> They can be purchased by the rich to be used as unlicensed hotels aka airbnb. They can be ought up as "investments" and not effectively rented out effectively enough as long as you don't build so much you literally flood the market.
There's a natural floor to this though. For example, if Boston built 3 housing units for every human being on the planet, there would hardly be any problem even if every person wanted to live in Boston and own multiple units. This is obviously absurd, but hints at the greater point. There's a point along the supply/demand curve where prices will end up falling, no matter how much external demand or AirBnb rentals come into the area.
The argument I think you're making is that there's no way to build enough housing units in a reasonable amount of time to meaningfully affect non-upper-end housing. There's not much controversy about that in practice (though weirdly enough there is a lot online.) California (and many Californian cities sweeten these deals) specifically offers developers many benefits for varying percentages of affordable housing mixes in their units. Boston also seems to have income-restricted housing as well. Most pro-housing policymakers agree that housing isn't just a build-build-build game but that incentives need to be offered to ensure affordable units are built along with upper end luxury housing.
We really just need to build in the Boston area. I’m politically pretty close to full on communist but all the policies I’ve seen around creating affordable housing are failures from my analysis.
Rent control changes who gets a home from a decision of whose wealthiest to whose luckiest which isn’t any morally or functionally better. Subsidizing or requiring developers to have “affordable” units in developments either offloads the cost to the other purchasers which will increase the average unit price in the area, which will cause people who used to be able to afford a home to slide down into too poor to afford one. All that’s doing is just moving around who gets to lose when it comes to this scarce resource.
The only answer to a scarce resource with high demand is to produce more of it. Unfortunately Boston, like most US cities, is full of nimbyism. It’s exacerbated by the fact that existing homeowners tend to have more political power just by virtue of the fact that they are more tied to the location and have a vested interest in voting in the area, vs renters who are more likely to up and move instead of invest time in local politics.
I also harp on the luxury housing building quite a bit. Emotionally it hurts to see only luxury housing being built when there is a housing crunch hurting the poor or middle class. The pragmatic bit however is that developers are always going to be incentivized to build luxury housing since it nets them the most profit. These building eventually turn into non luxury housing as the building age and the owners decide to not repair the unit to spec, or standards change and what is considered high end today isn’t in 20 years. We should stop fighting the natural incentives here with developers and lean into them to just build build build, imo.
The policy decisions that I think require actual thought are more along the lines of zoning and standards. Policies that require parking spots for every unit even when they are next to subway stations for instance hurt density a lot. Zoning being in the hands of towns who can act in a parasitic manner is also something that needs to be addressed, with my preference being something more along the lines of Japan’s zoning policies
Yup its all about making it easier to build, easier to build more density.. and build anything else you need to support that - schools, transit, parks, etc.
Everything becomes luxury housing when theres a shortage and it gets bid up by dollars. And the existing government housing has not covered itself in glory such that we should look to that as a solution (paging NYCHA).
This stuck-in-amber Euro-ficiation of US HCOL urban coastal areas is not going to work in the longterm, especially as we continue to have growing population unlike many of the quaint European cities people like to visit.
There's a natural floor to this though. For example, if Boston built 3 housing units for every human being on the planet, there would hardly be any problem even if every person wanted to live in Boston and own multiple units. This is obviously absurd, but hints at the greater point. There's a point along the supply/demand curve where prices will end up falling, no matter how much external demand or AirBnb rentals come into the area.
The argument I think you're making is that there's no way to build enough housing units in a reasonable amount of time to meaningfully affect non-upper-end housing. There's not much controversy about that in practice (though weirdly enough there is a lot online.) California (and many Californian cities sweeten these deals) specifically offers developers many benefits for varying percentages of affordable housing mixes in their units. Boston also seems to have income-restricted housing as well. Most pro-housing policymakers agree that housing isn't just a build-build-build game but that incentives need to be offered to ensure affordable units are built along with upper end luxury housing.