Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

cyberax

[flagged]

View on HN

Oregon has a severe housing shortage:

https://www.opb.org/article/2025/01/28/oregon-needs-to-build...

That is the root cause of homelessness:

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-...

This video also does a good job of explaining it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQW4W1_SJmc

Eliminating costly parking regulations are quite helpful for building the kinds of housing that will help people get out of homelessness.

Thanks for introducing me to Justine Underhill ( https://www.youtube.com/@justine-underhill ). She is a new YouTuber (4 videos so far) with excellent urbanist content! Her well-argued essays remind me of Oh The Urbanity!, Not Just Bikes, and About Here.

> Homelessness is through the roof

Allocating space for car parking does not help address homelessness. In fact, it hurts it a lot.

Nope. Allocating space for cars and prohibiting the orgy of real estate densification improves the homelessness situation. It puts less stress on people to move into The Downtown, so they are more likely to stay in more reasonably-priced areas.

The argument that density puts stress on people to move _towards_ that density seems to me to have the direction of causation reversed. People look at prices when they move, not density.

No. I have the causality arrow correct. Density forces people to move, it acts as a black hole of misery.

The _main_ reason people move ever closer to Downtowns is economic. They _have_ to do it, because that's where the high-paying jobs are.

Prices going up is a clear market signal of desirability.

Desirability as housing or as investment? Because speculation has a tendency to overlook the little things that make a quality product.

Housing as an investment is driven by scarcity. Commit to making housing abundant and it starts being a much less interesting investment.

If the housing isn't desirable for housing, why would it go up as an investment?

Because your analysis indicates that many other people think it will go up even more later.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com