It’s the natural conclusion of a system where you can “”“invest””” in a human necessity for survival

Disco Stu likes left-leaning commentary… and disco music.

Landlords and the real estate industry for starters

Home owners don’t want affordable housing , not even liberal ones .

California trick to get around rent control; kick out the tenants and turn it into luxury housing, rent control problem gone. It's a little outdated though, since everybody already did it, which is why California is now a tent city.

Zoning. It is not the only solution, but it will help reduce the cost of living overall. We need to get off our dependence of gasoline by fixing our transportation. We need trains and streets rather than highways and roads. We need multiple family housing and a rejection of the suburbs. I am convinced that the suburbs is reaponsinle for our ugly strip mall ascetic in this country. So not only build more housing, but build smarter infrastructure.

It would help if people cared about this issue before they personally got priced out, personally had security deposits stolen from you, personally "didn't qualify" because you didn't make 4x the rent, personally lost hundreds due to "application fees" (that should be illegal).

Vote Blue to make renting less slave like.

There are 28 empty homes to every homeless person. The homes are there. But they rather it burn down than give someone temporary housing. Me and my wife have nothing. We own a car that's it. We live with my mom and her husband both retired. Between the both of us we make 45k ish a year. We can't afford to afford to move out. we're going to be getting a place with her sister. We can't live alone as a couple. I don't care, I hope there is a great reset.

It’s not just the “real estate lobby.” These politicians and their boomer constituents are home owners with a vested interest in keeping house prices high. Democrats and republicans don’t want to help you.

The scheming we have to engage in just to take care of our most basic of needs is an obvious cue that the system itself is the problem we need to address. The NIMBY, zoning, government housing, wages, etc. battles we have been fighting for many decades now have yielded but a few carrot-stick victories here and there. Meanwhile the housing crisis has grown and grown nearly unhindered.
At what point do you stop and realize that little is going to change until we transform the system by its deepest, sordid, feudalistic roots?

Government especially federal should stay away from housing, all they do is waste taxpayers money into program that doesn't work and that will still exist in 50 years.

Austria has a good mix of public and private housing that seems to serve its populace well. I think that model could be used in US and in Canada where I'm from. I live on Vancouver Island and housing here is becoming unaffordable to even upper middle class working folk.

I live in Ontario, and it is horrifically worse here than in America that I kind of am jealous of your home prices. In my town, a 2800 square foot house is selling for $1.9mn CAD ($1.5mn USD). The house my parents are living in appreciated from $270k CAD to about $1.4Mn the past 18 years. It is so unaffordable that the only people moving in now in my neighborhood are rich people. If I were to purchase my parents home, the monthly payments would exceed the average Canadian salary. People are forced to rent, which just perpetuates capital owners, who can afford the homes, to get richer while people pay for their real estate equity. A 1 bedroom, 500 sq ft condo is selling for $500-600K in Toronto. It's so damn bad that me being 26 and my 2 other siblings, both older than me, are still living with our parents.

Many new home builders are actively selling their tracts of land to apartment complex builders. They get a huge cash windfall and it drives up the price of homes because now there is shortage of homes because there is less land on which to build the homes (increased demand and prices).

And then of course there's gentrification, pricing people out of homes where they have lived for generations.

Follow the money, who owns most of the real estate in the country ?

Medium income in Columbus is under $30,000/Year. Outlier wealthy residents cannot be in on data because it pushes medium x value up which does NOT represent the majority of poor Americans!

Affordable Housing = Basic Human Right To Function

Columbus needs 17,000+++/Year new affordable housing of single units only ! 1 bedroom 1 bath $450/Month and under due to poverty wages!

Columbus residents are forced to live in cars, van's, woods, crammed subletting which leads to domestic violence and poor health, moldy basements, under bridges, abandoned foreclosure buildings, couch surfing, in offices sleeping at desks, etc!

Columbus, Ohio residents are mostly poor and ONLY looking for 1 bedroom 1 bath apartments for $450/Month or less! Our city is brutally corrupt and the wrong housing is being built and of no value to poor Americans!

Supply and demand.
More houses would mean the supply increases and the price would drop, but you must also consider the cost to build a new house.
If the cost of materials to build the house go up due to inflation (which is happening right now ), then this would counter the rise in supply and put pressure on prices to go higher. If the home builder has to pay more to construct the house, he is going to charge more.
Another thing to consider is the buyer. If the cost to borrow has gone up, which it is(inflation), than it is going to cost more to buy the house which also puts pressure on demand.
So if there are less buyers there is a reduction in demand. This would have house prices falling as sellers would be tempting buyers will lower prices.
What is happening currently is home builders aren't building due to rising costs, and buyers aren't buying because of rising costs. The question is who will win this tug of war?

Just for a hypothetical considering the above situation, if government steps in and builds "affordable" housing, then the supply increases so prices should drop right?
Wrong! Because the Government pays for it by monetizing the debt through the Federal Reserve which causes inflation. This means prices go up which means the cost of everything goes up means not just the house cost more, but the cost of food gas etc so there is less more to put towards paying a mortgage. This puts pressure on the demand side- less people buying.
If government steps in pressing the Federal Reserve to drop rates so the cost to borrow goes down, you again run into the problem of causing more inflation and you get nowhere.
Matter of fact the government by continually stepping in and trying to manipulate the market, it continually creates more inflation which has been making the cost of living higher and higher. And as you know wages have not kept pace so it has the poor and middle-class falling further and further behind.
The rich on the other hand buy assets with the surplus of money they have after paying their expenses(food,gas,mortgage etc)
As inflation rises the cost of their assets rises, protecting themselves and most likely making themselves richer as the price of the asset increases more than inflation.
The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. All fueled buy inflation, which is created by Government monetization of debt.(printing of money- increase the supply of dollars- more dollars means each dollar in existence loses purchasing power-so it takes more of them to buy something- meaning prices rise)

Welcome to the real world. Welcome to the shell game/government con.
Time to reevaluate any system that relies on a Central Bank enabling the Government to spend money it doesn't have.

Wait till 2027. Rent nationally will be $4200 – $6200 month 🥃🔥

If you can’t afford to live in an area, then you can’t live there. Go find housing you can afford. Why do you have the right to live where you want?

Did he just say $1000 dollars and $50,000 dollars? In Eugene, OR I don't know what the median income is but studio's are more than $1000 and a two bedroom is between $1500 and $2500 so I am not sure if he has it that bad or I am missing something. And these prices are for shit apartments.

One of the problems of housing especially when built by private developers is they are given a a mandate of build whatever as long as they build a smaller percentile of public or affordable housing. when it should be, you want to build housing, you build 1 for 1, or 2 for 1 public housing and you're profit on what you build is not to exceed 7% profit on public housing, they can gouge the buyers of the private building but not public housing/affordable housing. there is more need for public and lowcost housing than private. if they don't like it then government commission it or have public development to build.

Did he say the median income was $50,000 and rent is around $1,400? I must have heard that wrong, what did I miss? If one can't live on $50,000 with rent that's less than $2,000 a month, the problem has nothing to do with the government. I listened to it a couple of times, did he really say $15,000?

Good conversation

You’re not going to make housing affordable by partnering with Private Real Estate.

Good point on why private industry is (duh!)NOTTT helpful for making housing, energy, college and HC costs “reasonable” and won’t be in some mythical rosy Adam Smithian capitalist future. Those industries raison d’etre ISSSS to keep those costs high and send them sky high while constantly “acquiring” protective monopolies. Only (“mean/nasty”)governments and community boards etc can make “reasonable life-balancing policies”, but they’re usually PRE-SPONSORED by those same naturally avaricious private industries. Yikes!!! 😥
PS) If our founders intended this to be a result they would have enshrined in the Constitution: “Territories shall duly elect thair representatives by faire methods of tabulation, but these same shued exclusively make pains to ONLY represent those corporitt interests that they also receiveth thair stipends from”.

Cities have systematically brought the housing crisis on themselves.

Decades ago, there were residential hotels. Cheap places where a person could rent a furnished room on a weekly or monthly basis. These were basically outlawed by city governments across the country.

Most land in cities is zoned specifically for single family homes. That severely limits housing density, which bloats the budgets for infrastructure, because roads and sewers have to be constructed over a much wider area.

Ideally, we should be building out 6-8 story apartment blocks with unit sizes ranging from single rooms up to 4 bedroom apartments. If the local governments owned these housing units, they could charge rent based on people's income, instead of the market.

That's the only realistic solution to the housing crisis.

Who's to blame?
Private Property, i.e. Capitalism