Seems like financypants lives in a beautiful world where corporations aren't greedy shitbags engaged in price gouging
Cheap houses in particular get voted off of most city councils or other local politics. It only costs $20k per trailer in a trailerpark IIRC, and so trailer parks can build hundreds of housing units for under 10-million invested.
Or various apartment buildings can be built with similar cost-efficiencies. Or Row-homes, or multiplex homes, etc. etc.
The issue is convincing the public that low-cost housing is to the benefic of society and that its a good thing to build. Most people see them as ways of attracting drug-dealers, black people / minorities, or turning a neighborhood into a Ghetto.
--------
So build enough low-cost housing. Build enough medium-cost housing. Etc. etc.
The problem is that in most municipalities, people are only happy when high-cost housing is built. But that's just not sustainable.
Yes, Seattle could use more trailer parks, but there is absolutely nowhere to put them. We build lots of multiplexes, row homes, town homes, apartment buildings, but we still have a net influx of a 30k/year into the area, so its a losing battle.
Because too little has been built and little of that fits widespread need.
> where everyone wants to live.
Wants to live infers worthwhile choices. The reality is that people live anywhere they can survive. Worthwhile choices don't include locations that are likely to lead to homelessness.
But housing has been built and is being built. We leave it to the market, so its mostly higher end housing that gets built (more money to be made), but plenty of well to do techies are moving to the city that there isn't a shortage of people who want to live in that.
> Wants to live infers worthwhile choices. The reality is that people live anywhere they can survive. Worthwhile choices don't include locations that are likely to lead to homelessness.
Actually, cites with nice weather but expensive weather attract the chronic homeless in droves. They don't care about the high cost of housing (they couldn't afford to live in Detroit either, so what does it matter?), and the nicer more mild weather works better for sleeping rough and not dying.
I'm not really sure what is your point. If all American residents wanted to live in San Francisco, should we fit 380 million people in that small area?
We dramatically slowed-down homebuilding after 2007, and have *NEVER* recovered.
https://www.census.gov/econ/currentdata/?programCode=RESCONS...
Note that our population has been growing at much faster rates than housing. So the overall trend is inevitable: fewer housing units than our population growth means that we will just have more expensive houses.
There's simply not enough houses for everyone.
So we don’t have a residency system in the states, so everyone is free to live wherever they want, only supply of housing being a limiting factor in where they want to move (which we use the market to sort out).
So build houses where people want to live.
As I already said earlier: the problem is that we stopped building houses at respectable rates. Its going to be a decade before we catch up to where the population wants to live.
You create immeasurable value, wealth, and dignity to hundreds, thousands, or even tens-of-thousands of people.
So we should do that. Full stop.
I'm pushing for trailer parks (aka, low end housing), and other cheap forms of housing most of all. Townhomes or Multiplexes as well.
Cheap, dense, highly deployable. There are other forms of dense housing (multiplex units) and whatnot as well. People don't necessarily need the best house per se, but having at least a crappy housing market that's vibrant and healthy is hugely important to the lower class.
Low-cost housing solves the worst-of-the-worst problems. Its better for the poor to live in cheap rowhomes or trailer-parks than for them to be roaming the streets at night in de-facto homeless encampments.
Greed is insufficient to explain the problem. We have a market failure here for sure. (Markets work even in the presence of greed, with the proper regulatory environment. Whatever the hell has gone wrong with our society over the last 30 years to cause us to stop building houses is... well... "Greed" just is insufficient to explain the behavior)