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1. Embed this notice
   Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:53:52 JST Cory Doctorow

   Postmortems and blame for the 2024 elections are thick on the ground, but amidst all those theories and pointed fingers, one explanation looms large and credible: the American housing emergency. If the system can't put a roof over your head, that system needs to go.

   --

   If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

   https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/11/nimby-yimby-fimby/#home-team-advantage

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   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:54:08 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     American housing has been in crisis for decades, of course, but it keeps getting worse...and worse...and *worse*. Americans pay more for worse housing than at any time in their history. Homelessness is at a peak that is soul-crushing to witness and maddening to experience. We turned housing - a human necessity second only to air, food and water - into an asset governed almost entirely by market forces, and so created a crisis that has consumed the nation.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:54:21 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The Trump administration has no plan to deal with housing. Or rather, they do have plans, but strictly of the "bad ideas only" variety. Trump wants to deport 11m undocumented immigrants, *and* their families, including citizens and Green Card holders (otherwise, that would be "family separation" and that's cruel).

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:54:32 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Even if you are the kind of monster who can set aside the ghoulishness of solving your housing problems by throwing someone in a concentration camp at gunpoint and then deporting them to a country where they legitimately fear for their lives, this *still* doesn't solve the housing emergency, and will leave America several million homes short.

     Their other solution? Deregulation and tax cuts. We've seen this movie before, and it's an R-rated horror flick.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:54:46 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Financial deregulation created the speculative mortgage markets that led to the 2008 housing crisis, which created a seemingly permanent incapacity to build new homes in America, as skilled tradespeople retired or changed careers and housebuilding firms left the market.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:55:05 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Handing giant tax cuts to the monopolists who gobbled up the remains of these bankrupt small companies minted a dozen new housing billionaires who preside over companies that make *more* money than ever by building *fewer* homes:

     https://www.fastcompany.com/91198443/housing-market-wall-streets-big-housing-market-bet-has-created-12-new-billionaires

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:55:21 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     This isn't working. Homelessness is ballooning. The only answer Trump and his regime have for our homeless neighbors is to just make it a crime to be homeless, sweeping up homeless encampments and busting homeless people for "loitering" (that is, existing in space). There is no universe in which this reduces homelessness. People who lose their homes aren't going to dig holes, crawl inside, and pull the dirt down on top of themselves.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:55:31 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     If anything, sweeps and arrests will make homelessness *worse*, by destroying the possessions, medication and stability that homeless people *need* if they are to become housed.

     Today, *The American Prospect* published an *excellent* package on the housing emergency, looking at its causes *and* the road-tested solutions that can work even when the federal government is doing everything it can to make the problem worse:

     https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-tackling-the-housing-crisis/

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:55:46 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The Harris campaign ran on Biden's economic record, insisting that he had tamed inflation. It's true that the Biden admin took action against monopolists and greedflation, including criminal price-fixing companies like Realpage, which helps landlords coordinate illegal conspiracies to rig rents. Realpage sets the rents for the majority of homes in major metros, like Phoenix:

     https://www.azag.gov/press-release/attorney-general-mayes-sues-realpage-and-residential-landlords-illegal-price-fixing

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:55:58 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Of course, reducing *inflation* isn't the same as bringing prices down - it just means prices are going *up* more slowly. And sure, inflation is way down in many categories, but not in housing. In housing, inflation is *accelerating*:

     https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-03-08/inflation-housing-shortage-economy-cpi-fed-interest-rate

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:56:13 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The housing emergency makes everything else worse. Blue states are in danger of losing Congressional seats because people are leaving big cities: not because they want to, but because they literally can't afford to keep a roof over their heads. LGBTQ people fleeing fascist red state legislatures and their policies on trans and gay rights can't afford to move to the states where they will be allowed to simply live:

     https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/11/business/economy/lgbtq-moving-cost.html

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:56:34 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     So what are the roots of this problem, and what can we do about it? The housing emergency doesn't have a unitary cause, but among the most important factors is fuckery that led to the Great Financial Crisis and the fuckery that followed on from it, as Ryan Cooper writes:

     https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-housing-industry-never-recovered-great-recession/

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:56:43 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The Glass-Steagall Act was a 1933 banking regulation created to prevent Great Depression-style market crashes. It was killed in 1999 by Bill Clinton, who declared, "the Glass–Steagall law is no longer appropriate." Nine years later, the global economy melted down in a Great Depression-style market crash fueled by reckless speculation of the sort that Glass-Steagall had prohibited.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:56:56 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The crash of 2008 took down all kinds of industries, but none were so hard-hit as home-building (after all, mortgages were the raw material of the financial bubble that poopped in 2008). After 2008, construction of new housing fell by *90%* for the next two years. This protracted nuclear winter in the housing market killed many associated industries.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:57:09 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Skilled tradespeople retrained, or "left the job market" (a euphemism for becoming disabled, homeless, or destroyed). Waves of bankruptcies swept through the construction industry. The construction workforce didn't recover to pre-crisis levels for *16 years* (and of course, by then, there was a huge backlog of unbuilt homes, *and* a larger population seeking housing).

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:57:18 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Meanwhile, the collapse of every part of the housing supply chain - from raw materials to producers - set the stage for monopoly rollups, with the biggest firms gobbling up all these distressed smaller firms. Thanks to this massive consolidation, homebuilders were able to build fewer houses *and* extract higher profits by gouging on price. They doubled down on this monopoly price-gouging during the pandemic supply shocks, raising prices well above the pandemic shortage costs.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:57:31 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The housing market is monopolized in ways that will be familiar to anyone angry about consolidation in other markets - from eyeglasses to pharma to tech. One builder, HR Horton, is the largest player in 3 of the country's largest markets, and it has tripled its profits since 2005 while building half as many houses.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:57:40 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Modern homebuilders don't build: they use their scale to get land at knock-down rates, slow-walk the planning process, and then farm out the work to actual construction firms at rates that barely keep the lights on:

     https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-the-land-stupid-how-the-homebuilder

     Monopolists can increase profits by *constraining* supply. 60% of US markets are "highly concentrated" and the companies that dominate these markets are starving homebuilding in them to the tune of $106b/year:

     https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3303984

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:57:54 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     There are some obvious fixes to this, but they are either unlikely under Trump (antitrust action to break up builders based on their share in each market) or impossible to imagine (closing tax loopholes that benefit large building firms). Likewise, we could create a "homes guarantee" that would act as an "automatic stabilizer."

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:58:12 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     That would mean any time the economy slips into recession, this would trigger automatic funding to pay firms to build public housing, thus stimulating the economy *and* alleviating the housing supply crisis:

     https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialHousing.pdf

     The Homes Guarantee is further explained in a separate article in the package by Sulma Arias from People's Action, who describes how grassroots activists fighting redlining planted the seeds of a legal guarantee of a home:

     https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-why-we-need-homes-guarantee/

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:58:22 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Arias describes the path to a right to a home as running through the mass provision of public housing - and what makes *that* so exciting is that public housing can be funded, administered and built by local or state governments, meaning this is a thing that can happen even in the face of a hostile or indifferent federal regime.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:58:31 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     In Paul E Williams's story on FIMBY (finance in my back yard), the executive director of Center for Public Enterprise offers an inspirational story of how local governments can provide thousands of homes:

     https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-fimby-finance-in-my-backyard/

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:58:38 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Williams recounts the events of 2021 in Montgomery County, Maryland, where a county agency stepped in to loan money to a property developer who had land, zoning approval and work crews to build a major new housing block, but couldn't find finance. Montgomery County's Housing Opportunities Commission made a short-term loan at market rates to the developer.

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   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:58:51 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     By 2023, the building was up and the loan had been repaid. All 268 units are occupied and a third are rented at rates tailored to low-income tenants. The HOC is the permanent owner of those homes. It worked so well that Montgomery's HOC is on track to build *3,000* more public homes this way:

     https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/business/affordable-housing-montgomery-county.html

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:59:09 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Other - in red states! - have followed suit, with lookalike funds and projects in Atlanta and Chattanooga, with "dozens" more plans underway at state and local levels. The Massachusetts Momentum Fund is set to fund *40,000* homes.

     https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/business/affordable-housing-montgomery-county.html

     Center for Public Enterprise has a whole report on these "Government Sponsored Enterprises" and the role they can play in creating a supply of homes priced at a rate that working people can afford:

     https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-fimby-finance-in-my-backyard/

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:59:20 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Of course, for a GSE to loan money to build a home, that home has to be *possible*. YIMBYs are right to point to restrictive zoning as a major impediment to building new homes, and Robert Cruickshank from California YIMBY has a piece breaking down the strategy for fixing zoning:

     https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-make-it-legal-to-build/

     Cruickshank lays out NIMBY success stories in cities like Austin and Minneapolis adopting YIMBY-style zoning rules and seeing significant improvements in rental prices.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:59:33 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     These success stories are representative of a broader recognition - at least among Democratic politicians - that restrictive zoning is a major contributor to the housing emergency.

     Repeating these successes in the rest of the country will take a long time, and in the meantime, American tenants are sitting ducks for predatory landlords,

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:59:47 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     With criminal enterprises like Realpage enabling collusive price-fixing for housing and monopoly developers deliberately restricting supplies to keep prices up (a recent Blackrock investor communique gloated over the undersupply of housing as a source of profits for its massive portfolio of rental properties), tenants pay more and more of their paychecks for worse and worse accommodations.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 10:59:54 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     They can't wait for the housing emergency to be solved through zoning changes and public housing. They need relief *now*.

     That's where tenants' unions come in, as Ruthy Gourevitch and Tara Raghuveer of the Tenant Union Federation writes in their piece on the tenants across the country who are coordinating rent strikes to protest obscene rent-hikes and dangerous living conditions:

     https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-look-for-the-tenant-union/

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 11:00:20 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     They describe a country where tenants work multiple jobs, send the majority of their take-home pay to their landlords - a quarter of tenants pay *70%* of their wages in rent - and live in vermin-filled homes without heat or ventilation:

     https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/terms-of-investment/

     Public money from Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac flood into the speculative market for multifamily homes, a largely unregulated, subsidized speculative bonanza that lets the wealthy make bets and the poor pay their losses.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 11:00:54 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     In response, tenants unions are popping up all across the country, especially in red state cities like Bozeman, MT and Louisville, KY. They organize for "just cause" evictions that ban landlords from taking their homes away. They seek fair housing voucher distribution practices. They seek to close eviction loopholes like the LA wheeze that lets landlords kick you out following "renovations."

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 11:00:57 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The American system is in crisis. A country that cannot house its people is a failure. As Rachael Dziaba writes in the final piece for the package, the situation is so bad that water has started to flow uphill: the cities with the most inward migration have the *least* job growth:

     https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-10-18-housing-blues/

     It's not just housing, of course. Americans pay more for health care than anyone else in the rich world and get worse outcomes than anyone else in the rich world.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 11:01:04 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The National Tenant Policy Agenda demands "national rent caps, anti-eviction protections, habitability standards, and antitrust action," measures that would immediately and profoundly improve the lives of millions of American workers:

     https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JF1-fTalW1tOBO0FhYDcVvEd1kQ2HIzkYFNRo6zmSsg/edit

     They caution that it's not enough to merely increase housing supply. Without a strong countervailing force from organized tenants, new housing can be just another source of extraction and speculation for the rich.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 11:01:04 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Their monopoly grocers have spiked their food prices. The incoming administration has declared war on public education and seeks to relegate poor children to unsupervised schools where "education" can consist of filling in forms on a Chromebook and learning that the Earth is only 5,000 years old.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 11:01:08 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     They say that the Federal Housing Finance Agency - regulator for Fannie and Freddie - could play an active role in ensuring that new housing addresses the needs of people, not corporations.

     In the meantime, a tenants' union in KC successfully used a rent strike - where every tenant in a building refuses to pay rent - to get millions in overdue repairs. More strikes are planned across the country.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 11:01:10 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     A system that can't shelter, feed, educate or care for its people is a failure. People in failed states will vote for *anyone* who promises to tear the system down. The decision to turn life's necessities over to unregulated, uncaring markets has produced a populace who are so desperate for change, they'll even vote for their own destruction.

     eof/

   • Embed this notice
     Allan Chow (grumpasaurus@infosec.exchange)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 11:33:49 JST Allan Chow

     in reply to

     @pluralistic tbh I thought the point to Tesla was actually to be a land grab first through charging stations, then solar farms, and battery. All to get the land subsidized by local and federal govt in the name of saving the earth. I thought wrong I guess.

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     Kai (professor444@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 21:56:45 JST Kai

     in reply to

     @pluralistic reading this as an LA resident, where gentrification is only adding to the housing crisis… and we are still battling forms of neo-segregation due to redlining….. and the Olympics are coming here… siiiigh

   • Embed this notice
     Michael T. Bacon, Ph.D. (michaeltbacon@social.coop)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 23:09:57 JST Michael T. Bacon, Ph.D.

     in reply to

     @pluralistic I was pretty dumbfounded that housing got so little air time. I think the DC-based political press was really clueless about it, TBH.

     Harris's $25k booster for new homebuyers was a good idea that would have helped a lot, but it disappeared under the waves so quickly and they didn't resurrect it, in part because they didn't seem to know how to talk about it.