alejandro46 wrote: ↑Fri Oct 15, 2021 3:16 pm
What the phuque are you talking about?
Not quite sure how to respond to someone who apparently earnestly thought that post was about mail and not this board's frequent preoccupation with aesthetics over addressing actual social problems.
- You don't know me, you make broad assumption about the whole board, and literally that is the most vague reference to tie in here that made absolutely no sense. "We only care about asthetics?" I mean, I obviously don't speak for everyone, but I think most people here care more about good urban planning that helps people, reduces traffic and improves the quality of life than asthetics.
I've been on this board (and reading way more of it than posting) for 16 years, so I wouldn't say I'm "making assumptions" about anything, just reacting to the posts I have seen here, though I regret and apologize if I have misunderstood anyone's intentions. I don't seek to call out any particular person (I don't have any one person in mind right off hand and have not looked through old posts to find specific examples), but I do think that building a pleasant urban playground is often a higher priority than fixing real problems, and I think this becomes clearer when some of those real problems, like affordable housing, come up. I think that your post, in which you don't take the activists seriously and finish by glibly prescribing specifically the thing they are concerned about, is part of this broader pattern.
Everybody lives in reality, but reality probably looks a little bit different to those among the ~16% of Kansas Citians who live in poverty and have to deal with landlords arbitrarily hiking their rent, selling the building to new ownership that promptly evicts them, or refusing to make residential spaces habitable (just a few of the anecdotes offered by KCTenants people in that tweet thread) than it does to someone who can go on a message board and post, presumably with a straight face, that "leveraging the free market" is the solution to all problems.
You are trying to \ draw a strawman arguement and draw an inaccurate and overreaching conclusion. "You don't like KCTenants so then you must agree tenants deserve to live in terrible living conditions."
No that is not at all what I said. I said that (1) screaming at the mayor is not gonna work, (2) making demands/manifestos that are impossible without major additional taxes levied, (3) no where did I say "leveraging the free market will solve all the problems," I said that by making it easier to build new housing AND leveraging the free market as part of a housing trust fund, as the mayor proposed and mentions in the clip, is one avenue to help build more affordable housing.
I don't think you agree that tenants deserve to live in terrible living conditions, I just think you aren't very interested in hearing from those tenants about what their problems are or what they think the solutions could be. For example, in your retelling, they are asked "who pays for social housing" and they respond "?????" In reality, they are asked "who pays for social housing" and
they respond that the Housing Trust Fund will pay for it by "defunding the police and taxing the gentrified for an ongoing revenue source." Of course, there are plenty of questions that you could raise in response to that -- how much money to take from the police and how, politically, to accomplish that?; what would taxing gentrifiers look like and how would it be implemented?; etc. But you aren't engaging with any of these points. If I hadn't read the Twitter thread, I wouldn't know they'd even be made. You just brush them off as an incoherent mob.
To your number (3), what you said -- all that you said -- was: "What about if we just build more housing leveraging the free market?" You'll have to excuse me if I found the natural reading of that to be that building more housing
is how you "leverage the free market," making these two things one and the same, and if it seemed to me that you considered this to be more than just "one avenue," but in fact the
only avenue, since you didn't say, or even really hint, otherwise.
The reality that affordable housing activists live in is one where profit-driven developers build the kind of housing that nets them the highest margins (that is, upscale/luxury housing) and profit-driven landlords will eagerly turn over units to new tenants who can pay more, not one where ***the market*** apparently compels developers, even in the face of high construction costs (driven by high costs for materials and labor, not by "rent control"), to magnanimously build affordable housing that loses them money and benevolent landlords to forgo potential profit to let tenants stay in their homes.
This statement not make sense. "New construction" aka market rate is expensive to build because of material, land, and labor cost, especially multi-structured in the urban core. Once people move into market rate housing, other vacancies open up. If the rents are too high, they will be forced to lower them. Supply and demand. If the market will bear a higher rent, as the property owner as much as it's unfortunate, if you agreed to in the lease then they have the right to evict you. The City's 20% "affordable housing" mandate has probably resulted in less total units built or planned. More total units means more housing for all. Artifically suppressing rents mean less housing overall.
This is what your microeconomics textbook tells you should happen, but it's not what happens in the real world. Housing is a segmented market and spillover between segments can be limited. I have
previously posted about the illustrative example of NYC, where new high-end housing sprouts all around the city like weeds, but prices at the low end continue to rise. This is because developers demand a high return on their expensive new construction and prefer to let it sit vacant until they can realize that return than discount it too much, so your reasoning fails where you assume that people will move into that new housing. Prices within that high end have fallen because of how much excess supply is available, but it doesn't trickle down to the lower end, which is, for all intents and purposes, a different market. To be fair, KC is a different city, where the overall range of prices is more compressed than in NYC and where construction costs are surely lower than in NYC (I didn't actually look this up, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and assume it's true), so maybe you will see somewhat more spillover between market segments there (though incomes are also lower in KC than in NYC), but I think it is nonetheless telling that in a city suffering a severe affordability shortage, letting developers build the housing they want to build has not alleviated the shortage at all. If you focus too hard on what economic theory says should happen, rather than what actually is happening, I don't know, one might say that you aren't "living in reality."
Rent control might lead to less housing being built by restricting the returns that developers can expect to achieve, but it does not actually increase the cost of construction, which is the distinction I was making in response to your post in which you asserted otherwise (" Rent Control ... makes it ... expensive to build new housing there"). It seems inconsequential to me whether no new housing is being built or a bunch of empty luxury units are built, since neither scenario eases the affordability crisis in practice.
They are responding to the conditions they are personally witnessing in their own neighborhoods. I don't know whether they have a fully baked plan to address these problems (though they do have more than "?????", which you'd know if you looked at the tweet thread or visited their website), but their reality deserves to be taken as seriously as yours.
They have a list of demands that, again, as I said, are not based in reality as in are not realistic to achieve.
I can't believe I took the 10 minutes to respond to this, but I believe in affordable housing that is free from pests, mold and dangerous conditions, but do not agree with many of this group's other goals or methods to achieve them at all. I know they are trying to go off the BLM type activisim, but if their goals are achieved I believe it will actually have the opposite result in having less housing than more.
To be honest, I was not even familiar with KCTenants as an organization prior to this conversation, so I don't intend to die on the hill of defending whatever their specific demands are. What I take exception to is the dismissive ridicule of affordable housing activists in general, which was not newly introduced to this board with your post, hence my mailbox gag (
full context for those who didn't watch the Simpsons). The uncritical deference to and enthusiasm for developers (and accompanying antagonism toward those who are skeptical of developers), whose job is not actually to make the city any better or worse but to make a buck, and whatever that means for the rest of the city is what it is; the gross just shrugging acceptance that the landlord "has a right to evict you" because "you agreed in the lease," so whatever, I guess you're evicted now, sorry!; and the uninterrogated expectation that we can simply build our way out of the housing crisis and "leverage the market," though it is not actually the purpose of the market to ensure that housing is affordable or that any other social goal is met and it is unreasonable to expect the market to do those things -- these are the points that deserve to be called out.
I'm not by any means advocating NIMBYism. At base the issue truly is that we have x number of housing units and y number of people who need to live somewhere and y is >>>> x. But simply building up to x = y isn't going to fix the problem if you are not building the right x. I don't get from the
KCTenants housing platform that they are necessarily advocating NIMBYism either (maybe in practice they are, in which case, I don't agree with them on that point), but the housing crisis is ultimately going to require government intervention to resolve, if for no other reason than that it's not profitable for developers to build affordable housing, and the current model of requiring them to throw a few "affordable" units in their otherwise market-rate developments is obviously not doing the trick. I think many of the planks in their platform -- public purchase, public housing, net gain requirement, etc -- are more promising than "leveraging the free market." They would require an investment that the government currently doesn't seem prepared to make, but the point of activism is to push the government on things it doesn't want to do. More fundamentally, it would be great if we could separate the basic necessity of housing from a store and source of wealth, which is the real root of the whole problem, but that's thornier, and no, not something the mayor can do anything about.
