I'll add... I think idealizing single family housing as the default, over generational family housing (mostly as a response to industrialization wanting worker movement, and the advent of automobiles) is going to eventually be seen as an unforgivable mistake.
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same
I see this take a lot, and I think it has a terribly romanticized and unrealistic rose-colored view of the past. Multi-generational housing suuuuucks, and it’s a near-universal feature of human societies that as soon as people become wealthy enough to vote with their feet and get out of it, they immediately do so, because “multi-generational housing” means constantly having nosy relatives butting into your business, demanding a say in your decisions, and being a downward drag on your life trajectory. People romanticize it if they’ve never experienced it, but in practice everybody hates it.
It's code for free childcare. Although in the old days the deal was the elderly took care of the kids and in turn the sandwich generation takes care of the elderly. Now the elderly taxes the shit out the sandwich generation, wields housing regulation to enrich themselves, and renegs on giving anything in return because they have you by the balls already paying taxes to them whether any SS is left for you or not.
I want to emphasize - amortized child care and free elder care - it's labor but not capital, and most families have lots of labor to spare that ends up going to leisure/free time right now in ways that probably aren't socially sustainable.
I watched all but one of my grandparents go absolutely bankrupt from elder care costs (dementia on one side, alzheimer's on the other), then I watched my parents shell out on the order of 10k/month in long term care costs for years, and that was just their portion of costs, after splitting among siblings (7 total siblings across both sides).
The only one who didn't go bankrupt had long term care insurance that you literally cannot buy anymore, at basically any price.
So I'll add that expectation to my future payments. Combined with the 4500/m I pay now for child care for 3 children. Not to mention the possibility of 100k/year private education costs as we dissolve federal funding for education in public schools, and see declining school quality in general.
All told... I firmly expect to end up housing my elderly parents anyways (and in-laws) because they simply didn't have as many children, and were the first generation to be completely pension-less, combined with what appears to be a truly incompetent admin in the US gutting the last shreds of our social nets and drastically increasing living costs.
Yes, and most people prefer to eat sweets and pizza instead of vegetables.
That doesn't change that single family homes are essentially making childcare and elderly costs skyrocket.
Personally, I'd much rather deal with the inconvenience of having family in my house than pay more than the mortgage on my property for childcare, and have my parents die bankrupt because of long term care costs.
Single family households bleed generational wealth, and that's somewhat ok during a period where the house itself appreciates enough to offset that... but otherwise... it's a bad deal.
Side note... it really helps if you don't hate your family. Sounds like you have personal issues on that front.
I'm not sure if democracy has the tools to adequately deal with this tbh, at-least in the short-to-medium term.
I really hope we can find a way to make voters actually believe an abundant future is possible, and that it'll benefit them and their families.
It's the biggest difference I see in societies like China, there's this pervasive optimism about technology, progress and abundance (~700 million people have first hand experience). No idea if they can keep up the growth but we sure won't.
> We have the tools, it's just going to be inter-generational warfare, and nobody really wants to say it out loud.
No, it's not. The people who own houses pass them down to their kids. As people invading a neighborhood, YIMBYs may be new, but they are not that young. They are early middle-aged and wealthy. They are trying to move into elite neighborhoods and cities that they can't afford, not trying to avoid homelessness. That's not a crisis. All of them can afford property, just not the best property in the world, (not coincidentally) near the jobs that pay them the most.
The problem is normal-case housing affordability, not elites wanting to build high-rises. Normal housing affordability is ruined due to the asymmetry between resident homeowners as buyers and wealthy buyers. Wealthy buyers are trying to extract wealth from housing. Resident homeowners and renters are the extractees.
The YIMBY goal is to make somebody in e.g. SF refusing to sell, and/or refusing to allow the houses on the corner to be demolished and a high-rise put in, the enemy. I have no idea why YIMBYs think they are either more rational, more likeable, or more victimized than that homeowner. Maybe all of the self-praise.
Yea, this is exactly what I mean by economic warfare:
>The people who own houses pass them down to their kids.
Pass them to one of their kids, who will likely be 65 or older when they inherit it. That leaves about 45 years where these kids will need to find housing.
>As people invading a neighborhood
That's an interesting way to say "moving somewhere for a job and to build a life."
>They are trying to move into elite neighborhoods and cities that they can't afford
Yea, this is absurd. People just want a decent place to live.
On a purely numbers basis the older generation of homeowners far outnumber the young. It's going to take a good while before the balance of power can be shifted. Democracy has the longterm tools for sure, just not for another twenty years or so.
Hopefully over time yimby can take hold in some pockets and gradually expand out from those strongholds.
>On a purely numbers basis the older generation of homeowners far outnumber the young.
The point is numbers of voters. There are more young voters now than older voters, this is why we are seeing things change at the state level. Now that many millennials are in there 40's with no real shot at home-ownership it's starting to freak people out. Which is why we will continue to see the YIMBY and Strong Towns movements, not just grow, but accelerate in growth.
I've been in SF for a long time and I remember when the YIMBY movement didn't exist, just 10 years ago, and Sonja Trauss was trolling SF by running for Board of Supervisors and saying all this shit out load knowing she'd lose in a landslide.
10 years later, the governor is a self-proclaimed YIMBY (even though he isn't), a book on YIMBYism is a national best seller, and nationally, folks are finally realizing that the reason why we're losing the working class on the left is because the left cares more about their own property values than about helping working folks. All the while, there is the parallel center-right focused Strong Towns organization that is making the exact same argument for the exact same movement in more conservative areas.
If that's not extreme acceleration I don't know what is.
I vote, monetary policy, weapons of mass destruction [1]. At-least have a long term plan for deleveraging residential real estate. Sure that'll suppress construction even further for a while but I'm sure we can get to the other side.
This is the china of "let it rot"[1] and a housing market so f'd that people felt pressure to buy and pay for houses that didn't even exist yet, leading to a massive mortgage boycott[2] in protest of all the resultant shenanigans? They're already failing to keep up the growth[3], their population pyramid projections are pretty bleak going forward.
I agree with you re the need to convince modern western voters of an (actual) abundant future, but china seems like they're not doing so hot either.
But right now they are in the acute/fallout phase of a massive economic disruption (the deleveraging of a highly indebted real estate sector, no less severe than the GFC, they overbuilt to a massive degree). No matter what folks are going to be struggling bad atm.
The trillion dollar question is what does this look like in ten years? It could go either way. A Japan style lost decade, or they manage to find and exploit new growth opportunities. I guess we'll see whether having pretty much the cheapest energy on the planet and impressive logistics allows them to get through this.
Do not discount the tremendous potential of electrification, and cheap renewable energy.
China's population is already declining, and that decline is accelerating. They are projected to lose 100M people by 2050, and 500M by 2075. Given their aversion to immigration, demand will continue to plummet for those unoccupied properties. This is clearly the end of their property boom. This was one of the last options left to ordinary Chinese to build wealth. Their stock market is little more than a slot machine.
It is encouraging what we see with their EV boom, but a car industry alone cannot sustain a nation with declining population levels. China has sold so few technological innovations over the decades that I do not see them innovating their way out of this.
We are all rapidly aging and pretty much no-one is bringing in anywhere near enough net contributing migrants to offset this.
What the immigration argument overlooks is domestic migration, particularly urbanization. It's zero sum for sure and rural communities will be hollowed out but I think there's a real possibility that they'll be able to soak up much of the excess capacity in the coming decade.
Urbanization massively increases productivity, reduces infrastructure costs etc. There's a real economic beauty to scale. Downside it suppresses fertility even further.
Elder care will be a real nightmare though, but the Chinese elders are willing to accept far more modest conditions and outcomes than their western counterparts. Confucian values for better or worse really help here.
US democracy is just better at managing perception and allowing controlled opposition. Dissent exists, but it’s channeled into ineffective political battles that don’t threaten the ruling structure. People think they have a say because they can vote, use twitter, get their guy in/out the whitehouse, but real systemic change is nearly impossible. Even now "doge is destroying everything the sky is failing" as they go back to scrolling.
China prevents dissent through suppression, while the U.S. redirects it into endless debates that never challenge the underlying system.
As a capitalism enjoyer this is good for me, these systems only exist to waste the time of "idealists" and reactionaries. The hands off approach used to be better, but with more technology population control becomes much cheaper, and now all the wasted time from arguing about politics and political decisions becomes a real cost center for the US.
With that said, a substantial part of that is that every major city in the US has spent decades underbuilding housing, so the smaller homes that urban seniors might otherwise want to downsize to are in very short supply in the first place.
