We all know that The Rent is Too Damn High. The affordable housing crisis is largely concerned with renters. In fact, though, homeowners are being screwed by the very same dynamics.
A lot of American cities have fucked up in a very important way: they haven’t been building enough housing. And just turning the shed in the back yard into a rental ain’t gonna cut it.
Many areas of America—the areas where lots of people want to live—also have crushing housing shortages. One unorthodox, wild idea seems to be becoming more attractive... build more housing, faster.
If we ever want to address poverty and inequality in America, we need to start with housing—most people’s greatest expense. A new report quantifies just how devastating our affordable housing shortage has become.
How bad is the housing crisis in California? So bad that cities are actively trying to stop the creation of new jobs, because they don’t have anywhere to house the people.
Nowhere is America’s affordable housing crisis more acute than in the California Bay Area. The problem: piss poor planning. Incredibly, an actual solution may be at hand.
In New York City, the average income and the average rent seem to have both just flown in from very different planets. They have no idea how to communicate with one another.
Kids who grow up poor have a better chance of one day not being poor if they grow up neighborhoods where everyone isn’t poor. But in some cities, affordable housing crises are making that impossible. It’s a quandary.
In San Francisco and Silicon Valley, housing is expensive and in short supply. All throughout the Bay Area, cities are discussing where the hell all their schoolteachers are supposed to live.
Hamilton Nolan · 03/21/16 04:10PM
A new report on the US housing market argues that one factor driving housing shortages is a growing gap in price between mid-tier and luxury housing (driven in part by rising incomes of the rich), which prevents homeowners from “trading up.” Dang it sounds like we need to build more housing.
Another week is here, and with it, another story about the affluent, techie-infested caricature that San Francisco has become. Hey, assholes: step one to surviving this trying time is to build more fucking housing.
Hamilton Nolan · 02/26/16 04:20PM
“A majority of New Yorkers who earn more than $100,000 a year feel they’re likely to be priced out of their neighborhood, according to a new poll.”
Creating enough affordable housing is one of the hardest political and economic challenges in the world. (If you think you know an easy answer, you’re wrong!) Here is a new piece of data that could “add to our understanding,” and make everyone mad.
Zoning laws, governing how we use our land, are often thought of as mundane drudgery, or as opportunities for civic-minded people to help “Keep Our Neighborhood Beautiful.” In fact, they can also be a powerful driver of inequality.
More than 181,000 people applied for 14 affordable apartments in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Time to start tweaking the master plan.
Hamilton Nolan · 09/21/15 04:25PM
A new report says America’s affordable housing crisis will soon grow worse, with an 11% rise in households spending more than half their income on rent over the next decade. So: any bright ideas?
Across America, rents are higher than ever, and they show no sign of slowing their climb. With housing shortages everywhere, owning a home seems like an impossible dream. Or is it?
The past decade has seen New York City go from a city with an economically mixed landscape to a city in which the rich have burst forth into every last neighborhood. Except three.
In many cities around the world—New York, San Francisco, London—most people find the rent to be unaffordable. Buying is out of the question. Perhaps that is because your city’s housing stock is now just another fungible financial instrument, like pork bellies.