Some More News - SMN: Why Is Housing So Expensive?

Episode Date: January 25, 2023

Hi. In today's episode, we look at the very simple but also impossibly complex causes of the U.S. housing crisis, and what we might be able to do about it. Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1etS0yIDMGhfkAxK-A6mmpJfO1BKQc0v8sgAT6mQ3u6Y/edit?usp=sharing Please fill out our SURVEY: https://kastmedia.com/survey/ Support us on our PATREON: http://patreon.com/somemorenews Check out our MERCH STORE: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/somemorenews?ref_id=9949 SUBSCRIBE to SOME MORE NEWS: https://tinyurl.com/ybfx89rh   Subscribe to the Even More News and SMN audio podcasts here: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA?si=5keGjCe5SxejFN1XkQlZ3w&dl_branch=1 Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/even-more-news  Follow us on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomeMoreNews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SomeMoreNews/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomeMoreNews/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@somemorenews Make CBD a part of reaching your full potential with NextEvo Naturals. Go to https://NextEvo.com/podcast and use promo code MORENEWS to get 20% off your first order of $40 or more.Support the show!: http://patreon.com.com/somemorenewsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Good golly, Miss Molly, it's news. Some more of it to be exact and to be even more exact, some more news about housing and why it's like hard and rough out there or rather in here in my home, which if you've been paying attention is now owned by Katie to whom I owe rent, which she is garnishing from my wages and taunting me

by sending me actual garnish in the mail, like parsley and stuff. She's like Carrot Top, but sinister. Anyway, here is some news. If you live here in the United States of Molly, America, you may be having the same problem. It is becoming way too expensive just to have a place to live and eat and make love.

Rents are through the roof and about 36% of American households are rented. So that means 36% of households are through this aforementioned roof, which probably has a bunch of leaks in it that someone keeps saying they will get around to fixing. Things have gotten so bad that many renters

have resorted to costly bidding wars just for the privilege of living in Joe's apartment. Remember that film? That came out in 1996, the same year rent in New York's Upper East Side was averaging at about $1,300 for a studio. Hey, I wonder how much that would cost today. Meanwhile, people who have saved up money

and felt like they were in a position to buy a home are being shut out of the market by sky-high home prices and mortgage rates. Those who have managed to become first-time homebuyers are statistically older than they have ever been and make up only 26% of home buyers overall, the lowest percentage on record. And even those first time home buyers

are finding new problems once they move in, in the form of electrical discharges, flaming ovens, bathtub floor crashes, and Tom Hanks laughing like a seal syndrome. Oh, dang. Remember that film from 1986 where Tom Hanks and Shelley Long buy a so-called million dollar mansion for $200,000? Fun fact, the actual $1 million house

they filmed that movie in went on sale for $5.9 million back in 2018. The point is, home renting and home buying are both Steven Spielberg Presents the Money Pit situations. Even as late 2022 saw prices start to finally cool off, this was still a cooling off from record highs. So it's kind of like being on the cool side of Venus, a chilly heat.

So we're going to take a look at the housing market today. Why costs are so high and what potential solutions there might be to change that. It's actually a very simple, complex web of interconnected economic forces, supply chains, profit incentives, and government regulations. Sounds like a blast. Why is housing so expensive?

I probably don't need to prove that housing is bad now, but here are some numbers. Between 2010 and 2019, the average rent in the US increased by 36%, while the median income only rose by 27%. This effect was more pronounced in major cities. An average of 19 U.S. cities had a rent increase of more than 58% during the 2010s, while median income increased only 39%. That disparity between income growth and rent means that a higher share of renters are cost burdened, defined as when someone has to commit more than 30%

of their income to housing costs. By the end of 2020, 46% of renters were cost burdened, which meant they had less money to spend on other essentials like food, healthcare, transportation, and Blu-ray editions of Steven Spielberg presents the money pit. Again, these numbers are even worse in big cities. In Los Angeles, an estimated 73% of renting households are cost burdened, and 48% spend more than half of their total income on

rent and utilities. And of course, black and brown communities tend to be hit harder by housing costs than other races. Race, of course, being a fake thing we made up. We should really just have a standing asterisk across this entire episode. Whatever I'm talking about, it's safe to say that the situation is probably even worse for black and brown people due to racism, a system of oppression based on a fake thing

that we made up. You will notice that those numbers are from before the start of the pandemic, which of course exacerbated this problem. Even with all that wonderful stimulus that has so many of us living high on the hog, nearly half of American workers in 2021 didn't earn enough money to rent the median one-bedroom apartment. Half.

And 14% of renters fell behind on rent payments during the pandemic, double the pre-pandemic rate, double. This is likely a contributing factor to why, in the first year of COVID, the number of people moving increased. Many of these people were out of work and could no longer afford rent and thus moved in with their parents or other family or looked for something cheaper.

Others moved out of dense cities and into the suburbs or to less populated states at higher rates than usual, either to look for something more affordable or potentially because they were able to work from home. Maybe some of them were offered money in exchange for spending a night in a haunted house. We don't know for sure, but it's exciting to think about. Regardless of the reason, this temporary increase

in movement pushed rents and home prices even higher. But at least, you might say, at least people were protected from eviction during the pandemic because of the federal eviction moratorium. You might say that because you forgot that this country values the rights of landlords more than the rights of people who'd rather not sleep in the rain. It happens. I forget stuff myself sometimes. That's why I'm covered in reminder tattoos, brush teeth, eat teeth, et cetera. Just as a refresher though,

the Supreme Court struck down the CDC's moratorium on evictions in 2021. And landlords were still finding ways to evict people anyway, often by citing a non-COVID related reason for doing so. And remember the asterisk, black and brown families were the most likely Americans to be evicted. So yeah, it's bad out there. Unless you're literally stuck in the floor, it's incredibly difficult to get real housing stability.

Landlords will just evict the floor too. So hey, G's and crackers now, what the fuck happened? Why were your parents or grandparents able to buy a four bedroom house for a goat and a smile while you're out here shelling out $2,600 a month for the Harry Potter room under the stairs, owl shit and all. A major reason is one we've already mentioned,

that home prices and rents have both grown at higher rates than income over the past 60 years, a trend which got worse in the first decade of this century. But another reason is that the US government used to actually help some prospective home buyers. Some, it's a big word there. Let's start with the New Deal. Not the Green New Deal when socialists try some prospective home buyers. Some is a big word there. Let's start with the New Deal. Not the green New Deal when socialists try

to make us gay Mary soy burgers, but the one before that. During the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt and Congress passed the National Housing Act of 1934, which created the Federal Housing Administration and provided insurance for the banking and mortgage industry. This was designed to slow down housing foreclosures

and encourage new construction. In 1937, the government created the United States Housing Authority, which provided funds to bolster construction in low-income neighborhoods, resulting in hundreds of thousands of new units in which tenants were only expected to pay half the rent. Unfortunately, there was some uncomfortable language

in there which contributed to some of the problems we still have today. And by uncomfortable language, I of course mean racism. Jeez, it's always racism with this country. Heck, it's like Spectre in those Bond films. And that's where the sum comes into play, you see. It's from this era that we get the process of redlining, whereby the homeowners loan corporation gave color-coded grades to

neighborhoods based on their risk for mortgage lenders. The public reasoning for this was to give the banks and other lenders an incentive to get on board, to tell them that expansion of homeownership wouldn't set them up for risky bets. Of course, the Federal Housing Administration just assumed, racially, that places where black people lived or lived near would have lower property values and be risky bets. And those were exactly the neighborhoods which got the yellow, definitely declining,

and red, hazardous labels. This trend continued after World War II when the GI Bill pumped $95 billion into programs for returning veterans, but whose benefits like housing and business loans were routinely denied to black service members. The GI Bill, which President Bill Clinton called the best deal ever made by Uncle Sam,

was actually deliberately designed to accommodate Jim Crow, according to political scientist Ira Katznelson. Also, sometimes when black and brown people lived in desirable areas, the local governments there would simply kick them out. Like literally just make them leave. This was the case with a piece of land called Section 14 in Palm Springs, California.

From 1954 to 1966, when Palm Springs was emerging as a popular vacation destination, the city started mass evictions of black families. People would often come home at night to find their homes were gone, as in bulldozed or burnt to the ground. Can't stress it enough, they just fucking booted them out. So again, some, the word some is very important

when talking about this era of housing. But for much of white America, New Deal programs were game changers, creating a level of housing affordability that allowed the suburbs to expand and white home ownership to surge. In 1947, President Truman signed legislation capping rents at $80 a month

and new home prices at $10,000, which helped everyone, but it was rescinded a few months later. If only the strict cap had stayed in place and those other federal benefits were applied to everyone and not just white people, this video might be a lot shorter or heck, might even be about something else. Like the Dilbert guy, that'd be fun, right?

Your tone implies you already know it wouldn't. See, we're sorting through two issues here. One is a state sponsored system of segregation that institutionalized the idea that proximity to people of color decreases property values. And the other is a very real solution to housing that sadly was only applied to white people. But obviously those two ideas are intertwined.

It's very important to recognize how racist policies result in negative outcomes for the majority of people, regardless of race. Not that white people should be anti-racist only if they are personally affected for the love of God. There's a whole other video we could do about racist housing policies of old and the very real ripple effect they cause today,

long after the practices were banned because everything I've just said, the red lining, the temporary surge of home construction, the way we built and maintain our cities sets the stage for the historic housing affordability crisis happening right now. And also it goes without saying that the good, not racist parts of the new deal

are things we probably needed to continue doing. Stuff like pumping billions into veteran support and funding low income neighborhoods. This is exactly why your grandparents could afford a house. But again, we should more specifically say your white grandparents, elder honkies, stale crackers, et cetera. But instead of making these advances less racist,

we just got rid of them. And that's the problem. We excluded certain people from great benefits and then just got rid of the benefits for everyone instead of making them more inclusive. Because of course we did. It's not surprising, but it's still disappointing. Like every time Kevin Sorbo is trending.

Anyway, we're going to explore the simple, right? Impossibly complex tangle of varying factors that are currently making renting and buying homes so expensive right now. Right now, meaning after these ads, which are happening right now. Right now, meaning after these ads, which are happening right now. Did you know that a lot of people leave their laundry hanging outside at night? They probably just forgot it's there, but if you go house to house, that's a lot of free clothes.

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So, given our troubled history of housing development, what is driving housing costs to unprecedented levels at this moment? One of the primary reasons, though not the only reason, is the same reason that strawberries get more expensive during a drought, supply and demand. The supply of housing has simply not kept up with the demand for it. But the demand for housing, unlike strawberries,

is directly correlated with the number of people alive. You don't need strawberries to live. I mean, if you call that living. But if you're alive, you absolutely need housing, shelter, et cetera. Supply hasn't kept up and demand is maybe artificially higher than it needs to be. We will get to that shortly.

The supply aspect goes back to the great recession of the late 2000s, which was caused largely by the collapse of the housing market. I mean, you could argue that the scary movie franchise switching hands from the Wayans to David Zucker had something to do with it as well, but there's not as much evidence of that. Anyway, not to re-litigate this subprime mortgage crisis, or litigate it, I guess, for the first time since nobody ever went to jail for it. But decades of deregulation and a market that encouraged the bundling and selling of subprime loans led to a housing crisis and recession.

Basically, the price of houses inflated, like an inflating sphere of some kind because of loose standards for things like credit checks and mortgage rates until that inflated sphere burst, like some kind of, like a bursting sphere that had been inflated. Also, Brad Pitt's there, but he has weird hair. Putting aside the dubious ethical actions

that allowed Wall Street executives to put our economy in that position, the market collapse and plummeting prices spooked developers spooky. This meant that many builders went out of business and new home construction dropped off significantly and it still hasn't caught up. This is by the way, exactly what the Center for Economic

and Policy Research said would happen in their housing bubble fact sheet paper from July, 2005. So first of all, bubble is the word I was thinking of, but also I guess a point, you know, on the board for think tanks, I guess. Just this once, the fallen home construction understandably hampered supply right at a time when a large cohort of Americans

of the millennial persuasion were graduating from college, getting jobs, and might have, in another era, been in the market to buy houses or condos or love shacks or igloos, huts, or lean-tos or geodesic domes. The Great Recession kind of fucked up the whole plan for them for a few decades, saddling them with lower incomes, making them live with their parents,

and as a result, forcing them to watch just fucking hours and hours of blue bloods. That chart we just showed about home construction ends at July, 2020. And you can see a lot of volatility right there at the beginning of the pandemic, where construction plummeted as the COVID-19 outbreak started.

And then bounced back in the summer when everyone was like, well, I guess we'll just keep doing stuff even though people are dying. Had that chart continued, you'd see it continue to be volatile as supply chain issues kept even adamant builders from starting new projects.

The supply over the last 15 years essentially stagnated, but the number of people didn't. There are more than 26 million more people in the United States than there were in 2009, a mixture of both births outpacing deaths and immigration. And to be clear, overpopulation is not the problem, nor is the immigration the problem. We just need to give people places to live.

And no, they can't and shouldn't all live like Charlie Bucket's grandparents or the Beatles in Help. So while the supply side of this problem is difficult to address, it is pretty easy to identify. Relatively low supply exists while there's high demand, i.e. basic human need for shelter. And that demand side of things is where this all gets even more complicated

because it's not just that there are lots of people looking for places to live. Those aforementioned millennials may have closed the income gap with prior generations, but their parents overall still have way more wealth. And though it's not a competition, it's kind of a competition because downsizing seniors have more money

to play around with and are going to scoop up the starter homes and two bedroom apartments that are supposed to go to young people. You know, hence the word starter home. And while I'm sure a lot, if not most of you couldn't actually give a half slice of a ghost's fart about these poor people who are financially able

to consider buying a home, it should be stressed that in our current system, we should want people to buy homes if they're able to. If they can't buy a home, guess what they'll be doing instead? They will be filling up the rental market, using their wealth to afford more than most renters can and pushing up the cost of rent,

which is what's happening right now. So all of this stuff has kind of a, what do you call it? Like an effect where it trickles down, but not in the good way where good things trickle down, in the bad way where the thing trickling down is like, it's pee and spittle and other unsolicited fluids. Everyone is a notch lower than where they should be,

making the people at the very bottom homeless. Demand is also being artificially pushed even higher by a series of economic forces that are largely speculative. Again, demand in the economic sense is very high for housing because shelter is not like an iPad. In the hierarchy of needs, it slots in right between food and sleep.

So we should want to avoid a situation where housing is being intentionally withheld for profit. Right? Now, none of these things I'm about to talk about are by themselves the cause of high housing costs, but they add up. The first is the phenomenon of landlords intentionally keeping housing off the market. Vacancy rates well into the double digits housing costs, but they add up. The first is the phenomenon of landlords intentionally

keeping housing off the market. Vacancy rates well into the double digits in cities all across the Bay Area, but not all landlords are willing to drop their rent prices to meet the demand. It stings hard already and it's gonna sting harder the longer it goes. Jeff Zell says turnover at his properties in Mountain View is constant. But if at all possible, Jeff and Jim won't drop the monthly rent. The reasoning the landlords give here is that movement during the pandemic turned housing briefly into a renter's market and that local rent control laws would force them to keep units below prior monthly rents potentially for years. And I'm trying to have a response to that other than, okay, oh wait, so what works too?

There's no requirement that investments always have to provide a great return. And property ownership, if it's a home you're not going to personally be living in is just that, an investment. We saw lots of stories like this in 2020 and 2021, the mom and pop landlords decrying the eviction moratorium or other renter protections,

given that they didn't receive the same benefits. But of course, it's incredibly dubious to describe rent as a landlord's only source of income, as it is not really income in the traditional sense of the word as no labor was exchanged to get it. For landlords who turn hefty profits, it's more like a dividend,

something you get to keep after expenses, which for most landlords would be property taxes and maintenance. And of course that renter's market dissipated shortly thereafter and rents continued to break records. But to defend these poor, small, helpless mom and pop landlords for a moment, even this guy holding a sign

reading moratoriumism is discrimination against property owners, why wouldn't they act this way? Why wouldn't they be motivated to turn their investment into as much money as they possibly can? Goodwill toward their fellow human? Who are they, Santa Claus? I mean, this guy looks a little like him if Santa only gave people typewriters for Christmas,

but come on now. They've become property owners in a society that values their ownership of property more than it values people who earn a living through actually working. Hell, Steve Bannon even thinks they're the only ones who should be allowed to vote. And you've got to think a lot of people agree with him

and just aren't saying it. You know, like those slave owners who founded the country. The takeaway from this isn't that landlords are assholes. It's that we've created a society where being an asshole is highly incentivized, which in turn makes a lot of landlords assholes. Not all, I know some very nice landlords who don't care about the lingering weed smell

or the lingering knee smell, but a lot of them are assholes, even the ones being discriminated against. No justice, no bleeps. Fortunately for these, it says here assholes, it's really hard to get solid data on how many units nationwide are being kept intentionally empty.

A 2019 report from San Francisco's Budget and Legislative Analyst's Office estimated that 10% of all housing stock in the city was vacant. But some of these might be for good reasons, like renovations, or if the unit has been rented but the new tenant hasn't moved in yet, or if the property is part of some sort of ongoing litigation, or it's a 1408 situation where the room is just super mega haunted to the max.

And then there are a few other broad categories potentially involving more than half of all vacant units, which are classified in the report as sold, not occupied, or other vacant. These include landlords that may be holding out for a better rental market, plus Airbnb and other speculators, including private equity firms. It's really difficult to know exactly how much that kind of speculation

impacts the housing market overall. The number of vacant units in the US has decreased since 2012, but that's partially because the supply hasn't increased and more units are getting scooped up. And Wall Street owners don't exactly want any of us to know how many empty properties they own in major cities, as that would justifiably single them out

as earning record profits while the unhoused population increases. However, according to an analysis by Redfin, one out of every seven homes sold in a major city in 2021 was purchased by an investor or investment group, AKA people who have no intention of living in the unit they just bought. And wouldn't you know it,

black neighborhoods in the South are disproportionately affected. And wouldn't you know it, black neighborhoods in the South are disproportionately affected. Remember the asterisk. To defend small landlords a bit more, and gosh, I'm real sorry I have to keep doing that, they're less likely than corporate landlords and far less likely than landlords backed by private equity to evict tenants.

Now there has been backlash to the assertion that private equity investors like BlackRock buying all the homes are the cause of increased prices. And what those groups are basically saying is, well, it's not our fault that supply is so low. Don't blame us when you could simply be building way more homes than we can scoop up in our little money talons.

After all, the argument goes, investors go where the yield is, which kind of makes me think there shouldn't be a yield, the term referring to how much income an investment generates. So like, there are more than half a million unhoused people in the US, so it seems like we shouldn't have housing be this lucrative market until we perhaps don't have people dying the street. But also, even considering the argument investors like BlackRock are making, they're clearly part of the problem.

Like, of course they are. In certain zip codes in Atlanta in the early 2010s, for example, a Blackstone spinoff called Invitation Homes accounted for 90% of all home purchases. And yes, there are two different investment companies with black plus mineral names, like the evil CIA entity in a Bourne film, the Bourne Residential.

And they're not purchasing $140 million Bel Air mansions with sub-zero vodka rooms either. They're purchasing the very homes middle-income people would be buying to live in and build wealth. So sure, BlackRock and Blackstone and other Flintstones era corporations buying all the homes isn't the only problem nationwide, but when they suddenly hold 90%

of all the recently sold homes in your neighborhood, and when they are taking ownership of new homes that are built exclusively to be rented, it's gonna have an impact. And you might want to fill their Christmas stockings with black rocks or black stones or something else that might be unwanted in a stocking. Also, the corporatization and private equitization and techifying of landlords

has really helped them turn from regular, everyday societal parasites into fully engorged, Peter Green wearing the mask level monstrosities. You're probably wondering just what in the ungodly hell you just watched. Well, this company, RealPage, has a software called YieldStar that uses data from 13 million apartment units to recommend rents on the higher end of what the market will allow. Essentially, it tells landlords that some other landlord was able to charge $2,800 a month for a one-bedroom piece of shit in the same neighborhood where you own a one-bedroom piece of shit. You can raise the rent and available tenants won't have better options.

So the software says. Executives at RealPage have credited their software as a primary driver of increased rent in the United States and are helping landlords get around that pesky emotion known as empathy. According to one testimonial from a real estate company, "'The beauty of Yieldstar is that it pushes you "'to go places that you wouldn't have gone "'if you weren't using it. "'That place being, of course, straight to hell.'" RealPage also hosts an annual conference

where large property owners meet to, I don't know, share salmon recipes. Well, coordinate pricing strategies and then share salmon recipes. It's no different than how all the airlines got together about 15 years ago and decided that checked bags weren't going to be free anymore. And they're the ones who control the planes,

so there isn't a sweaty little thing you can do about it. The one difference being that the Department of Justice is investigating RealPage, since forming a cartel to artificially inflate rents is one of those trusts that the United States is in theory anti. Plus a number of class action lawsuits have been filed against RealPage.

So there's actual hope that landlords might have to go back to the good old fashioned methods of screwing over their tenants. Analog screwing, like our grandparents did with just some twine and an apple core. The other good news is that the iBuying industry is beginning to scale back. iBuying being a way to use algorithms to flip homes, often by large companies.

See, we haven't mentioned yet that some of those prominent home marketplaces like Zillow and Redfin spent the pandemic paying cash for homes and then selling them for a profit. Just a quick money-making scheme from the websites where you fantasize about moving into a charming three-bedroom, two-bath in Vermont, getting out of the rat race, you know? Maybe taking up hiking or running model trains or starting a bakery called Cody's Dodies. Anyway, those particular vultures got royally fucked by their house flipping scheme, with Zillow losing almost $900 million

on the venture in 2021 and shutting down its iBuying program in 2022. Redfin also closed its iBuying operation and house flipping company Open Door might not last much longer. Of course, it's worth noting that the reason these companies are getting out of the home flipping game is not because it can't be profitable,

but because supply chain and labor issues mean they can't renovate and flip them fast enough. They would love to keep buying all the houses and then selling them back to people at an elevated price. But wouldn't you know it, it's that pesky labor market again, refusing to let corporations magically duplicate money. Workers are so selfish like that. We need more robots. So to review, we've looked at what the problem is, ever increasing housing costs, and analyzed why it's happening,

including a hindered stockpile of housing and the way landlords and corporate interests have conspired to move housing costs higher. And we're going to do something a little different now. We're going to dedicate the rest of this episode to looking at the myriad solutions presented for how we can address the problem and why they're so hard to put into practice.

Right after, I address another supply issue, the previously low supply of ads. Yes, the demand for ads is ever ascending and we're gonna crank up that ad supply. No need to thank us, your sweet, sweet attention to these ads will suffice. Bing. Oh my.

Have you ever gone to the store and thought, wow, I, there's too many options. I need fewer options. And then you go home and you're like, well, I should have bought stuff. That's why I went to the store. So instead you just, you go on YouTube and sort of watch some stuff to take your mind off

how you should have bought the food that you needed, the store. And then, then you watch our videos. Hi, there's no ad here actually. This isn't an ad for anything. So this week, we're just gonna say, if you go to patreon.com slash some more news, you can support us because there's no ad this week.

There's stuff on there, early releases. We're gonna do some gaming stuff, maybe. I don't know. Look, just fucking stop looking at me, okay? Okay, you can look again. Back to the show. We're back and we're beautiful. And I'm just about to solve the housing and renters crisis

with my big bearded brain. But I want to highlight that this entire problem is only really a problem if you're a renter or don't have housing. The US home ownership rate is about 65%. And for people who are part of that group, the rising cost of housing is financially good. It means their home is more valuable now

than when they bought it. And while there are definite reasons for them to want home prices to decline, after all, homelessness hurts tourism and the sensibilities of our valued private jet owners. And it's also bad for the homeless people. Those incentives still tend to take a back seat to seeing the value of one's home increase.

It's a very difficult motivation to get through. A motivation which is often enhanced by outright racism, given that white people are disproportionately represented among the ownership class. I mean, just look at how the media talks about declining home prices. When Redfin doesn't meet its Q3 earnings expectations, that's the housing market getting worse.

Here's a woe is them article about how it sucks that home prices are declining for the people who bought a house while prices were at the peak. It's not enough that they got the condo they wanted. They need to see their investment rise in value every three months, like it's a Star Wars figurine. And of course they do.

We've designed everything around financial worth and the idea that as things age, they get more valuable. That's of course, thanks to the dangerous deep state cabal that is Antiques Roadshow. Tell me my Elan Sleazebagano figure is worthless. I will show you worthless. You are worthless. My Sleazebagano is priceless.

My favorite character from movies. Now, the perfect solution to the housing crisis would address all of these things. The financial incentives many Americans have to keep housing scarce, the cruelty of making a profitable industry out of something that everyone needs to survive, and the racism that made our system so unequal

in the first place. Surely there are some kinds of solutions we can look at there. Like, I don't know, can we sell dirt blocks to poor people? My reply guy, Elon Musk, seems to think so. Bless his heart for doing that thing that he never actually ended up doing.

Probably because actual architects don't think it could work. I mean, you can't even really put wiring in dirt blocks. Seems like that Elon Musk guy isn't very serious. I don't know, haven't really looked into him that much. Another idea floated by weird online randos is to, I guess, move homeless people out into the desert, like internment camps. Yeah, yeah, that wouldn't help.

Can you imagine if we did that? Were you ever within the city limits? Yeah. And why did you move out here? Pretty much told by law enforcement that the only way not to be messed with are camps ransacked or bulldozed or even burnt down, it would be to move north of G,

which G is that street right there. Oh, ha, well that's bleak and unsurprising. I guess cops really are just kicking people into the Mojave Desert, a place super notable for habitability instead of doing anything to help them. And these are really the solutions we came up with. Oh, right, there's also a startup in the San Francisco Bay Area

that offers $800 a month fart pods that come with a built-in fan, electrical lighting, a fold-down desk and charger for electrical gadgets. But don't worry about feeling vulnerable. They all come with curtains that close for privacy. Jesus fucking Christ. Capitalism, you are exhausting, sir or madam. It's almost like we should come up with solutions that aren't also designed to hurt the most vulnerable people or enrich some tech company through the misery of others.

Just a thought, write it down, send it to the president or whatever. Let's actually look at some actual solutions people are floating. Starting with number one, build more housing. Yes, great, let's do it. Are we doing it? Why aren't we?

Okay, I'm not seeing anything about us building more housing now that I said that we should do that. Okay, well, turns out that it's not that simple and there are a lot of conflicting forces preventing it from being simple. We're talking NIMBYs versus YIMBYs versus left NIMBYs versus QUIMBYs versus FIMBYs versus DWIMBYs

versus all the people who don't have backyards at all and so aren't invited into one of the clubs. The build more housing rallying cry gets very complicated when you start talking about what kind of housing you're building and where. To break it all down, we've got to start back at that supply and demand issue from earlier. Remember, housing construction has significantly slowed since the Great Recession, even as the population continues to increase. So in a vacuum, building more housing should address the supply side of the issue and provide more options for everyone while reducing costs. People of means

will move into market rate units, thus easing pressure on the low cost housing for low income people and reducing rents overall. A number of recent studies provide support for this argument, but also it really doesn't seem like people would just move accordingly like worker ants. Also, the studies seem to be missing a lot of nuance. For example, this Upjohn Institute study from 2019 found that new market rate housing in major cities generally lowers nearby rents by five to 7%. That's good, right?

But the fear from housing supply skeptics who have been pejoratively dubbed left NIMBYs is that opening up historically black and brown neighborhoods to wealthy developers without firm regulations will result in further gentrification, the destruction of historic neighborhoods, and ultimately higher housing costs over time.

Plus that study is only looking at new market rate housing and only in low income neighborhoods. Market rate housing is basically another word for the average amount an apartment or house goes for in that area. So while in theory, a rising tide that lifts all boats, why not just also build housing for lower income people? You know, since those are the people

who are really in danger of losing their housing and account for the nearly 1 million US evictions every year. These studies never seem to look at the effect of new housing in Birmingham, Michigan, Brentwood, California, or Palm Beach, Florida. So while creating more housing options is a good idea and we need to do it in general,

it seems that the push is always for market rate housing in low income neighborhoods and forcing at least some level of gentrification on those areas. Even if the worst fears of displacement tend to be overblown, an influx of wealthier residents will always make the overall neighborhood more expensive. Again, the owners of the homes in the neighborhoods

might want that change way more than the people living there who don't necessarily own their homes. At the same time, it's a little unreasonable to expect people to just not move to New York City or San Francisco or Los Angeles or Chicago if they have the money and want to. Maybe President AOC will make it illegal

for rich white people to move to Brooklyn, but I kind of doubt it. Big, exciting cities in blue states will continue to be attractive places to live, what with all the big, shiny buildings. So there need to be new housing options that don't put all the burden squarely on low income neighborhoods. But if you try to put affordable housing developments close to wealthy or middle class neighborhoods, that's when you butt heads with the real NIMBYs of this whole problem. You know, like the residents of Beverly Hills who didn't even want a subway system going through their neighborhood, citing safety concerns. Or even the small town of Dexter,

Michigan, where some residents spontaneously sprouted pearls to clutch when an affordable housing development was proposed near an elementary school. It's not a safe place to have people that can't control their behavior across the street from our schools. What a delightful lack of specificity there. People who can't control their behavior are in this case veterans and people with disabilities who have experienced homelessness. The concerned citizens in this story

distributed pamphlets with misleading information, suggesting that the housing development itself would distribute needles and devices to make smoking crack safer, as if that's a bad thing to do. The good news in this story is that the development eventually went through and welcomed its first residents last year.

But the years long fights that arise from situations like this all over the country make the process painstaking and slow. Even when a city's leaders fundamentally agree on zoning changes and placing an emphasis on more dense housing, it can still face challenges from unlikely sources. Take what's been happening in Minneapolis

over the last several years. In late 2018, the city council voted 12 to one in favor of the Minneapolis 2040 plan, which would allow duplexes and triplexes in every neighborhood across the city and parking minimums for developments and allow more dense mid-rise residential buildings along major traffic corridors. The city said it wanted to take this step to end historical housing segregation and also because of anticipated population increases over the coming decades.

However, a Hennepin County district judge blocked the plan last year, following a lawsuit from a group called Smart Growth Minneapolis and a pair of environmental groups, the Audubon Society and the Minnesota Citizens for the Protection of Migratory Birds. The lawsuit argued that the plan for increased density

did not take into account potential environmental impacts. That ruling was recently upheld, and the city says it will further appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court. And while I'm not arguing we should scrap environmental reviews and pave over swamps and build strip malls from baby bird bones, this resistance doesn't seem entirely in good faith. And what I mean is Smart Growth Minneapolis seems to not have existed before the Minneapolis City Council approved this plan

and formed, at least based on the earliest iteration of their website, exclusively to oppose the plan and upzoning in general. As Strong Towns, a nonprofit advocacy group for a more dense development points out, Smart Growth Minneapolis provides no alternative to the city's plan. And it looks like preserving the status quo

is their only goal. It's a cynical NIMBY move, using environmental laws to its benefit and successfully delaying any potential re-imagining of urban development. Also, one of this lawsuit's main arguments is that the growth of population in Minneapolis is its primary reason for environmental concern.

But like, that's gonna happen no matter if they build the project or not, right? The good news is that despite the overall Minneapolis 2040 plan being blocked, the city has been making incremental progress in building more dense, affordable housing, and rents in the city have started to decline while they're increasing in most of the country.

So that's good. Really, the only downside is that you have to live in Minneapolis. Boom! Ah, ha, ha, ha! Took you down, you Twin City fucks. How do you like them, Minneapolis? Hell yeah!

Roasting Minneapolis for having better housing. But examples like that are why this conversation gets so muddled, because left NIMBYs, who are concerned about gentrification and the environment and whether or not the housing projects will actually be affordable, definitely have a point. But these types of concerns can easily be hijacked

by anyone who just doesn't want more housing. They also make these individual situations far more complicated. For example, in New York City, a council member named Tiffany Caban put her support behind a 1,300 unit housing development in Astoria, Queens. Before approving the project, Caban and local community groups negotiated

with the developer to guarantee that 25% of all the units would be considered affordable housing, and that 10% would be earmarked for families earning less than 30% of the neighborhood's median income. Nevertheless, the DSA Queens Housing Working Group called the proposal an insult to nearby public housing tenants who would not be able to afford

even the cheapest units in development. But Caban defended the project, saying that the lot was currently a vacant environmental hazard, and that the developers agreed to pay $16 million to clean it up and create additional park and community space. Further, she argued the alternative would be

to either leave it vacant or allow it to become, quote, a facility where some massive corporation like Amazon would pay our neighbors garbage wages for nonstop backbreaking work that would clog our neighborhood streets with dangerous pollution heavy delivery vehicles. She's essentially saying, I hear you. This isn't ideal, but in our current system,

the alternatives are even worse. Conversely, some people would rather have nothing if it's not actually affordable housing. New York City Council Member Kristen Richardson Jordan helped block a proposal for a complex that would have brought 915 new units to Harlem. She argued that many black residents had already been

displaced from the neighborhood and that those people would not be prioritized to return under the proposal. Though half of all those units were to be considered affordable housing, Jordan said this would be based on the area median income and included the income of wealthier neighbors from nearby Westchester. So as a result, the affordable housing options were not really going to be affordable

to people who actually lived in Harlem, where the median income is much lower. To quote one of the area tenants. We keep saying the word affordable, affordable, affordable, yet everyone on this call understands that low income and affordable are two very separate and different things. Right, so the argument there

is that approving that development would actually increase displacement. Ultimately, that development was killed and is set to become an also very unpopular truck depot. So yeah, it's frustrating. Nobody's happy. It's easy enough to blame the greedy developers. You know what, actually?

Let's blame them for a minute. Fuck them right in the toes and eyes and other places. I would like them to eat my shoes and pants. But also in our current system where housing is a commodity used by organizations to turn a profit, there's simply no incentive from the private sector to build truly affordable housing in Harlem, Queens,

Los Angeles, the Detroit suburbs, or anywhere else. Especially while the cost of construction is so high that developers either need huge subsidies from local governments or higher rents in order to turn the profit they require to do anything at all, even with all the epic sauce dirt bricks. So what if we change the laws

to make some of this work better? To protect tenants through rent control or find landlords who keep units empty? I feel another segment coming on. Deep in my loins. Number two, more regulation. Finally, we're at the horny part of the episode. I get so horny about regulation that we can only film

these parts in one minute increments with hour long breaks in between. Every episode takes months to film. You guys excited for Thor 4? Yeah, it looks good. Now to start, there are a bunch of simple regulations that cities in the midst of a housing crisis should probably do immediately to alleviate pressure, even if they won't solve the whole problem. Patrick Range McDonald, a journalist, activist, and consultant for the AIDS Healthcare

Foundation, criticizes local governments for their development-first approaches to new housing, and details a few of these regulations using what housing justice advocates call the three Ps. And no, that doesn't stand for some kind of penis-cadora. Why would you even think that? That's really weird of you to think of. No, it stands for protect renters by strengthening tenant protections,

preserve existing affordable housing such as rent-controlled units, and produce affordable housing. Currently, only five states have rent control laws on the books, and yet 31 states have laws preventing local municipalities from putting them in place. Boy, we really hate poor people. When I say rent control, what I really mean though

is rent stabilization, policies whereby landlords can raise the rent, but only by a certain amount every year. True rent control, which placed strict caps on rent, was common in the first half of the 20th century, but was dismissed by economists since they reduce incentives for developers and landlords to build and maintain housing and ultimately create higher rents for people without rent control.

More modern rent stabilization policies have been found to prevent evictions and increase stability in a neighborhood, though results are mixed on whether they prevent gentrification and racial disparities. Rent stabilization laws without a subsequent rise in development and new housing, however, could still have the effect of raising other rents

for new units given limited supply. Nevertheless, with housing costs astronomical for existing renters right now, voters in many local municipalities have approved rent stabilization ordinances, even in states where they are currently banned. It's a good idea, this rent control. So good that this advocacy group for property owners

is fearing a threat for more rent control initiatives in 2023, because of course, there are going to be powerful people spending millions of dollars to defeat progressive initiatives such as this. And of course, there are going to be politicians who want to please those powerful people. Tonight, there is a legal fight to get a rent control measure off the November ballot. Last week, Orange County commissioners approved the ordinance in a narrow vote, but now a realtor group and an apartment association are suing,

saying it will have unintended consequences. This legal challenge is why leaders in St. Petersburg struck down a similar measure and why the mayor of Orange County is strongly against it. Fun follow-up, that Florida measure for rent control was approved by voters by a wide margin, and yet it still won't go through until the litigation between the county and the suing realty and rent companies ends, which is wild when you think about it. Basically, a couple of companies didn't like that an ordinance would hurt their business

and tried to stop people from being able to vote for it. And when they did vote for it, they were able to gunk up the courts enough for it to not matter. Then there's vacancy taxes, which are aimed at landlords like dusty hipster Santa who intentionally keep units empty for a certain amount of time. Another good idea, and there has been movement to put more of

them into place around the country. San Francisco voters just approved one, which will go into place in 2024, though single family homes and duplexes will be exempt. Los Angeles has been considering one, given estimates that there are up to 100,000 vacant units in the city. Even Toronto, a city I'm told is America adjacent, is levying a tax on vacant property owners equivalent to 1% of the home's current value assessment. These are all good moves in the right direction, but are unlikely to fully address the problem given that overall vacancy rates in the US at least are at their lowest levels in 40 years. Here's another no-brainer for all you no-brains out there,

expanded renter's tax credits. You see, if you own property and are thus a better person, you get to deduct some or all of your property taxes and mortgage interest. But renters can only claim a portion of their rent if they use their home for business, and only for the portion of their home that's engaged in that business, and only in some states.

An expanded renter's tax credit would address economic and racial inequality since renters are much less likely to be white than homeowners, and it could specifically target the most rent-burdened households by allowing an additional deduction for everything over 30% of one's income paid in rent. Joe Biden referenced this specific proposal in the housing section of his campaign page, alongside an expansion of Section 8 housing vouchers and expanded housing benefits for people like educators and EMTs.

So, you know, vote for him, I guess, if you want those things to be part of his campaign platform three years ago and nothing else, because it never happened. The proposed expansion of a renter's tax credit that was actually introduced in the Senate in 2021, though not passed, would have given that tax benefit

to the owners of the property who agreed to reduce rent for low-income tenants. Way to go, Democrats. The almost not really doing the right thing party. And finally, there's zoning. We covered single-family zoning in an episode last year and how ending it is one of the simplest things America's slimy mutant leaders or government

could do to make people's lives better. Minneapolis, that podunk we already mentioned, took steps to end single family zoning and allow more dense and mixed use housing. California followed suit in 2021, and more neighborhoods across America are considering it. This is a good step and should be followed by efforts to establish more inclusionary zoning, which requires new and updated developments to include units affordable to those with low incomes. None of that including Westchester

bullshit either. True inclusionary zoning should provide significant below market housing to the existing community, preventing gentrification and a surge in prices. 11 states still place limits on or outright ban local municipalities from zoning for inclusion. Because again, people just hate the poor or at the very least seeing the poor.

Unfortunately, even inclusionary zoning policies with good intentions are still dependent on private companies, and thus they still need profit incentives. It's how you get failed inclusionary zoning laws, like the one in Baltimore, where the city just ended up giving developers waivers to build without affordable housing options.

It's also how you get situations like this, where a 212 unit apartment building in DC was purchased by a nonprofit with plans to convert 75% of the units into affordable housing, but is reliant on funding from Amazon and another investment firm. Amazon's $2 billion housing equity fund has been criticized for ignoring the poorest renters in communities. And the fund equity fund has been criticized for ignoring the poorest renters in communities. And the fund's response has been that it isn't their job to fix the housing crisis single-handedly, which is, I'll admit begrudgingly, a fair point,

except also seems like the kind of excuse any $2 billion fund can give to dismiss legitimate criticism. Hey, you should let your employees take bathroom breaks. What are we, God of toilets? Still, $2 billion is of course a drop in the bucket for Jeff Bezos' e-commerce side project, and they're clearly just looking for some quick PR

and reinforcements for their dwindling workforce. If we are relying on Amazon and other conglomerates to approve the changes needed to fix the problem, we're going to be waiting a long time. You know, until the free-floating space colonies for worker drones get blasted into orbit. Oh, maybe they'll be constructed with dirt blocks. Okay, so further regulations and attempts to push the housing market in a more equitable direction would definitely help, but they aren't going to solve the housing crisis

themselves. And the reason why is the thing we've been circling around and also outright saying this entire time, that when housing is treated like a commodity to be sold and traded and profited from, that means that everyone from single mothers with five kids to unhoused people literally ushered into the desert by cops is stuck being a part of this economic system. We can't really capitalism our way out of this. And that's why the solution we're about to explore is a tad bit outside of the profit driven box.

Dare I say, a little socialist. Number three, completely rethink public housing. If you live in the United States, the phrase public housing probably brings a very specific image to mind. We're talking about subsidized housing in low income communities, frequently referred to as the projects.

Public housing in the US is underfunded. Living conditions are lower than elsewhere by expectation, and they aren't the most aesthetically pleasing places to live either. This image is likely to blame for the difficulty in building new public housing. Because while a majority of Americans support it, they just don't want it around where they live.

And even when money is allocated to provide crucial repairs to public housing, something a strong majority of Americans also support, a big chunk of that money ends up going to repair the disaster damaged houses of millionaires. That's the result of an administrative technicality, also known as an oopsie shiddle sticks a poo poo, and also also known as the way this system was apparently designed to work. Anyway, what if, what if we rethought public housing and made a major investment in it as a country? The FIMBY movement, which stands for public housing in my backyard, wants to add significant numbers of public housing units nationwide, as well as strengthen

tenant protections and rent control. The good of this plan is that it directly benefits the people who need it the most and doesn't rely on market forces to lower the cost of housing over time while still allowing wealthy developers to make a profit. Nothing is trickling down or not trickling down. Nobody needs to be displaced or made homeless while the invisible hand of housing Sauron does its work. Unfortunately, support for public housing

at the federal level has declined in deference to short-term housing vouchers and rental assistance, which is essentially just a fund for landlords. That means states and local municipalities have to pick up the slack. There was originally $150 billion allocated for housing in the Inflation Reduction Act, but it, of course, all got scrapped.

As of 2016, 1.6 million people were still on public housing waiting lists nationwide. So there's a demand for public housing, which means the government just needs to make with a supply, but it would most likely require rebranding public housing to purge those images of the dilapidated housing projects where so many candy men lurk. And that's very possible.

The same way Old Spice rebranded as the hip, funky deodorant and soap company, and Peyton Manning rebranded from weird sexual harasser to two-time Super Bowl champion and jovial guy willing to spend three hours a week talking with Eli. If not all movies, we watch sports too. I don't actually watch sports.

Now Americans really hate doing this, but we might want to look to other countries as a model for our own public housing revamp. One place to look would be Austria, where the nation's robust social policy provides high quality public housing, including access to open spaces, playgrounds, and fitness centers. They're such nice places to live that even rich Austrian celebrities often opt to live there. 60% of the residents of the capital Vienna live in some form of subsidized housing, and the Vienna City Council is the largest property owner in Europe.

The housing is so nice and the system has worked so well that it's driven down rent throughout the city. So even those who don't live in subsidized housing pay far lower for housing than elsewhere in Europe. Although important to note, Austria kind of had to hit rock bottom to get there, which kind of works for us, actually. Give it a few years, you know?

See, after World War I, Austria was devastated, as countries that are on the losing side of wars with world in the title tend to be. A quarter of Vienna's population was homeless. So in 1923, a bunch of socialists built 25,000 new public housing units and paid for it by taxing things like champagne, fancy restaurants, horse racing, cars, and sex work, which is generally legal in Austria, don't you know?

Now you know. A bunch of stuff obviously has happened since then, but the Vienna of today is largely inspired by this active choice to improve living conditions 100 years ago. Yes, many Austrians pay 50% of their income in taxes, but for that money, they get much lower housing costs and an attractive network of public housing options,

which don't all look gray and gross since every new public development is subject to an architectural competition to determine its design. The people who live in public housing also get free opera tickets, music festivals, outdoor movie nights, and access to this ridiculous Art Deco indoor swimming pool.

And notably, there's no social stigma to living there. And honestly, I know this sounds a little pie in the sky. Can you imagine the United States giving public housing residents tickets to the fucking opera? Opera's a bad example, because opera's kind of, you know, snoozer. But okay, imagine if it were tickets to see all those avatars or a monster truck show.

You know those shows are fixed. Anyway, other nations have adopted these principles into their own countries. Finland had rampant homelessness for decades, decided this was unacceptable for some silly reason, and started giving people homes without condition. The capital Helsinki owns most of the land in the city and neighborhoods are integrated

because of social housing quotas. I can't emphasize enough that these are things that groups of people really did over time. They saw that a better future was possible, if not also extremely necessary. That displacement and homelessness and exorbitant rent were policy choices instead of inevitable conclusions. And they did something about it. And that's, in a way, the whole ballgame. All that other stuff we talked about, while potentially beneficial, it's really just

comparing what size bandits should be put on this festering wound of a system. An increase in market rate housing is relying on the market to reduce costs and make neighborhoods livable and vibrant. The eviction moratorium and direct payments from earlier in the pandemic helped a lot, but they went away. And they were always just intended to keep the already broken system going. We need something radical and tubular and bodacious to upend this system, to stop us from competing against each other just for a place to call home,

to prevent boxes of cilantro from being delivered to my door as a word play taunt. Whether it's a reinvestment in public housing or a New Deal style reboot, but like without the racism, please. New Deal Zero with 40% less racism. Can't even make it 100%, what an embarrassment. Of course, this isn't something any of our politicians

are likely to solve anytime soon. It's not a Democrat or a Republican problem, though Democrats probably offer more and bigger bandages. The problems are the incentives that property owners, landlords, and other NIMBYs have to perpetuate this system. As long as housing is a commodity, it's going to continue to be attractive for people who already have wealth to become landlords,

because being a landlord is much easier than having a job. Remember that profit series we did last year, where we pointed out the perverse incentives in the prison, healthcare, and energy industries, and how the people running those industries were more motivated to make money than to do the thing their industry is ostensibly there to do. Well, this is sort of a fourth installment of that, except the people with the perverse incentives are most of the people in this country. The second we become homeowners, our incentives change. It immediately becomes to

our benefit for property values to go higher and for supply to tighten because it will make our resale value soar and secure our own retirements. And that's, it's a real fucking shame that solidarity with our fellow human beings who are seeking the same security and stability as anyone else goes out the window once we become part of a slightly more privileged class. It's why any candidate who floats things like collective ownership and community land trust gets attacked in the media. This is the system we have designed, where housing is not guaranteed but rather a commodity to be hoarded and traded, and it's seemingly the only way to establish any kind of financial security.

And for most people, changing that system for good, which means reversing the stranglehold that property ownership holds over our society, probably looks terrifying and dystopian, where we're all assigned a concrete block to live in, like in 1984, which I've recently found out is a book and film adaptation, and not just a four digit number for conservatives

to reference for things they don't like. So given that reality, housing is likely to be tied to capitalism for a long, long time. And as long as that's the case, there just won't be any perfect solution. And so for the time being, we are all stuck in our own personal

Steven Spielberg presents the money pit. The promise of owning your own home is a facade that looks great, but then you get inside and realize that there are holes in the floor and you're going to get attacked by vicious raccoons. The only thing you can try to do is fix it up as best you can and sell it at a profit, thus roping some other poor diluted sucker

into the same cycle. Plus your wife used to be married to fucking Carl from Die Hard. That's gotta be intimidating. The Money Pit in theaters 37 years ago. Check it out. Does anybody get the references to the money pit? Joe versus the volcano.

Anyone leave a comment that says you're not old, you're spry, and your references are fresh. Because they are. Gonna go get tickets to Thor 4. Ah, I didn't see you stay. Hi, thanks for watching the video. Make sure to like the video, subscribe to the channel the video was published on,

and leave a comment, as I said, like 30 seconds ago, about how cool I am. We've got a podcast called Even More News you can listen to. We've got this show as a podcast. It's called Some More News, where the podcasts are. We've got merch in a store for merch stuff, and we have a patreon.com slash some more news

where you can support us elsewise. And there's no fun bit here. So sorry to make you stick around. But, oh wait no it's a Thor reference end of the credits and you open on a good movie

I don't know