Quote (RedFromWinter @ Mar 30 2024 08:08pm)
Homelessness in the US is a very complicated mess. There has always homelessness due to mental illness, drugs, alcohol, various addictions. The recent rise seems directly correlated to housing shortage and wage stagnation.
Question is why is homelessness, child homelessness, and first time homelessness rising in the US?
Not sure on the answers, but these trends stick out to me.
- Cost to have a house built very expensive. $250sqft is bargain rate. It's $600sqft for new house in my part of US.
- Most parts of US have outlawed alternative living solutions. Things like Tiny House on Wheels, smaller square footage dwellings, ADU, container house.
- Hurdles to build DIY: excessive permits and inspection, required license work nonsense (abet EE not supposed to wire simple 2-phase residential.....)
- Cost of house relative to income worse than the worst year of Great Depression
- Banks and Corporate owned vacant houses are held as investment commodities
- Housing market is a closed market. The transactional data is held in a private DB only moron realtors and the like access. Very capitalist free and open
- Residential Zoning is near meaningless. Many residential zoned houses operate as investment property for business margin.
- Squatter 'rights' burden the whole system from locking up real estate to bogging down civil court.
- tens of millions of ILLEGAL now competing for the low supply houses.
- local real estate tax has doubled or tripled in areas
- big gap in income requirement houses price and free market price
- retiree converting larger single family house to rentals and buying second homes. Big part is they need the extra income in retirement to offset inflation and fixed income from retirement accounts
Anyways, a lot of these trends impact SUPPLY and FED and HUD and local municipality only pull levers on demand side. The homelessness are a function of the housing supply and affordability. YES, there will always be homelessness, but the rise is not related to the regular suspects IMO
Between 2021 and 2022 in Colorado you sometimes had to bid up to 50,000 over asking just to beat off some capital investment company from buying a house you wanted. PLUS the offer had to be cash since your competition had cash on hand.
It's such a shame so many companies are allowed to just buy buy buy to avoid income taxes
The rental market blew the fuck up; apartments, condos, storage. Etc
But that covid demand is going away and I'm seeing rents go down and many places offering 2-3 month discounts and some even waiving the deposits.