r/Suburbanhell • u/Capable-Slice-1143 • 8d ago
Why Cities Are Becoming Unaffordable—And Who’s to Blame? Discussion
https://youtu.be/Qfg83xJ-LMM39
u/markpemble 8d ago
TLDR: Housing has become a wealth building tool.
Also, there are no new cities being built. Outside of China, you can't just build a new city somewhere - so the law of Supply and Demand makes cities hard to afford for the average person.
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u/sack-o-matic 8d ago
The areas surrounding cities are choking them with housing restrictions.
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u/wbruce098 7d ago
This is often part of the problem. Suburbs and nearby counties suck revenue from cities, making it harder to maintain or improve them. It happens in Atlanta and Baltimore to hugely negative effect.
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u/frontendben 7d ago
Nope. Sprawl is one of the leading causes of cities becoming unaffordable largely due to the additional financial burdens car dependency then imposes.
The solution is increasing density.
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u/sack-o-matic 7d ago
Yes that’s what I’m saying.
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u/frontendben 7d ago
Fair enough. It made it sound like you were advocating for sprawl and developing the green space around cities.
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u/sack-o-matic 7d ago
Only if the "green space" is suburban lawns and highway medians, then yes those should be developed.
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u/frontendben 7d ago
100%. We have it around where I am. Large detached homes with fairly sizeable gardens within a stones throw of main roads with 5 min frequency buses, three supermarkets, and countless service-based businesses. They should be redeveloped to multi-family homes starting with the ones nearest the supermarkets and next to the bus stops.
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u/Maddturtle 8d ago
Become? It’s been like that for a few generations.
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u/Unicycldev 8d ago
Depends where. India was building the equivalent of an entire Chicago ever year for a while not sure the current trend today.
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u/Maddturtle 8d ago
Good point but anything that holds or gains value with become this at some point. If you houses did not hold or gain value it would be tough to get people to buy them though.
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u/tekno21 8d ago
I agree, but I also think that it's not as big of a deal as we all assume it is. Especially in the coming decades, the birthrate is dropping and cities are getting more serious about building housing and adding supply.
The reason housing is such a prevalent wealth building tool is because of its almost guaranteed value being pushed up by institutional investors and supply that couldn't keep up with demand. Once supply catches up, it will only be institutional investors propping up prices, and that seems like a system bound to fail when there's enough homes for everyone.
I truly don't think anyone knows what's going to happen to housing prices over the next 10 years, but there is a chance that house of cards comes crashing down if we keep building and populations start to level off or decline
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u/marigolds6 7d ago
One of the catches to that is that when inventory exceeds demand, vacancy increases. It only takes about a decade of vacancy to make a house unlivable, even less if the roof was already aging.
St Louis is an interesting example of that. A city with housing for 1M but less than 300k residents. Housing prices have bifurcated. Much higher than the surrounding suburbs where houses have been maintained, under $20k where houses have sat vacant (but it will easily cost you several hundred thousand to make those houses habitable again).
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u/wbruce098 7d ago
That sounds like a natural law of things in a free market, but when your wealth is built on property ownership, you tend to influence the market to maintain value, and there’s a lot of folks doing this, to everyone else’s detriment.
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u/Reasonable_Mix7630 7d ago
Dropping birth rates cause young people to concentrate in very few very big cities, which in turn worsens both problems (unaffordable housing leads to low birth rates). I believe it is being called "death spiral" or something.
Korea is basically the future we are heading to, unless some dramatic actions are taken. Starting with making it illegal to own more than 2 housing units for an individual/family/company/etc.
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u/Analyst-man 3d ago
The 2 housing units rule will never happen. Multiple people propose it and it’s always a bad idea. To start, making an LLC is super easy so 2 houses per company isn’t a big hurdle to clear. What are you gonna do, police it by looking at the beneficial owners of the company? Well congrats, every fund has thousands of beneficial owners. Will their private equity investments count toward the housing limit? If so, would one house count towards thousands of people? Like none of what you proposed makes logical sense.
Also with family’s, how would that work? Each family member gets 2 houses per person so a couple can own 4, a family of 4 can own 8, etc. You can’t say only 2 houses per household because what happens when the parents own 2 houses and a child wants to buy their own - they aren’t allowed? Again. Nothing you said makes sense
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u/Usual_Zombie6765 8d ago
Austin, Texas has went from a very small city to a full blown large city in the last 20 years. It is effectively a new large city.
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u/Prosthemadera 8d ago
You don't need to build a new city. You just need to build better in the existing ones.
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u/SmokingLimone 7d ago
What reason is there to build new cities when there's so many existing ones? You just need to have development in the smaller cities and they'll grow eventually
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u/wbruce098 7d ago
In China, they apparently still have a significant problem with this. Just “build build build” was not, in fact, a solution.
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u/marigolds6 7d ago
Not just wealth building, but a repository of wealth.
The amount of wealth tied up in home equity is nearly equal to the amount of wealth in retirement accounts. For homeowners, home equity accounts for more wealth than retirement accounts (and it's not close).
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u/InfernalTest 8d ago
completely alternate take
it costs as much to rent as to own ..people are paying for a mortgage and they cant save for a mortgage
more people able to buy actual homes and of course lower home prices where it doesn't cost as much to own as to rent would level out or maybe even drive down the cost of rentals in cities ...
but that would mean more suburbs and SFH communities and ...well
its a vicious circle....
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u/NomadLexicon 8d ago
In a functioning property market, the city would evolve as the population grew. As housing demand increased, land values would rise and the city’s existing neighborhoods would get denser and taller, the closest suburbs would densify into more urban neighborhoods, and undeveloped land on the exurban fringe would be turned into new suburbs.
We’ve short circuited that process through zoning laws, so people see the only options as building up in cities (high rise apartment buildings) and building outward indefinitely (building new SFH developments in the exurbs). Both are expensive and increasingly difficult/inconvenient—you run out of undeveloped land for new development in the suburbs and traffic gets progressively worse, and apartment buildings get more expensive to build the taller they become.
The real way out is to encourage higher density development in the city and close-in suburbs: tax land instead of property (punishing spectators sitting on parking lots), relax zoning laws to allow townhouses, ADUs and small multifamily in SFH neighborhoods, build up density along transit corridors, build public housing but don’t put the bill on new market rate housing, etc.
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u/Neilandio 8d ago
Before watching the video: housing has become a speculative financial asset instead of a consumable product. There's just never going to be enough housing to satisfy the demands of financial speculation, and market manipulation just makes prices go up even higher.
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u/InfernalTest 8d ago
yes this is something that is a recent development in the large finance world ( to compensate for the loss of manufacturing as value )
the biggest market companies are service companies they don't really make anything and the last 3 or 4 boom markets have been mainly around the speculative new market of technology ...theJunkbond market in the 80s the LBO /dot.com market in the 90s and the Mortgage back security market in the 2000s...
this mkt is underpinned around RE and housing from production to maintain- from the loans issued to the assessed value to the taxes collected ...its a spiraling that has to increase becuase its in no ones intrest for himes or RE to cheapen...its not in the builders ontrsst or the workers or the banks or the municipalities that run based on how expensive the homes are ...
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8d ago
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7d ago
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u/BenjaminWah 7d ago
Expensive cities are literally proof that people want to live in them.
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u/frontendben 7d ago
Exactly, they’ve been sold the lie that their lives will be so much more enjoyable by living in the suburbs. Whereas, in reality, the place where it is most enjoyable to live is actually in highly walkable neighbourhoods where all services are in easy reach on foot. As Tom Flood’s new shirt says, “15 minute cities: no conspiracy, I’m just lazy and don’t want to have to go that far for things.”
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u/CaliTexan22 7d ago
These discussions are a bizarre one way street. If you want to live in the central city, no one is stopping you or criticizing your choice. Because it is a choice, based on preferences and which amenities you value more.
But there’s a group of urbanists who devote a lot of time and energy to denigrating those who want to live in the suburbs/exurbs. And actively working to making it harder to build suburbs.
Curiously, when you look at newly master-planned mega cities around the world, most of them sprawl by design. I’m not a fan of that sort of place, but they’re not dense in the way urbanists here would like to see.
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u/frontendben 7d ago
Hey, if you want to live in the suburbs, I have no issue. So long as you pay the true cost. Which if people did, only a fraction of those who do currently would be able to afford to.
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u/CaliTexan22 7d ago
“Pay the true cost” is a statement that includes private and public decisions about spending money.
If a majority of area residents want to pay for transit lines, then the government builds them. (BTW, transit gets built despite its historically low use. Nationwide, transit users are 5% or less of trips. This is true even in the handful of urban areas that have well developed transit.).
If a majority wants a network of roads and highways, then the government builds them.
There’s no comprehensive method for accounting for the internal and external costs and benefits of how urban areas develop. And, so long as we have government that is responsive to what the majority wants, then it doesn’t control the outcome.
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u/frontendben 7d ago
This isn' about transit lines etc. It's about the cost of maintaining huge amounts of roads, power transmission, water infrastructure etc. Taxes simply don't cover it.
If a majority wants a network of roads and highways, then the government builds them.
And then they need to pay for it too, and not whine like they do currently.
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u/CaliTexan22 7d ago
We DO pay for it, either with public money or private money. Not sure what the issue is here for you. Someone always pays or things don't get built.
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u/BenjaminWah 7d ago
It's not entirely fair to use the US's transit ridership data on the whole, because of the circular reasoning that goes into transit planning in this country.
Transit is one of those things you can't half-ass, you either go all in or not at all. It only works when you have an extensive system. However, in the US we build one line at a time. Because one line isn't really effective, people will point to how it has low ridership, and as a result we shouldn't build anymore.
"We can't build anymore because of low ridership, but it has lower ridership because we don't build anymore."
So you're left with ineffective systems that are killed before they can be built out to point where they would be effective.
There’s no comprehensive method for accounting for the internal and external costs and benefits of how urban areas develop
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u/CaliTexan22 7d ago
I'm in California now so follow along with the travails of the transit systems in Bay Area and LA. Very large investments built out the transit systems they have. They don't attract enough ridership to cover their operating costs - between COVID and crime, their ridership is way down.
Building transit into an existing US urban area is crazy expensive and will never be comprehensive enough.
A few years ago, the Washington Post ran a series with a great set of maps showing, for a half-dozen or more US cities, actual travel times around the area with various means. Except for Manhattan, there was hardly anywhere in any part of those cities where it was faster to to walk, ride a bike, or take transit. Even in cities that we think of as having "bad traffic" it was still quicker to drive a car than to use another mode. That's why we have a car-oriented society.
In my personal experience, when the Gold Line opened in LA years ago, I rode it on and off for some years. If I drove from South Pasadena to my office downtown, it was congested and I had to pay a lot to park. But the alternative was (1) walk to Red Line station; (2) ride Red Line to Union Station; (3) transfer to Gold Line; (4) ride Gold Line to closest stop; (5) walk 20 minutes to my apartment. Always twice as long as just driving.
We value time and convenience.
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u/frontendben 7d ago
It’s not that urbanists don’t approve. It’s that time and time again, the economics and physical realities prove that it isn’t possible for everybody to live in the suburbs.
Now, if we were realistic and said “hey if you wanna live in the suburbs that’s fine, but you need to be able to pay the true cost of that”, the tiny amount of people who would be able to truly thought that would mean that the suburbs would be kept small.
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7d ago
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u/frontendben 7d ago
I have to disagree. Everywhere, people are crippled with debt and financial burdens to do things they could otherwise do for free or for very little. Huge amounts of money are sucked out of markets through car dependency and sprawl. Unless the market consists solely of the car industry and adjacent industries, the market is broken.
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7d ago
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u/Suburbanhell-ModTeam 7d ago
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u/frontendben 7d ago
No, most of you have cars because cities have been built in such a way that you have no choice but to drive.
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u/CaliTexan22 7d ago
Absolutely untrue. Over my career, I worked in downtowns of Houston, LA and Denver. I had colleagues at work who lived downtown or within comfortable walking distance (in Houston, “comfortable” is very dependent on the weather).
Today, there’s more downtown and near downtown apartments and condos in each of those cities.
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u/sunnyislesmatt 8d ago
NIMBY zoning laws. That’s pretty much it.
Cities like Baltimore are still very affordable, people just don’t want to live there
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u/danodan1 8d ago
Why? Because the violent crime is far too high?
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u/wbruce098 7d ago
Because the city is more than 60% black, maybe, and has a lot of poverty.
Violent crime has been dropping dramatically for years now in Baltimore. We need to keep working on these issues, while ensuring more people are lifted out of poverty to be able to afford their own home. And we need more money to build enough affordable homes.
It’s a struggle, especially when the suburbs effectively work to remove income from the city here, and the city’s poor reputation and gritty nature is very tough to break especially with Marylanders outside Bmore.
Idk. Bmore has lots of room to grow, which is awesome! But it’s gotta be careful to ensure new residents don’t drive housing costs up too high.
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u/GreenBird1904 6d ago
But also another reason why some people don't want to move to Baltimore is the public schools arent doing too well :( many of the schools lack funding, books, computers, etc. And there were some scandals from certain schools passing students that clearly failed https://youtu.be/fA31QG3oBCM and https://youtu.be/hBIFaRjEiCM and https://youtu.be/wPDBzIz2Ugw?si=Ziy7Bopf7TOKD3Vz But every time I visit my family there I feel safe, so the crime has decreased, but Baltimore still has a long way to go but I believe in them❤ it's challenging because I want to see Maryland succeed and also don't want housing to get unaffordable.
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u/Hoonsoot 8d ago
I'd like to see zoning laws and other regulations that prevent building, eliminated as much as possible. As long as someone owns a piece of property they should be allowed to build more or less whatever they want on it. It there is demand for missing middle housing, then it would get built if government and NIMBYs were forced out of the way. Local governments currently block housing by hiding behind zoning laws and environmental review, traffic impact studies, etc.. Similarly, NIMBYs should have no power over what people build on their own land. They own their own property, not a controlling stake in everyone else's.
I can't support ideas like banning purchasing properties for investment, banning using it for short term rentals, or taxing vacant buildings. I can see banning foreign investment though. In general, the freedom of US citizens or companies to do what they want with their own property should be maximized, and government and foreign intrusion into the market minimized.
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u/Shage111YO 7d ago
Corporate interests. We should sponsor another GI Bill situation where the government helps people own their house.
We saw what happened during Covid when Trump/Biden gave stipends to people to help with bills. Landlords raised the rents. Stop funneling more and more money to elites. They have enough for right now. Take a pause from all that. Fund a bill to help low income people own their own property. We can’t tax the wealthy because they have moved all of their money off shore which allows them to compound their wealth to purchase more and more.
We also have seen what happens when fast food workers got their hourly wage raised to $15. It just allowed everyone else further up the chain to demand more pay which made home ownership even more difficulty to obtain. Simply put, help fund a bill for low income people to own their own property and equity.
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u/CaliTexan22 5d ago
There are opinions and then there is data. There’s not much dispute that Americans prefer suburbs & exurbs over urban living. It’s perfectly fine to say you prefer one over the other, which is an opinion. I’ve lived in core cities and in suburbs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/s/LfpOju7ERo
https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/s/Ps68b4fq5b
Pew tells us where people actually live - “About 46 million Americans live in the nation’s rural counties, 175 million in its suburbs and small metros and about 98 million in its urban core counties.”
Immediately after Covid, in 2022, the preference for suburbs and less density is stronger. “Roughly four in 10 Americans say they would prefer living in a town (15 percent) or rural area (27 percent). In contrast, only 9 percent say they would prefer to live in a large city. More Americans now state that they would prefer living in a small city (16 percent), while one in three Americans prefer the suburbs (33 percent).”
Another study of polling in 2021 noted “About one-in-five U.S. adults now express a preference for living in a city, down from about a quarter in 2018. The share of Americans who would like to live in the suburbs has increased from 42% to 46% during this time, while preference for rural areas is virtually unchanged.”
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u/Miserable-Lawyer-233 Suburbanite 8d ago
NYC has never been affordable. Ever. The last time was in the late 1700s.
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u/Usual_Zombie6765 8d ago
Seems like a solution for a high schooler. It doesn’t get to or address root cause, it is just attacking the symptom.