Affordable housing

I don’t get why people are complaining about housing prices. There’s plenty of cheap houses available in Detroit and southside Chicago.

maybe you should buy some and retire

Maybe they don’t like the Detroit-LA commute.

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Yeah, I don’t see why more people aren’t clamoring to the Detroit slums. Cheap housing, and plenty of open positions to be an Assistant Crackwhore.

You can also move to my hometown, which is pretty much the alt-right opium capital of Kansas. You can get a 3BR house for like $60k. Simple.

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okay say what

And drugs are cheap.

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Imma buy a whole block or two and build my empire there! You’re welcome to come visit

You need a YouTube channel, I think your first year there will be like Survivor.

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I grew up in Detroit. I recently posted a photo of the house we lived in. Pretty depressing.

I drove back for a funeral last weekend. Talked to a fringe relative who has a good job (designer for GM) and lives in a nice suburb. His daughter is going to Wayne State. He was amazed by the neighborhood around the university. Real nightlife, a “happening” feeling.

I’m sure you don’t have to live in either the worst or the best part of the metro.

I posted last week about the first house we owned in a Des Moines suburb. It’s a perfectly livable house. I think the current assessed value is $186k. But, “Des Moines is borrrring”. So everyone wants to crowd into LA and San Francisco and NYC and Boston and complain about the high cost of housing.

“But, that’s where the jobs are.” If lots of prospective employees said “Good job, I can’t take it because I can’t afford to live here”, employers might find satellite locations in affordable places.

What they really mean is, it’s expensive and I am struggling to afford to live here, but I still like living here so much that I don’t want to leave.

As much as everyone shit talks LA, it is still THE place to live.

Yeah, a lot of it is supply & demand.

My church in a former city was located in basically THE most expensive suburb of the city, where there are very few homes under $1,000,000, and the median home price is several multiples of that. I, a credentialed actuary, couldn’t afford to live there. I commuted from several suburbs over.

The church spearheaded some movement to bring affordable senior housing to the area and I was pretty mystified as to why. Why do low-income seniors require housing in the city’s very most expensive suburb? Even if this is something that’s needed, how much does 17 housing units help the problem?

They spearheaded a lot of extremely worthwhile mission projects, but I never understood the rationale for that particular one.

Added the important part.

It doesn’t seem so expensive, if you happen to be homeless. Yes, people want to live here so much, that they will live on the streets. And I’m not talking hundreds. I’m talking tens of thousands. 69000 as of February in LA County, population 10M.

In Iowa, 2,000 or so. For the whole state, which has a population of 3M.

This won’t solve the problem, but it’s a step in the right direction imo.

While the building code can force this or that, the Market does a better job. If I had to drive (and sometimes it’s required) to a work building that had no parking, I’d probably start looking for a new job.
Now, I notice this:

those requirements will disappear within a half-mile of regular transit service, effectively ending parking minimums in large swaths of the state’s cities and suburbs.

So, what is “regular”? Are they talking the bus service or Metro trains?

I’m not so trusting of the Market. If developers are allowed to do as they please, they’ll prioritize profits over parking, resulting in traffic tie-ups long after they’ve pocketed their loot and left.

Is @Nick_Papagiorgio here? I know Louisville had an issue with this several years ago, when nightlife in the Highlands area was granted parking waivers, resulting in patrons parking all up and down nearby residential streets, precluding any motorist house guests.

I worked in downtown Louisville for a brief time, and my employer subsidized my parking in a lot several blocks from the office, so I guess the free market does work there. I was young and didn’t mind the walk.

My area has a solution evidenced by the signs I see out my car window such as “E58 permit required for parking”, but that seems like such a huge bureaucratic PITA.

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The solution has to include making it easier to move about without a personal car. It’s a long-term project that necessitates transforming our infrastructure to be less car-centric. Building more places for bikes (and e-bikes) will help, but it’s a complex problem with no easy (or cheap) solutions.

It would work better if the whole of LA County were merely the size of NYC.

Agreed. More compact cities with lots of walkable space just work better. It took decades for urban sprawl to become the norm so there is no quick solution. Certainly not in our lifetimes, but hopefully we can make some incremental changes that will pay off down the road.

One necessary condition for urban sprawl is cheap energy. It takes a lot of energy to move all those cars around and to heat/cool all those single family houses. If energy costs go up enough, that might reduce sprawl.

I live in the sprawl. I’m thinking about the places that I drive that are within ten minutes. There are a couple supermarkets, one Walmart, a good hardware store, a few gyms, multiple dentists, an “emergency” local hospital,
a few primary care doctors, a library, multiple fast food outlets, a few restaurants, a high school and a few elementary schools, one parochial school, a Walgreens and a local drug store, indoor and outdoor pools, little league fields, the trail head for a multi-mile bike trail, a few bank branches, …

Where I live, it is hot and humid in the summer and bitterly cold in the winter. Ten minutes in a climate controlled car is okay, but if I were walking I think I’d want to get where I’m going in five minutes. How high do we need to build to get enough density to support those services within a five minute walk?

LA definitely needs more skyscrapers. But no, everyone wants a yard with pool.