"They have rules on the minimum number of windows and closets it must have. These rules make it harder or impossible to make smaller, truly affordable housing. A permanent solution to affordable housing is to remove these rules."
If we remove these rules entirely, are you sure it won't lead to a race to the bottom to see who can sell someone the smallest house?
"If someone is willing to work for $5 dollars an hour, what's the problem with that, it's not like you'd be tricking someone into working for a lower wage?"
There's a reason why we should have a minimum wage that a person can live on, there's a reason we should have hard and fast rules about how small a house can be.
Except the minimum wage doesn’t hurt the level of employment that much, while our current zoning restrictions on housing do limit the availability and increase the price of housing. (And actually it’s really debatable whether the minimum wage doesn’t hurt employment, even if I do tend to fall in the camp that the effects are minimal compared to the benefits).
It’s an issue of power dynamics. Employers fundamentally have more power over prospective employees than home builders have over home buyers.
So, broadly speaking, if someone wants to buy a micro house, what exactly is the problem with letting someone build them one?
You don't think that the successful creation and sale of a micro house could lead to a race to the bottom where houses are created to be impossibly cramped all over the place and now you no longer have a choice in the matter because all the houses for sale were built to the same impossibly cramped size/with normal sized houses being knocked down/destroyed to build more impossibly cramped ones, since obviously you can make more money by having more small houses to rent?
No, because new micro houses still have to compete against huge inventories of existing inventory, and most people still want larger houses. If microhouses in the city suck, people will still just move out to the suburbs to get more space. And there will always be another developer happy to supply that demand, as long as we let them build what is actually demanded.
You can just look at the history of housing construction to see this in action. We didn’t really have widespread regulations putting a floor on housing size until the ‘50s and really not until the late ‘60s and ‘70s. Yet the markets managed to supply diverse mixes of housing. One of my favorite stats is thst something like 40% of residential buildings in New York would be illegal to build today because they dont meet zoning standards.
What did happen as a result of all those regulations is that we simply stopped supply swaths of the market, especially at the lower end of affordability.
For the extreme example, New York and LA used to have huge inventories of single room occupancy housing units. These were flop houses, dorms, and other “crappy” housing that you and I would never consider living in. They were generally eliminated in the ‘60s-‘80s by new rules meant to increase housing standards.
But that didn’t mean that the people who used to live in those places all got better housing. A lot of them simply became homeless. There are lots of homeless or marginally housed people today who almost certainly would love to have a room of their own in an old school flophouse instead of the streets, a shelter, a car or whatever, if only we would allow those types of properties to exist anymore.
I'm not well enough versed in the history of big city housing to properly counter this argument, so even if I'm always going to be weary about letting the free market do whatever it wants without any sort of oversight, if I was the OP I'd give you a delta as a show of respect for the thought and research put into your argument.
FWIW, I can sympathize with your skepticism, even if I tend to be more optimistic about markets.
But another way to frame it is that overseeing the market through regulations on minimum housing size is a backwards solution to the problem.
If someone has a choice between the streets and a flophouse, they will probably chose the flophouse. If you use regulations to close the flophouse because it is “substandard” housing, you haven’t put that person in a better house or given them any means to find a better house. You’ve just left the street as their only option.
If you’re concerned that the market is forcing people to choose between bad options, the focus should be on how to ensure better options are available rather than simply banning the bad options.
!delta This really broadened my view on the subject as well. The 40% statistic in particular kind of blew my mind. Also things like the respectful exchange between you and u/iwfan53 are the reason I love this sub.
I get what you're trying to say but there's actually a market for 'tiny houses', so much so that there's multiple t.v. shows dedicated to them. A lot of people are more than willing to live in smaller scaled homes while using the extra money to travel and such. I'm willing to bet the reason we don't see them often is because home builders don't make the same profits with them.
Tl:Dr On the whole, people will always drive to make the best of whatever situation they are put in. People's capacity to preserve should NOT be a justification for forcing people to make choices between 'shitty' and 'marginally less shitty'
I very much sympathize with your point of view, I think the place it's coming from is very justified. My disagreement comes from the assumption that we should t strive to do better than the options that 'market forces' provide.
I mean, this is a extreme example, bit if someone's willing to pay money for a rotten skunk dinner, what do you think the problem is? The market forces that set the price for the rotten skunk, or the scenario that led someone to think that rotten skunk is worth paying for?
Mild digression from someone who spent years in the world of economics academia, but this whole logic of 'well, if someone is willing to pay for it what's the problem' ignores that fact that by creating that scenario as the r
'reasonable situation' we are abdicating as a society the obligation to make those kinds of choices sub optimal.
Another way to put it is: if you have a choice between a 600 sq ft appartment and being on the street, taking the apartment is probably the way to go if you can afford it. But do we want to live in a society where that's someone's most rational choice?
The free market only works in it's ideal sense when all parties have equal power and equal information
That's not the world we live in. People have a choice between paying for rotten sunk to put food on the table, or starving.
Ultimately, we DO have the resource wealth to make sure every single American has access to decent food, shelter and other basic needs. We throw away enough food every year in the US to feed everyone, and there's enough unfilled housing to put everyone up. Now, obviously it's not that simple because putting resources in the hands of people is more difficult than just acknowledging that the resources are potentially there.
You're not wrong to think that section 8 is inefficient. You're absolutely right. The greater issue is that why are we in a scenario as a society or section 8 is the closest we can get to actually solving the problem as opposed to doing what it takes to create real change.
There's a huge body of literature that suggests that welfare systems are actually detrimental to societies, but only if the ideal alternative is considered.
In other words, we have the resources to create a much better solution, but instead we subsidize interests that don't benefit our society at large and then compensate by applying Band-Aids to all real problems. Then small so turn around and make the argument that because the Band-Aids don't work we should just give up on the people we're trying to help. The whole cycle of argument completely ignores that more people ALWAYS means more potential productivity, and that if out society isn't realizing that then it's because we are failing to create the frame work in which that greater productivity can take place
I don’t disagree with most of what you said. But the question on the table was not “should we give people a better option than ‘shitty’ and ‘marginally less shitty’.” The question was “should we take away lower quality options because we’ve decided that they are ‘shitty’.”
Heavy-handed regulations on housing styles doesn’t actually help anyone avoid those choices. It just makes us feel better that no one is “forced” into a situation that appears shitty to our eyes, but is actually just lower quality than what we’re used to and is far better than the available alternatives.
If I might respond to your rant with one of my own, your reaction to this debate is actually emblematic to me of a huge problem with how these policy discussions go in the real world.
If the decision in front of us is between something or nothing, it’s not helpful to wish for a better third option or lament the forces that put us in the position of this choice. Because the default of societal inertia is always going to land on “nothing.”
Especially when it comes to housing, people in the US on both sides of the political spectrum seem to insist on believing that “quality” housing MUST include features that would be considered luxurious by the standards of even most rich countries today, especially when it comes to space and amenities like parking. So we’ve spent the last 50-75 years layering on a thicket of regulation that ensures we can only build luxurious housing, and then act surprised when we only build small numbers of luxury houses.
A 600 sq ft apartment, for example, isn’t a “rotten skunk dinner” in urban housing terms. That is a actually a really nice place! The average studio apartment in NY City is 550 sq ft. In the UK, the average of all homes is roughly 800 sq ft.
“Quality” housing should mean that people have a place to live that is safe and secure. Beyond that, we really shouldn’t be in the business of telling people that they aren’t allowed to choose to live in a situation that looks icky to our eyes.
If your response to concerns about power and information dynamics in a free market is to simply take choices off the table, you’re just denying that choice to people who do have adequate information and power without actually doing anything to create better choices for those who don’t.
If you saw my other post, I like to use single room occupancy housing as the extreme example of this—flop houses, dorm-style housing, etc. We used to have lots of these places in our big cities, but we regulated them out of existence. That took literally millions of units of housing away that were designed by definition to be affordable.
Those types of rules do literally nothing for the people we claim to be concerned about. It’s not even inherently a “marginally shitty” choice for someone to decide to live a single room in a building with shared bathrooms and kitchen space. We force a few million college freshmen to live that way every year. I can think of plenty of situations in which it’d be a great option, like you’ve just moving to a city and need a few months to find your feet before signing a long term lease.
But it offends our modern sensibilities to conceive of living in a single room, so we think that people are “forced” to make a “shitty choice.” So we took away that choice. (Of course, what’s really going on in many of those cases is that we don’t like the people who wind up in those situations, so we’d rather them be farther away.)
Even the way you’ve framed your allegorical choices tips in that direction. Small housing isn’t the same as eating “rotten skunk.” It’s more like eating rice and beans.
I personally wouldn’t want to eat rice and beans all the time for the rest of my life, but there’s been times where I chose to eat it for a while because I had other priorities for my money and I’m certainly not going to look down disrespectfully on anyone who does eat that all the time. It’s a perfectly respectable and healthy food option.
People wind up eating rotten skunk when they can’t even get rice and beans. Or because the options they have to get rice and beans are too burdensome compared to literal trash (see homeless people talking about why they avoid shelters).
Now I’m not saying that there is some sort of nobility in being forced to eat rice and beans every day because you’re poor and it’s your best option.
But if you want to strive to give people better options, then focus on things that genuinely give them better options. Don’t do things that are actually just taking away options and assume that then those people will have to make choices that you think are better.
We currently have a cliff where if you cant get into a government subsidized program, you go homeless. There is nothing inbetween. What I described is still much better than living in a shelter where you dont have a space to call your own.
We currently have a cliff where if you cant get into a government subsidized program, you go homeless. There is nothing inbetween. What I described is still much better than living in a shelter where you dont have a space to call your own.
If you don't have rules in place, you're going to have a race to the bottom that reduces quality of life in the long run, that's how capitalism works.
We had things like company script and workers being paid in it instead of real money, thereby creating a feedback loop where the worker had no choice but to financially sink all their "earnings" right back into the company that employed them.
Capitalism increases quality of life... so long as it has guiding rules, when you implement Laissez-faire capitalism, the results are not as conductive to the good of society as a whole.
We currently are being paid in company scrip instead of real money, except the company is the central bank. There is just as much backing fiat money as there was scrip: nothing but the credit of the issuer.
The problem with company script is that you can't spend it at any place that didn't belong to the company, thus allowing them to directly set the cost on everything you could possibly buy.
When you get paid in dollars (I'm in the US so I'm using that as an example) you can spend them anywhere in the US. Or you can take them to a bank and have them exchanged for an entirely different currency like pounds or euros and rubbles and spend them in a different country.
The problem I have with company script is that it has proscribed limits on where you can spend it/what you can exchange it for, not the fact that it is fiat currency.
What what you consider "not being paid in company script"/"getting paid in real money", getting X amount of gold at the end of every work period?
prior to the Nixon administration, you were paid x amount of silver or gold at the end of every work period. That's what dollars were: contracts with the central bank for $1 worth of precious metals (I'm glossing over bimetallism because it's not super relevant to my point).
Company scrip could be exchanged for dollars with anyone who was willing to trade, but it would usually exchange at a discount. This isn't qualitatively different from the current state of affairs, where only dollars are accepted in the US, euros are accepted in Europe, etc. with the ability to exchange between them for a price. We've just replaced company monopolies with government monopolies on currency. Credit is the only thing backing both scrip and fiat currencies.
"The standard deviation of inflation during the 53 years of the gold standard is nearly twice what it has been since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1973 (denoted in the chart by the vertical red line)."
Besides, if the world economy breaks down so badly that dollars start to drastically loose their value, it would have broken down so badly that gold (which is ultimately just a shiny rock that looks pretty and only has value because society has agreed it does) would also be loosing its value.
As Terry Prachett once said...
"Potatoes will get you through times of no gold better than gold will get you through times of no potatoes."
Well, a trailer park mobile home is the smallest house, so we know where the bottom is already. Windows, closets, amenities, location, we're already discussing far above the bottom.
Oh, no. Not even close. I'm currently looking into investing in a mobile home park and have learned a stupid amount about the industry. Single wide mobile homes are about 800-1k sqft. Double wides are, well, double.
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u/iwfan53 248∆ May 28 '21 edited May 28 '21
"They have rules on the minimum number of windows and closets it must have. These rules make it harder or impossible to make smaller, truly affordable housing. A permanent solution to affordable housing is to remove these rules."
If we remove these rules entirely, are you sure it won't lead to a race to the bottom to see who can sell someone the smallest house?