"affordable housing without a government subsidy is becoming extinct."
Was recently in LA, had a very excited Uber driver tell he just bought a house near Topeka, KS and it was 4 bed, 3 bath, unfinished basement, 2 car garage for $95k, on a 3/4 acre. He was extremely excited about moving. That's a massive house. There is plenty of cheap housing elsewhere in the USA, you have to be willing relocate.
The title should be "How did relatively small areas in California in the grand scheme of the USA make housing so expensive most people can't live there?"
Local control of housing and zoning should be taken away and placed at the State level or above. Over time that will probably become just as corrupt and it will need to revert to the local level again. I am amazed what people
will complain about on my Nextdoor group. There
is not one ounce of sacrifice in these people for even a 30 second increase in traffic or a change in the student:teacher ratio from 21:1 to 21.3:1. Maybe we’d have more money for schools if we didn’t keep having to deal with all the externalities developed by expensive housing and long commutes.
Reminds me of that lady in SF who opposed a housing development recently because she said it blocked the sunlight to her zucchini garden. Now many YIMBY groups are adopting the zucchini as their logo...
How does this cabbie intend to make a good wage so he can continue to live in his huge house? Or does he not care, since he bought a HUGE house for $ 95K -- assuming it was all cash. If not, he has a mortgage to pay like everyone else, once a month.
"Affordable housing" implies that there is a job at the destination that can pay a wage that can pay the mortgage. Sure, $95k isn't a lot—but what do jobs in Topeka pay, and how many of them are there?
I had a cab driver in Austin tell me that he and his friends all bought $150k houses in the suburbs, with great schools, pools, etc., on 15-year mortgages that many had paid off already.
I was (and still am) amazed at how cheap housing was when I started looking away from the West coast. While places with really depressed home prices likely don't have any jobs, there are still plenty of cities with growing economies and cheap housing. I moved to Texas last year and meet people all the time that moved here specifically for the low cost of housing.
It has never been easier to move across the US and settle somewhere else. The internet has made it much easier to research locations, jobs, housing, etc in advance before moving.
Something that is never brought up, the lack of recessing property values for property tax purposes.
It really punishes new young families.
example. say an old couple lives in a home presently valued at 2.5 million dollars in California, say they bought the home for 75,000 in the 1970's. So they pay about 750 bucks a year in property tax.
New family, buys the exact same home today, owes 25,000 in property tax a year. Over 2k a month just in property tax that doesn't exist for the older home owners that have been grandfathered into to low property taxes on a house whose value hasn't been reassessed for years.
Just like student loans created the monster of exponentially rising college tutiton, it seems reasonable to suspect housing subsidies as a big cause of unaffordable housing (in addition to perhaps zoning laws).
Has way more to do with lack of new development and the massive increase in costs to build new homes because of ridiculous housing laws. Look at all the cities with high housing prices and look at how few of homes they built in the last 30 years.
Nobody is going to like what I am going to write, but I have the opinion that homeless people are generally happier in modern developed country when you compare to other countries.
As long as there are minimum efforts done to take care of the poorest, meaning charities and a minimum of a justice system, things are relatively good enough.
I think the debate rather belongs to why do we constantly need to use carrots to run a society? As long as society has rules that are in agreement with our natural instincts, meaning self preservation, things will be easily managed, but not easy for everyone.
When we will understand that "go get that income by yourself, joe!" cannot always function properly, maybe things will change a little. I have never understood the undying belief that "work is necessary for society to function". It is not. Humans have constantly worked to avoid human labor, but for some weird reason, people still want to work and mooching has a bad reputation.
We are just approaching a weird, dystopian future where food is everywhere, but for some reason humans cannot agree to find a relevant system to feed and shelter everyone properly. Capitalism is not the problem, it is just that nobody can agree on helping each other, and I sense that everyone is afraid of letting government be more gentle because it would somehow resemble communism or socialism.
I've been homeless in the United States. It sucked big time. Saying homeless people in developed countries are happier than other countries might be true. But that feels kind of like saying most people would rather get stabbed in the leg by a short knife than shot in the chest by a 44 magnum. Homelessness, at least the involuntary flavor, stinks, and I wouldn't wish it upon anyone.
Capitalism as an economic system may not be a problem, but capital in politics is. You shouldn't be able to pay the political system to allow you to essentially destroy the planet with pollution.
Homeless people in the USA may be relatively more opportunities and benefits than homeless people in other countries. But having been homeless - and not knowing who's going to give you your next meal - working in almost any nation is better than being homeless in the USA.
The gutter between upper class and poverty is nothing like the chasm between poverty and homelessness.
I agree with everything you said except the last bit. I wonder if you actually made some research about your own words and ideas. For example:
> When we will understand that "go get that income by yourself, joe!" cannot always function properly, maybe things will change a little. I have never understood the undying belief that "work is necessary for society to function". It is not. Humans have constantly worked to avoid human labor, but for some weird reason, people still want to work and mooching has a bad reputation.
Believe it or not, this is one of the core arguments of Marx. I wonder what was your reasoning to conclude "Capitalism is not the problem". I'm very interested to discuss this.
I think talking about "capitalism" and "communism" is the worst thing we can do at this point, since these words are extremely politicized and they have no meaning at all. Like, today "communism" refers specifically to USSR's Ideology (state capitalism, centrally planned anti-consumerist economy etc...), a Stalin and post-Stalin form of Marxism-Leninism, which has pretty much _nothing_ to do with Marx's original ideas. Anyway, we should start talking about concrete things, like private property. And, it seems to me that, one logical conclusion of your reasoning is that private property is at least a problematic concept for our society.
> Nobody is going to like what I am going to write, but I have the opinion that homeless people are generally happier in modern developed country when you compare to other countries.
You're smart and self-aware enough to have this thought. Why go on and contribute your uninformed opinion? Why not research whether homeless people really are happy or ask people who've been homeless?
> As long as there are minimum efforts done to take care of the poorest, meaning charities and a minimum of a justice system, things are relatively good enough.
Happiness and hope don't come from other people's "minimum efforts".
It's related to Balmol's Cost Disease [1]. Everything that is not technology is increasing in price relative to what employing those people in a high-productivity-multiplier industry would, and of course physical real estate is the ultimate in non-substitutable, non-automatable goods.
This is the same reason that education, healthcare, and other human services are eating more and more of the GDP: anything that can't be automated becomes dramatically more expensive by comparison with things like industrial automation and information technology.
BCD applies to costs of production in which a given factor (typically labour) hasn't had its productivity increased, but because it competes for other employment, the price paid for it if any of the resulting good is to be provided must keep pace.
The interesting part is what BCD doesn't describe, which is the amount of the good provided. The canonical case is the string quartet: you need four performers, no matter how much technology you've got. But: the total demand for string quartets need not remain constant. Tastes could change favouring other forms of music, recordings or broadcasts can increase the productivity of the four essential players, etc.
(The evolution of popular music from self-provisioned to big band to amplified orchestra to amplified three- or four-piece rock groups, to synthesizer, to disco, rap, house/hip-hop, and now extensive one-person sampling acts, is one example of the type of shifts that can occur.)
The "factors of production" in housing are raw materials, housing, and land. Land itself is the original rent-seeking good, for various reasons that ... modern economics fails to explain very well. My argument is that land is a network of control points (owning land gives you control in the right to exclude others), and with varying access costs to other useful capabilities (manufacture, employment, trade, education, entertainment, ag, etc.). The characteristic of economic rents is that the prices they command rise to include part, or all, of the consumer surplus. This contrasts with commodities and labour in which prices generally fall to costs. That paired relation is David Ricardo's famous two observations: the Iron Law of Wages, and the Law of Rent.
(This is why I see both a rent tax and some mix of UBI / employer of last resort with a living wage guarantee as a probably necessary economic policy.)
So, thanks for the opportunity to play with some economic concepts, but Baumol's got nothing to do with this. Your men are Ricardo and George.
Cost disease primarily applies to markets where much of the product is labor. Construction has been slow to automate, but there has been considerable progress especially recently. Most of the excessive cost of properties comes from land rights and acquisition costs and not construction. Over long periods housing markets revert strongly to medians.
What the sibling posters said -- it's not related. Cost of production itself is actually going down because we get ever better tools to make the houses and they don't have a fixed "human content requirement" to the labor.
Costs are spiraling up because of restrictions on building -- both the density, and the transit that could handle it.
> How did we[1] create a society where we[2] can’t afford to live in our own country?
[1] TPTB a.k.a. the 0.1%, a.k.a. the majority of the owners of the majority of private property.
[2] The people that have to work to sustain their livelihood, or are not even that fortunate (jobless, impaired, etc.).
Interesting how the article compares the US of today with the situation in the year 1900. The country as a whole has become sooooo much more wealthy in that period, but still is not able to take care of it's population's basic needs. And it seems to be getting worse.
But it's a democracy, so the 99.9% should have the power to fix this, right? Well...
"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal" -- Emma Goldman
Voting has the possibility of changing zoning laws. For some reason it's just not happening. If these few areas in California and North-East had similar density to cities in other countries it would help a lot.
This article is trash and I'm stunned that it would be hosted on a harvard.edu domain. Whoever posted this should be ashamed of themselves.
Fallacies, lies, and generally ignorant opinions include
* Pretending the US was a more market-oriented economy in the past (which is not true)
* Comparing the housing situation 100 years ago to that of today. There are many reason why america in 1917 is very different than the america of 2017
* Literally cites a Wall Street Oasis forum post as a source on why we should not subsidize housing for the poor
* Income inequality is (obviously) a huge component of housing not being affordable (especially in urban centers) and this is dismissed using an obvious straw man argument.
One of the biggest housing subsidies is the mortgage interest deduction which is almost entirely captured by wealthy homeowners and financial institutions. It also definitely pushes up housing prices. If the author of this post had any knowledge of the housing market they would have brought this up.
Income inequality is exacerbated by low income housing programs. If wages in NYC are so low that people can't afford to live there, then those people should leave. If we must have a government program, then let's create one that helps people relocate to greener pastures. By decreasing labor supply, wages will rise until incomes and housing prices are in parity. Low income housing programs do the opposite, they artificially increase the labor pool of people who can accept lower wages which of course applies downward pressure on wages.
"Can we blame rich people stealing all of society’s wealth? Again, wealth inequality was very high 100 years ago. In any case, a rich person may cause us to become sick with envy but he or she doesn’t usually occupy 50 apartments at a time. So it doesn’t make sense to blame rich people for reducing the housing supply, does it?"
"Not only are all of the buyers of the new South Gardens foreign investors; from the 51 bought so far, many appear to be offshore – untraceable and untaxable. Every single one of the 51 purchases made is listed as "care of 2 Tower Street, WC2H 9NP". Helpfully, that's Riseam Sharples' office address."
> Can we blame income inequality? Supposedly it was higher 100 years ago and poor people were able to afford crummy houses back then.
Zoning is a huge factor here - many of the "crummy" dwellings 100 years ago were in buildings/conditions that would today be illegal. Whether that's a good or bad thing (and what to do about it) is a separate question, but it shouldn't be ignored.
I only skimmed the article, but would creating something similar to the homestead act, but with regards to low population residential areas be a workable solution? Population dispersal seems like an interesting topic.
Number one root cause: The (non)Federal Reserve system.
The big things as a result of it are what caused it. Debt is inversely proportional to freedom, and the wealthy have gobbled up so much of what allowed us to prosper in the first place.
People that always go on about taxes or the budget deficit etc need to realize the fed is a root causal issue here.
Also, two more points. I think the fed is unconstitutional, and I think Hammurabi had it right that such a system requires regular debt jubilees.
I'm not generally anti regulation, but for housing it's ridiculous. New housing should be granted by-right permission. NIMBY's have a major empathy gap and should not have a veto.
Country? No the country is fine, the problem is that so many want to live in hotspots. In the U.K. Central London is super expensive but there is plenty of cheap property in the North.
It's very curious that we are so focused on housing because it's a problem in relatively few areas driven by demand surging because of increased job centralization. It isn't surprising and it's hard to fix because it's complicated to incentivise lower density cities.
But what about food and clothes? What about books? For all our wealth, everything in the US is dozens of times more expensive than in some poorer countries. Can we develop a society that produces these products at a similarly low cost while sustaining our lower classes in other industries (since the ultimate floor for costs of goods in the US is the cost of paying laborers 'living' wages)?
Most immigrants I know, including myself, get sent "shopping lists" by our families abroad because the US is a notoriously cheap place to be a consumer. Especially compared to poor countries.
Not sure if you are talking about cost of production or price of the products, but comparing to Brazil, clothes, books and electronics are usually cheaper to buy in USA.
At least in some places, the root cause of high housing prices is their proximity to work. In those cases, why not address the root cause?
Example: If you wanted to start a business that would consume more city resources than city infrastructure could support, say sewage/water/parking/etc, the city would deny a permit
to build.
Why not restrict the number/size of businesses in a location based on how many people/workers could reasonably afford to live there?
I’m surprised that the article and the discussion here don’t assess the impact the booming short-term rental market has on keeping otherwise available inventory off the residential market. Many cities have a lot of empty dwellings on any given day, yet seemingly face a scarcity of inventory.
i have been looking into buying land and building a house on it -- ive been reading and researching intensely for a while now and i am simply astonished at how affordable it is to have your own land and a house, all while being well within commuting distance of the city. the thing about owning land is that instead of paying for your landlords luxury car and his wifes boob implants, you only have to pay property tax. if you make other simple efforts to reduce your expenses, you can bring your total operating costs down to insanely low levels without sacrificing any quality of life. i feel like this is some kind of conspiracy -- i have no idea why people seem to be oblivious to the wonders of cost reduction. it takes monumental effort to increase your income but its pretty much trivial to reduce your expenses which accomplishes the exact same outcome. rent is currently 80% of my expenses and there is nothing i can do to change that, except buy land. even if i lived in a super crummy part of town (i dont want to do that) it would still cost a fortune compared to property tax for land and a modest house (modest but still a thousand times better than most apartments).
I think I’ll probably be ok, mostly because I won’t have children. I don’t understand how people do that these days, unless they have a lot of help from the grandparents. Suddenly you need a bigger house and it needs to be in a good school district, or pay out the ass for private schools. And then it all just gets worse from there.
[+] [-] exabrial|8 years ago|reply
Was recently in LA, had a very excited Uber driver tell he just bought a house near Topeka, KS and it was 4 bed, 3 bath, unfinished basement, 2 car garage for $95k, on a 3/4 acre. He was extremely excited about moving. That's a massive house. There is plenty of cheap housing elsewhere in the USA, you have to be willing relocate.
The title should be "How did relatively small areas in California in the grand scheme of the USA make housing so expensive most people can't live there?"
[+] [-] Top19|8 years ago|reply
Reminds me of that lady in SF who opposed a housing development recently because she said it blocked the sunlight to her zucchini garden. Now many YIMBY groups are adopting the zucchini as their logo...
[+] [-] justboxing|8 years ago|reply
Almost all the jobs I see in Topeka are in retail "Sales Associates" = glorified title for minimum wage jobs. https://www.google.com/search?q=Topeka,+KS+jobs&oq=Topeka,+K...
How does this cabbie intend to make a good wage so he can continue to live in his huge house? Or does he not care, since he bought a HUGE house for $ 95K -- assuming it was all cash. If not, he has a mortgage to pay like everyone else, once a month.
[+] [-] derefr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|8 years ago|reply
The 1,500 mile commute sounds like rather a pain, though.
[+] [-] pxeboot|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zip1234|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hycaria|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickgrosvenor|8 years ago|reply
It really punishes new young families.
example. say an old couple lives in a home presently valued at 2.5 million dollars in California, say they bought the home for 75,000 in the 1970's. So they pay about 750 bucks a year in property tax.
New family, buys the exact same home today, owes 25,000 in property tax a year. Over 2k a month just in property tax that doesn't exist for the older home owners that have been grandfathered into to low property taxes on a house whose value hasn't been reassessed for years.
Why isn't this talked about more?
New families get killed by this.
[+] [-] vadym909|8 years ago|reply
In some cases this keeps rent low as homeowners with 2 houses paying low property taxes can afford to charge lower rents.
[+] [-] wolfgke|8 years ago|reply
The mistake rather is to found a family under such circumstances.
[+] [-] dannyw|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freedomben|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diogenescynic|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jokoon|8 years ago|reply
As long as there are minimum efforts done to take care of the poorest, meaning charities and a minimum of a justice system, things are relatively good enough.
I think the debate rather belongs to why do we constantly need to use carrots to run a society? As long as society has rules that are in agreement with our natural instincts, meaning self preservation, things will be easily managed, but not easy for everyone.
When we will understand that "go get that income by yourself, joe!" cannot always function properly, maybe things will change a little. I have never understood the undying belief that "work is necessary for society to function". It is not. Humans have constantly worked to avoid human labor, but for some weird reason, people still want to work and mooching has a bad reputation.
We are just approaching a weird, dystopian future where food is everywhere, but for some reason humans cannot agree to find a relevant system to feed and shelter everyone properly. Capitalism is not the problem, it is just that nobody can agree on helping each other, and I sense that everyone is afraid of letting government be more gentle because it would somehow resemble communism or socialism.
Go figure.
[+] [-] amorphid|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eksemplar|8 years ago|reply
But good luck fixing that. :)
[+] [-] stephengillie|8 years ago|reply
The gutter between upper class and poverty is nothing like the chasm between poverty and homelessness.
[+] [-] gnulinux|8 years ago|reply
> When we will understand that "go get that income by yourself, joe!" cannot always function properly, maybe things will change a little. I have never understood the undying belief that "work is necessary for society to function". It is not. Humans have constantly worked to avoid human labor, but for some weird reason, people still want to work and mooching has a bad reputation.
Believe it or not, this is one of the core arguments of Marx. I wonder what was your reasoning to conclude "Capitalism is not the problem". I'm very interested to discuss this.
I think talking about "capitalism" and "communism" is the worst thing we can do at this point, since these words are extremely politicized and they have no meaning at all. Like, today "communism" refers specifically to USSR's Ideology (state capitalism, centrally planned anti-consumerist economy etc...), a Stalin and post-Stalin form of Marxism-Leninism, which has pretty much _nothing_ to do with Marx's original ideas. Anyway, we should start talking about concrete things, like private property. And, it seems to me that, one logical conclusion of your reasoning is that private property is at least a problematic concept for our society.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] smt88|8 years ago|reply
You're smart and self-aware enough to have this thought. Why go on and contribute your uninformed opinion? Why not research whether homeless people really are happy or ask people who've been homeless?
> As long as there are minimum efforts done to take care of the poorest, meaning charities and a minimum of a justice system, things are relatively good enough.
Happiness and hope don't come from other people's "minimum efforts".
[+] [-] jaggederest|8 years ago|reply
This is the same reason that education, healthcare, and other human services are eating more and more of the GDP: anything that can't be automated becomes dramatically more expensive by comparison with things like industrial automation and information technology.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
[+] [-] dredmorbius|8 years ago|reply
BCD applies to costs of production in which a given factor (typically labour) hasn't had its productivity increased, but because it competes for other employment, the price paid for it if any of the resulting good is to be provided must keep pace.
The interesting part is what BCD doesn't describe, which is the amount of the good provided. The canonical case is the string quartet: you need four performers, no matter how much technology you've got. But: the total demand for string quartets need not remain constant. Tastes could change favouring other forms of music, recordings or broadcasts can increase the productivity of the four essential players, etc.
(The evolution of popular music from self-provisioned to big band to amplified orchestra to amplified three- or four-piece rock groups, to synthesizer, to disco, rap, house/hip-hop, and now extensive one-person sampling acts, is one example of the type of shifts that can occur.)
The "factors of production" in housing are raw materials, housing, and land. Land itself is the original rent-seeking good, for various reasons that ... modern economics fails to explain very well. My argument is that land is a network of control points (owning land gives you control in the right to exclude others), and with varying access costs to other useful capabilities (manufacture, employment, trade, education, entertainment, ag, etc.). The characteristic of economic rents is that the prices they command rise to include part, or all, of the consumer surplus. This contrasts with commodities and labour in which prices generally fall to costs. That paired relation is David Ricardo's famous two observations: the Iron Law of Wages, and the Law of Rent.
(This is why I see both a rent tax and some mix of UBI / employer of last resort with a living wage guarantee as a probably necessary economic policy.)
So, thanks for the opportunity to play with some economic concepts, but Baumol's got nothing to do with this. Your men are Ricardo and George.
[+] [-] m0llusk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SilasX|8 years ago|reply
Costs are spiraling up because of restrictions on building -- both the density, and the transit that could handle it.
[+] [-] cies|8 years ago|reply
[1] TPTB a.k.a. the 0.1%, a.k.a. the majority of the owners of the majority of private property.
[2] The people that have to work to sustain their livelihood, or are not even that fortunate (jobless, impaired, etc.).
Interesting how the article compares the US of today with the situation in the year 1900. The country as a whole has become sooooo much more wealthy in that period, but still is not able to take care of it's population's basic needs. And it seems to be getting worse.
But it's a democracy, so the 99.9% should have the power to fix this, right? Well...
"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal" -- Emma Goldman
[+] [-] pandemi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Areading314|8 years ago|reply
Fallacies, lies, and generally ignorant opinions include * Pretending the US was a more market-oriented economy in the past (which is not true)
* Comparing the housing situation 100 years ago to that of today. There are many reason why america in 1917 is very different than the america of 2017
* Literally cites a Wall Street Oasis forum post as a source on why we should not subsidize housing for the poor
* Income inequality is (obviously) a huge component of housing not being affordable (especially in urban centers) and this is dismissed using an obvious straw man argument.
One of the biggest housing subsidies is the mortgage interest deduction which is almost entirely captured by wealthy homeowners and financial institutions. It also definitely pushes up housing prices. If the author of this post had any knowledge of the housing market they would have brought this up.
[+] [-] Consultant32452|8 years ago|reply
>mortgage interest deduction
I agree we should get rid of that.
[+] [-] pjc50|8 years ago|reply
"Can we blame rich people stealing all of society’s wealth? Again, wealth inequality was very high 100 years ago. In any case, a rich person may cause us to become sick with envy but he or she doesn’t usually occupy 50 apartments at a time. So it doesn’t make sense to blame rich people for reducing the housing supply, does it?"
Actually, yes. This is certainly a problem in London, rich people buying houses that they remove from supply but then don't occupy. Everything from empty mansions: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jan/31/inside-londo... to empty luxury flats https://www.theguardian.com/money/2013/sep/27/one-hyde-park-... to empty flats built by evicting the previous occupants: https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/qkq4bx/every-flat-in-a-ne...
"Not only are all of the buyers of the new South Gardens foreign investors; from the 51 bought so far, many appear to be offshore – untraceable and untaxable. Every single one of the 51 purchases made is listed as "care of 2 Tower Street, WC2H 9NP". Helpfully, that's Riseam Sharples' office address."
[+] [-] krallja|8 years ago|reply
Not to imply anything about the quality of the article; I just think it's fun to make historical connections to our Internet elders.
[+] [-] fanzhang|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelukelugames|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Alex3917|8 years ago|reply
When reading Philip's posts, keep in mind that he's probably 10x smarter than you.
[+] [-] the_watcher|8 years ago|reply
Zoning is a huge factor here - many of the "crummy" dwellings 100 years ago were in buildings/conditions that would today be illegal. Whether that's a good or bad thing (and what to do about it) is a separate question, but it shouldn't be ignored.
[+] [-] pixl97|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badmin_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arca_vorago|8 years ago|reply
The big things as a result of it are what caused it. Debt is inversely proportional to freedom, and the wealthy have gobbled up so much of what allowed us to prosper in the first place.
People that always go on about taxes or the budget deficit etc need to realize the fed is a root causal issue here.
Also, two more points. I think the fed is unconstitutional, and I think Hammurabi had it right that such a system requires regular debt jubilees.
[+] [-] dangjc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaius|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vfulco|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eximius|8 years ago|reply
But what about food and clothes? What about books? For all our wealth, everything in the US is dozens of times more expensive than in some poorer countries. Can we develop a society that produces these products at a similarly low cost while sustaining our lower classes in other industries (since the ultimate floor for costs of goods in the US is the cost of paying laborers 'living' wages)?
[+] [-] kharms|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soneca|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisbennet|8 years ago|reply
Example: If you wanted to start a business that would consume more city resources than city infrastructure could support, say sewage/water/parking/etc, the city would deny a permit to build.
Why not restrict the number/size of businesses in a location based on how many people/workers could reasonably afford to live there?
[+] [-] zgramana|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wheresmyusern|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whipoodle|8 years ago|reply