Skip to main content

Housing affordability and ownership bias

If we want housing affordability, we'll have to confront our bias toward home ownership. While it has some sound reasoning, it's a brush applied too broadly. The expression of this bias has often done real harm to lower income individuals and families.

It's not possible to have constant, high appreciation of home values and affordable homes. It's not possible to have affordable rents and unaffordable homes (without subsidy).

You can try to force landlords to provide the subsidy, by rent control, but eventually they'll just sell out to homeowners. Those that remain will operate in areas where appreciation is not expected, home value is depressed, and rent control does not have effect. Unfortunately these areas will be the least desirable, either from crime, access to transit, pollution, or some other element that has real costs on the well being of residents.

If we want equitable housing, we should abandon the policies that restrict housing supply, and we should subsidize the rent payments of those in need. This will provide them with a degree of flexibility to disperse throughout cities, which is well known to be a strategy to provide greater opportunity which might translate to better quality outcomes for their future or children's future.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Commit to Long Term Testing

Expanding testing is very important now.  It's also clearly an area we were unprepared.  We should commit to having testing capacity long term, to both provide more certainty to anyone expanding testing capacity today, and to be prepared in the future. I had some thoughts about how this testing would be best structured.  It's not possible to test for an contagious disease you're not aware of, but much of the infrastructure for doing so can already be in place, ready to be adapted.  That infrastructure would roughly boil down to a) sample collection b) sample handling c) sample preparation d) sample analysis e) materials: reagents, etc. Scaling these up from scratch is quite a bit more work than adapting to a new contagion.  A commitment to having that infrastructure would have helped a lot with the current crisis. Right now, the focus is rightfully on health care workers, suspected cases and essential workers.  In terms of preparation though, in the early stages
Post a Comment
Read more

How to create a resilient Oil & Gas industry

Use Less As part of the current crisis, oil usage is down, and storage around the world is filling up, to the point that oil has traded at negative prices.  As a reaction, many Republican lawmakers want to bailout the oil industry, by providing free access to storage or no-collateral loans.  While it would make sense to ensure oil doesn't get dumped in the ocean, the right way to do that is by producing less oil. These proposals from the Republicans undermine the motivation for the industry to do so.  Workers are important, but they have the same access to unemployment as the other 25 million Americans who are out of work. What this crisis should illustrate is something that has been illustrated many times before, the oil industry is a fragile thing.  In the past this fragility has been demonstrated by massive spikes in prices and fears of shortage, in this case it's the inverse.  Why the fragility?  The simplest explanation is, we use too much.   In a world where oi
1 comment
Read more

Office Plans

I was inspired to do some research on what types of office plans were most popular among workers.  So I dived in and started looking and stumbled across an interesting failure in this area.  When a particular office plan was presented, it never included images of monitors.  This seems a somewhat shocking error considering that the average office worker will spend a fair amount of their time in front of screen.  Consider this as an example:  https://officesnapshots.com/articles/the-top-25-most-popular-offices-of-2018/ .  In all 25 examples, the initial shot is of a common space.  I understand that a bit, it's easier to make these distinctive, the creativity of the designer is more unbounded.  But lets be honest, while these areas are useful to collaborative working, without a large screen and space for a keyboard and mouse, the personal ergonomics of them are not adequate for a lot of work.  Dig a little deeper and many of the deeper reviews don't feature a single shot of a pe
Post a Comment
Read more