We all know that The Rent is Too Damn High. The affordable housing crisis is largely concerned with renters. In fact, though, homeowners are being screwed by the very same dynamics.
A lot of American cities have fucked up in a very important way: they haven’t been building enough housing. And just turning the shed in the back yard into a rental ain’t gonna cut it.
Many areas of America—the areas where lots of people want to live—also have crushing housing shortages. One unorthodox, wild idea seems to be becoming more attractive... build more housing, faster.
Airbnb is set for a new round of fundraising that would value the company at $30 billion. How do we regulate this ephemeral behemoth before it swallows our urban real estate markets whole?
If we ever want to address poverty and inequality in America, we need to start with housing—most people’s greatest expense. A new report quantifies just how devastating our affordable housing shortage has become.
A new startup wants to take a “deep dive” into the private social media activity of prospective tenants—their chats, check-ins, how many times they’ve posted words like “pregnant” or “loan”—and score their “personality” for their potential landlord. Why would anyone let this happen? Because “people will give up their privacy to get something they want,” Steve Thornhill, co-founder of the British startup Score Assured tells The Washington Post.
Great news for Manhattanites looking to save a few bucks on their next apartment: according to a new report, rents in 40 percent of the market saw a slight downturn last year. Which 40 percent? Why, the top 40 percent, of course.
How bad is the housing crisis in California? So bad that cities are actively trying to stop the creation of new jobs, because they don’t have anywhere to house the people.
Nowhere is America’s affordable housing crisis more acute than in the California Bay Area. The problem: piss poor planning. Incredibly, an actual solution may be at hand.
New Census figures show that U.S. urban growth is slowing, “as a bulge of late-20s Americans reaches prime homebuying age and high urban real-estate costs are making suburbs and exurbs more attractive.” Good!!
In New York City, the average income and the average rent seem to have both just flown in from very different planets. They have no idea how to communicate with one another.
Kids who grow up poor have a better chance of one day not being poor if they grow up neighborhoods where everyone isn’t poor. But in some cities, affordable housing crises are making that impossible. It’s a quandary.
In San Francisco and Silicon Valley, housing is expensive and in short supply. All throughout the Bay Area, cities are discussing where the hell all their schoolteachers are supposed to live.
A new report on the US housing market argues that one factor driving housing shortages is a growing gap in price between mid-tier and luxury housing (driven in part by rising incomes of the rich), which prevents homeowners from “trading up.” Dang it sounds like we need to build more housing.
Another week is here, and with it, another story about the affluent, techie-infested caricature that San Francisco has become. Hey, assholes: step one to surviving this trying time is to build more fucking housing.
During the furious stock market boom of the past several years, the only apartments you could find anywhere were exclusively glass-walled luxury penthouses, priced at $85 million. It seems, however, that we may be waking up from our cash-induced fancy apartment haze at last.
“A majority of New Yorkers who earn more than $100,000 a year feel they’re likely to be priced out of their neighborhood, according to a new poll.”
Creating enough affordable housing is one of the hardest political and economic challenges in the world. (If you think you know an easy answer, you’re wrong!) Here is a new piece of data that could “add to our understanding,” and make everyone mad.
In December 1950, Woody Guthrie signed his name to the lease of a new apartment in Brooklyn. Even now, over half a century later, that uninspiring document prompts a double-take.
Zoning laws, governing how we use our land, are often thought of as mundane drudgery, or as opportunities for civic-minded people to help “Keep Our Neighborhood Beautiful.” In fact, they can also be a powerful driver of inequality.
