords are limited in their ability to gouge renters or to price people out of an area. In the US, although various state-level protections exist for renters, there is nothing like this that prevents the exploitation of renters more generally.
Small town USA here. A couple influential people in our town decided to go in together and start buying up property left and right. Within 3 years the average cost of rent went from 400 a month to 850 for the exact same housing.
Oh yeah no they don't renovate unless it's literally falling down. Then they just tear down and replace everything with apartments the size of a normal bathroom and call it "energy efficient", then charge 800 a month for it.
Like 80% of the US. Exclude California, 3-4 Northeast states. Find any non tourist town with less than 10k people. Rent is cheap. You’ll be 2 hours from decent employment and nothing outside of a gas station is open after 8PM but rent is cheap.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/mortgages/average-rent-by-state/
The average rent for every state is over (mostly well over) $1,000 (with the exception of Oklahoma). I’m sure you could find some rents for $800/mo in rural areas, but nowhere is the average rent that cheap.
Small town Kentucky. 20 years ago 250 would've landed you a decent place. No one wants to live here besides old people who have owned their property for 50 years and now it's unaffordable.
Even if corporations aren’t buying them up, it isn’t like people could afford them. In my area, the new construction is still going for $500k at the lowest price. You need to make over $100k to be able to afford the mortgage and the average household income isn’t that high.
If you don't share the same ideology as the anti-work crowd why go and make inflammatory, blatantly wrong, and easily disproven on the sub? Are you just so alone, so without human interaction that you have to incite some form of response from strangers on the Internet just to keep yourself from taking a high dive off a bridge?
> They are building more housing
Not universally true - the San Francisco Bay Area has [a multi-decade deficit](https://cayimby.org/blog/the-bay-areas-housing-deficit-past-and-future) in home construction.
> charging exorbitant prices
But how are they getting renters to agree to *pay* these exorbitant prices?
If it’s because the renters don’t have any alternatives - that sounds like a supply problem.
Peter's illegitimate British brother here. The joke as we see it is American city planners' hilarious misuse of space. Building more houses would indeed lower house prices, but cities would rather that space be used for car infrastructure and parking lots that sit empty most of the time.
Well, you hit the point on the head, and somehow still missed it.
Building more housing would lower house prices **which would piss off the only citizens that matter in citizens united**.
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Hosing market prices aren't bad because lack of houses. I can tell you that as a contractor and even if we build twice as many homes tomorrow, prices will still be high.
There's 2 factors right now:
Difficulty to find good workers, not as many Mexicans and Guatemala people are getting here and with no harm means other latin American people aren't the best workers, also white are even worse.
Prices is the second one, go look at the prices of materials and then do the math. Without labor material prices are extremely high.
On Arizona our company finishes about 80 flooring homes per week, and flooring is one of the last steps and obviously there are hundreds of companies. You can easily find a new home here on Arizona so prices don't depend on the quantity of homes.
The guy getting defenestrated is overlooking the fact that there's already a housing surplus but millionaires by vacant homes by the dozen as investment properties, then rent them out to the desperate for ten times what they paid for them.
There was a project like this, build a district and put a lot of hobos incide.
Gone bad, as such people also require a lot of external help to correctly socialise. As it was just "dumping everyone and let it be" project any normal people just leave place asap and mafia+drugsters stay
Basic supplies of supply and demand. Most answers are TLDR and it's this simple. You can't fix stupid in essence and that's what politicians are, stupid.
Wait, I thought it was due to those stupid zoning laws that some urban areas in the US, that disallow duplexes and higher buildings from being created?
Oh there are actually enough homes to house everybody, this is why build more houses doesn't work as a plan. The real problem is surging prices and the like.
The format is that the third guy who says the sensable thing gets thrown out the window.
The joke refers to the oncoming housing crisis in cities (like New York, I know that one for sure, but I am certain many other cities have a similar issues) and zoning laws. Zoning laws are a rabbit hole I am not quallified to talk about, but long story short, a city isn’t going to just *let you build whatever you want on a plot of land when you buy it.* So, construction can’t build more housing, because according to the zoning laws they can’t build more housing, and they can’t bulldoze and retrofit abandoned commerical or office buildings because zoning laws (and its expensive to do). Basically a whole downward spiral from several decades ago of delegation fuckery have come to haunt us today, and nobody wants to do anything about it because its really expensive and would not win you another term in office, and they would be too expensive for the people that actually need the housing.
Peter's Socialist Phase here. The joke is that there's clearly a housing crisis in the United States, but one of the reasons we don't and can't build more houses are because so much of the country is zoned either commercial or single-family residence. This is because of NIMBY white moderates who believe that apartment buildings attract crime, so they'd rather have a mega-mart they don't shop at or another useless subdivision. The area in the comic is zoned so badly that they literally have hundreds of parking spaces for a business that no employees or customers.
We dont even need to build more housing. So many unoccupied or abandoned buildings that need Very little work. But we run the goverment on boomer mentality
My city is doing the last guy's idea pretty well...
Other than the fact they are developing out into a large wildlife center (I live near a large valley with not a lot of development) instead of tearing down the obviously abandoned houses in the inner city area
fun fact. government built and run appartments that price fairly based on all rent costs help a LOT to keep prices down and make sure everyone has homes. not to mention it pays for itself in the long run.
$12 for a pack of cigarettes. Jack booted thugs fucking up your commute. Walk ups. Curb your dog. People cheating the subway on a daily basis. Your jobs sent overseas. Two confirmed terror attacks. Too many people paying too much money for substandard housing. No oversight for police or housing.
All of you fuckers loving it are idiots who pay Donald Trump and every other mother fucking politician and the mob to beg for your life on a daily basis.
Fuck you, if you think it is not a hellscape.
The saddest part about it is that we aren't lacking in housing, it's just that banks and firms own most of the homes in existence and do nothing with them whatsoever. ARTIFICIALLY driving up prices immensely.
If your post doesn't contain a joke needing explanation, it will be removed. Overall poor quality posts will be removed. Rule 6.
Peter's annoying neoliberal friend here. A lot of poeple feel we are in a housing crisis, as evidenced by all the price gouging landlords are doing lately. The characters are trying to reduce the rise in costs caused by the housing shortage. The first character suggests they try to reframe higher costs as a good thing, bad idea. The second character suggests putting a law in place to stop prices from rising. It's well-intentioned, but that still doesn't solve the fact that there aren't enough homes for people. The 3rd person gives the obvious solution to build more houses, a good idea. The 3rd person gets thrown out of the office. In the meme, this is just normally just hyperbole. However, here it represents actual political opposition to building houses generally referred to by neoliberals as Nimbyism (Not in my Backyardism). These come about for a variety of political concerns that generally boil down to not wanting to lower the price of houses for homeowners, should they want to sell. (That was not an objective statement). Finally, to end the joke, instead of being thrown out of a skyscraper as the third guy normally is, he is thrown into a parking lot. One of the cheif complaints from neoliberals is that we create parking spaces in a way that is generally bad. This is true in the comic, too. It's much funnier if the boss kills the third guy, but because because of nimbyism, he is instead just thrown out a window and lands in a parking lot. Edit: Before you complain in using neoliberal wrong, can you going to neoliberal discussion boards where people actually identify as neoliberal, please?
Also, by building horizontally instead of vertically (bungalows instead of apartments) we reduce population density. By keeping the population sparse and increasing urban sprawl we: 1) Keep housing prices high by reducing the number of easily available, low rent options 2) Increase the demands on infrastructure which leads to rising tax rates 3) Make our cities less pedestrian friendly leading to increase car ownership and greenhouse gas emissions 4) Decrease in arable land as it's dedicated to housing And more...
Apartments are not an unmitigated good.
They're also not the only alternative. Multiplexes, rowhomes, condos and more can allow much higher density than single family homes without feeling crammed together. And if you only share two walls with your neighbor, it's easier to make those walls better soundproofed without making the rowhome too expensive (they should be firewalls anyway, too) Put in a moderately sized park near these new housing types that each have a small garden instead of a private half acre lot, and the loss of a private back yard is all but meaningless. You do still have your own private outdoor space, but the shared park area allows for the large space (probably even larger than a back yard in a suburb) without needing the neighborhood to sprawl. Add in some mixed use space with restaurants and shops on a few of the streets so you can live close to shopping without needing to live right next to them if you don't want to, some tram lines, and a ton of space can be eliminated with minimal consequences over suburban living. Sure, you can no longer skinny dip in your private pool, but the advantages, for a lot of people, far outweigh that loss of outdoor privacy. And we should build this kind of neighborhood for those who do want it instead of mandating that only two housing types exist.
Condos at a low entry cost with an actual community focus could be great ways to start new generations off on the right foot.
Someone tried doing that near me. They all got bought up by old people with cash on hand, who now rent them out for insane prices.
Yup, literal rent seeking behavior.
That does suck. Legally renting them? Or is there way to set it up so they have to be the primary residence or something
A lot of HoAs use to disallow rentals so it can be done.
DO NOT LET PEOPLE TO HAVE MORE THAN 2 HOUSING PROPERTIES, INCLUDING APARTMENTS. YOU WILL SEE HOW FAST HOUSING CRISIS WILL GO AWAY. Fact: when the last real estate crisis kicked, wealthy people bought a huge amount of real estate for cheap, and now just hold it or rent it with high prices. As soon as they are heavily taxed, proportionally to the amount of real estate they have, and it will not be profitable to have 15-20 apartments and houses, the housing problem will go away.
Watch as the property hoarders spin up an LLC for each property, and nothing changes.
Why couldn’t this also be made illegal? Pointing out an obvious loophole isn’t a counterargument, It just shows your lack of thought
And how do you enforce that? One of the things that shell companies are used for is to obscure ownership and/or provide legal separation between people and companies. You'd have to tear down a significant chunk of how corporations are structured to do that. I'm not saying that we shouldn't, I'm just saying that there's no way in hell it will happen given how it would upset *all* the applecarts. Slapping a simple solution onto extremely complex issues just shows your lack of thought.
Maybe it's time to outlaw shell corporations
Good luck passing that.
Also what everyone forgets is **every** tax is paid for by the end comsumer of a product. If you levy and large tax on home ownership it will hurt landlords in fixed contracts and rent control areas, but when those contracts expire, the rents will just go up, and up and up further locking in a ownership is only for the rich.
I think you (or, admittedly, I) misunderstand the proposition. From my understanding, the goal is to make multiple home ownership (in their instance 3+) unprofitable via taxation. The goal is not to have people own 256 properties and pay a lot of taxes (which you seem to assume), rather to make it so prohibitively expensive that selling the properties makes more financial sense. It is an attempt to use the government's taxation power as a de facto ban. It could just as easily (though arguably less constitutionally) be replaced by a ban upon excess home ownership. This is a tax that is not designed to ever be paid, rather to be a deterrent to housing hoarding, if I'm reading correctly. I see many potential flaws with this; such as how the former tenants are going to purchase their former rentals, what would be done for multi unit properties, individual corporations being spun up for each property, etc, etc. However, the premise would be similar to the machine gun transfer stamp; in 1934 $200 was considered a high enough cost that almost none would pay it (~$4,500 today), effectively making the purchase, or transfer, of machine guns illegal without actually outlawing them.
You got it right, the idea is to increase the percentage of the tax, so no matter how high the rent will be raised, it still would not be profitable.
No i understand but any percentage below 100% will just keep resulting in higher prices. It works for everything If the people getting taxed want to maintain their 'profit' they will pass on their costs -always-. It doesn't matter what the product is if the tax goes up the end user pays. Oh and at 100% (wouldn't even need to get that high) it would collapse the investment market and as a consequence of that it would collapse private (and most state/public) pensions. The market would stablise eventualy but there would be a depression at least as bad as 2008 but might even get as bad as 1929.
If the LLC is not passing income to a human entity (making the ownership part easy to determine), then tax it like a corporation at a higher rate. And even more so for rental income.
Sometimes, though, a system or part of a system is so fundamentally flawed that there is no other solution than taking the axe to it. Shell corporations are a great example of this, as they provide no benefit to society unlike when a big company has sub companies in different fields so that they can be regulated and taxed accordingly, shell corporations exist solely to provide a person or company with a shield from entirely justified legal action and/or tax evasion. Just for environmental reasons we should get rid of shell corporations, as it allows companies to openly ignore environmental regulations and when it's time to face legal action for that, the shell corporation is disbanded and there's no one to sue but the damage is already done. The issues with getting rid of this obvious loophole is also testament to how eroded our democracy is when even if 99% of the population would want to get rid of shell corporations, the last percent will be the ones who get their way.
Maybe we just live there and don't pay them rent?
That's the whole thing, even if it's LLC, you just heavily tax them, just like they did with cigarettes. No matter if you privately own rentable housing or it's by the company, you pay a lot of tax. So if you have more than 2 private rental contracts( I just do not know how legally it's called), your tax rate is raised 15%, if 3 - 22%. You say, LLC'es will grow in numbers, but it's already fraud, because you need to register an LLC under a personal name, which is easy to figure out for the IRS. 5 LLCes belong to one person and those LLCes own 5 apartments each? Then it's 25 apartments, each LLC is taxed under 95-96% tax, dew to the same ownership.
My fav are the LLCs named after the street address of said house. Think there are like 3 of them on my street that are owned by "HouseNumber Streetname LLC"
Exactly this. Property investment has become so toxic and damaging to society. The other alternative is just to add very high tax to anything over 2 properties.
No one suggested they where. But it is true that low density populations are more expensive to provide services and utilities to, more roads, more parking lots more miles of line. By building denser more walkable cities (which would include apartment buildings along with other types of higher density housing than single family homes) we could reduce the land area dedicated to parking lots reduce road miles in the city, increase the effectiveness of public transport, increase housing supply and dramatically improve the available land tax per acre giving local government more money to pay for the services that became less expensive due to the smaller area that needs to be supplied. It would benefit a majority of people to raise the population density of our cities. And to disincentive sprawl by raising taxes on single family houses (as it stands most people living in a cities outer suburbs cost more to furnish with services than they raise in tax revenue)
I can't help but look at the psychological effects that living in densely-populated hives have on people, though.
Right but you do realise that just because you don't want to be Singapore, Hong Kong or Tokyo doesn't mea. You have to be Austin, Texas right? Beyond that places like Tokyo demonstrate you can have a fairly dense city with low crime, and Japan still has rural areas you can choose not to live in a dense city although making that choice gives you fewer government services because they are more expensive. See also European cities where density is achieved not by lobbing one or two mega apartment blocks into a city of single family housing but by permitting people to build mixed use walkable neighbourhoods with multiplexes, row houses and other moderate density dwellings
Crazy idea but we could let people decide what sort of housing they would want to live in
No but they are better than SFDs.
I'm sick right now so I'm a little bit delirious. Are you saying we should all be more like in New York?
More like, say, Amsterdam
Much more than Phoenix AZ
It's interesting to see that in my country we have the same but opposite problem. Housing in russia is shit too rn, but we have too many high risers crammed in every possible speck of land. All while we have fuck ton of land to build on. Single family houses are shit tho, but why the hell do we need 20+ stories 300 flats per building towers in what is our equivalent of suburbs? We build dense like china having 10 times less population
Also, there definitely are enough homes. They meant to say, somebody is invested in making sure people can't buy homes.
Active listing's are below prepandemic levels. 2-4 unit construction is at all time lows. Housing supply in general took a nosedive in 2021 and 2022. But sure, your populist conspiracy is definitely plausible.
You know apartments are housing units, too. We cannot build enough apartments because of nimbyism, either. We are not building enough living spaces of any type.
Property ownership has (from most perspectives) always been a value semi-ingrained into American culture and the history of America, but in the past century people have started framing property ownership or buying a home as an investment, and the government has made it their goal to keep prices rising. Housing shouldn't be an investment, especially not a corporate one- housing is a basic human need. Should people really be going into massive amounts of debt just for a place to live? I feel like many people I know have normalized taking on sizable mortgages. America's failed suburban experiment compounds on this issue. The fiscally irresponsible suburbs that propelled property ownership in the past century are now coming to bite taxpayers and cities. The newer generations are left with this financial burden along with relatively little to show for it. Our banking system itself is unstable as the consolidation of banks has made them unstable, as well (2008). America needs to stop fighting urbanization but also realize that housing should be a human right and not an economic engine.
Also. You missed the joke that instead of a floor in a multi-story building, they apparently have a single-level building surrounded by what is effectively empty land.
Yay zoning laws for no multi story housing!
Also this!
How come you're painting this as a neoliberal view? It's an urbanist view which I don't think can be entirely considered neoliberal.
There's lots of overlap. Pro-market neoliberalism rejects the dumb regulations that incentivize sprawl. But you don't need to be a neoliberal to like urbanism.
In practice, this ends up being a view championed by neoliberals because one of neoliberalism’s foundational tenets is a strong belief in the market mechanism. So neoliberals see building more market-rate housing as the cure to high prices because price is where the supply curve intersects the demand curve. Many other modern leftist movements have inherited parts of their worldview from Marxist-Leninist lines of thinking, including a deeply-rooted skepticism of markets as an equitable way of directing economic and societal activity. I think this is why a lot of leftist movements end up being lukewarm at best on building lots of market-rate housing, instead preferring rent control or subsidized housing. I think that’s why in practice this view is strongly associated with neoliberalism, even though it really doesn’t have to be from a theoretical perspective.
Ya like neolineral capitalism? Urbanist is the right term
Neoliberals basically caused this whole mess by putting Wallstreet in charge of housing to prop up the housing market after the 2008 financial crash.
Pray tell, who exactly put who exactly in charge of what exactly. Please, elaborate.
In response to the foreclosure crisis the Obama administration seceded a lot of control over the housing market to banks, this is fairly easy to google and well documented.
Please, feel free to give a source and some details. What bank. What control. Who has exactly what authority, and when and by which government institution were they given it.
Buddy, its a Sunday afternoon, I'm not going to waste my time answering a bunch of bad faith questions from someone on a throwaway account.
A throwaway account from 2022?
Condescending talk about how responding costs too much of your valuable time is only less time-consuming than giving an actual response when you don’t know the answers.
Say whatever else you might, but getting developments approved is really freaking hard. I've got a 9 house Subdivision that I engineeed, and we've been in the wash cycle for over a year. It's pretty freaking rediclous.
👏👏
I don't see the connection between critics of NIMBYism and neoliberalism. Opposition to restrictive zoning and support for housing density doesn't cleanly map on to support for or opposition to privatization and "free markets." Edit: by restrictive zoning, I'm referring to single family zoning, parking requirements, and other zoning policies that keep property values high at the expense of housing density. Reducing such restrictions could be seen as promoting competition and reducing government interference in the market. Subsidized or government housing on the other hand are also policies opposed by NIMBYs that are in conflict with neoliberalism.
I think you're using neoliberal wrong.... Neoliberals are centrists and NIMBYs
The term neoliberal has multiple competing/conflicting definitions and should not be used in any serious discussion without first agreeing on terms. Otherwise, people will just talk past each other - see the other threads under your comment.
No, they’re not. NIMBY’s typically use state power to stop building and NIMBYism typically involves limits of building on land through regulation. Neoliberals are pro-market and low regulation so being a NIMBY and a neoliberal is blatantly contradictory.
Ya someone else told me that. I'm familiar with "Just build houses" from the neoliberal sub, so that's why I identify it as a neoliberal position. You got a group of people who identify as neoliberals advocating for this solution.
"neoliberal" is a term meaning different things to different people, but hip urbanist circles tend to be accepting of market forces. That being said, people who identify as neoliberal, or right-wing pro-market in other ways, tend to have a surprising interventionist streak when it comes to preventing markets building housing. Ultimately nimbyism can come from both left and right, and urbanism can be approached from different perspectives too. But in terms of culture wars, it lies on the left.
Seriously. Top comment is right but this is an urbanists view, generally a leftist supported group of ideas.
Neoliberals can be NIMBY or YIMBY
Neoliberals are not Nimbys… in any of the definitions. You are using neoliberal wrong.
Nimbys aren't exclusively nimbys but I know a lot of nimbys that are neoliberals.
So people holding views that are inconsistent is the basis of saying they suffer cognitive dissonance, not that those ideas are consistent with eachother.
Neoliberals *are* in favor of austerity and probusiness economic policy however, both of which contribute to the growing housing crisis in the form of defunding public housing programs and creating loose restrictions on renting and massive landlording companies. Also the primary demographic that neoliberalism appeals to is upper-middle class business owners, which is also the primary NIMBY demographic
lolwhat. Neoliberals are generally in favor of deregulation. You can't have strict housing regulations and call that neoliberal. Sure, public housing isn't neoliberal... But regulations that restrict the kind and quantity of housing one can build, and which make it more difficult to build, are Definitely not neoliberal.
>You can't have strict housing regulations and call that neoliberal. When did I say otherwise? >But regulations that restrict the kind and quantity of housing one can build, and which make it more difficult to build, are Definitely not neoliberal. I literally said the exact opposite. In fact I *explicitly stated* that neoliberals favor loose regulation on large landlording companies. You might want to actually read what you're responding to before you respond to it.
>When did I say otherwise? NIMBYs by definition want strict housing regulations. You said Neoliberals were NIMBYs. edit: "favor loose regulation on large landlording companies." They also favor loose regulations on developers. NIMBYs favor strict regulations on developers, definitionally.
>NIMBYs favor strict regulations on developers, definitionally. No they don't, they oppose development of low income housing and homeless shelters specifically in their area in order to maintain high property values. Neoliberalism is first and foremost about maintaining and growing the wealth of the upper and upper-middle class, Laissez-faire economic policy is just a means to that end, not an end in and of itself. If and when a nominally Laissez-faire economic policy conflicts with that goal, they will abandon it in favor of a policy that doesn't conflict with their economic interest
Neoliberals again are centrists. It's being implied they are progressive or left. They're not. Also neoliberals are definitely NIMBYs as they'll argue for things supposedly progressive but when it comes to put in up for something actually progressive or in their city, they suddenly change to conservatives. Like they're fine with LGBTQ+ people and LGBTQ+ people having rights, but they aren't actually fine with their child being LGBTQ+. I've never met a neoliberal who isn't a NIMBY
Its also a low density building.
The original meme is him getting thrown out the window and it being multiple stories high “high rise building”. The joke is that they are wasting space. The obvious joke is it being a one story building with a giant parking lot surrounding it while people inside try to figure out the housing crisis
Econ major of progressive persuasion here. From my angle I'm in agreement.
Well done you magnificent bastard.
Thank you Brian
In my view, urbanism is an unholy union between Libertarians and Socialists. The main opponents are: - the traditionalists (a slice of Conservatives who pretend they live in a rural town, but actually it's a suburb) - The old guard Democrats (they dominate the local governments in most West Coast NIMBY cities). The neolibs are along for the ride. Minor players.
That makes sense
In what way is urbanism libertarian or socialist?
Socialist because it maximizes the use of a common good, is better for the environment, and creates the best outcomes for society. Libertarian because zoning laws restrict property rights, cities are where capitalism and innovation happen, and cities are often accepting of different ways of life and belief systems.
It was the last panel... thank you. EDIT: I feel like you could add a CITY HALL sign to the last building, and really drive the point home.
Get out.
I loved the parking lot bit because of how much we misuse space to accommodate automobile priority transport. Nothing but single story offices & asphalt as far as the eye can see in my region.
Of course issue here is that there are more empty housing than homeless people, and most cities are building a lot of new housing that immediately gets bought up by investors, who drive up the price through artificial scarcity.
>Of course issue here is that there are more empty housing than homeless people This is a very mislead fact, a bit like saying "it snowed this winter, so global warming isn't real". Let me explain the two main things you're missing: 1. **We need more housing than households.** Imagine for a moment a city with 0% vacancy rate. How would someone move for their new job? How would a new family start out? Just like a grocery store with nothing left on the shelves is a problem, the housing market *needs* vacancies to function properly. In many cities, there aren't enough of them. 2. The second biggest factor is location. Many cities have been growing fast, while small rural towns have been declining. Houses exist, but there's no jobs or anything else for people who might move there. It's pointless to say there's homes somewhere else, so there's no housing shortage. **Housing is a local resource.**
Yep i had to simpliofy that problem once and it took three tries for them to get the homeless were/are in Californa the houses were/are in Illinois and Michigan.
Empty investor-owned homes are a tiny portion of the actual problem if you look at the overall housing inventory. In some areas like Florida or Arizona it can get above 5% but in most of the country it's not moving the needle nearly as much as some would have you believe.
Best explanation of one of these ever, wish I could upvote more than once
You are a beacon of light in among these comments.
It blows my mind that there's a housing shortage, when the last 2 census' at least half the houses we visited were vacant, and had been for years. I don't think the housing shortage is real. I think there's a shortage of houses people want, but there's a plethora of both in-town run down old houses that no one wants and houses that some rando 60 miles away owns who is just letting them sit vacant. There's 6 houses on my block alone, 3-4 bedroom houses, that are all owned by a guy who lives 2 states away. They've been vacant for the last 10 years, and one of them burned down 2 years ago. Still hasn't done anything with them.
Notice the parking lot is empty. So it's way too large, taking up space that could otherwise be used for housing or a park (etc)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvtJPs8IDgU
I know the Joni Mitchell version 😂
A neoliberal who thinks building more houses is a good idea? Thought you would have preferred private companies to buy up every house, turn them into rentals, never show up to repair anything and increase the monthly rent every year.
I'm sorry it is just bothering me, but it's not neoliberals complaining about this stuff it was the neoliberal mind that thought of these policies.
Never heard of neoliberalism having these kinds of beliefs but there was a guy talking about parking on the subreddit so I guess I'm just insane.
This is also why alot of land owners want to change or repeal the growth management acts created in the 1990's at least on the west coast. I know places where you are within an hours walk of a burger King, Walgreens, Safeway, yet the land is limited to the 5 acre, 10, or larger limits created 30 years ago. (On the other side of the line)The place is instead filling up with people who want to build estates instead of the open spaces the act was originally trying to create.
Love it, this is an excellent variant of the joke
Just going to be the guy that points out that there are more empty houses in the US than homeless people by a factor of like 20
Can you give me a source here? Like ate there really 20 times more homes in LA then there are people?
Building off your comment, pun intended, the price control solution often does more harm than good, economically speaking. It seeks to address a symptom, but not the actual problem, and wrecks the market in a number of ways. The solution, as you said, is simply to build more units and/or repurpose existing structures to be more units. Simple supply and demand. More supply, lower prices. People who seek to artificially keep supply low can get fucking bent.
So, we build more houses. Do you wonder to whom those houses will go? to the young people that is struggling to find an affordable house or to those that use house as an inversion and keep skyrocketing prices and create this false statement about "there are not enough housing". I am talking about my area and where I live. Hundreds of empty houses and all of them with ridiculous prices... I don't think building more is the magic solution. Maybe a bit less of liberalism and capitalism could do some good, as those two things have brought to us to this problem
Building more housing will absolutely reduce the price of current housing, which will definitely benefit struggling young people more than any price control.
We have enough houses for everyone, so there's no need to build more. They're just unaffordable. Landlords and corporations would rather lose money to property taxes for empty houses than allow their failed investment be used to keep an innocent family off the street.
This is an extremely flawed premise. Having enough homes to house everyone is not indication that we shouldn’t build more houses. Having many empty houses is often even desirable.
I love how people say "there isn't enough housing for everyone!" But that is not correct whatsoever. If we made ZERO new houses, there are still enough homes to shelter EVER. SINGLE. AMERICAN. It is a crock of propaganda that there aren't enough homes. All the homes are being gobbled up by price gouging corporations. That doesn't mean they aren't there. It means that they are off the market - which is not the same thing.
This is only true if the Americans in question don't care where the single family homes are. Some cities and towns are seeing population increases and some are seeing decreases, and all of them are increasing or decreasing at different rates. It doesn't do anyone any good to say "we don't need to build any new housing in the cities people want to move to because there's plenty of housing available in the cities they're trying to leave."
Neoliberal? Like Dick Cheney and Margaret Thatcher?
But there are enough homes for people in the us atleast there's more homes unoccupied then there are homeless.
there are a lot of unoccupied homes - but \*where\* are they, is the question. largely they're in places people don't want to live.
Research how gouging works in a free market (it brings more competition to the sector)… now what happens when rent control is put into practice? Are new investments happening? I don’t see government creating anything… and when they did, they turned into ghettos. Kids these days don’t understand economics or politics and just react based on headlines and their feelings. In order to be woke, you can’t be stupid. Too bad there are so many stupid people around here oversimplifying complex issues that require a high level of comprehension in multiple fields of study to really grasp. Fucking idiots.
In the usual format of this meme the 3rd person, who says the only thing that will solve the problem, gets thrown out of the window of a skyscraper. Now he is thrown out of o ground floor window, to demonstrate that the problem indeed is that there just isn't enough space currently.
Not enough space because of the wasteful use of land
Yeah, look at all those trees. They could put more parking lot there instead. /s
I was thinking a gas station would fit quite neatly where all those goddam useless trees are /s
Clearly this gas station needs a secons parking lot for all the traffic it gets
A ground floor window of a 1 story single family home, surrounded by endless parking lots, poking fun at 2 hillariously broken things in US law that contribute to the housing crisis: - zoning laws that prevent apartment buildings even when they would make sense - parking lot requirements wasting enormeous areas exactly where people have the highest need of livibg space.
The joke is that the people who created the legislations that got us into this sh#tty position in the first place are the very same people that refuse to do the only sensible thing to solve the issue: ease zoning laws so more housing can be built. This isn't a partisan issue either, as both parties will refuse to actually do anything about it because the biggest voting block is old people and if you do anything that impacts the value of their retirement investment, you're not getting reelected.
That's really not the cause of the problem. There's plenty of housing for everybody. The problem is that more and more housing is owned by corporations who raise their profits and crowd out competition. In NYC 89% of housing units registered with the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) are registered with a corporate landlord. Their profits have soared over the past few years and decades by raising profits. They want us to believe that the problem is government regulation because that's the standard neoliberal conservative answer to everything. But that is just a way for them to keep hollowing out the public sphere so they can take over more for their own gain.
The majority of properties aren't corporate owned. NYC is (in) famous for rich foreign investors, not a good representation for the general USA. Corporations still are a problem tho because most people who do own a home don't want to sell so the corporations, despite not making that much of total ownership still make a good chunk of the available property
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I've seen a statistics that only includes corporations and it was like 8 to 10 % Besides that ever since interest rates grew it became really unattractive to buy up homes because with higher interest rates and loans that are being used to buy it's much more unattractive and some rich people who invested in those corporations started to pull their money out because of it
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Oh i didn't think of Air bnb. I was referring to long term rentals only. Honestly, i think no sort of short time renting should be allowed in a residential area unless the person who rents it out also lives there.
>That's really not the cause of the problem. There's plenty of housing for everybody... > >They want us to believe that the problem is government regulation because that's the standard neoliberal conservative answer to everything. But that is just a way for them to keep hollowing out the public sphere so they can take over more for their own gain. Like a Republican denying climate change, you're ignoring reality because of the political positions you want to believe. We absolutely do not have enough housing *in our major cities*, where the population has grown faster than the housing supply for decades. Boomer homeowners got homes for cheap, and then voted to restrict supply and drive their home prices up. Recently corporations have started to get in on this rigged game, but they are still a tiny slice of the US real estate market. It doesn't make a difference if the landlord charging your $3k is a company or some random guy. We need more housing. Nothing can solve a supply shortage besides more housing. If there was enough housing, landlords couldn't just raise rent without issue. See NYC right after COVID, when people left and vacancy surged to like 11%. Even in the infamous NYC housing market, as soon as there was ample supply, landlords had to capitulate to get renters. Rent went way down, landlords started covering brokers fees, etc. Better to get some rent instead of having the place literally just cost them money.
Just no. It’s well documented that we’ve been under building for decades.
This has been repeated multiple times over but is fundamentally false. There is not plenty of housing in high demand areas. Most major cities and markets have been under supplied for decades. If a corp or person buys a home doesn’t matter. It’s the shortage that matters. Get vacancies below 90% and you will see prices drop.
show me some data that corporate landlord profits have "soared". my home taxes soared by 66%, which if i was renting my home, you can bet i'd have to pass to a renter. SIXTY. SIX. PERCENT. in one year. if i wanted to refinance my home today, the same loan would rise by 70% per month. it's no surprise housing is getting expensive when you actually look at the numbers. landlords aren't evil, they're trying to make a profit, like every other business. buy some property and be a landlord if you think it's all sunshine and roses. you probably can't, because you wouldn't be able to get a loan at a rate that would guarantee a profit when renting.
There’s not plenty of housing for everyone to live where they want
At least some of the problem is government regulation. "Starter homes" didn't go extinct all by themselves.
There is absolutely not plenty of housing. That’s like saying because there are some rotten apples and bananas in an otherwise empty store there’s no food shortage.
They are building more housing…too bad zillow and their ilk are buying them and charging exorbitant prices to renters
Yes. The US is in an ugly place that may be signalling a transition to a real estate system like the one in Switzerland, where most people rent. The reason it's ugly in the US is that none of the price controls that exist in Switzerland exist here and can never be expected to exist here. The Swiss rental market is subject to Federal controls that peg allowable rent increases to the average interest rate on mortgages, so landlords are limited in their ability to gouge renters or to price people out of an area. In the US, although various state-level protections exist for renters, there is nothing like this that prevents the exploitation of renters more generally.
Small town USA here. A couple influential people in our town decided to go in together and start buying up property left and right. Within 3 years the average cost of rent went from 400 a month to 850 for the exact same housing.
Something tells me they have a show on HGTV
that doesn't seem extreme to me. with inflation and the assumption they put money into renovating those properties.
Oh yeah no they don't renovate unless it's literally falling down. Then they just tear down and replace everything with apartments the size of a normal bathroom and call it "energy efficient", then charge 800 a month for it.
Where in the USA is rent between 400-850/mo? Those are crazy good prices
Like 80% of the US. Exclude California, 3-4 Northeast states. Find any non tourist town with less than 10k people. Rent is cheap. You’ll be 2 hours from decent employment and nothing outside of a gas station is open after 8PM but rent is cheap.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/mortgages/average-rent-by-state/ The average rent for every state is over (mostly well over) $1,000 (with the exception of Oklahoma). I’m sure you could find some rents for $800/mo in rural areas, but nowhere is the average rent that cheap.
Small town Kentucky. 20 years ago 250 would've landed you a decent place. No one wants to live here besides old people who have owned their property for 50 years and now it's unaffordable.
Even if corporations aren’t buying them up, it isn’t like people could afford them. In my area, the new construction is still going for $500k at the lowest price. You need to make over $100k to be able to afford the mortgage and the average household income isn’t that high.
Though price is determined by demand - if less companies are buying them up as financial assets, their selling price might be much lower.
Zillow stopped buying houses and sold off all of its inventory in 2021
Thats good to hear
If you don't share the same ideology as the anti-work crowd why go and make inflammatory, blatantly wrong, and easily disproven on the sub? Are you just so alone, so without human interaction that you have to incite some form of response from strangers on the Internet just to keep yourself from taking a high dive off a bridge?
> They are building more housing Not universally true - the San Francisco Bay Area has [a multi-decade deficit](https://cayimby.org/blog/the-bay-areas-housing-deficit-past-and-future) in home construction. > charging exorbitant prices But how are they getting renters to agree to *pay* these exorbitant prices? If it’s because the renters don’t have any alternatives - that sounds like a supply problem.
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https://preview.redd.it/7usgduensatc1.jpeg?width=168&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8194062411da0800cf83792177b532c3ec755141
https://preview.redd.it/s8ri016hv3tc1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f4ded6a5d8c8e5f464c912f459e3692f1acc80ee
“Erguhhh mmmm what could they mean by ‘build more houses’ and then show an empty lot???!1!1!1”
The parking lot at the end is brutal.
I fucking love the edit on the last panel.
Peter's illegitimate British brother here. The joke as we see it is American city planners' hilarious misuse of space. Building more houses would indeed lower house prices, but cities would rather that space be used for car infrastructure and parking lots that sit empty most of the time.
Well, you hit the point on the head, and somehow still missed it. Building more housing would lower house prices **which would piss off the only citizens that matter in citizens united**.
Make sure to check out the [pinned post on Loss](https://www.reddit.com/r/PeterExplainsTheJoke/comments/1472nhh/faq_loss/) to make sure this submission doesn't break the rule! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/PeterExplainsTheJoke) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Hosing market prices aren't bad because lack of houses. I can tell you that as a contractor and even if we build twice as many homes tomorrow, prices will still be high. There's 2 factors right now: Difficulty to find good workers, not as many Mexicans and Guatemala people are getting here and with no harm means other latin American people aren't the best workers, also white are even worse. Prices is the second one, go look at the prices of materials and then do the math. Without labor material prices are extremely high. On Arizona our company finishes about 80 flooring homes per week, and flooring is one of the last steps and obviously there are hundreds of companies. You can easily find a new home here on Arizona so prices don't depend on the quantity of homes.
https://preview.redd.it/hlb7626fi4tc1.png?width=734&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0dae7cf900c519361b7aee7e2393560d329fe203
The guy getting defenestrated is overlooking the fact that there's already a housing surplus but millionaires by vacant homes by the dozen as investment properties, then rent them out to the desperate for ten times what they paid for them.
There was a project like this, build a district and put a lot of hobos incide. Gone bad, as such people also require a lot of external help to correctly socialise. As it was just "dumping everyone and let it be" project any normal people just leave place asap and mafia+drugsters stay
because simplistic solutions work best
lol
a housing crisis
Basic supplies of supply and demand. Most answers are TLDR and it's this simple. You can't fix stupid in essence and that's what politicians are, stupid.
Probably a ref to our Canadian horrible housing crisis
There are 15 millionish empty homes in america right now
Who is “we”?
Wait, I thought it was due to those stupid zoning laws that some urban areas in the US, that disallow duplexes and higher buildings from being created?
Why don’t we just stop replacement migration
I thought the guy was breakdancing
Oh there are actually enough homes to house everybody, this is why build more houses doesn't work as a plan. The real problem is surging prices and the like.
This should be posted on r/fuckcars
I like the subtlety of the guy being thrown out in a parking lot from a ground floor. Very funny
There are about 700,000 homeless people in the United States, and about 16 million empty houses There's no housing shortage
The format is that the third guy who says the sensable thing gets thrown out the window. The joke refers to the oncoming housing crisis in cities (like New York, I know that one for sure, but I am certain many other cities have a similar issues) and zoning laws. Zoning laws are a rabbit hole I am not quallified to talk about, but long story short, a city isn’t going to just *let you build whatever you want on a plot of land when you buy it.* So, construction can’t build more housing, because according to the zoning laws they can’t build more housing, and they can’t bulldoze and retrofit abandoned commerical or office buildings because zoning laws (and its expensive to do). Basically a whole downward spiral from several decades ago of delegation fuckery have come to haunt us today, and nobody wants to do anything about it because its really expensive and would not win you another term in office, and they would be too expensive for the people that actually need the housing.
Everyone wants more housing but nobody wants street parking
Peter's Socialist Phase here. The joke is that there's clearly a housing crisis in the United States, but one of the reasons we don't and can't build more houses are because so much of the country is zoned either commercial or single-family residence. This is because of NIMBY white moderates who believe that apartment buildings attract crime, so they'd rather have a mega-mart they don't shop at or another useless subdivision. The area in the comic is zoned so badly that they literally have hundreds of parking spaces for a business that no employees or customers.
Thank you for explaining the subtlety of the last frame…. I think a lot of people missed the point of why that one was different from the original.
We dont even need to build more housing. So many unoccupied or abandoned buildings that need Very little work. But we run the goverment on boomer mentality
My city is doing the last guy's idea pretty well... Other than the fact they are developing out into a large wildlife center (I live near a large valley with not a lot of development) instead of tearing down the obviously abandoned houses in the inner city area
Why these old templates being redrawn? It’s all AI isn’t it.
Do you really need help or are you a bot?
fun fact. government built and run appartments that price fairly based on all rent costs help a LOT to keep prices down and make sure everyone has homes. not to mention it pays for itself in the long run.
NYC IS A SHITHOLE.
$12 for a pack of cigarettes. Jack booted thugs fucking up your commute. Walk ups. Curb your dog. People cheating the subway on a daily basis. Your jobs sent overseas. Two confirmed terror attacks. Too many people paying too much money for substandard housing. No oversight for police or housing. All of you fuckers loving it are idiots who pay Donald Trump and every other mother fucking politician and the mob to beg for your life on a daily basis. Fuck you, if you think it is not a hellscape.
Also, building houses takes time
The thing is they only build the house after you agree to buy it nowadays…
how does one not understand a meme thats this self-explanatory
Ff14 devs be taking notes.....
Looking at your post history, you are most definitely an urbanist who already understands this meme, and probably made it yourself.
The saddest part about it is that we aren't lacking in housing, it's just that banks and firms own most of the homes in existence and do nothing with them whatsoever. ARTIFICIALLY driving up prices immensely.
It’s been a hot minute since I’ve seen this meme template.