Root cause of housing unaffordability

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No one's mentioned immigration. 600,000 net in the UK last year.

What we need is more tightly controlled immigration and more social housing.

Record immigration is a factor in Canada, too. Plus there are a few highly desirable cities and the rest of the country is empty.

And:

Foreign investors. Airbnb and the like. Low interest rates. Government stopped building social housing 30+ years ago. Zoning/approvals. NIMBYs. Collectivist cultures in multi family homes. People demanding luxury finishes. Etc etc.

What is that?

Exactly. Depending upon where you live there is at will employment. You can be fired (or not hired) for any reason at all. You can work your tail off and be an excellent employee. They can still harass you until you leave, fall ill, or even die.

The benefits are a joke. The state I'm in gives around $200 a month. You can't live on that.

For the people who haven't experienced homelessness... Don't talk about something that you haven't experienced and know nothing about. You think it can't happen to you... It can. I hope it never does.

According to various studies, recent immigrants (to the US and UK) tend to live more densely, taking up less space per capita, and therefore do not contribute to the housing shortage.

Wouldn't taking up less space still mean that those immigrants still take up some space which is more than if they didn't emigrate to the US or UK?

People that come from cultures where adult children, especially the oldest male, never move out. Their spouse moves in. They have kids. Sometimes there are other siblings and their families. Usually one set of grandparents as well.

So, they end up with several full time incomes coming into the household vs one or two and their houses are very large these days.. like 5-7k sf for more “normal,” ones and then there are bigger ones.. and then there are farm houses that due to zoning can be quite large and range from 10-20,000 sf.. palatial homes that look like Scarface mansions or small hotels.

When you have 6-10+ full time incomes + business/farm revenue etc the price you can bid land up to increases significantly and then people who come from cultures where grown adults typically move out and live solo can no longer afford a detached house on their one or two incomes - especially when a Lot of the population is from collectivist cultures.

This has been one contributing factor to our insane real estate prices, especially in the suburbs.

Yes.

^^ That's been the standard family model in countless cultures for millenia... I'm not sure weather it's the cause or the effect. In a completely different land and completely different reality I grew up in a multi-generational household exactly because of problems with availability of housing.

Actually, even a very big house with several family units usually takes less space than a smaller house for each nuclear family within it.

It's now becoming the norm here for financial reasons, but over the last ~century it has not been the norm. My parents generation moved out when they were ~18, rented their own place, saved up to buy a home etc. Might have had roommates, might have had a partner etc.

Sure, those arrangements still happen for some, but not at the extremely high rates they used to. People can't afford it.

And it hasn't been the rule or norm for families to all pool their incomes together to buy a multi-family home here. Adult siblings and all of their kids and the grandparents and great grand parents didn't all live together. It'd just be a single family in each home going it alone. Some could only afford to rent an apartment, others bought houses, others bought mansions etc - back when a Single income could pay a mortgage, and for transportation/food etc.

Mine is now the first generation either staying in the family home and not leaving or moving back to it if you have the option/need to. People who don't have that option, or don't want it, and want to start a family are moving East or North. There are also recent, and long time, immigrants that are leaving the country. A young Taiwanese guy I talked to was so upset with the lack of anywhere to live and afford that him and his girlfriend who've been here 3 years are leaving the country. An older European guy I talked to a couple days ago (when he asked about the collector plates on my bike) said he's retired now and can't afford the rent on his pension so he's going to ship his motorcycle one way back to Europe and move there. ALMOST anywhere else on the entire planet is more affordable than here, so it doesn't matter where people decide to move to - even most other expensive places are cheaper than here.

Immigration is a red herring. Fact is that we need immigrants or our standard of living will suffer - and we'll still have a housing shortage. Actually it will probably be worse because of the number of immigrants working in construction...

The issue is a lack of housing supply, simple as. We need to make it easier to build homes, easier to move house, and disincentivise property speculation through Land Value Tax.

Every train station with decent service should be surrounded by dense housing and all of life's basic amenities.

Me trying to figure out how you can have record immigration and not strain the housing supply further:



Condos get built up around new train stations, and then huge numbers of them are sold to overseas investors for $1-3+ Million each and people who work jobs for a living have to live an hour+ drive away, so building density doesn't solve the problem if it doesn't translate into population density.

And that's the problem.
All those "investors" who use real estate for purposes other than living in them, so no matter how many apartments there are, regular people can't live in them.

Certainly people who pool their incomes together to make ends meet are not to blame.

Yes, it’s a part of the problem.

Another is Airbnb and the like removing tons of private rentals from the housing market. We now have dipshit realtors calculating home values/prices based on Airbnb revenue. Recent news article about a house in Vancouver listed for something like $5.8M because of the Airbnb revenue from the 2 basement suites. Totally nuts - especially if someone takes a ~30 year mortgage assuming that $20k or so per month is going to last forever… demand could change, regulations could change - poof - now they’re getting foreclosed on.

Many other parts to the problem, too. Red tape is one of them, but even that is BS considering construction workers built full tilt as much housing as manpower could build for quite some time, even over building units of housing vs population growth. It’s all the housing that never becomes lives in homes that’s the problem.

And then developers canceling approved projects when the market softens and they can’t maximize profits. Etc. Greed greed greed at every turn. And now a 3 bedroom apartment in the city rents for $5500/month. :screwy:

Capitalist ideology that tries to create greed as a virtue is deadly sick.
Immigrants are just easy scapegoats of this.

On the other hand - I think the idea that every nuclear family should own a house is unsustainable - it lasted a couple of decades and now its unsustainability is just showing up. Street viewing American cities makes me astonished by their waste of space.