Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California

[moniker]

The bank and the builders do not have to realize the loss as long as they maintain the fiction that the apartment can be rented at the luxury price they projected when they approved the developer's loan to build it 10 or 20 years ago.

This is a good observation if true because it is similar to banks not having to recognize a loss on low-interest bonds they hold if the bank says they intend to hold them until maturity. Of course saying you intended to hold until maturity and actually intending to do so are two different thing.

[RE]

The bank and the builders do not have to realize the loss as long as they maintain the fiction that the apartment can be rented at the luxury price they projected when they approved the developer's loan to build it 10 or 20 years ago.

This is a good observation if true because it is similar to banks not having to recognize a loss on low-interest bonds they hold if the bank says they intend to hold them until maturity. Of course saying you intended to hold until maturity and actually intending to do so are two different thing.

Yes, it is exactly the same thing, and almost certainly true because if not, then where did all the units go that have been built over the last 20 years? How is it that there is such a sudden increase in disparity between the number of housing units available and the number of people who need them?

Perhaps a combination of a lower pace of building during the covid epidemic and the increasing number of immigrants coming in now has created the crunch, or at least exacerbated it.  If that is the problem, in THEORY, the capitalist market should respond with an increase in building now, but it is not doing so.  Why?  Because the rapid rise in the interest rates has made it harder for developers to get loans to put up low income housing, even with the tax incentives handed out to get them to do this type of building.

A good platform for a Democratic candidate would be to increase these tax incentives and at the same time subsidize the rents for low income applicants, as well as offering 3 months free rent to recent immigrants while they look for jobs.  The rent prices should be scaled to 40%  of what a person earns taking a min wage job for 40 hours/week in the zip code of that apartment building.  Again, the tax subsidies and developer loans would be financed by a wealth tax on Billionaires.

There would be a lag time of 1-2 years before the units start coming available, but that can be addressed as mentioned using the empty floors and buildings in the commercial RE market.  Of course office space isn't perfect living space since it lacks showers and you would have to share bathrooms, but it's way better than Tents with no electricity or running water in the middle of nowhere.

What currently appears to be the case is that the big cities like NYC & Chicago are throwing up the tent cities as a political ploy to say they are doing SOMETHING,  while in fact they are doing NOTHING.  Venezuelan immigrants given rides out to these places have gotten right back on the bus to go back to the intake center, despite being told take it or leave it, otherwise you sleep in the street.  It's a complete joke, there's no way to get to any jobs, no way for kids to go to school, nothing for anyone to do, etc.  I'm not even sure what they are supposed to do for food.  K-Rations?

Another question on my mind is why Venezuelans right now?  What is going on there beyond the usual failed state stuff?  Any news from there I missed out on?

RE

[Nearings Fault]

How about viewing all this from an energy lens. Maybe the era of the 1 bedroom apartment with kitchen, bathroom, living room for every single person, the least efficient mode of housing, is an artificial product of the age of cheap energy. The cracks have been papered over as long as possible but they can't hide now. Multi generational housing, boarding houses granny suites or just a room in an over shared house are going to have to make a comeback as we return to historical norms in terms of income and energy use. I don't worry about the housing shortage it's an artificial blip created by a wealthy generation that bought too much housing and is holding on too long thinking it's worth more than it is. What other things do you buy become more valuable as they ages? Why is a 40 year old house with a worn out furnace, mold filled duct work, electrical wiring chewed by rodents, soggy roof plywood etc worth more when old then new? Crazy. 

[RE]

How about viewing all this from an energy lens. Maybe the era of the 1 bedroom apartment with kitchen, bathroom, living room for every single person, the least efficient mode of housing, is an artificial product of the age of cheap energy.

Actually, the opposite is true.  Because 1 bedroom units are usually built in large buildings, they are more efficient than rooms in single family homes.  Fewer units have exterior facing walls.  In fact when I lived at Creekwood Park, because my unit was surrounded by units on either side and had one above it, I actually almost never had to turn on my own furnace, enough heat came through the shared walls with my neighbors and little leaked out the ceiling to keep my unit warm enough.  The bigger the building, the more floors and less roof space/unit, the more efficient in use of heat.

You could think of my current SNIF as just a very big one family house with 102 tiny bedrooms for the extended family of grandparents.  All our little bedrooms surround common areas that17 of us share, like a big living room.  All the cooking is done in one kitchen in large pots and ovens, saving energy from individually cooking meals, or even for meals for a big extended family like the Waltons.

A really efficient building for single people would have individual bedrooms and shared kitchens for a communal style of living.  A well run old folks home like this one is a good model.  The only thing wrong here is the medical industry and overpriced staffing  administration and insurance costs.  If it was reorganized so young healthy people could get a free room in exchange for helping out the old folks and old folks like me who still can do stuff were put to work we could run the place ourselves.  I would love to run the kitchen here, it would be a blast.  I actually met laast week with the chief cook to discuss some ideas and ways to change the menu and choices available.  I could also easily handle the front dest and transportation scheduling, etc.





The single family home model is actually the least eefficient building method for energy efficiency.  Bigger buildingss housing more people are much more efficient.

RE

[Nearings Fault]

How about viewing all this from an energy lens. Maybe the era of the 1 bedroom apartment with kitchen, bathroom, living room for every single person, the least efficient mode of housing, is an artificial product of the age of cheap energy.

Actually, the opposite is true.  Because 1 bedroom units are usually built in large buildings, they are more efficient than rooms in single family homes.  Fewer units have exterior facing walls.  In fact when I lived at Creekwood Park, because my unit was surrounded by units on either side and had one above it, I actually almost never had to turn on my own furnace, enough heat came through the shared walls with my neighbors and little leaked out the ceiling to keep my unit warm enough.  The bigger the building, the more floors and less roof space/unit, the more efficient in use of heat.

You could think of my current SNIF as just a very big one family house with 102 tiny bedrooms for the extended family of grandparents.  All our little bedrooms surround common areas that17 of us share, like a big living room.  All the cooking is done in one kitchen in large pots and ovens, saving energy from individually cooking meals, or even for meals for a big extended family like the Waltons.

A really efficient building for single people would have individual bedrooms and shared kitchens for a communal style of living.  A well run old folks home like this one is a good model.  The only thing wrong here is the medical industry and overpriced staffing  administration and insurance costs.  If it was reorganized so young healthy people could get a free room in exchange for helping out the old folks and old folks like me who still can do stuff were put to work we could run the place ourselves.  I would love to run the kitchen here, it would be a blast.  I actually met laast week with the chief cook to discuss some ideas and ways to change the menu and choices available.  I could also easily handle the front dest and transportation scheduling, etc.





The single family home model is actually the least eefficient building method for energy efficiency.  Bigger buildingss housing more people are much more efficient.

RE

I won't argue that too much. So basically the dorm room model would be the most efficient. I would not be surprised if you start seeing some of that with the underused office space. In my own research one of the stumbling blocks of the transformation of office space turns out to be plumbing. Office buildings tend to have centralized plumbing which does not work when you want to turn it into 12 one bedrooms each with bathroom and kitchen. Dorm model? Much more doable. Individualized plumbing and cooking facilities are very inefficient and expensive. In defense of the single home in my world of rural living large buildings are very uncommon and a move to more centralized structures would take decades. Large underused homes though are very common here. A move to shared housing could be done relatively quickly and at very little cost. Right now I see the stumbling block to it being people being unwilling to give up their sense of entitlement to that space and lowering expectations of rentors. Lack of money to keep an apartment or home should alter those feelings in time. I don't feel bad about our space. There are 4 of us, it's a very efficient house and when the young things leave we have already discussed either creating an apartment downstairs or downsizing. We have to travel too much, we could probably pack a few more in here, grow more food ourselves etc. but I too suffer from my energy rich delusions.
I've often thought about the medieval town surrounded by fields often with common walls between houses. Very efficient space wise, not much travel to get your resources. Maybe in our futures again.
Cheers,  NF

[Surly1]

Since private developers won't build affordable housing, a Goobermint home building company like the WPA should be assigned the resposibility for building single and double occupancy units in every major city equal to or greater than the number of immigrants that city is expected to accept each year.

While I applaud the image of banksters and developers either reduced to penury and/or swinging from lampposts, don't overlook the NIMBY factor. Every time a municipality down here tries to create "affordable" housing, the local civic leagues mount a hue and cry about how such a project would mean The End of the World as we Know It: not in my back yard. After all, it might house "those" people.

Some things never change. In America. the only unforgivable crime is to be poor.

[RE]

Since private developers won't build affordable housing, a Goobermint home building company like the WPA should be assigned the resposibility for building single and double occupancy units in every major city equal to or greater than the number of immigrants that city is expected to accept each year.

While I applaud the image of banksters and developers either reduced to penury and/or swinging from lampposts, don't overlook the NIMBY factor. Every time a municipality down here tries to create "affordable" housing, the local civic leagues mount a hue and cry about how such a project would mean The End of the World as we Know It: not in my back yard. After all, it might house "those" people.

Some things never change. In America. the only unforgivable crime is to be poor.

Indeed, NIMBY is a big problem, which is why the Hooverville in NYC was plopped down on Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn.  It's an old airstrip all the way out on Jamaica bay which might be like 2 feet above sea level so as soon as you get a decent storm and a King Tide, all the migrants there will be washed out to sea.  lol.

The Homeless Migrants are so low on the NIMBY scale, not even the people who live in the crime infested project housing in Brooklyn want them next door.  There is no public transportation out there, no subway or bus service for miles.  No stores, no schools, nada.  You might as well be putting them in the middle of the sahara desert.

As you indicate, even for normal low income housing,  "middle class" neighborhoods such as they exist anymore don't want them because their precious property value would decrease, because of course the next buyer doesn't want to live next to poor people.  That's WHY people moved out of the cities to the suburbs, once you got rich enough to afford one of the tract houses built on Long Island after WWII, you left your apartment in Brooklyn for new poor immigrants to move into.

Now of course nobody currently in those apts can afford to move out of them to new  McMansions out in the burbs, both because theey are unaffordable and because there is almost no room left for new subdivisions.  All the farmland that had been on LI before WWII has been completely gobbled up, all the way out to Montauk.

So the only real solution here is to increase the density of the buildings, which means taking the single family homes still in parts of Brooklyn and Queens, razing them and putting up multi story buildings.  Nobody who owns a house in such a neighborhood wants that now, because no matter how much a developer pays for their plot of land, it's not going to be enough to buy anything close to what they would be selling.

NYC itself has had the same 8M or so population size my whole life.  The only increase in population has been in the "Greater NY Area", which is about a 25 mile radius around Manhattan and includes all the "Bridge & Tunnel" people from NJ, LI and Westchester County.The only way to increase the population housing capacity would be to raze the single family homes in places like Nassau County and Hoboken and on Staten Island.  The Boomers who own those homes won't sell them, they'll leave them in their wills for their favorite Gen Z Great Grandchild.

Too many people want to move in to NY from around the world, just like they always have.  The difference today is the people who have been living there no longer have better places to move to as they become richer.  Everywhere else is too expensive to replace what they have, and there aren't great new high paying job opportunities elsewhere to attract most of them, particularly retired Boomers.

Basically, some other city should be picked to send all these folks to after they cross the border.  Maybe some old Rust Belt cities like Cleveland or Buffalo have room to build some new low income housing.  Any job opportunities in those place?  Well, no, that's why they are rust belt cities!  lol.

Since this is only the beginning of the Collapse of Industrial Civilization, things will be getting worse before they get better.  Much worse.  Enjoy this moment.  10 years from now these will be the Good Old Days.

RE

[RE]

I won't argue that too much. So basically the dorm room model would be the most efficient.

It is definitely the best model in an idealized world where everybody gets along well and does their share.  Unfortunately in the real world those last two caveats aren't necessarily true unless all the people in such a housing model have some commonality, like they are all members of the same religious cult. lol.

Taking your example of Dormitory style living, at Columbia one of the dorms actually built by Barnard (the sister college for women back before they went coed) Plimpton Hall had 4 suites with 2 shared bedrooms each all surrounding a central kitchen/dining are.  The problem for all my friends who lived there was that all 16 people sharing the kitchen were not equally good about washing their dishes and cleaning the fridge of old leftovers, or picking up the beer cans from the last party.  It follows the 80-20 rule, where 80% of the work gets done by 20% of the people, who eventually tire of cleaning up after the slobs.  Same problem with cleaning the shared bathrooms, though there only 4 people shared each of the 4 bathrooms.

Once you get to the size of a really big commune like my SNIF for 102 people, you have to have paid staff for the Housekeeping aspect, and that would be true even if the place wasn't populated by old folks and cripples who can't mop floors and scrub toilets.  If it was a cult commune with a really strong David Koresh running the place, he might be able to assign work details and threaten lazy culties with going to hell if they didn't keep the toilets clean on their turn in the rotation, but without some type of enforcement you can never get this sort of scut work done in a large group of unrelated people.  In the military, if you don't get your job on KP done, you'll get some time in the brig.  Screw up enough, you'll get a dishonorable discharge, a nasty thing to have on your record on a par with being a convicted felon even after you serve your prison sentence.

I do think in an area like yours with houses of 4 or 5 bedrooms, it would be a good idea to develop friendships with neighbors of similar age, and when the kids have all grown up, pick one of the bigger nicer houses with good common areas and share it with 2 or 3 other retired couples or singles, since some spouses will die off and there are divorces etc.  You could help each other with less need for old age homes and paid PCAs.  Could you envision making friends around there you could do that with?

RE

[Nearings Fault]

I won't argue that too much. So basically the dorm room model would be the most efficient.

It is definitely the best model in an idealized world where everybody gets along well and does their share.  Unfortunately in the real world those last two caveats aren't necessarily true unless all the people in such a housing model have some commonality, like they are all members of the same religious cult. lol.

Taking your example of Dormitory style living, at Columbia one of the dorms actually built by Barnard (the sister college for women back before they went coed) Plimpton Hall had 4 suites with 2 shared bedrooms each all surrounding a central kitchen/dining are.  The problem for all my friends who lived there was that all 16 people sharing the kitchen were not equally good about washing their dishes and cleaning the fridge of old leftovers, or picking up the beer cans from the last party.  It follows the 80-20 rule, where 80% of the work gets done by 20% of the people, who eventually tire of cleaning up after the slobs.  Same problem with cleaning the shared bathrooms, though there only 4 people shared each of the 4 bathrooms.

Once you get to the size of a really big commune like my SNIF for 102 people, you have to have paid staff for the Housekeeping aspect, and that would be true even if the place wasn't populated by old folks and cripples who can't mop floors and scrub toilets.  If it was a cult commune with a really strong David Koresh running the place, he might be able to assign work details and threaten lazy culties with going to hell if they didn't keep the toilets clean on their turn in the rotation, but without some type of enforcement you can never get this sort of scut work done in a large group of unrelated people.  In the military, if you don't get your job on KP done, you'll get some time in the brig.  Screw up enough, you'll get a dishonorable discharge, a nasty thing to have on your record on a par with being a convicted felon even after you serve your prison sentence.

I do think in an area like yours with houses of 4 or 5 bedrooms, it would be a good idea to develop friendships with neighbors of similar age, and when the kids have all grown up, pick one of the bigger nicer houses with good common areas and share it with 2 or 3 other retired couples or singles, since some spouses will die off and there are divorces etc.  You could help each other with less need for old age homes and paid PCAs.  Could you envision making friends around there you could do that with?

RE

The golden girls model is actively being discussed by 3 women in their 60-70's who all live in their own homes up the road a bit. All 3 are older farmhouses with land all just leased out for hay. It's a collosal holding of resources country style. Each property when originally constructed about 100 years ago housed large farm families and produced enough food to feed them all which a surplus. Now they grow hay for cows and horses, trees, and house widows who due to much better economic times have the money to hold onto these places. Meanwhile all the kids moved because there was no place to live and no jobs (ag jobs could exist but they are very demanding in terms of time and labour). It's the rural reality I have observed brought on by cheap energy.