> In brief, our city has a housing shortage and a homelessness problem
I've never understood why people try to connect these issues. They're wholely unrelated. No one's like "oh, I can't find a house in my city, guess I'll just live on the street". In reality it is "oh, I can't find a house in the city. I'll move where it's reasonable". If I can afford a very reasonable rent, I can afford a ride out of town.
The homeless aren't homeless because housing is expensive where you are. There are places within reach where housing is cheap.
There are many homeless people who are not living on the streets: those living in shelters, or cars, or who are frequently moving between temporary living situations with friends or family. And they may even be holding down a job, and/or relying on local support systems for, say, child care, which could make ‘move where it’s cheaper’ an untenable or very risky option.
Two of my coworkers are homeless and in just that situation. I'm somewhat astounded that you can't see any reasons why people don't want to just pick up their lives and cut all ties to go somewhere else.
My grandparents picked up their lives and cut all ties to go somewhere else. It was hard but they were better off for it. I have little sympathy for those who are unwilling to take similar steps to improve their own lives.
I would like a trial job and a trial house for 6-12 months. Ill find something myself. It should probably involve a schedule with social interactions and someone to monitor the progress. Other people who just relocated are probably interesting to talk with.
> The homeless aren't homeless because housing is expensive where you are. There are places within reach where housing is cheap.
This is about as disconnected from reality as it gets.
We beat out >50 applicants for our current rental by offering 6mos up front. That ad was up for less than 2 hours. Other landlords we talked to were working through 400 applications per day.
We're paying just over double for the same sq ft, in the next county out. We beat long odds for the privilege.
People all around the region - with steady gov jobs and money in the bank - moved into dodgy hotels or their cars because they had nowhere to go.
If people value living in an area, the price goes up until supply and demand are similar. Those with less to spend have many other options. Nobody is owed a specific home. To say otherwise would ignore the huge benefit of immigration.
> Those with less to spend have many other options.
That's where you are very much making bad assumptions, or showing your complete lack of experience
I know a single mom with a kid who needs a regular scheduled experimental treatment only available in one hospital in the province. She can move to a lower cost area, where there aren't many jobs, and none that would pay enough for her to regularly travel to the city and get a hotel. She can't find a cheaper place to live in the city, because even a shared place is going for $1k+ for a bedroom, and no one wants a shared place with a kid. She could move farther away from the city and commute, but the rent savings wouldn't cover the cost of public transit, let alone a reliable car. The line for affordable housing is years long. She is one of thousands with a story like that.
There are a million and one scenarios where 'other options' just don't exist. To suggest that people opt to be unhoused/live in a car/couchsurf even though they have the option to be housed is wild.
Nobody is owed a specific home, but it is cruel, inhuman and immoral to suggest that people aren't entitled to a shelter of some sort, especially in a country where we have more than enough resources to solve the problem.
This is very hard to give the benefit of the doubt - nobody has implied "just be homeless". You're calling an imaginary enemy "cruel, inhuman and immoral", but you're addressing a real person.
They said there were other options. They said they shouldn’t live in a region if they get priced out of it.
What are the other options? “You can’t live in this city, regardless of reason, unless you have enough money” is cruel and inhuman in the real circumstance I described.
It may be that they don’t have the experience or knowledge to realize that things are the way they are, but “you aren’t entitled to live anywhere near where you need to live to keep your child alive” is the reality of their position.
But this doesn’t offer any justification for why, for locations that people highly value living in, we as a society ought to do anything other than maximize the number of people living there.
Sure, but it is an option (as well as everywhere along the spectrum up to maximization), and so ‘people want to move there’ is not on its own a justification for ‘prices must go up’.
Why don’t you put this comment on GP, who is saying blatantly false stuff in order to construct a blatantly false narrative about an issue that people care about?
Yes. People are flooding desirable areas, and developers (and some politicians) would like to keep trying to fight the locals to get a piece of that pie, even if it means harming those areas, rather than developing outward and stopping foreign buying. Then the resulting house-price crisis is pointed to as the reason they should be given free reign, but that's circular reasoning. That's "negotiating with terrorists".
After that, the next thing blamed is the issue of wealthy Americans using housing as an investment in high-profile areas, which takes up the public consciousness despite being such a small part of the problem.
The homelessness crisis is mostly unrelated, and the subset of it that is related is not related in the ways for which people use it as an argument. Again: Build outward. Get businesses to spread out.
Even the silliest argument against becoming a historical district is a wonderful argument.
I live in a historic district and am not allowed to do things that would help preserve the house or even to change it back to its original state (unless I have photos of my house circa 1900 to prove it, but who took photos of middle class houses then?). The city busybodies don't have a background in architecture or history and seem to think that the past actually looked like Disney's Celebration, FL.
Best of luck to Mark in keeping his own city's troublemakers out of his neighborhood.
I think these historic areas are getting out of control. Where I grew up, just about the whole city became an historic area. The end result over the years, rents are raising a lot and development has destroyed the character of the city.
If you looked at the City in the 70s, when it became "historic", it looked amazing, but greatly run down. If they repaired the structures instead of tearing then down structures over the past 50 years, it would be an amazing place to visit.
Now, it is a shell of its former self. But there are plenty of signs saying "This is where ... was". Now I think getting a historic designation is nothing but a money grab by the local gov and their friends in development.
related to this I'm surprised more people don't get together to start (or reboot) more small towns? Saw a video on abandoned CO towns and made me think that if 20 people moved there are opened some small businesses while keeping it historic it would be fun.
1) Most people these days want to live in cities, for good reasons: jobs are there, cultural activities are there, dating opportunities are there (for single people), good schools are there (for married people), etc. An abandoned town won't have any of that.
2) Sure, if a bunch of people moved to an abandoned town and revitalized it, it would be interesting, but how do you coordinate something like that? What are these people going to do for work in the meantime? Are you relying on a bunch of WFH people? And even if 100 WFH people suddenly move to a dying or abandoned town, how do they deal with all the things that aren't ready for them, such as the utilities, or lack of skilled labor to fix problems in their houses, etc.?
You need something like Culdesac and a way to bootstrap the economics so there is enough income coming in: some retirees in pensions, some folks with local business, and some folks with remote jobs.
Where are the retirees going to get medical services? Some tiny town isn't going to have a hospital or any other medical services, and retired people need that more than anyone else.
Average travel time to an acute care facility for someone in rural America furthest from a facility (a quarter of rural population) is about 34 minutes. Assuming ~55mph country roads, that gives you a ~30 mile radius from rural hospitals where you can site. Closer is better but your constraint is price per acre, broadly speaking.
People in the 1800s and before didn't worry much about medical services. When they got sick, they suffered with it, or died. The state-of-the-art with medicine at the time could be handled by one doctor. Expectations these days are a lot higher.
>I wonder what was the last town in a america to be established?
That's a good question, and probably impossible to answer without some qualifiers. I'm sure some new "towns" have been created in the recent past which were really nothing more than an incorporation of a previously-unincorporated area immediately outside another municipality, but that's altogether different from establishing an all-new town far from any other settlement, as was probably common in the 1800s expansion westward.
Imagine if you will, a stealth apparment building. Disguised as mc Mansion, its actually a appartment block going deep into the ground.the "owners" play pretend to be be soccer mum and dads, but are actually janitors and shuttle service drivers. HOA agents stalk the lands, trying to discover the anti nimby activity. Construction is stealthy and in situ.
No one has a right to housing at any location they want at the price they want. That’s entitlement. There are plenty of cheap places to live in this country. But people instead want to go to a desirable high demand place and force it to change to accommodate them. Why shouldn’t people who live there already resist change and fight to keep their neighborhood and quality of life?
This post also makes the same mistake pro density activists usually make, which is to project their false ideas of how their “opponents” think onto them. Residents who fight against density and change aren’t doing it for scarcity or property value. That’s what activists say to make them look bad, along with a healthy dose of childish pejoratives like “NIMBY”. The reality is people mostly just want to keep the quality of life they’ve worked hard to find and build.
how ironic to call others entitled, when the NIMBYs are trying to tell builders what they can build on someone else's land, just because they enjoy the "character" of the 99% of the town they don't own.
Why is character in quotes? What you build where doesn't just affect the view - it can materially harm community, camaraderie, and safety. It's impossible to have an argument if you can't even respect people's desire to maintain those fundamental aspects of society for which they've worked so hard.
If you want to make it about rights, how about this: People have the right to do what they want with their own belongings. And in particular, land owners have a right to build what they want on land that they own.
In my country the Constitution guarantees that "private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation". But when the government tells a land owner that they can't replace a single-unit dwelling with a more valuable apartment building, they are doing exactly that.
> Residents who fight against density and change aren’t doing it for scarcity or property value.
Yeah, they are. They may not ONLY be fighting for some reasons, but this absolutely one of them.
City in Washington, not the most expensive, but repeatedly very high (double digit percentage) value increases, struggling with density proposes "The Missing Middle" and looks to study how to improve medium density housing (not even huge apartment complexes).
Inevitable question: "What will this do to our property values?"
"The most conservative study shows that we expect property value increases will go from 12.9% YOY to 9.2% YOY."
Holy hell. You'd have thought the city council was executing toddlers and pouring sugar in grandma's gas tanks. As soon as that little trinket came out, everything crumbled. Despite the fact that property values were still looking at increasing nearly 10% a year.
You say all this, but I've also met more than my share of property owners who believe that property should be an appreciating asset, and that that is some form of inalienable or constitutional right, the right to considering their home an asset or "investment" that outperforms the economy significantly.
And I say that as a home owner in that same city as someone who "worked hard to find and build" my quality of life.
> They may not ONLY be fighting for some reasons, but this absolutely one of them.
I’ve attended neighborhood and local council meetings, and I have literally never heard anyone talk about property value except those who are pro density, when accusing and attacking other residents. I’ve heard concerns about density affecting neighborhood character, crime, parking, traffic, etc but not property value. Sorry but I continue to think this is just a false generalization.
> You'd have thought the city council was executing toddlers and pouring sugar in grandma's gas tanks.
You’re claiming that people were angry about property value even though property value wasn’t a concern under proposed changes. That just doesn’t sound believable. Are you sure you’re hearing and understanding their perspective accurately? We all (me too) sometimes hear only what we want to hear.
> I've also met more than my share of property owners who believe that property should be an appreciating asset, and that that is some form of inalienable or constitutional right
Did anyone actually say they think it’s an “inalienable right” or a “constitutional right” or is that your editorialization? I have, however, heard people say that everyone has a “right” to housing - and you can find many opinion pieces saying the same with a simple search. Again, this all feels like projection.
I've never understood why people try to connect these issues. They're wholely unrelated. No one's like "oh, I can't find a house in my city, guess I'll just live on the street". In reality it is "oh, I can't find a house in the city. I'll move where it's reasonable". If I can afford a very reasonable rent, I can afford a ride out of town.
The homeless aren't homeless because housing is expensive where you are. There are places within reach where housing is cheap.