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dedoubt t1_j5a7kqc wrote

Reply to comment by Shake-Spear4666 in MaineHousing ready to spend $21 million to provide overnight shelters this winter by Shake-Spear4666

>not building enough homes and apartments only made the homeless crisis worse.

I'm sure that's part of it but from the perspective of someone who has had unstable housing for years, lived with friends/relatives/in my car/dilapidated trailers & cabins just to have shelter, the real issue is that rent prices are fucking out of control. I simply could not afford to pay rent in most places, and definitely couldn't afford to pay rent plus save money for first/last/deposit to move elsewhere. Edit- meant to say that I technically have stable housing now because I got a small inheritance after my sister died, so I was able to buy some off grid land with a decrepit trailer on it, but it's going to take a lot of work to make it livable in winters, so I'm still shuttling around to various places. (Planning to build a cabin, but that'll take time.)

One place I rented in 2018 increased rent from $600 to $900 on the shitty apartments in the building in one year, increasing every time a tenant moved out. Last I checked, those apartments were $1200+. The building didn't magically become less shitty over the course of a few years, they badly paint the place occasionally, but everything is old, paint peeling and barely functional.

Having new places built wouldn't have helped me, because new buildings generally charge even more for rent.

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dirtroad207 t1_j5aa8up wrote

Building new housing doesn’t help now. It helps 15 years from now. If there was adequate construction 15 years ago rent wouldn’t be as crazy as it is today.

If we don’t build more now then the housing situation is going to go full San Francisco or Boston in ten years.

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dedoubt t1_j5ak2rp wrote

>Building new housing doesn’t help now. It helps 15 years from now. If there was adequate construction 15 years ago rent wouldn’t be as crazy as it is today.

I totally get that, but in addition to building more housing, stopping the rent prices hikes would help immediately. There is no reason that the apartment I used to rent 5 years ago for $600 should be $1200+ now, except that property management places can get more profit.

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redwall_hp t1_j5b4l4v wrote

And, like anything, rent prices are a function of the demand and the supply. Housing is artificially scarce and often employs protectionist policies to inflate the price so it can be used as an investment vehicle for rentiers.

That's why you have cities like San Francisco with moratoriums on apartment construction or questionable zoning laws that promote suburbanization: the goal is to drive up prices and prevent competition from pushing them down.

The demand for housing is inelastic, so the supply is the main driver of the cost, since the demand side can't drive it down by not buying.

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dirtroad207 t1_j5bmrx3 wrote

Yes. I prefer a government solution that creates nice public housing. But there are two important factors when doing government housing:

  1. No means testing. You need mixed income households so that it doesn’t create permanently impoverished neighborhoods. You also need buy in from the the middle class so that people want to keep the programs running.

  2. It can’t be self funded. In the past housing programs in the US were set up to be self funded and had very little margin for vacancy. Basically as soon as they weren’t at max capacity they had no budget for essentials like trash removal and basic maintenance. This means that sometimes the government eats a loss. That loss is always going to be cheaper than the long term cost of caring for unhoused people.

Creating this kind of housing will flood the market with housing thereby driving down demand. It will also function as a price anchor.

This is something that requires federal funding. It won’t ever happen in the US.

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IamSauerKraut t1_j5afceq wrote

If you build it, they will move north from Boston and NYC.

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respaaaaaj t1_j5acnhc wrote

The best way to bring down rent prices is to build more housing

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dedoubt t1_j5ajr7w wrote

>The best way to bring down rent prices is to build more housing

That will help in the future. In the present what would help is somebody stopping the ever increasing rental prices, right now.

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GaryHart2024 t1_j5b7lge wrote

More units stalls increases. There's pretty decent research on this.

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respaaaaaj t1_j5b6gxm wrote

The issue with that is that short term measures to bring down on existing housing costs (rent control, limiting short term rentals second homes etc) discourages construction and frequently leads to landlords going condo potential driving rent up or at least availability down while also preventing the long term cost reduction that more construction brings.

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SabbathBoiseSabbath t1_j5b72tm wrote

So while places build new housing for prices to maybe fall 10 or 20 years from now, eff the people that need relief right now?

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respaaaaaj t1_j5b81la wrote

Yes government policy needs to balance short and long term interests, but the biggest issue is that attempts at short term reductions in costs of housing frequently backfire and either don't help short term and hurt long term or just straight up hurt both. This shit should have been addressed 5 to 10 years ago, but the best that can realistically be done is start on it now. (And it doesn't take 10 to 20 years for newly built housing to impact housing, nor does it take 10 to 20 years to build new housing).

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SabbathBoiseSabbath t1_j5b9yy4 wrote

Government (at any level) really doesn't do long term planning at all. In fact, I can't think of a single policy or program that is long term focused, other than maybe public lands conservation.

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respaaaaaj t1_j5bawbi wrote

I guess that would depend on what you consider long term, because things like zoning, environmental protections (of any kind), fishery and wildlife management, infrastructure, tax credits aimed at promoting particular kinds of buildings products vehicles home upgrades (heat pumps extra insulation windows that retain more heat) etc are all what I'd call long term just off the top of my head.

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SabbathBoiseSabbath t1_j5bdsyh wrote

Yeah, this is true. My previous comment was certainly too lazy and lacked nuance.

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respaaaaaj t1_j5be8q0 wrote

You are right that outside of emergency relief there aren't many short term actions taken by governments in regards to housing, because all of the short term options that governments have tried have risks of backfiring both short and long term.

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