alert0's comments

I guess, either way, you need a system that addresses supply and allocates housing fairly. I believe the free market can do that. Saying no land ownership doesn't really address who builds more housing, what incentive do they have, what restrictions are there, who gets to live where. Sure, if you could replace it with a system where the government builds as dense as is safely possible to meet demand, then held a lottery for who got to live there, and those tenants were forced to relocate every 3-5 years to give other people an opportunity to live there, I guess I'd be on board with that.

My hesitation is that would be a total rewrite, and we have a system that works pretty well where we could remove some market distortions and have it working really well. Remove residential zoning restrictions and landlords will build, there is incentive for it. So much of LA is zoned for SFH+ADU, and your neighbors will sue you if you get creative. There is no room in the zoning code for low end housing. I read about these men's hotels [1] and I don't think you can build something like that anymore, something that addresses a need at a price point people can afford. It sounds crass but we need tenements, so someone who is barely scraping by has a bed, an address, and a shower.

There is nothing besides legacy rent control units at the $500/mo price point in LA. There should be. We shouldn't rely on rent control, where we privatize the costs of a social problem and give landlords a huge incentive to get people out. We should just build some livable shit.

1. https://newrepublic.com/article/161808/ewing-annex-hotel-hou...

>leading to problems with homelessness and tenant impoverishment, ..., paying increasing quantities of their income

I see all of these as problems with zoning. I could also rant about rent control but it has a much smaller effect compared to the prevention of construction and density.

>does one dare imagine that a dozen or more others weren't damn close

I think about this in the computer security industry, and my conclusion is that no, they were not. You do this in depth research on a niche topic. You submit it to an industry conference with 1000 attendees, 100 people attend your talk, 10 have the background understanding for it, and it is relevant to 1 other person's work.

There is a surprisingly finite number of people working on certain problems. I am working on a hypervisor for binary instrumentation right now. It is because a single person streamed themselves building one over the course of a week. [1] How many other people watched the hours of video and were inspired to undertake such a project? I know of 1 other. The community is small, but let's extrapolate that to 5 people.

I am not saying we are working on something so revolutionary, but on a rather niche problem, there are less than half a dozen people working on it. We also have other obligations in life like work, school, or personal relationships. So it is likely there will only be 1 or 2 applications fully realized.

Could someone else do it? Absolutely, but very few are motivated on such a specific problem. They may have an interest in some other topic instead.

1. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSkhUfcCXvqHsOy2VUxuo...

I appreciate the reply, I hadn't seen these before and I'll do some more research on them.

My initial reaction is how does this address the issue of developing more units in dense urban environments? For example, if we convert all multi family dwellings in LA to CLTs. Housing is more affordable and no residents are being displaced. Now more people want to move to LA. Who builds housing for them?

They would be required for compete over an extremely limited number of SFHs. Unless the CLTs had a provision that every Nth year, they would be torn down and redeveloped for greater density, this sounds like it would cause a city to completely stagnate. That Nth year clause would really go against the non-displacement goal. It could be sustainable if a city had zero growth, but for desirable metro areas that are mostly developed, that is not the case.

Market rents cause healthy turn over. There are other ways to address affordability, such as addressing wage growth, removing density restrictions, or expanding Section 8. Non-profit landlords would just further distort the system by not addressing systemic needs that require capital.

>The person who built the building, either the actual builders or the investors, make it available.

The person who owns the land makes it available by deciding to rent to people. The person who owns the land can decide to tear it down or not rent to people.

>take no risks

Real estate is not a risk free investment. It would be much more popular than bonds (when interest rates aren't near zero) if it was.

>provide no service

Maintaining the property in a habitable condition is a service. Maintenance expenses are why a large number of people choose to rent instead of buy when staying somewhere short term.

>add no value

Making housing available in desirable locations for less than the cost of a SFH is adding value. It can reduce people's commute or put them in neighborhoods they want to live in. If that land was instead covered in SFHs (which seems to be the implied ideal for the "landlords should not exist" crowd) the number of people who could live there would be significantly reduced.

>employ nobody

Landscapers, plumbers, electricians, roofers, property managers, cleaners, inspectors. In the case of new construction, a lot more people.

>often literally do nothing

Ha. I wish.

The comment is about landlords being predatory, not about an underwater investment.

This is a similar situation to rent control, it privatizes the costs of a social problem.

>you're in the least productive and most predatory sector of our economy (the landlord)

I never really understand this. Let's say I own a 4 unit building on a decent sized lot in a big city. I make housing available to 3 other families in a place they could not afford to own. What is your alternative? I should tear down the apartments and opt to live in a single family home? How does that help anyone?

It wasn't like that at all when I worked there. Quite the opposite, people were very quiet so we could do focused work, we did our work, then went home. We usually ate lunch together. Many of my coworkers had kids to go home and take care of. No one was looking to hang around. I'm sure it varies throughout the company though.

You can afford condos on both sides of the bay.

75% of the US is overweight. Losing weight can increase testosterone levels. [1]

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25982085/

I am really sick of the word share. Share your data with us, share your heart rate with us, we just share this with a few of our partners. Sharing is caring, I guess.

I think they are. They are purchasing an asset that others may not be able to afford and making it available. Additionally, they're funding construction of more housing wherever possible. Are tenants just money conduits for the corporations they work for?

Right now interest rates are low, they cannot use them as a tool in a crisis, for this reason they are printing money to lower the overall debt obligation of the US. Inflating away our debt. This will eventually lead to inflation at which point the interest rates will rise again (prediction, at the end of the decade). This is the correct play for where we are in the long term debt cycle. In my opinion, this is happening a little earlier than it should, but it might just be a sneak preview provided by the pandemic.

Stock prices are rising because the interest rates are so low. A ton of institutional money that was in bonds is now out seeking yield. This moves a ton of money into stocks and, as we see in the article, real estate.

The labor class has been shafted for years by the US dollar being the global reserve currency, causing us to run persistent trade deficits. This has off-shored manufacturing and gutted our capabilities. If the US weakens the dollar and rebuilds the manufacturing base, which they appear to be trying to do with the investment in semiconductors, I think we will be in a much better position. I am happy with the stimulus because it does both, weaken the dollar and invest in US capabilities. We just need to make sure it flows to the correct places.

That actually messes with single family home owners more. I would love to provide more housing and make more money.

Rent control makes landlords very hesitant to add new people to a lease. Otherwise the unit can just be passed from friend to friend and never get back to market.

I get motion sick from Minecraft and nothing else. I have thousands of hours in other FPS, even watching someone else play Minecraft in person makes me nauseous.

I think it is more so a way to recognize the actual scarcity in the SWE labor pool. I am sick of using apps implemented by the CEOs nephew who is learning to program. I am sick of developers who don't understand a memory corruption vuln. I am sick of people not managing, updating, or auditing dependencies. There is scarcity of talent and we need to stop letting people accumulate and then lose personal data.

I would really like to see a move toward purpose built systems and actually software engineering. General purpose operating systems really speed up development time, but I am not sure we need critical infrastructure to be capable of playing Doom or running generic ransomware. In the same vein, it would be nice for the people who built these systems to be able to provide tolerances and document failure cases. This would be mandating memory safe languages, understanding dependencies, mandatory penetration tests, mandatory fuzz testing. We have standards for building bridges but not for computing systems.

Another policy point would be data de-risking. It has been shown time and time again that companies cannot protect their own data, not to mention user data. I think we should make it very costly to be breached and lose PII. It would raise the bar a lot for who could do what, but I do not think companies have really demonstrated that they can handle this data responsibly. These data losses have even become a national security risk. [1]

1. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/21/china-stolen-us-data-ex...

Enjoy!

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