Exactly. I tell people complaining about housing prices in New York City and California this all the time! There are other great places to live. It’s an obvious move if your financial expectations aren’t being met.
Folks seem to want to celebrate this case just because they think it matters and makes the US look bad.
The amount of Cubans, Guatemalans, El Salvadorans Panamanians, etc… who had literally nothing and no resources to their name, who walked or hitched to the United States or Canada to back breaking labor to put their kids into high school is staggering.
Similarly for pretty much every cab driver and worker in Dubai, who is from Bangladesh or India or Kuala Lumpur or whatever…
In fact, I knew a very successful Honduran restaurant owner in Houston, who was deported twice from the U.S. between 1980-2000 finally got his citizenship on the third trip.
Without ever considering the possibility that things are just less affordable all across the US. There’s multimillion dollar condos even in tier 3 places that aren’t even all that. Like Madison or Pittsburgh. Let alone talking about getting a house in these areas.
We gotta get the government refocused on affordability. That’s really the only way forward. Young people really have to be given a fair shot here.
You can buy a house in Pittsburgh lol. Have you been? Madison less so. But it’s telling that the first two places that come to mind are those two places. Forget Madison or anywhere anyone else going to Yale is talking about on TikTok.
How about Buffalo, Cleveland, and Memphis? Of course things aren’t as affordable as they might otherwise seem but there are plenty of homes outside of the “cool” places.
Here is an example right here in Columbus: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/644-E-Whittier-St-Columbu...
Safe enough area, you could be a single nurse and walk to work at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and buy a place. Not everyone’s desire or whatever but there are definitely affordable places to live.
Personally I propose that city governments just start building housing on land they already own, or buy land and develop it especially in the city where there is a lot of opportunity and then give it away by lottery or sell it at cost. Instead they give out lots of money to non-profits who “tackle” affordability and other such nonsense.
Didn’t California spend a bunch of money “housing” the homeless? The solution is right there in front of us - build housing. Why aren’t these majority Democrat city councils in these cities doing something about it?
Because building shelter housing for the homeless one can pass off as "charity" for those less fortunate. And no one would willingly move to those shelters in any case.
Building desirable housing in a desirable place for nurses making 6 figures is an entirely different thing. It's gonna piss a lot of people off. So it becomes a political issue. No one wants to do it because they will be voted out of office by all the teachers, nurses and IT guys who didn't get a new place with free built in equity.
That's why we need, first, for the voters to agree on refocused policies and then afterwards build the necessary housing stock. No one's gonna build and give away free equity without a referendum providing political cover first.
> Building desirable housing in a desirable place for nurses making 6 figures is an entirely different thing.
Nobody needs or should build housing for people fitting this profile. Not everyone will be able to live in the desirable areas because if they did then there would just be other desirable areas.
Simply build housing. That’s all there is to it. Every time someone makes an excuse or tries to say some “charity” will get money or someone will get voted out of office you are just making the problem worse or maybe just not helping.
If building housing isn’t popular with voters though, and we are voting people who are building housing out of office, perhaps we shouldn’t be building housing regardless of outcome then. If someone is worried about their politician job then they should be voted out for that reason alone. Many elected officials have multi-year terms. They could at least make some progress even if they are sacrificing their job for it.
You take a place like, say, Madison WI. The place is on an isthmus. Where other than a desirable place are the people who run Madison supposed to build new housing? It has to be in the city limits. That's where they have authority.
Now as soon as people who have to live out in the suburbs find out that some people get access to housing on the isthmus, yes, they're going to be justifiably pissed.
Now, if what you want is for housing to be built in other areas that maybe are not as desirable, (outside the isthmus/city limits), well, ok, that's fine. But in that case it's not the people who run the city who can do that. You asked why the people who run the cities don't build housing. It's generally because building affordable housing in desirable cities creates perverse incentives of the sort I mentioned above.
You need an enormous city like Houston, LA etc where there is always more land somewhere that is less desirable, perhaps even unused, yet still in the city limits. You're just not gonna find that in a lot of the desirable cities that everyone wants to move to.
We have to either incentivize people to want to move to these less desirable places. (Maybe with jobs or creative amenities or something.) Or we need to get referendums in place that allow us to change policies in the desirable places so that rebuilding a neighborhood for higher density, greater affordability, and probably fewer single family homes becomes less politically perilous.
Because in a lot of these cities, there's just only so much space. This is especially true in cities with challenging geography, Seattle, San Fran, Manhattan, even low tier cities that are not that great like Madison. It's also generally true the further east you travel in the US. Phoenix/Scottsdale is enormous in terms of physical space. LA area is even bigger. But you travel east things get smaller and smaller until you're dealing with Boston, and Manhattan.
I admire your passion. But we need solutions that can actually work. Referendums work. "Just build more housing" doesn't. Because people who build housing deserve to be paid for it, and they get paid for it by charging market value. Market value in desirable places is contrary to collective affordability. We need referendums that resolve to build housing without expecting to make market level money on the new housing stock.
City councils can simply take land they own (or buy land), and then build housing. If voters vote them out, well it takes time until the next election cycle and at least some housing gets built. If politicians are worried about losing their jobs, they shouldn’t be in that line of work. We shouldn’t be voting for people who just want a job and to play house.
We should stop talking about places that don’t matter (Madison) or the “cool” cities like Boston or Seattle. If you want “affordable” housing in these places good luck, send some more political fliers and organize on Facebook.
Meanwhile we have plenty of space here in Columbus, great jobs, and we are growing. We sit on over 1,000 acres of undeveloped land, many of it is surface parking lots. We just need to stop talking, and build housing. Period.
FWIW I have a nice house and whether new housing gets built is of little economic concern to me. My passion comes not for building housing as much as it does getting this country to build stuff and actually try to solve problems instead of us across the board electing the same whiny dotards who promise to do things and then issue statements and hand out money to ineffective groups and consultants and market studies or other such nonsense. There is only one thing that brings housing prices down (or I should say slows their relative price increase over time) and that is to just build more housing. That is it!
> We have to either incentivize people to want to move to these less desirable places. (Maybe with jobs or creative amenities or something.) Or we need to get referendums in place that allow us to change policies in the desirable places so that rebuilding a neighborhood for higher density, greater affordability, and probably fewer single family homes becomes less politically perilous
I agree with you that many of these cities including my own need to build more attractive and interesting amenities to attract more residents (interesting how it just keeps coming back to building stuff). One area where I disagree is the emphasis on building fewer single-family homes. We need single-family homes. We don’t need the suburbs. Those are two totally different things. Neighborhoods, like a healthy forest, need a variety of housing types to meet folks at different stages of their lives and different income levels. You need mansions for the wealthier, and you need apartments for the artist or student. You need smaller homes for the empty nesters, and you also need larger homes for folks with kids. Today in suburbia we do build a lot of SFH, too much. Car-only infrastructure and out of control state and federal highway administrations are doing their best to bankrupt us and keep driving up tax increases. But cities (like mine) also don’t have jurisdiction in the suburbs and can’t control what gets built there.
I have a kid. I have family. I work. I move continents when I get bored of the one I live on currently.
On which note, hi from Brazil. 9th country in which I have lived.