How Americans Voted Their Way Into a Housing Crisis
How Americans Voted Their Way Into a Housing Crisis
A new book from Jerusalem Demsas explores how local elections, community meetings and other democratic structures brought on a national shortage of affordable homes.
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There's no lack of homes. There's a lack of affordability.
The article does seem to repeatedly say that
No, it makes the tired and false argument that there would be plenty of housing if only we could get rid of the red tape and let the developers build more housing. Bullshit.
We don't need more housing. There's plenty of housing for everyone. We need the existing housing to be affordable and for the developers and corporate landlords to go fuck themselves. We need to tax the shit out of everyone who owns more than one home to disincentivize the practice. No more AirBNB. No more slum-lords. Let people buy houses.
For all the jackasses who are do the 'what about' disco and say that not everyone can afford a house and not everyone wants a house. First of all, fuck you. Second of all, not everyone can afford a house because that's by design. Change the design. People are paying more in rent than it costs to own a place and pay the upkeep. Everyone doing that could be buying the place they live in, instead. Secondly, there are lots of multi-tenant units where one can still rent if that's what they really want to do.
Idk, I just skimmed it again. It definitely seems like it's focused on a woman's book about the impact the electoral process has on "affordable homes".
A new book from Jerusalem Demsas explores how local elections, community meetings and other democratic structures brought on a national shortage of affordable homes.
That said, I agree with all the general points you mentioned
There's also a lack of homes due to investors hoovering up available stock and letting them sit idle. Over 1/3 of the homes in my state are owned by investors and a significant fraction of those are sitting empty and idle until the market bubbles again and they're unloaded at +25-100% over the purchase price.