@snoopydawg

i thought that i would look to see how many houses the city of los angeles owns, since a lot of cities own significant amounts of property due to tax forfeitures, etc. here in baltimore the city owns huge amounts of property that the real estate industry has been fairly successful at getting the city to destroy rather than renovate and make them available to homeless and low income people.

so anyway, it looks like la county owns about 14,000 homes and los angeles (city) owns around 7,500.

but then i ran across this. it's pretty interesting and there's a lot more at the link:

The Vacancy Report: How Los Angeles Leaves Homes Empty and People Unhoused

Because of the unprecedented housing crisis in Los Angeles, few people will be surprised by this report. Our housing system fails to house tens of thousands of the city’s residents and leaves hundreds of thousands more struggling under astronomical rents. But for some, the housing market is working exactly as they would prefer, delivering unprecedented profits to a privileged class of investors who have bent the housing market to their interests. Rampant speculation has resulted in a housing system that works in the interest of a few, to the detriment of the many, along lines of race and class.

Some of the outcomes of this dynamic are detailed in this report. With more than 36,000 unhoused residents, Los Angeles simultaneously has over 93,000 units sitting vacant, nearly half of which are withheld from the housing market. Thousands of luxury units across the city are empty, owned as second homes or pure investments. At a time when the city should be doing everything in its power to house people, over 22 square miles of vacant lots are owned and kept vacant by corporate entities. The power of finance, which has brought 67% of the city’s residential units under its control, is also manifest in the ability of speculative developers to remake neighborhoods to fit their own vision. The pattern of development occurring all across Los Angeles further contributes to the vacancy and houselessness crises, as new units are priced beyond the reach of most Angelenos, leading to an excess supply of high-rent housing that fails to lease and therefore fails to house people, coupled with a crisis of unmet need for housing for the most vulnerable.

High vacancy rates in expensive luxury housing developments are a core symptom of a broader speculative housing system that is failing to benefit our communities. Speculative practices yield an unbalanced production of vacant luxury development at a time when evictions are fueling a loss of affordable rental units, increasing numbers of corporate landlords are unaccountable to lowincome tenants, and we are failing to build enough covenanted, deeply affordable housing. All of this accelerates our houselessness crisis. We must prioritize using housing to actually house people and reorganize the market to meet this goal.

Our unhoused neighbors are human, and the language we use should reflect that.
Let's abandon outdated, "othering", and dehumanizing terminology- and instead, adopt people-centered language that emphasize personhood over housing status. pic.twitter.com/w3u2pfFbjf

— LA Homeless Services Authority (@LAHomeless) August 22, 2022

“With respect, I often interview people on the street,” said filmmaker Glen Dunzweiler on Twitter. “They don’t care about euphemisms. They care about being looked in the eyes and being afforded dignity. I think the word salad just makes housed people feel better.”

Good lord will this woke crap ever end? Let’s not help people who are living on the streets, but let’s not insult them either. I guess that’s going to do a lot for their feelings.

However they might be labeled, Los Angeles has enough people living on its streets to populate an entire small city. The county’s homeless population jumped to 66,436 in early 2020, up 13% from a year earlier. Since then, the LAHSA has stopped counting.

Where the hell is that money going? Hey maybe congress can quit giving trillions to the rich and start giving it to people who actually need it?

The LAHSA oversees more than $800 million annually in local, state and federal government funding for homelessness programs. Heidi Marston, who resigned as the authority’s director earlier this year, lamented that even as an average of 205 homeless people in Los Angeles County were finding housing each day, 225 were losing their dwellings. “Homelessness is a crisis we made,” she said. “We can unmake it if we only have the will.”

Well duh!

Atlanta cut homelessness by 40% through housing

Houston cut homelessness by 63% through housing

Finland cut homelessness by 75% through housing

Tokyo cut homelessness by 80% through housing

The solution to homelessness isn’t policing — it’s housing, housing, and more housing https://t.co/vwYmEWdWeC

— Aaron Carr (@aaronAcarr) August 25, 2022

@humphrey

i can't really make heads or tails of the situation at this point, either. there is so much bs in the news it's hard to figure out what is really going on.

on the other hand, it sure looks like germany is screwed.

gets more confusing.

WHAT TURBINES?! Gazprom Baffled By Canada Promise as Prices Soar to $3200. Zelensky Successor Named.https://t.co/DQlUAiRH02 via @YouTube

— -- GEROMAN -- The Zerbian - - (@GeromanAT) August 25, 2022

Currently, none of the turbines of the Portovaya CS are undergoing repairs in Canada.

— Gazprom (@GazpromEN) August 25, 2022

@janis b

that fellow is on to something, but he surrounded it with a lot of less relevant verbiage:

Affordable food, shelter, are best not delivered by a private market mechanism.

thanks for the article, have a great evening!

Thanks joe for the Lenoir, I'm enjoying it.

Deep in Debt Blues

Even though this opinion piece is related to the economic state of housing in NZ, it’s not that dissimilar to the American situation. I think this journalist’s perspective is relevant to both.

In classical economics if you have a shortage of affordable houses like we currently have, that sends a signal to the market that a profit can be made by supplying more houses, so they supply more house. The demand gets met to a point where less and less people are able, or willing, (or all supply needs are met), to pay at that price. So demand stops/drops. A drop in demand sends a signal that prices can drop. So prices start to drop. And this in turn sends a signal to a supplier of housing that there is less profit to be made so they will either slow supply or stop new supply. And it all stabiises around a new equilibrium(?) and the market is happy and somehow affordable housing must have been met.

There are many obvious flaws in this logic, especially when applied to ‘affordable housing’. E.g.: …

https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2022/08/26/affordable-housing-for-dummies/

Have a good evening everyone.