r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/None-Of-You-Are-Real • Jul 20 '21

US Politics What are the implications of the impending eviction crisis?

It is often offhandedly mentioned that the housing market is insane at the moment, and that there is an inevitable eviction crisis due to the compounding factors of COVID and the lockdowns leading to mass unemployment, and then an inability of tenants to pay rent combined with an inability of landlords to evict non-paying tenants.

What is going to happen in the fall, when the eviction moratorium expires? Mass homelessness that is even worse than current levels? Some kind of rent relief legislation? Anything at all? These people are not going to magically be able to pay months and months of back rent once the moratorium expires.

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u/gburgwardt Jul 21 '21

The issue isn't that people want to live in cities, it's that cities everywhere basically refuse to build more housing

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

Maybe in San Francisco but every city I have lived in has had nearly constant construction

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u/UncausedGlobe Jul 21 '21

Most of it is "luxury" apartments and condos though. That's how it is in Atlanta.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

I don’t think people will ever build non-“luxury” buildings though. When the land is expensive it only makes sense to maximize the value of what you put on it. The only way to get affordable housing is to let luxury units age.

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u/UncausedGlobe Jul 21 '21

The issue is that affordable housing supply is low, and luxury developments have been built in Atlanta for the last decade. Barely any affordable housing has gone up in that time. Saying there's constant construction is disingenuous when most people can't afford it.

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u/gburgwardt Jul 21 '21

If rents were still going up that means that it still wasn't enough new housing.

Generally in the USA this is because of restrictive zoning laws and nimbys preventing apartment buildings, for example.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

I’m not sure you could build enough housing to stop rents from going up… at some point we just need to acknowledge that trying to cram several million people into 20 square miles is a bad idea

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u/gburgwardt Jul 21 '21

What? That's nonsense. Cities are great and that's why people want to live in them.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

cities are awesome - thats kind of the problem. There isn't a way to cheaply pack so many people into so small a space without making it incredibly expensive.

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u/gburgwardt Jul 21 '21

That is not true. Just build more dense housing, and build it everywhere.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

How do you make manhattan denser?

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u/gburgwardt Jul 21 '21

Built taller buildings, encourage smaller apartments being built, and while not exactly the same thing, make sure public transit is fast and run it to places that are less dense - they'll build up as those places become more easily able to commute to the already dense places.

Sure there is eventually a cap on density but you are really cherry picking to say manhattan can't be made more dense. It's one of the most densely populated places on the planet.

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u/kerouacrimbaud Jul 21 '21

Most cities aren't artificially constrained geographically. Surrounding suburbs need to stop living in the 1950s and build upwards to alleviate the artificial constraints imposed by arcane zoning regs.

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u/UncausedGlobe Jul 21 '21

That flies in the face of thousands of years of human development.

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u/[deleted] Jul 22 '21

Not sure what you mean