Affordable Housing

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FangKC
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Re: Affordable Housing

Post by FangKC »

Investors flip housing markets, and home buyers are reeling
...
Now, the BeltLine was being extended to southwest Atlanta, and investors were betting on the same transformation. They bought nearly 26,000 homes in the Atlanta area in 2018, largely in the southwestern quadrant of the city — including at least four on Boulevard Lorraine.

The same story is playing out across the country. A confluence of factors — rising construction costs, restrictive zoning rules and shifting consumer preferences, among others — has already led to a scarcity of affordably priced housing in many big cities. Investors, fueled by Wall Street capital, are snapping up much of what remains.

“If it weren’t bad enough out there for first-time homebuyers, the additional competition from investors is increasingly pushing starter homes out of the reach of many households,” said Ralph McLaughlin, deputy chief economist at CoreLogic, a provider of real estate data.
...
For decades, single-family homes were an investment primarily for people who wanted to live in them. Real estate investors were around, but they were mostly individuals or small partnerships. That changed with the Great Recession and its aftermath, when investors bought at least 2 million homes, and almost certainly far more than that, with prices depressed. Large-scale institutional investors bought tens of thousands of homes for less than they cost to build.

At first, the flood of capital seemed like a one-time opportunity arising from the collapse of the residential real estate market. Once the bargains dried up, the investors were expected to stop buying.

Except they didn’t stop. In 2018, investors bought about 1 in 5 starter homes in the United States (defined as priced in the bottom third of the local market), according to CoreLogic. That was even higher than in the early years after the Great Recession and about double the level of two decades ago. In the most frenzied markets, investors bought close to half of the most affordable homes sold last year, and as much as a quarter of all single-family homes.
...
https://tinyurl.com/y3fqqkbk
phuqueue
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Re: Affordable Housing

Post by phuqueue »

FangKC wrote: Sat Jun 22, 2019 9:33 pm Meet the A.I. Landlord That’s Building a Single-Family-Home Empire
...
Sean Dobson, Amherst’s CEO, is an imposing Texan data savant who dropped out of college to get into mortgage trading. A decade ago, he made a killing shorting shaky debt during the housing crash. Today he’s adding 1,000 homes a month to his empire with the help of artificial intelligence, using data modeling to make dozens of offers a day on potentially profitable houses. The Main Street homes are a $3.2 billion investment that generates around $300 million in annual rental income, but Dobson harbors far bigger ambitions: “We want to get to 1 million homes in the next 15 years or so,” he says. While that figure reflects as much bravado as realism—it’s more than 60 times the number of homes Amherst owns today—the fact that it’s conceivable shows how much the housing market has changed, and how technology is helping investors profit from those changes.

The rise of the single-family-rental industry reflects profound shifts in the finances and attitudes of America’s families. Homeownership, long a bedrock of financial stability, has become unattainable or undesirable for many middle-income workers—for reasons including tighter lending standards, large college-debt loads, lagging wage growth and savings, and real estate speculators, such as the guy we are profiling in this very article, who outbid would-be owner-occupants to snap up "investment" property and drive prices up broadly. According to ­Yar­deni Research, slightly more than one in three households that would have been buying first homes before the financial crisis is now either renting or still living with their parents.

These trends translate into roughly 5 million households that are renting single-family homes rather than taking out mortgages and building equity, and that’s Amherst’s target market. Its specialty is grabbing run-down properties in nice, middle-class subdivisions—guided by algorithms that help it avoid bidding wars and money pits—which it then spruces up for the new rental generation. Amherst’s typical customers are couples in their early forties with one or two kids and household incomes around $60,000. They’re paying an average rent of $1,450 a month. “That’s almost exactly what they’d pay on a mortgage and other expenses if they owned the house,” says Dobson. “We’re catering to a whole new class of Americans—the former buyers who are now either forced renters or renters by choice.” And Dobson is betting that this new class is a permanent one.
...
http://fortune.com/longform/single-fami ... ket-newtab
Added back in a fairly glaring omission from this article
brewcrew1000
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Re: Affordable Housing

Post by brewcrew1000 »

FangKC wrote: Sat Jun 22, 2019 9:50 pm Investors flip housing markets, and home buyers are reeling
...
Now, the BeltLine was being extended to southwest Atlanta, and investors were betting on the same transformation. They bought nearly 26,000 homes in the Atlanta area in 2018, largely in the southwestern quadrant of the city — including at least four on Boulevard Lorraine.

The same story is playing out across the country. A confluence of factors — rising construction costs, restrictive zoning rules and shifting consumer preferences, among others — has already led to a scarcity of affordably priced housing in many big cities. Investors, fueled by Wall Street capital, are snapping up much of what remains.

“If it weren’t bad enough out there for first-time homebuyers, the additional competition from investors is increasingly pushing starter homes out of the reach of many households,” said Ralph McLaughlin, deputy chief economist at CoreLogic, a provider of real estate data.
...
For decades, single-family homes were an investment primarily for people who wanted to live in them. Real estate investors were around, but they were mostly individuals or small partnerships. That changed with the Great Recession and its aftermath, when investors bought at least 2 million homes, and almost certainly far more than that, with prices depressed. Large-scale institutional investors bought tens of thousands of homes for less than they cost to build.

At first, the flood of capital seemed like a one-time opportunity arising from the collapse of the residential real estate market. Once the bargains dried up, the investors were expected to stop buying.

Except they didn’t stop. In 2018, investors bought about 1 in 5 starter homes in the United States (defined as priced in the bottom third of the local market), according to CoreLogic. That was even higher than in the early years after the Great Recession and about double the level of two decades ago. In the most frenzied markets, investors bought close to half of the most affordable homes sold last year, and as much as a quarter of all single-family homes.
...
https://tinyurl.com/y3fqqkbk
I am not able to view that link, i think this is the orginal story
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... ket-newtab
brewcrew1000
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Re: Affordable Housing

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https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019 ... s-industry

Is it really the techies fault? I think its the entire system, why not build more housing? Greed has really fucked this city big time.

If you want to get rid of homelessness, why can't you just make it illegal, repeat offenders are to be put on a bus in the middle of Nebraska and housed there, i dunno some solution needs to be done to save our cities.
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Re: Affordable Housing

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brewcrew1000 wrote: Mon Jul 01, 2019 3:11 pm https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019 ... s-industry

Is it really the techies fault? I think its the entire system, why not build more housing? Greed has really fucked this city big time.

If you want to get rid of homelessness, why can't you just make it illegal, repeat offenders are to be put on a bus in the middle of Nebraska and housed there, i dunno some solution needs to be done to save our cities.
No to mention the limits of geography, height limitations in most areas and expensive earthquake building codes.
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TheLastGentleman
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Re: Affordable Housing

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brewcrew1000 wrote: Mon Jul 01, 2019 3:11 pmIf you want to get rid of homelessness, why can't you just make it illegal
Good way to get a lot of homeless people shot.
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Re: Affordable Housing

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TheLastGentleman wrote: Mon Jul 01, 2019 4:23 pm
brewcrew1000 wrote: Mon Jul 01, 2019 3:11 pmIf you want to get rid of homelessness, why can't you just make it illegal
Good way to get a lot of homeless people shot.
How else u gonna end homelessness and its attack on cities?
When there is a homeless person found in the lilly white suburbs the first thing that happens is these suburban police ship the homeless off to the "city" and have the city handle it cause "they have the resources". I have heard that from police in Blue Springs and Grain Valley that they do this. Major Cities in the US are gonna end up like places in India or Brazil if we don't do something.
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TheLastGentleman
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Re: Affordable Housing

Post by TheLastGentleman »

brewcrew1000 wrote: Mon Jul 01, 2019 6:17 pmHow else u gonna end homelessness and its attack on cities?
Is your best solution really just arresting these people and sending them to a concentration camp? Yikes. Maybe we can start by thinking of these people as fellow members of the country and not like some sort of disease "attacking" cities.
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Re: Affordable Housing

Post by phuqueue »

Homelessness isn't an "attack on cities," homelessness is a result of capitalism's attack on people. Arresting people for being too poor to have a home is insane.
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FangKC
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Re: Affordable Housing

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brewcrew1000 wrote: Mon Jul 01, 2019 3:11 pm ...
If you want to get rid of homelessness, why can't you just make it illegal, repeat offenders are to be put on a bus in the middle of Nebraska and housed there, i dunno some solution needs to be done to save our cities.
I'm sorry Brewcrew, but this statement sounds not thought through. What's next? Making poverty illegal, and moving low-income workers to some unseen place where other people don't have to look at them?

Some homeless in SF and LA are natives, with low incomes, who have been displaced by dramatically-high rents. Many who had/have jobs where their income has not kept pace with the dramatic rent increases. People who were born in those cities, and have lived there all of their lives. It is their home. Some include seniors who are on fixed incomes. Many don't even have the resources to move somewhere cheaper. Many Americans simply don't have the money saved for that type of emergency. Some have had their income circumstances change dramatically. A job loss that resulted in them taking a job that pays much less than before. They may be eligible for housing subsidies, but the waiting list for public housing is years-long, and the list to get a Section 8 voucher is also years-long. This is true even in Missouri.
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Re: Affordable Housing

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I didn't mean a literal attack, I just meant why are cities treated as a dumping ground when it happens outside a city? There are shelters in Johnson County but if there were 2 guys camped out in a park in Overland Park, the cops would be called immediately and the police would most likely escort them to Kansas City.
I think San Francisco is reaching a boiling point. There was a time the homeless pretty much kept to themselves and were just "there" but now they are attacking residents, shitting all over the city and doing drugs wherever they feel like. You want to walk around and raise a family in that kind of environment?
Last edited by brewcrew1000 on Tue Jul 02, 2019 8:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Affordable Housing

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brewcrew1000 wrote: Mon Jul 01, 2019 7:58 pm ...but if there were 2 guys camped out in a park in Overland Park, the cops would be called immediately and the police would most likely escort them to Kansas City.
This definitely happens.
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chaglang
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Re: Affordable Housing

Post by chaglang »

Homelessness happens for a lot of reasons but every possible solution, whether it be better access to mental health resources, better access to addiction prevention resources, living wage jobs, affordable housing, infrastructural design that leverages transportation redundancies (i.e., multimodality) is so far from being a priority in the United States that it's almost inherently farcical to discuss a solution.

San Francisco has well documented problems with building any housing at all, so no, the problem is not the techies - it's with any city that adds jobs but not housing. An explosion in the NorCal dibble and widget industry would have netted the same result. KC sucks at being a dense city but our complimentary suckiness at job development let us get away with it.
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Re: Affordable Housing

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Criminalizing being poor isn't going to do anything but create vastly more criminals in an already capacity-starved criminal justice system.

Start billing the PDs that dump their problems in the city and then sue them when they don't pay? I dunno, but the richest county in the metro dumping its problems on KCMO, which is already home to most of the metro's poorest, is scandalous almost to the point of absurdity.
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Re: Affordable Housing

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mean wrote: Tue Jul 02, 2019 2:55 pm ...but the richest county in the metro dumping its problems on KCMO, which is already home to most of the metro's poorest, is scandalous almost to the point of absurdity.
Which makes some of the affordable housing initiatives and tenant groups kind of hard to understand. Why is there so much effort inside the city but rich suburbs get off scot free? Why aren’t there protests in Lenexa for more affordable housing or city initiatives in Overland Park? There needs to be some equity in caring for the requirements of the metro.
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Re: Affordable Housing

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I assume because poor people live, and vote, inside the city and not in Lenexa?
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Re: Affordable Housing

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mean wrote: Tue Jul 02, 2019 4:39 pm I assume because poor people live, and vote, inside the city and not in Lenexa?
But, why is it alright to make housing affordable only in certain parts of the metro? And why are we pushing more affordability in the areas that are already the cheapest in the metro instead of pushing for equity where there is total lack of balance?
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Re: Affordable Housing

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beautyfromashes wrote: Tue Jul 02, 2019 4:51 pm
mean wrote: Tue Jul 02, 2019 4:39 pm I assume because poor people live, and vote, inside the city and not in Lenexa?
But, why is it alright to make housing affordable only in certain parts of the metro? And why are we pushing more affordability in the areas that are already the cheapest in the metro instead of pushing for equity where there is total lack of balance?
Bingo
I've always had this dream where Bill Gates bought 500 homes for poor families of all racial groups in a 1000 home subdivision of an all white suburb and paid everything, the taxes, utilities, etc. I guarantee the existing home owners would be pissed, they would call the cops daily over anything and they would fight tooth and nail to end this experiment because the number 1 thing they would be concerned about is property values and quality of life. Out of sight out of mind when it comes to the poor and affordable housing but when it hits home they will fight tooth and nail to prevent it from coming to them.

Planning boards in the suburbs have the most residents show up to "voice their opinion" when there is some kind of development plan for low income housing or apartments comes to the table and the number 1 issue these people voice is that it will affect home values, crime will increase or increased traffic.

I just think there needs to be a better balance with the suburbs and cities when it comes to affordable housing
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Re: Affordable Housing

Post by mean »

beautyfromashes wrote: Tue Jul 02, 2019 4:51 pm
mean wrote: Tue Jul 02, 2019 4:39 pm I assume because poor people live, and vote, inside the city and not in Lenexa?
But, why is it alright to make housing affordable only in certain parts of the metro? And why are we pushing more affordability in the areas that are already the cheapest in the metro instead of pushing for equity where there is total lack of balance?
Affordability is being pushed in the areas where poor people live because they voted people into office who would push it for them, and the governments of rich suburbs are inhabited entirely by people who were voted into office to reject those kinds of proposals. Nobody lives in Lenexa to be around poor people and minorities. They live there to be as far away from them as possible, and they will continue ever further south as the cheaply constructed suburban houses and strip malls deteriorate to the point that the poor can start migrating in.

That doesn't make it alright, but I mean, what's anyone gonna do about it? Have a serious moral reckoning? Start treating the poor like Jesus talked about in the Bible instead of with self-righteous contempt? :lol: Not these Christians, my friend.
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Re: Affordable Housing

Post by beautyfromashes »

Well, I’ve seen several protests on the Plaza calling for more affordability and care for those in desperate situations. This is a valid call for those in terrible situations in our city. But, if these groups aren’t going to even attempt to speak in force to where the true inequality is, it seems rather weak. Would other protest movements have generated any traction if they just stayed in the areas where the inequality was the least oppressive?
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