Poll of the Day > The Cost of Living Keeps Rising

(+) Yeah! (+)

Crazy, huh?

Sounds like a broken promise to me.

Zora_Prince posted...

Yep. Even when the whole supply chain issue was resolved, the prices didn't go down.

I wonder if this is the case for the Switch 1 going up in price. I don't doubt the tariffs are a factor but still wonder if it's also a convenient excuse for greedflation.

Nintendo was already planning on raising the price.

They used the tariffs as an excuse but they had already raised prices before Trump was even elected.

Revelation34 posted...

Nintendo was already planning on raising the price.

They used the tariffs as an excuse but they had already raised prices before Trump was even elected.

source?

ooger posted...

source?

Tears of the Kingdom price.

Revelation34 posted...

Tears of the Kingdom price.

oh, so you don't have one and are talking out your butt, as per usual.

ooger posted...

oh, so you don't have one and are talking out your butt, as per usual.

Nah it's a fact.

Revelation34 posted...

Nah it's a fact.

Yet you have no source.

ooger posted...

oh, so you don't have one and are talking out your butt, as per usual.

Its funny because hes usually the fuckin goof responding with Citation needed.

ooger posted...

Yet you have no source.

I already gave it.

Revelation34 posted...

Tears of the Kingdom price.

Making one game that was in development for an exceptionally long time more expensive is not "raising prices." It's raising one price. I'm sure they'd had $70 as the norm for Switch 2 games in mind well before it actually came out, in line with what's become the norm for AAA games (a norm Nintendo did not establish, despite your bizarre insistence in other discussions that TotK was the first $70 game), but TotK was not the start of a trend, aside from perhaps the trend of "Most of our games will be $70 but the occasional one will be higher if we feel we can justify it."

I cant believe they increased the cost of the switch lol. Damn thing is 8 year old

Revelation34 posted...

I already gave it.

No, you gave your speculation. That is not a source.

teddy241 posted...

I cant believe they increased the cost of the switch lol. Damn thing is 8 year old

Tbf, it sounds like a Switch 2 cost increase is also on the table.

Tariffs, baby.

teddy241 posted...

I cant believe they increased the cost of the switch lol. Damn thing is 8 year old

As much as it's typical for systems to drop in price over time, the unfortunate reality of the last 8 years is that it simply hasn't gotten cheaper to make them. Covid and the crypto boom inflated the prices of electronic components quite dramatically, which has offset the price drops we'd usually see over such a period, and ongoing inflation issues and now tariffs mean the industry really hasn't been able to recover from that. I'm sure there's more than a little corporate greed factoring into it, but it also wouldn't surprise me if continuing to sell the Switch at its old price would be an actual loss for Nintendo now and not just less profit than they want.

adjl posted...

crypto boom

I've heard of the environmental damage they're doing for this scam. No surprise they're increasing the price of electronics.

Zora_Prince posted...

I've heard of the environmental damage they're doing for this scam. No surprise they're increasing the price of electronics.

That's largely passed now because you can no longer make money as readily by mining, but for a while around 2018-19 it was almost impossible to buy a decent GPU for MSRP because they were getting snapped up for mining rigs. That was compounded when something or other happened in 2020 that introduced a bunch of supply issues, but died down as those supply issues gradually got resolved (but were replaced with inflation and now tariff issues that have kept prices relatively high).

Console manufacturers were able to weather the storm better than many because they had supply contracts already in place for components, so they wouldn't have felt the full magnitude of the price swings retail customers did, but there are limits to that. We're now seeing those limits, in the form of the Switch 2 being so much more expensive than the Switch 1 and a need to increase the Switch's price 8 years after launch.

I am very smart with my finances, and know how to live within my means. So yes. I am keeping up just fine.

But I do see how corrupt the whole system is.

A person's rent/mortgage should NOT be anywhere even CLOSE to 50% of their monthly fucking income. It's absurd.

I personally know several people who were evicted from their homes because the landlords got greedy and decided to triple their rent, knowing these out-of-state construction workers who recently got a contract with the county would soon be moving in and would have no problem paying the higher rates.

It was fucking evil.

My grandfather bought a house, a boat with trailer, and regularly bought new cars, while he was in the Marine Corps. Then he went to college and got a Bachelor's degree in accounting.

His wife didn't have to work. He was able to afford all these things on sergeant's (and later warrant officer/chief warrant officer's) pay.

He bought his house in 1955, and I believe he was a staff sergeant at the time. E-6 with over 8 years service made $222 per month in 1955.

GreenKnight127 posted...

I personally know several people who were evicted from their homes because the landlords got greedy and decided to triple their rent, knowing these out-of-state construction workers who recently got a contract with the county would soon be moving in and would have no problem paying the higher rates.

I feel some details are missing. Were they actually evicted? Or simply not renewed?

You can't just evict someone because you want a new tenant.

captpackrat posted...

My grandfather bought a house, a boat with trailer, and regularly bought new cars, while he was in the Marine Corps. Then he went to college and got a Bachelor's degree in accounting.

His wife didn't have to work. He was able to afford all these things on sergeant's (and later warrant officer/chief warrant officer's) pay.

He bought his house in 1955, and I believe he was a staff sergeant at the time. E-6 with over 8 years service made $222 per month in 1955.

Yeah. Food was much cheaper back then too.

Agreed. I compare it to the obesity epidemic. Yes, you one is denying that personal responsibility is a factor, but when 1/8th of the human population is now obese and 50% of the world is expected to be obese by 2050 at the current rate, this clearly isn't a problem of "People have just gotten lazy and are making bad choices" and is an indication of a systemic issue.

It's demoralizing. I feel like in the past decade, all of my idealism and optimism has been shattered. Things like the internet that were supposed to revolutionize society for the better is now used as an effective weapon. I'm fortunate enough to be doing OK (Bought a Condo a year ago, have a sizable savings, and don't struggle to pay bills) but am worried about the future of the world.

Zora_Prince posted...

Agreed. I compare it to the obesity epidemic. Yes, you one is denying that personal responsibility is a factor, but when 1/8th of the human population is now obese and 50% of the world is expected to be obese by 2050 at the current rate, this clearly isn't a problem of "People have just gotten lazy and are making bad choices" and is an indication of a systemic issue.

It's demoralizing. I feel like in the past decade, all of my idealism and optimism has been shattered. Things like the internet that were supposed to revolutionize society for the better is now used as an effective weapon. I'm fortunate enough to be doing OK (Bought a Condo a year ago, have a sizable savings, and don't struggle to pay bills) but am worried about the future of the world.

Hyper-individualism not only makes it much harder for people to perceive systemic issues, but it also makes it much harder to build meaningful community i.e. the very thing that enables ameliorating or challenging systemic problems.

True community is not quid quo pro- you just do something or give something because you can and it's needed/wanted.

Clench281 posted...

I feel some details are missing. Were they actually evicted? Or simply not renewed?

You can't just evict someone because you want a new tenant.

Presumably, that's using "evict" in the colloquial sense of "made to leave against their will" and not the legal sense of "terminated the lease prematurely on a legally approved basis." Leaving because your rent got tripled is not legally an eviction, but in terms of the impact on you as a tenant, that distinction is largely meaningless (aside from not having a formal eviction tied to your name making future renting difficult).

Well, you can plan around your lease renewal ahead of time so there's no immediate surprises. Been a renter my whole life and if the price goes up at your place, or there are cheaper/more optimal choices, you want to be ready to vote with your feet and wallet.

The fact that the asking rate for rent went up so much clearly shows there isn't enough housing in the location, so getting people working construction into the area is kind of the antidote to ever-increasing prices

Clench281 posted...

Been a renter my whole life and if the price goes up at your place, or there are cheaper/more optimal choices, you want to be ready to vote with your feet and wallet.

Wanting to be ready to vote with your wallet and actually being able to do so are two very, very different things, especially when the market as a whole has been grossly inflated by rampant greed. Pretty much nobody can actually prepare for having their rent triple, if that's even remotely reflective of the local renting market. "Preparing" for that means planning to move to an entirely different area, which is massively disruptive to pretty much every aspect of one's life, likely means looking for a new job (which may or may not exist in one's field in cheaper areas), and any savings in rent are likely to be significantly offset by increases in commuting costs (especially in the US, where relying on walking/biking/transit is outright impossible in many areas). That's not a solution, and the fact that it's even considered to be a viable workaround illustrates just how bad the problem is.

Clench281 posted...

The fact that the asking rate for rent went up so much clearly shows there isn't enough housing in the location, so getting people working construction into the area is kind of the antidote to ever-increasing prices

It's a prerequisite, but it doesn't exactly solve the problem for people that just had their cost of living explode overnight. "I know you're staring down the barrel of homelessness right now, but in 5-10 years the new construction that's coming will mean there'll be a bunch of new housing available that you still won't be able to afford because the new stuff is almost exclusively catering to wealthy people looking to move into the area and does nothing to address the housing needs of locals" isn't exactly comforting.

The housing crisis is a product of much more than just "we need to build more housing." Yes, that's part of it, and zoning to allow housing to be built more densely and efficiently is critical to achieve that goal, but in the interim there's a pressing need to limit the power landlords have to screw over their tenants and to prevent the existing supply of housing from being eroded by things like speculators and wannabe hoteliers.

My rent went from:

450 to 750 to 950 to 1150 in 5 years time

adjl posted...

in the interim there's a pressing need to limit the power landlords have to screw over their tenants and to prevent the existing supply of housing from being eroded by things like speculators and wannabe hoteliers.

In what, the form of rent control? Which certainly does help the individual(s) currently living in any effected units, at the cost of anyone else who also would want to be there, worsening equality overall. It undeniably, irrevocably, decreases housing efficiency in the short term (more incentive to stay put even if moving to a larger or smaller would make more sense, i.e. less incentive for renters to properly sort themselves into the housing) and decreases supply in the long term (less incentive to build housing in an area that's going to be rent controlled).

Music_Rock_Cat posted...

My rent went from:

450 to 750 to 950 to 1150 in 5 years time

Jesus Christ. Was the $450 one a spare bedroom in some old lady's house or something? Where the hell were you able to find something that cheap? What year was that?

Was this increase for the same place? Or did you move to better places that justified the increase?

Clench281 posted...

It undeniably, irrevocably, decreases housing efficiency in the short term (more incentive to stay put even if moving to a larger or smaller would make more sense, i.e. less incentive for renters to properly sort themselves into the housing)

Generally speaking, renters already "properly sorted themselves into the housing" (which, as a concept, is a weird combination of dictatorial paternalism and anarchocapitalism) when they signed the lease in the first place. People don't choose to spend more than they need to if they have the choice. The idea that people need to be forcibly moved into smaller apartments when richer people want to move into their city would be outright dystopian if it were fictional.

Clench281 posted...

and decreases supply in the long term (less incentive to build housing in an area that's going to be rent controlled).

Which is why you rent control everything. You don't need to worry about rent control disincentivizing development in one area if every area is equally disincentivized. It's far from impossible to make money off of a development in a rent controlled area, developers just don't make as much. By taking away the opportunity to make extra money elsewhere, they can make do with making slightly less.

Clench281 posted...

Which certainly does help the individual(s) currently living in any effected units, at the cost of anyone else who also would want to be there, worsening equality overall.

I'm generally more concerned about maintaining a stable life for people currently living in an area than for creating opportunities for wealthier people to move in. This isn't like we're talking about limiting opportunities for disadvantaged people to move somewhere to make a better life. If we're specifically looking at what uncapping rent allows in terms of migration to an area, it's overwhelmingly going to be people that are already doing well.

Clench281 posted...

In what, the form of rent control?

For the sake of short-term stability, yeah, but long-term rent control doesn't solve the core problems of a lack of housing. That, as I alluded, is going to have to involve killing the residential real estate speculation that entails multibillion dollar corporations engineering housing crises for fun and profit, as well as killing the short-term rentals that have resulted in a substantial amount of residential-zoned property evaporating from the housing market. Building more is still necessary, but vacancy rates being as low as they are is not just a matter of a lack of development interest. They're a product of a substantial number of viable homes being held off of the market for the financial gain of the owner.

It seems you either don't know how rent control actually functions, or you're arguing based on what you want it to be, instead of what it actually is. Because it irrefutably does discourage people from sorting into housing efficiently. What someone is willing to pay for rent should reflect how much a person values what that rental gets them. This value is distorted by rent control and leads to ineffective use of housing stock. As I said, this applies during time to renew a controlled lease or to move. A family of 5 has all of their children move out, but the unit is rent controlled? No point ever downsizing even if they have little use for the two spare rooms, because changing to a smaller unit will end up costing more for them as new tenancy lets a new rent level be set. A young couple starts having children? They decide not to move from their rent controlled 1 bedroom place even though they could use more space. A person gets a new job that they would otherwise move closer to, reducing their commute, but they don't want to move and lose a rent controlled unit. These distortions are widespread.

"Rent control everything" is nonsensical. If everything in a market is rent controlled, then everyone pulls out of the market and fewer units will be available to renters, and I'm sure even you will agree what happens to price of a good when supply drops. This is why new developments are exempted: nothing would be built otherwise.

Clench281 posted...

It seems you either don't know how rent control actually functions, or you're arguing based on what you want it to be, instead of what it actually is. Because it irrefutably does discourage people from sorting into housing efficiently. What someone is willing to pay for rent should reflect how much a person values what that rental gets them. This value is distorted by rent control and leads to ineffective use of housing stock. As I said, this applies during time to renew a controlled lease or to move. A family of 5 has all of their children move out, but the unit is rent controlled? No point ever downsizing even if they have little use for the two spare rooms, because changing to a smaller unit will end up costing more for them as new tenancy lets a new rent level be set. A young couple starts having children? They decide not to move from their rent controlled 1 bedroom place even though they could use more space. A person gets a new job that they would otherwise move closer to, reducing their commute, but they don't want to move and lose a rent controlled unit. These distortions are widespread.

"Rent control everything" is nonsensical. If everything in a market is rent controlled, then everyone pulls out of the market and fewer units will be available to renters, and I'm sure even you will agree what happens to price of a good when supply drops. This is why new developments are exempted: nothing would be built otherwise.

Your argument might hold water if the market actually did efficiently "sort" people- whatever you mean by that. The problem is that it's sorting low-income renters into the street because the profit margins are so much better when you're renting a "luxury" apartment to middle-to-upper class people, or simply posting a residential space on AirBnB or whatever. The market is clearly not meeting the needs of consumers- solely its need for ever-increasing profit margins.

That's if you even accept the idea that housing ought to be a commodity, which I, personally, do not. If it's "inefficient" to make sure everyone has housing, then I am 1000% in favor of an inefficient housing market.

adjl posted...

Which is why you rent control everything. You don't need to worry about rent control disincentivizing development in one area if every area is equally disincentivized. It's far from impossible to make money off of a development in a rent controlled area, developers just don't make as much. By taking away the opportunity to make extra money elsewhere, they can make do with making slightly less.

This is the most out-of-touch leftist take I've seen since BBT unironically suggested using Soviet style government owned, centrally assigned housing as a solution.

No, it is not possible to build new rent-controlled housing without massive subsidies. Usually, those subsidies come from building an 80-20 mix of market rate and "affordable" housing as part of a new development. An alternative might be the government funding new construction, until you realize that government housing managers are the worst slum lords on the planet. The typical example is the NYC Housing Authority, which is the largest landlord in the city and by far the worst slumlord in the city by every conceivable metric.

adjl posted...

For the sake of short-term stability, yeah, but long-term rent control doesn't solve the core problems of a lack of housing. That, as I alluded, is going to have to involve killing the residential real estate speculation that entails multibillion dollar corporations engineering housing crises for fun and profit, as well as killing the short-term rentals that have resulted in a substantial amount of residential-zoned property evaporating from the housing market. Building more is still necessary, but vacancy rates being as low as they are is not just a matter of a lack of development interest. They're a product of a substantial number of viable homes being held off of the market for the financial gain of the owner.

This is two different takes, the first one another out-of-touch leftist take and the other legitimate. The share of housing units owned by institutional investors is less than 4% of the total; significant but not nearly enough to engineer a housing shortage. That's the sort of take that sounds good to the uninformed but is essentially dishonest.

The short term rental issue is more significant - about four times as many units are used in STR than are owned by institutional investors (defined as those that own 100+ properties). Keep in mind that those numbers will be skewed toward apartments in the STR market rather than stand-alone houses, while the institutional investor number will be skewed toward stand-alone houses since apartment buildings count as 1 property regardless of the number of units.

But again, NYC effectively banned STRs about a year ago and there hasn't been noticeable change in the rental market as a result. Nearly all the talking points you see about STRs ruining the rental market are ultimately funded by hotel industry groups, for fairly obvious reasons. Can it have an effect? Sure. But that effect is not nearly as large as you might think.

Kallainanna posted...

If it's "inefficient" to make sure everyone has housing, then I am 1000% in favor of an inefficient housing market.

Every form of inefficiency has a cost, and someone is going to have to pay it. From your take I'm guessing your answer to that question is "not me, so I don't care".

Clench281 posted...

so getting people working construction into the area is kind of the antidote to ever-increasing prices

Nah this is just you supporting landlords raising prices massively.

Clench281 posted...

These distortions are widespread.

The thing is, most lease renewals don't conveniently coincide with life changes that would promote moving. Most lease renewals happen when the tenants' housing needs are roughly the same as they were the previous term. In the absence of both rent control and an adequate supply of housing, that family of 5 got priced out of the city - 3-bedroom or 1-bedroom - well before the kids all moved out and they started to look at downsizing. We're not talking about "I pay $1200 a month for a rent-controlled 3-bedroom and don't want to pay the same for a new lease on a 1-bedroom because that's silly," we're talking about "I pay $1200 a month for a rent-controlled 3-bedroom because $1200 a month is all I can afford to pay on housing and I'd have to move to another state to find anything under $1600, regardless of how appropriate it is for my needs."

Again, it's a question of short-term stability, not a long-term solution to a supply problem. Properly configured, rent control allows rents to rise as costs do (allowing landlords to see a consistent return on their investment), but smooths out spikes in demand that might otherwise see people priced out of their homes, which are in most cases just as well-suited for their needs as they were when they started renting them. Pricing them out is not "sorting people into appropriate housing," it's "sorting people into housing that richer people want less."

You've expressed before that home ownership shouldn't be treated as the holy grail of living situations because it's what's driven the suburban sprawl that's creating so many problems, and I don't entirely disagree, but the current state of renting is a huge part of why that attitude exists. As it stands, renting is not a stable situation for most renters. Home ownership offers an escape from that instability because your living situation isn't entirely in the hands of somebody that might decide they want to charge more than you can afford just because they can. Renting can only be a stable option if the landlord can't jack up your rent in an act of capricious greed. In an ideal world, that would be because the market wouldn't support it (i.e. if they increase rent too much, you can find somewhere comparable for a lower price and they won't be able to get somebody else in at a higher price than what you were paying, effectively the "vote with your wallet" to which you previously alluded). In the real world, however, housing supply is usually much slower to increase than housing demand, so that stability must be artificially imposed to some degree or another.

Clench281 posted...

"Rent control everything" is nonsensical. If everything in a market is rent controlled, then everyone pulls out of the market and fewer units will be available to renters, and I'm sure even you will agree what happens to price of a good when supply drops. This is why new developments are exempted: nothing would be built otherwise.

If a developer's got a choice between an expected profit of $10 million and an expected profit of $20 million, obviously they're going to choose the latter. If a developer's got a choice between an expected profit of $10 million or just not doing anything at all, they're going to choose the $10 million. Developers aren't going to stop making any money at all just because they can't make all the money.

To be clear, I don't mean "rent control everything in one city and hope for the best." I mean everything. If you eliminate all uncontrolled alternatives, there's no longer a need to compete with them.

willythemailboy posted...

No, it is not possible to build new rent-controlled housing without massive subsidies.

It is if the rent control reflects the actual year-over-year increases in the costs of providing housing (which, incidentally, can be expected to be moderated if there are fewer opportunities to make enormous amounts of money with uncontrolled rent, because those charging those costs can only charge what the market can bear and the market can't bear as much if it's been cooled off). The initial rent in a new build is not set based on "we'll have to triple this in two years to ever turn a profit," it's set according to what's needed to turn a profit in the current market. Jacking up the rent that dramatically is rarely a matter of reflecting increased costs so much as it's a matter of seizing an opportunity the market has created to make even more money.

willythemailboy posted...

The share of housing units owned by institutional investors is less than 4% of the total; significant but not nearly enough to engineer a housing shortage.

4% is massive when the typical target for a healthy vacancy rate is 3-5% and so many cities are struggling to break 1%. That is, in fact, single-handedly the difference between the crisis level at which many cities currently sit and what's needed to be healthy. In practice, of course, that's an average and doesn't necessarily mean those properties are in areas that are in crisis, but given that areas that are in crisis are generally ones where property values are increasing the most rapidly, I'd actually expect a greater proportion of that to be in those crisis zones than elsewhere. Regardless, freeing those up for habitation would absolutely make a significant difference.

willythemailboy posted...

The short term rental issue is more significant - about four times as many units are used in STR than are owned by institutional investors (defined as those that own 100+ properties).

So between the two of them that's ~20% of available housing (ignoring your clarification that - while meaningful - is difficult to calculate and doesn't impact the ultimate point) tied up in non-housing purposes.

willythemailboy posted...

But again, NYC effectively banned STRs about a year ago and there hasn't been noticeable change in the rental market as a result.

By and large, anti-STR measures have been notoriously toothless. Either they aren't enforced, they're enforced in the form of a fine that's easily offset by raising prices a bit, or they haven't even figured out how to track them accurately enough to enforce them.

My inclination is to go nuclear: Every residentially-zoned property must have a long-term resident registered as living in it within six months of purchase, and cannot go more than six months without a registered long-term resident unless a clear explanation is provided for the vacancy (such as ongoing construction for which there is a definite plan and concrete timetable). If this condition is not met, the property is expropriated, sold for current market value, and the proceeds of that sale go to the previous owner. The numbers obviously need some tweaks (possibly scaling based on local vacancy rate), but the bottom line is to force residential properties to be used for residing.

GreenKnight127 posted...

Jesus Christ. Was the $450 one a spare bedroom in some old lady's house or something? Where the hell were you able to find something that cheap? What year was that?

Was this increase for the same place? Or did you move to better places that justified the increase?

Yep same place. 450 for a two bedroom in 2002 now 1150 in 2025. Im kind of a cheap ass when it came to shelter but Wisconsin Rent is fucking insane right now. I personally wish I had one of those big ass tunnels in Gaza with working toliets and shit like that minecraftish stuff.

Before that in Walworth? was 650 now in the 1400 range here.

adjl posted...

To be clear, I don't mean "rent control everything in one city and hope for the best." I mean everything. If you eliminate all uncontrolled alternatives, there's no longer a need to compete with them.

This is how you get nothing but condos.

Questionmarktarius posted...

This is how you get nothing but condos.

Then you end up with condos being cheap enough that a bunch of people previously stuck renting are able to buy their way onto the property ladder. If everybody sells at once, things get pretty cheap.

adjl posted...

If a developer's got a choice between an expected profit of $10 million and an expected profit of $20 million, obviously they're going to choose the latter. If a developer's got a choice between an expected profit of $10 million or just not doing anything at all, they're going to choose the $10 million. Developers aren't going to stop making any money at all just because they can't make all the money.

This is why I question your contact with reality. A more realistic profit margin would be $1 million for the high end and essentially zero for the low end. And that's after putting $12 million into the project. So risking $12 million to maybe sell for $13 million is the ridiculously high profit margin you think they can shave in half (and that's only if everything goes perfectly). If you cut that in half, you're dropping 8.7% net profits down to 4.35%, which is basically what Treasury bonds are paying right now. The developer would be about as well off buying treasury bonds and building nothing because the returns are the same and there's basically no risk and no work.

adjl posted...

It is if the rent control reflects the actual year-over-year increases in the costs of providing housing

It won't and you damn well know it won't. Certainly it never has in any currently existing rent control scheme.

adjl posted...

4% is massive when the typical target for a healthy vacancy rate is 3-5% and so many cities are struggling to break 1%.

The institutional investors owning 4% does not in any way imply that those properties are empty. Institutional investors are generally in the market for returns, not speculation. That means keeping those units occupied as much as possible.

adjl posted...

My inclination is to go nuclear: Every residentially-zoned property must have a long-term resident registered as living in it within six months of purchase, and cannot go more than six months without a registered long-term resident unless a clear explanation is provided for the vacancy (such as ongoing construction for which there is a definite plan and concrete timetable). If this condition is not met, the property is expropriated, sold for current market value, and the proceeds of that sale go to the previous owner. The numbers obviously need some tweaks (possibly scaling based on local vacancy rate), but the bottom line is to force residential properties to be used for residing.

I know the NYC market the best since it's a world class manual on what not to do, so I'll use that. In many cases that "current market value" is zero. The value of an apartment that needs $50k worth of renovations to bring up to code but due to rent control cannot possibly charge rent high enough to recoup that cost is nothing but a net drain on whoever owns it. The most cost effective way an owner has to deal with it is to turn off all the utilities and take the property tax loss in perpetuity.

How does your utopian plan deal with one totally uninhabitable, economically nonviable apartment in a building full of otherwise rented apartments - knowing that whoever is dumb enough to buy the building is going to be in exactly the same position in six months because your solution doesn't in any way address the issue?

ultra_magnus13 posted...

"Im too exhausted from work to make dinner" proceeds to spend 4-8x as much money on food vs buying reasonable groceries.

Enough drops and the bucket fills up.

Well for me this is the only one that is true. Problem is, I literally work from 1:30 - 10pm at DFW as a guest assistant. I don't have time to do anything but sleep and work, so you better believe most of the time I get fast food.

Glob posted...

Sounds more like you know people in their early twenties who have significant levels of privilege. There was no amount of good decisions that could have led me to being financially secure at that age.

Well, my parents kicked me out around that time and I had huge college loan debt so I don't have much in the way of money. Paycheck to Paycheck is my life and has been for about 20 years.

Zeus posted...

Pretty sure a person's income and other circumstances tell them what they need to do. I can only point out options.

Lots of middle-aged people have roommates. Lots of middle-aged people live in alternative accommodations. These aren't controversial ideas. While everybody would love to live in a mansion on a beach (or a preferred locale), that's never been the world we live in.

The problem is that it should be the world we live in. Republicans are the ones destroying everything and if you dare say that it isn't true then I want you to tell me which party elected Trump who is literally doing everything he can to turn the U.S. from a third world country with a Gucci bag and a few Prada outfits that they got from second hand stores that they wear over and over again into an actual third world country.

ArctheNomad posted...

Well for me this is the only one that is true. Problem is, I literally work from 1:30 - 10pm at DFW as a guest assistant. I don't have time to do anything but sleep and work, so you better believe most of the time I get fast food.

My way of getting around this is to meal prep on my days off. Make a big batch of meals for lunch at work and even extra that I can easily heat up after work. Even a few simple things like eggs and toast or tuna on toast are kept around if Id like to mix it up. I get it. I work 10 hour shifts and dont want to make a big meal after work either, so this has been good for my wallet and waistline.

ArctheNomad posted...

Well, my parents kicked me out around that time and I had huge college loan debt so I don't have much in the way of money. Paycheck to Paycheck is my life and has been for about 20 years.

My parents kicked me out at 16, just as they had for my older brothers. They thought it would make men of us. Funnily enough, none of us spoke to them for years before they died.

Zora_Prince posted...

My way of getting around this is to meal prep on my days off. Make a big batch of meals for lunch at work and even extra that I can easily heat up after work. Even a few simple things like eggs and toast or tuna on toast are kept around if Id like to mix it up. I get it. I work 10 hour shifts and dont want to make a big meal after work either, so this has been good for my wallet and waistline.

Indeed. Meal prepping can go a long way to reducing the amount of eating out you do, even if you don't have much time/energy after work. It's also pretty trivial to whip up simple side dishes like rice or noodles if you want those to be fresher than whatever you're reheating, which can open up a lot more variety in what you prepare.

willythemailboy posted...

This is why I question your contact with reality

Well, I did just make up numbers to illustrate the point of "making less money>making no money," so I'm not terribly surprised they aren't an accurate representation of actual figures. Obviously, the exact figures need to be analyzed in greater depth than anyone is going to do for a post on GameFAQs to figure out what limitations will be appropriate. I'm not specifically suggesting that profit margins be reduced by 50%.

willythemailboy posted...

It won't and you damn well know it won't. Certainly it never has in any currently existing rent control scheme.

I mean, yeah, but it's also kind of a given that rent control with any real bite is pretty unlikely in the first place. Too many politicians are also landlords for them to ever get behind legislation that would put any real limits on their ability to make money. There's nothing intrinsic in the concept of rent control that means it can't keep up with the costs of renting out a place, but like my algorithmic minimum wage idea earlier, there isn't much incentive to figure that out because then politicians can't get elected on the basis of how they argue for it (to say nothing of the personal conflict of interest, in this case).

Off-hand, though, one easy provision is to restrict the amount property tax can go up annually on a rent-controlled property, reflective of the limits that rent control places on owners' ability to cover tax increases.

willythemailboy posted...

The institutional investors owning 4% does not in any way imply that those properties are empty. Institutional investors are generally in the market for returns, not speculation. That means keeping those units occupied as much as possible.

I was specifically talking about speculators and not just any large corporation owning a bunch of rentals, so it seems we may be talking at cross purposes here. Data on speculation seems to be hard to find, though. I'm just seeing some things about the impact of vacancy taxes, which isn't tremendously useful for drawing definite conclusions.

Anecdotally, though, I've definitely seen substantial amount of property bought up by investors that sits vacant while they buy up the rest of the block in hopes that they can knock the whole thing down and either develop something large themselves or sell the land to a developer that will do so. Sometimes, they're fully vacant, other times they abuse weak lease protections to be able to kick people out on short notice, but either way they aren't available for use as stable housing and that unavailability contributes to housing accessibility issues. Long-term, that large building will provide a bunch of new housing, but it's usually priced well outside of what existing residents of the neighbourhood can afford, and it'll be several years before that's realized even after all of the properties have been bought/demolished (which can itself take several years). That's an issue, one that's resolved by disincentivizing (or outright prohibiting) that kind of long-term speculation in favour of short-term plans for smaller developments that require fewer land purchases and can be built faster. Demolishing 20 single-family houses to build a 200-unit condo building is obviously a net gain, but so is replacing one pair of those houses at a time with an 8-unit building. Long-term, obviously, 200>80, but that 200 requires there to be 20 fewer homes for 5+years. Each smaller building requires there to be 2 fewer homes at a time for 1-2 years.

That, really, is the issue I have with current development strategies: They're all aiming big and not for the "missing middle" sort of housing that cities generally need more of. More housing is needed *now*, not in the 5-10 years it takes to buy up a block and build an apartment tower. By pushing for smaller, quicker developments, you get that response faster, plus you end up with more local investors instead of large corporations that will be siphoning their revenue out of the community (since you don't need as much capital to buy two houses for a 2-year plan as you do to buy 20 for a 10-year plan).

willythemailboy posted...

How does your utopian plan deal with one totally uninhabitable, economically nonviable apartment in a building full of otherwise rented apartments - knowing that whoever is dumb enough to buy the building is going to be in exactly the same position in six months because your solution doesn't in any way address the issue?

I'm inclined to guess that if one unit is uninhabitable beyond economically viable repair, the rest of the building probably isn't far off and demolition/replacement may be on the horizon as the only route forward (let's be real: if a single unit needs 50k in repairs, it's probably not viable to repair that unit with or without rent control), but putting that aside, the most obvious solution seems to be to sell that unit as a condo. Obviously, the administration of that gets fiddly (off-hand, the best approach would probably be to redefine every unit in the building as a condo, currently owned by the building owner, and with the newly-defined condo fees included in the rent they're currently paying), but the ultimate result is that somebody looking to get onto the property ladder gets a cheap fixer-upper, the owner gets the sale price and condo fees for a unit that would otherwise have just been a drain, and the unit becomes usable and inhabited.

As it stands, I don't think zoning laws typically allow for a building of apartments to have units sold individually as condos, but that's not that hard to change, and treating apartment buildings as a collection of individual properties is kind of a prerequisite for any sort of legislation that requires individual properties to be occupied. Other alternatives would be to instead set a minimum occupancy threshold that does treat buildings as a single entity and not a collection of individual properties (like 90%, which gets rounded up so that buildings under 10 units are expected to be fully occupied), or to exempt a unit from being counted by having it formally condemned.

I do agree with your overall point of "it doesn't make sense to force somebody to sell a whole building because they have trouble renting out one unit," but I also don't expect to solve the housing crisis with two sentences. This is a broad concept, aiming to crush vacant speculation and short-term rentals with a much harder application of the sort of sentiment behind vacancy taxes (which can act as an incentive, but are too easy to pass on/circumvent). Obviously there's a need to iron out the details to cover fringe cases and ensure the concept isn't applied inappropriately.

adjl posted...

Well, I did just make up numbers to illustrate the point of "making less money>making no money," so I'm not terribly surprised they aren't an accurate representation of actual figures. Obviously, the exact figures need to be analyzed in greater depth than anyone is going to do for a post on GameFAQs to figure out what limitations will be appropriate. I'm not specifically suggesting that profit margins be reduced by 50%.

It's not the "reduce profits by 50%" specifically that is the problem, it's that the return on investment is actually fairly low and it doesn't take much tinkering at all to make building anything at all economically nonviable. That's why I pointed out that "affordable" housing generally has to be build as a small fraction of higher income housing, as building "affordable" housing is already economically nonviable without some sort of subsidy or government support. It is literally better to build nothing than build "affordable" housing in most cases, as the return on investment is lower than alternative investments with far less risk.

adjl posted...

There's nothing intrinsic in the concept of rent control that means it can't keep up with the costs of renting out a place

But of course there is, as the politicians who set those rates can run on keeping them as low as possible. The more units that are rent controlled, the more votes that can be bought by keeping rent increases lower than they should be. NYC rent control does have "real bite", to the point where some units are priced 60% below market rates and are (supposedly) calculated to be set to just barely cover costs and minimal profit. In reality those costs are calculated too low and rent controlled units are break-even at best and generally losses in the long term.

adjl posted...

Off-hand, though, one easy provision is to restrict the amount property tax can go up annually on a rent-controlled property, reflective of the limits that rent control places on owners' ability to cover tax increases.

Another example of where politics interferes, as about a third of NYC's budget comes from property taxes. Such a policy would blow a massive hole in the budget that would need to be filled somehow, and alternative revenue sources are likely to be less politically viable.

Again, NYC is simply a case study since it's easier to find relevant numbers for one particular city than to generalize national numbers that treats major cities the same as Bumfuck Iowa.

adjl posted...

Data on speculation seems to be hard to find, though. I'm just seeing some things about the impact of vacancy taxes, which isn't tremendously useful for drawing definite conclusions.

The reason you can't find data is because defining what exactly counts as speculation is hard to do, and people have reasons to inflate how common it is specifically to push policies to tackle a problem that is actually much smaller than they would like you to believe.

adjl posted...

Sometimes, they're fully vacant, other times they abuse weak lease protections to be able to kick people out on short notice

Long-term, that large building will provide a bunch of new housing, but it's usually priced well outside of what existing residents of the neighbourhood can afford, and it'll be several years before that's realized even after all of the properties have been bought/demolished (which can itself take several years).

Somewhat ironically, those properties being held for later development would be ideal for use in the STR market. Sometimes when you have two problems you can make progress on one by solving the other.

It's an unpopular position, but new construction being unaffordable to the existing residents isn't really a bad thing. Overall the city benefits from higher tax revenues and higher economic output from that neighborhood, and the neighborhood doesn't become a multigenerational poverty zone. The issue is the rate at which such turnover occurs, not that it occurs at all. Too high is bad, but so is stagnation.

adjl posted...

That, really, is the issue I have with current development strategies: They're all aiming big and not for the "missing middle" sort of housing that cities generally need more of. More housing is needed *now*, not in the 5-10 years it takes to buy up a block and build an apartment tower. By pushing for smaller, quicker developments, you get that response faster, plus you end up with more local investors instead of large corporations that will be siphoning their revenue out of the community (since you don't need as much capital to buy two houses for a 2-year plan as you do to buy 20 for a 10-year plan).

For even local investors, the capital issue isn't that big a deal. Faster response can be a bonus, but existing residents also means you have bigger NIMBY problems with any development that changes the nature of the neighborhood, regardless of whether that change is a single 8 unit building, multiple 8 unit buildings, or one 200 unit block.

With that level of occupancy difference, it's likely large-scale utility issues come into play, requiring a bigger overall investment to justify the expense. For example, while zoning laws are an issue in NYC the bigger barrier to higher density is that 100+ year old water and sewer systems are at capacity with the current density, and replacing even a few 4 story buildings with 10 story buildings would require $100 million worth of utility upgrades. Sometimes those upgrades wouldn't even be near the construction site, depending on where the service bottlenecks are located. And of course the city doesn't have the money or really the motive to make those upgrades, so the developer would have to pay for it as part of the development cost.

adjl posted...

I'm just seeing some things about the impact of vacancy taxes, which isn't tremendously useful for drawing definite conclusions.

my Cynicism Sense tells me any sort of "vacancy tax" will quickly become a de facto "empty lot tax".

willythemailboy posted...

But of course there is, as the politicians who set those rates can run on keeping them as low as possible. The more units that are rent controlled, the more votes that can be bought by keeping rent increases lower than they should be.

this seems like a good way to spark off an urban decay death-spiral.

adjl posted...

I'm inclined to guess that if one unit is uninhabitable beyond economically viable repair, the rest of the building probably isn't far off and demolition/replacement may be on the horizon as the only route forward (let's be real: if a single unit needs 50k in repairs, it's probably not viable to repair that unit with or without rent control)

Not at all. Significant fire or water damage, or a single destructive tenant, combined with decades of code changes that stop being "grandfathered" in when major renovations are undertaken can pile up in a hurry, and NYC labor costs add even more. $50k in renovations isn't that much of a stretch. An example might be that renovating that one apartment would require replacing the entire building's plumbing system to remove lead pipes to bring that one unit up to code. The lead pipes are currently grandfathered in (and despite the Flint disaster, generally safe enough), but for a newly renovated apartment they'd have to be removed.

Admittedly, some of those should result in demolition and replacement, but lol NYC "historic character" and zoning laws generally mean even 100+ year old buildings built before insulated wiring was invented can't be knocked down. And people tend to get upset when all the rest of the tenants get evicted to do that, especially since new construction wouldn't fall under rent control.

In terms of viability, consider that the difference between rent control and market rate is going to be at minimum $1000 a month, meaning even a $50k renovation bill would pay for itself in four years for a market rate unit, and could not ever pay off at all for a rent controlled unit.

adjl posted...

As it stands, I don't think zoning laws typically allow for a building of apartments to have units sold individually as condos, but that's not that hard to change, and treating apartment buildings as a collection of individual properties is kind of a prerequisite for any sort of legislation that requires individual properties to be occupied. Other alternatives would be to instead set a minimum occupancy threshold that does treat buildings as a single entity and not a collection of individual properties (like 90%, which gets rounded up so that buildings under 10 units are expected to be fully occupied), or to exempt a unit from being counted by having it formally condemned.

Existing rent control is why none of this would work. The NYC implementation of rent control is so financially debilitating to landlords that every conceivable scheme has been used to get units out from under such controls. As a result, most of the loopholes allowing units to be changed from rent control to market rate have been eliminated.

I know using current policy to argue against changes to that policy seems pretty stupid, but the whole system is so fucked up you're stuck with a "can't get there from here" problem unless the entire legal code - and possibly the entire physical city - is nuked from orbit, bulldozed flat, and started over from scratch.

willythemailboy posted...

as building "affordable" housing is already economically nonviable without some sort of subsidy or government support.

And that, really, is just plain broken.

willythemailboy posted...

In reality those costs are calculated too low

Which really makes me question why that's the case. Not so much the miscalculation (as you say, messy politics), but the fact that costs inflate so much that keeping rent from ballooning past affordability means it can't keep up with that inflation. I expect a substantial part of that is because there are so many uncontrolled rents jacking up both what landlords are collectively able to pay and the costs of living for the people that need to be employed to maintain units. In theory, eliminating uncontrolled properties would help with that.

I don't doubt that enforcing rent control on every property at the current rate would be disastrous, but I do doubt that anyone actually needs to triple rents year-over-year. There's a middle ground in there that would help to moderate maintenance costs without making them unaffordable.

willythemailboy posted...

Another example of where politics interferes, as about a third of NYC's budget comes from property taxes. Such a policy would blow a massive hole in the budget that would need to be filled somehow, and alternative revenue sources are likely to be less politically viable.

Politics interfering or not, it's just plain common sense that the government shouldn't be increasing taxes by more than they allow revenue to be increased (adjusted proportionally, of course, because a 5% increase in property tax is not a 5% increase in operating costs). If that creates a tax shortfall because they rely on that unsustainable increase on rent-controlled properties, apply a larger increase to uncontrolled ones to compensate (or, better yet, maybe actually tax suburbs what they cost to sustain instead of subsidizing them with tax income from denser properties). Unpopular, certainly, but not mathematically impossible.

willythemailboy posted...

It's an unpopular position, but new construction being unaffordable to the existing residents isn't really a bad thing. Overall the city benefits from higher tax revenues and higher economic output from that neighborhood, and the neighborhood doesn't become a multigenerational poverty zone. The issue is the rate at which such turnover occurs, not that it occurs at all. Too high is bad, but so is stagnation.

I think we're on the same page there. In an ideal world, less affordable new construction frees up older/lower-quality units that are currently occupied by wealthier renters looking for an upgrade, which lets lower classes move into those at more affordable prices and ultimately everyone ends up with a place to live, while the neighbourhood sees more money flowing. At an appropriate rate, gentrification is a good thing.

In practice, unfortunately, what seems to actually happen is that the rents in the "luxury" places get treated as carte blanche for all the shitholes to jack up their rents to align with "the market" (less than the new stuff, but still higher than they were charging before the new stuff showed up), and because the new builds aren't enough to alleviate the supply issues (and in many cases, new builds won't even be built unless there are enough supply issues to guarantee demand for them, so they never will be enough to alleviate them), they end up being snapped up as the only remaining options by the people that can make higher rents work, leaving more and more people out of luck. That's gentrification happening too fast, aggressively pricing people out of neighbourhoods faster than they can realistically migrate out more naturally and creating rampant inequality issues.

willythemailboy posted...

For even local investors, the capital issue isn't that big a deal.

Not so much in NYC, which is literally the home of Wall Street, but for smaller cities less famous for all the billionaires that live there it's more relevant. Significantly more people can afford two houses than 20, regardless of where you look, and that helps to avoid concentrating too much real estate in any one person/company's hands by promoting meaningful competition.

willythemailboy posted...

Faster response can be a bonus, but existing residents also means you have bigger NIMBY problems with any development that changes the nature of the neighborhood, regardless of whether that change is a single 8 unit building, multiple 8 unit buildings, or one 200 unit block.

NIMBYs do suck, but I'm afraid I can't really get behind "it's good to kick everyone out of a neighbourhood for a few years before building so you don't have to deal with NIMBYs." It's convenient, yes, but I'm generally more a proponent of "listen to the NIMBYs just in case they have valid concerns, but then ignore everything else they say and build it anyway so they can start getting used to it."

willythemailboy posted...

With that level of occupancy difference, it's likely large-scale utility issues come into play, requiring a bigger overall investment to justify the expense.

And in that regard, just going for a larger building may make more sense. Larger buildings also spike density faster and more predictably, which is helpful for planning transit and other transportation infrastructure adjustments. I'm not saying there's no place for larger developments, just that there's a real problem when they comprise the majority of the new housing being built (by area, not just by unit count) because they do so much to disrupt the existing supply and respond so relatively slowly.

Questionmarktarius posted...
my Cynicism Sense tells me any sort of "vacancy tax" will quickly become a de facto "empty lot tax".

That hasn't generally been the case, when they've been implemented. Vacancy tax or no, a usable house is usually worth more than an empty lot, unless it's a large enough lot to build significantly more house. It's more common that speculators will just do something like get a friend or family member to officially move in for a few days a year to count the place as occupied and circumvent the tax (that, or just eat it and price it higher when it comes time to sell, since if everybody in the market is paying the tax, nobody's surprised by that). The idea has seen some success, like Vancouver's vacancy rate (that is, the proportion of homes that are unused, not the good vacancy rate that is the proportion of rentals that are available) dropped from like 4% to like 1.5% after they implemented theirs, but in general I'm not a huge fan of "just add a tax to incentivize people to do thing" instead of actually forcing people to do thing, at least in cases where that tax can be passed on so easily.

willythemailboy posted...

In terms of viability, consider that the difference between rent control and market rate is going to be at minimum $1000 a month, meaning even a $50k renovation bill would pay for itself in four years for a market rate unit, and could not ever pay off at all for a rent controlled unit.

Maybe I'm just not thinking long-term enough, but my inclination is that going into the hole for four years in a building that was able to rack up $50k in exceptional repairs in the first place (as you say, it's not impossible, especially if parts of the whole building have to be redone to bring it up to code, but things like fire or water damage usually aren't contained entirely to the uninhabitable unit and will likely rear their heads in other units in the not-too-distant future) isn't overly appealing. Yes, it's more appealing than not making the money back at all, but it'd probably be better invested in a building with a more certain future.

willythemailboy posted...

Existing rent control is why none of this would work. The NYC implementation of rent control is so financially debilitating to landlords that every conceivable scheme has been used to get units out from under such controls. As a result, most of the loopholes allowing units to be changed from rent control to market rate have been eliminated.

It crossed my mind that such an idea could be used as a loophole to circumvent rent control, but it wouldn't be terribly difficult to do something like specify that if the condo-ified unit were rented out within some reasonable time frame after being purchased (like 2-3 years), it would face the same rent cap as pre-purchase (especially if universal rent control is standardized). The intent with the condo-ification idea would primarily be to get people into homes they can own, rather than just to create new rental opportunities.

To be clear, NYC's rent control is probably a little too strict. When I'm thinking of applying rent control universally, I'm thinking somewhere in the 5-10% range, which I don't expect should prevent anyone from making money from a build unless something happens to dramatically spike repair costs (especially if property tax increases on rental properties reflect the rent cap), but would prevent people from having their rents double overnight because something happened to spike demand. That doesn't necessarily correct massive discrepancies like are seen in NYC due to 6-7 decades of 1-3% caps and skyrocketing property values that new construction can't really do anything to alleviate no matter what's done to incentivize it (a lot of NYC can't really get much denser), but that's kind of its own mess that I don't have an easy answer to.

willythemailboy posted...

I know using current policy to argue against changes to that policy seems pretty stupid, but the whole system is so f***ed up you're stuck with a "can't get there from here" problem unless the entire legal code - and possibly the entire physical city - is nuked from orbit, bulldozed flat, and started over from scratch.

I don't entirely disagree. The legal code as it stands right now has been a big part of why the cost of living has gotten as bad as it is. Some substantial overhauls are needed, whether we agree on exactly what they should be or not.

adjl posted...

Which really makes me question why that's the case. Not so much the miscalculation (as you say, messy politics), but the fact that costs inflate so much that keeping rent from ballooning past affordability means it can't keep up with that inflation. I expect a substantial part of that is because there are so many uncontrolled rents jacking up both what landlords are collectively able to pay and the costs of living for the people that need to be employed to maintain units. In theory, eliminating uncontrolled properties would help with that.

I don't doubt that enforcing rent control on every property at the current rate would be disastrous, but I do doubt that anyone actually needs to triple rents year-over-year. There's a middle ground in there that would help to moderate maintenance costs without making them unaffordable.

I'm not sure what you consider "so many uncontrolled rents" but roughly half of NYC's units are rent stabilized of some form or another and half are not. The problem may well be that the rent controlled units being so constrained means that the only possible profits must come from the uncontrolled units, which is where the huge differential between controlled and uncontrolled rates come from

Considering that rent controlled apartments are currently capped at about 3% increases, that middle is probably worth exploring.

adjl posted...

If that creates a tax shortfall because they rely on that unsustainable increase on rent-controlled properties, apply a larger increase to uncontrolled ones to compensate

That would be extraordinarily difficult, as the two often coexist in the same buildings. In fact, one recently-outlawed tactic to get apartments out from under rent control was to "Frankenstein" a stabilized and a market rate apartment into one larger apartment which would be market rate.

adjl posted...

In practice, unfortunately, what seems to actually happen is that the rents in the "luxury" places get treated as carte blanche for all the shitholes to jack up their rents to align with "the market"

That jacking up of prices is the real issue and could be addressed in multiple ways instead of or in addition to rent control. It's definitely worth exploring.

adjl posted...

Not so much in NYC, which is literally the home of Wall Street, but for smaller cities less famous for all the billionaires that live there it's more relevant. Significantly more people can afford two houses than 20, regardless of where you look, and that helps to avoid concentrating too much real estate in any one person/company's hands by promoting meaningful competition.

When it comes to real estate development, buying the land is not the cost-prohibitive part even if there are already houses on that land. Anyone who could afford to build a 200 unit development isn't going to struggle to buy the land, while anyone whose budget would limit them to tearing down 2 houses for an 8 unit building probably isn't going to lock up all their capital in one building anyway. In reality the development would likely be under the same corporate ownership in piecemeal rather than as a block but the end result is largely the same.

adjl posted...

NIMBYs do suck, but I'm afraid I can't really get behind "it's good to kick everyone out of a neighbourhood for a few years before building so you don't have to deal with NIMBYs." It's convenient, yes, but I'm generally more a proponent of "listen to the NIMBYs just in case they have valid concerns, but then ignore everything else they say and build it anyway so they can start getting used to it."

Here's where I do wander into truly unpopular opinions, but I am actually in favor of eminent domain for redevelopment purposes under certain clearly delineated circumstances. Something like Transit Oriented Development is a substantial benefit to the city as well as the developer, but it definitely needs to be constrained pretty heavily. One thing I'd insist on is anyone being bought out getting 3-4 times the market value of the property, so the developer has to really want that land rather than just wanting a cheap plot to build on.

adjl posted...

And in that regard, just going for a larger building may make more sense. Larger buildings also spike density faster and more predictably, which is helpful for planning transit and other transportation infrastructure adjustments. I'm not saying there's no place for larger developments, just that there's a real problem when they comprise the majority of the new housing being built (by area, not just by unit count) because they do so much to disrupt the existing supply and respond so relatively slowly.

I don't necessarily disagree, but see previous post about affordable housing being economically nonviable. Building small is also generally less viable than building big or building multiple smaller buildings at once in the same area. If you're building 8 unit buildings, building two at the same time right next to each other is not twice as expensive as building one and building two buildings some distance apart or building one after the other is more expensive that building two next to each other at the same time.