[HN Gopher] Yoni Appelbaum on the real villians behind our housi...
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Yoni Appelbaum on the real villians behind our housing and mobility
problems
Author : serviette
Score : 36 points
Date : 2025-07-21 20:43 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.riskgaming.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.riskgaming.com)
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Some excerpts: Over the past few decades, an
| astonishing pattern has taken place: Americans no longer
| migrate. In 1970, one in five Americans was moving
| every year. It's now down to one in 13. For
| more than 100 years before, my neighborhood had been a
| place for the children of immigrants, for strivers who
| were trying to better their condition. Suddenly, it
| wasn't doing that anymore. It was turning into a
| neighborhood of young professionals.
|
| Unstated here is that nothing replaced that loss.
| ljlolel wrote:
| Demographics are totally different. Baby boom bulge was
| teenaged then
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| The author indicated a neighborhood character that endured
| for 100 years. That places this community's origins in the
| early 20th century.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| I think urbanists should be a lot more cautious of throwing
| Austin around as a success story. It is still too early to say
| whether they've found a good equilibrium in supply/demand that
| limits price increases _or_ they 're cresting a major COVID-
| triggered speculative glut which will be very damaging to the
| city.
|
| I'd bet that Miami is just a few years ahead of it (entering
| serious decline) and within a decade Austin will be seen as an
| obvious-in-retrospect cautionary tale.
| bazingakiller wrote:
| I've never seen anybody with more than half a brain describe
| anywhere in Texas as having good city planning.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| _" People would like to have a house that's large enough for
| their family and access to good employment."_
|
| _" Over the last 50 years, America has kind of told them, 'You
| can't have both'."_
|
| I'd go past that and say you probably can't have a home over 3
| bedrooms without already being in an upper income bracket.
|
| So no large families (to offset population challenges). No
| extended families to help the existing family. No space to help
| relatives relocate.
|
| No homes for four income earners in a 4-income economy.
| WalterBright wrote:
| In the 1800s, it was commonplace to have 8 children. Did they
| all lived in huge houses?
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| No but the living conditions were atrocious, dangerous,
| unsanitary, and probably quite psychologically traumatizing
| (e.g. kids growing up in households where adults would have
| sex in the same room have all sorts of problems)
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| ... traumatizing (e.g. kids growing up in households where
| adults would have sex in the same room have all sorts of
| problems
|
| Sure, to my western/puritanical upbringing that is weird,
| but I suspect for the majority of human history: parents
| have being having sex in very close proximity to their
| children. Separate bedrooms, even separate beds are a
| modern luxury.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| The issue is that we raise kids into _this_ world, and
| not a different time and place. They grow up to be
| maladapted to _this_ world.
| honkycat wrote:
| i always drag this one out: For a lot of modern history,
| public hangings were a family affair. Pack up a picnic
| and go downtown to watch a man hang.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| Yes, _and that was bad_. If you prefer a society free of
| violence (I do), then exposing people to violence in
| their daily life _is bad._
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| I was born in 1964 in the midwest US, the 7th out of 8
| children. The house was a two story brick structure with five
| bedrooms and two bathrooms. The house was less than 2000 sq
| ft, but that included a moldy basement with seepage and
| jackposts all over the place helping support the sagging
| joists, so the real living space was closer to 2/3 of that,
| so 1350 sq ft or so.
|
| The house had been built before 1920 when expectations were
| less grand; those rooms were much smaller than nearly any
| home I've been in built after 1980. When my grandpa came to
| visit each summer, it meant all five boys in one room, the
| two youngest in sleeping bags and occasionally getting
| stepped on in the middle of the night when one of my older
| brothers would get up and forget we were there.
|
| There was also no air conditioning, nor ceiling fans. My
| parents had a box fan in their bedroom window during the
| summer. It was a big deal when the bedroom I shared with my
| next older brother got a box fan too; that was in high
| school.
| honkycat wrote:
| I grew up in the 90s and I agree: I shared a room with my
| older brother until high school.
|
| We shared EVERYTHING. And strangely, it didn't kill us! In
| fact: it just motivated us to go to sports and clubs and
| stay out of the house.
|
| Obviously less extreme, but I do not understand this "every
| child must have their own room" thing. They don't! And I
| grew up in an incredibly poor rural area, imagine living in
| a city where there was actual shit to do.
| Aeolun wrote:
| The only thing I can say (having been born in 1988, sharing
| a slightly smaller house with 4 siblings), is that that
| sounds reasonable.
|
| We all shared rooms and had less than a few square meters
| to ourselves. It was fine. People these days are too
| attached to the idea they need massive homes to live their
| lives.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > In the 1800s, it was commonplace to have 8 children. Did
| they all lived in huge houses?
|
| This is a bit of segue from where we were. To brings us more
| in line with the topic: In the early 20th century, large and
| extended families lived in commonly built row housing.
|
| Their roomier accommodations were one piece of communities
| that were more affordable and an overall better fit _for
| larger groups & families_ (than modern housing and
| communities).
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Well, no shit. You can't live in a 5000 sq ft mcmansion in the
| middle of times square.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You can't afford a 1 square foot lot anywhere near Times
| Square for four bedroom house in the Midwest money. Luckily,
| no one was talking about raising a family in Times Square,
| which in 1970 was adjacent to one of the most notoriously
| degenerate and crime ridden neighborhoods in the Western
| world. People understand that's out of their reach now.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| In this account you just created, you're being unnecessarily
| caustic. Could you please dial that back? No one here has
| done anything to deserve it.
| bazingakiller wrote:
| Unremarkable podcast spam decides that decades of housing market
| financialization has nothing to do with the cost of housing but
| because of some obscure 70s activist who had the evil radical
| leftist idea of "hey maybe don't bulldoze an entire inner city
| neighborhood to build an interchange". With intellectual titans
| like this working on the problem it's mystery why housing is so
| expensive.
| metabagel wrote:
| I didn't down-vote you, but your comments could adhere closer
| to the guidelines (kindly page down to the "In
| Comments"section).
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| metabagel wrote:
| It's a bit more nuanced than what you are saying. Here's what
| Yoni Appelbaum said:
|
| > I should start by saying this: Jane Jacobs is right about
| almost everything. She was right about what makes cities
| vibrant and vital. She was right about the ballet of the
| sidewalk. She writes brilliantly about needing to treat cities
| as living things, that if you try to centrally plan them and
| assign all of their functions, it doesn't work very well. They
| need to evolve over time. They need a diversity of peoples, of
| uses.
|
| She was right about all of that, and she sees great menace in
| the urban renewal schemes of the time, where the experts of her
| age looked at cities and saw disorderly places that needed
| rationality. In all of that, she was exactly right, but her
| solution was to reassert the original right of communities to
| define their own boundaries.
|
| She said individuals, activists should have the right to veto
| new developments in their neighborhoods. And so you get the
| sort of endless processes of community hearings and reviews,
| and she's quite explicit that the goal of these reviews is not
| to gauge the actual opinions of the neighborhood or to balance
| the good of the community, but to empower activists like Jacobs
| to step in and say "no."
|
| She wants "right-thinking people" like her to be able to stop
| the government from doing bad things. It is a revolt against
| government from the left, and it is amazingly effective. But
| the new rules don't just get exercised by right-thinking
| people, and one of the things about right-thinking people is
| they're often wrong about the things they're thinking about.
| And so, she imagines this as the ability to veto lots of
| destructive changes. But in practice, it emerges as a simple
| collective veto of almost all change, and it has had tremendous
| costs for Americans as a whole.
| api wrote:
| Housing market financialization can only "work" if housing
| tends to go up over time, which results from housing scarcity.
| If housing is not scarce a long position on housing will lose
| money.
|
| Blaming housing investors for housing affordability is like
| blaming gold market speculators for gold being expensive. If
| the price of gold comes down, the speculators lose money. Same
| with housing.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Housing market financialization can only "work" if housing
| tends to go up over time, which results from housing
| scarcity.
|
| This is not true. The art market is financialized and tends
| to go up over time, but this does not result from art
| scarcity. You can make a market go up by making huge
| institutional cash buyers 30% of the buyer's market, and by
| getting even independent sellers to collude on price.
| Independent buyers in that market are irrelevancies, because
| they bought on credit borrowed against a house at an
| artificial value.
|
| Also, that little property bubble we had in the first decade
| of the 2000s was not a result of a sudden population
| increase.
|
| edit: also, it's important to mention that "if housing tends
| to go up over time" is within a window. It can lose all of
| that false value in a day, and the government will respond by
| directly subsidizing all of the institutional losers, and
| their stockholders.
| sir0010010 wrote:
| The art market does not tend to go up, only specific works
| of art that become collectibles tend to appreciate in
| value. And these are the works that become financialized.
| This is similar to the market for automobiles, only very
| specific cars become collectibles while the vast majority
| of cars depreciate.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| Outside of the fact that moving itself, the physical process, Is
| incredeibly stressful for most peopled, uprooting kids from
| schools and friendships, leaving a community that you know and
| (love??) in some form, I am not willing to accept that "Americans
| not moving all the time" is a bad thing.
|
| I think you can also mention that with both parts of a marriage
| need to have jobs to pay the bills, moving is not just one
| getting a good deal in a different city, then the other part has
| to find something as well and wants something better or at least
| not worse. so two good offers is needed.
|
| I also wonder what the timescale is.
|
| I would presume this started as a factor of the industrial
| revolution. when people had farms and worked farms, I think
| moving about was less common as well.
|
| When the man was
| pj_mukh wrote:
| I presume this average includes 20-something's that are far
| more mobile on all fronts except for housing costs at a higher
| opportunity destination. If they are not moving to seek better
| opportunities, it does signify a bit of a deep rot in the
| system.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| Im getting sick of hearing about the "housing problem".
|
| As a percentage, how big do you think the home ownership problem
| is? Guess: 10? 15?
|
| If I told you that home ownership is un-moveable would you
| believe me? That the percentage is less that 6 from peak to
| trough?
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
|
| 63 percent of US households owned the home they lived in in 1960,
| we peaked around 2008 at 69 percent and are about 65 today.
|
| Home ownership is functionally an un-moveable number.
|
| But the housing problems, corporate ownership, rent prices, young
| people can't afford houses....
|
| These things aren't housing problems. They are social ones.
|
| First, we are using housing much differently:
| https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q...
| -- Lots of us are living alone, including the old. The boomers
| aren't moving in with the kids, or to homes, or shacking up
| together (the Golden Girls is a quaint bit of history that does
| not happen today). This has created a massive amount of pressure
| on the housing stock we have.
|
| And that Corporate ownership problem: It is hyper local (Atlanta,
| Phoenix, Tampa are major markets). One would think that these
| things being a local issue would have local resolutions. Except
| the biggest predictor of voting is "home ownership" and the
| biggest predictor of turn out is "anything that harms the price
| of homes". There is simply no political will locally to change
| this.
|
| But the bulk of Investor Owned Properties aren't corporate, they
| are people with 2nd homes. These aren't "places people could
| live" they are homes in markets that only exist as tourist
| destinations. The condo in Florida for snow birds, The house at
| the beach, by the lake or in the mountains for a weekend getaway.
|
| One of the largest factors in run away cost is where the money
| is. I hate to say this but that older generation that isn't
| moving in with kids, or shacking up like golden girls... they
| have ALL the cash. You don't have to believe me but as these
| people pass things will change and it has a name:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Wealth_Transfer
|
| And yes, lack of mobility, the missing middle, zoning (back to
| that pesky voting things contribute) aren't helping. And so do
| tenants rights (the parts of these that helped end shared living
| situations from house mates to boarding houses).
|
| Do we have a housing problem, Yes. The real fixes are going to be
| unpopular because the facts are in conflict with how people feel
| singleshot_ wrote:
| > 63 percent of US households owned the home they lived in in
| 1960
|
| Wouldn't measuring dynamics of home ownership using a unit
| "households" cause all sorts of problems? Consider two people
| who would get married and become a "households" except they're
| too poor to live together so they each cohabitate with their
| parents. Every household in this example that owned a house in
| 1960 (the two sets of parents) still does, but the example
| shows a pretty serious housing problem.
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| The primary problems are private equity buy up and rich foreign
| buyers. Prices would have already collapsed finally if not for
| the latter. Not possible to build our way out of this mess. It's
| a population problem in the numerical. An immigration problem.
| Stop the flow of high income potential immigrants and the prices
| will drop.
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