Around here a house that looks old-timey is a “Craftsman” when described by realtors.
The link just occurred to me: Craftsman tools from Sears! The Arts and Crafts movement rebranded by Sears. Thanks for this. I always associated department store homes with Eatons:
IWW Possum gang <3
One of the main reasons mobile homes (or manufactured housing) are really not all that good is that they aren’t built using standard measurements for anything. Want to replace a door or a window? Good luck finding a doggone thing that will work at Lowe’s or Home Depot. You’re stuck with whatever trailer supply store you can find (for us in the early 70s it was 55 miles away in Charlotte) at an exhorbitant price. Even the stupid sink faucets were ‘specially manufactured’ for mobile homes. It was awful, and I swore to my husband we’d not live in anything we couldn’t find reasonably priced components for ever again. And we haven’t.
The economics of commercial real estate are different from residential. Conflating commercial with residential is… Unwise, Even if the residential real estate is “operated” by a commercial entity. No one is deliberately letting residential properties sit fallow. Dream on.
You’re right… It WAS a correction. The 100,000 figure encompassed an area running from well above Sacramento to well below San Jose. And once corrected the issue became clear… There aren’t enough units, period. Not that there are anything approaching significant numbers of housing units being kept off the market.
And once ANYONE looks at why there aren’t enough units, everyone involved is involved in some form of NIMBYism… Renters and owners alike. Owners are accused of keeping the number of units low to keep their values high and renters want to keep neighborhoods exactly as they’ve been for 50 years or more.
I’ve watched new construction delayed for years, not by homeowners, but by “activist/extrotionists” extracting concession after concession from developers, actually increasing pressure on low cost housing by not allowing ANY construction to go forward.
Somewhat related: in the linked essay the author says
The small size saves energy and curbs my shopping habits, since there literally isn’t any room for, say, another pair of shoes.
So, if rampant consumerism has some relation to sustainability of the planet, then maybe having smaller homes would help—not just by potentially using less energy to heat, or a smaller amount of materials to build in the first place, but also by helping control the desire to own more and more stuff.
(That said, it does seem to me that her tiny house is, indeed, a bit too tiny for comfort.)
This “myth” is confirmable fact. And recently reported here in the context of New York. Similar problems are documented world wide, particularly in major cities but also in suburban areas.
And as heavily covered with regards to Trump’s massive business losses and sketchy filings. There are massive tax write offs available For real estate losses. Especially if held by a business, a vacant unit produces a loss. Which can be written off as a business expense. Or those losses can be bundled up, passed through the business to the owners, and broken up over multiple returns.
Not only does that make it relatively simple to zero out the costs of allowing property to sit vacant. But the tax reductions are often large enough to reduce an individuals income tax burden. Even down to zero.
This isn’t something a normal person who owns one, or even a couple homes is doing. This is a factor of wealthy, investment class people who can buy many homes or entire buildings and package them into a shell company. Or big real estate companies and banks. Together with increasing property values. Or the expectation that real estate values always hold or increase make this sort of real estate an incredible investment. Since even right now its often more profitable to sit on vacant properties than to sell or fill them at a loss or close to break even.
Also well documented is the use of this sort of investment property as tax shelters and money laundering avenues for sketchy oligarchs from other countries. A HUGE amount of luxury housing in our major cities (and many major cities in other countries) is owned by Russian and Chinese billionaires.
All this stuff is confirmable, on the books. And some cities have even improved their housing costs and supply by taxing vacant properties above a certain market value at levels that eclipse these benefits. People have been fighting to institute such a tax in NY and it’s been suggested in San Francisco.
And if you look around you you’ll see it happening. Shit there are three spec houses that have been sitting vacant for 4+ years in my neighborhood. And a restaurant property nearby sold this year after sitting vacant for 12 years. All have/had asking prices well in excess of their current market value and the owners are more than happy to wait for the market to catch up. In the meantime they’re empty.
Of course this happens. It happens all the time.
If someone owns multiple homes, there are sometimes loopholes to write-off losses from one property against earnings on others. It happens at the low-end of landlording and at the professional level:
Property owners with modified adjusted gross incomes of $100,000 or less may deduct up to $25,000 in rental real estate losses per year if they “actively participate” in the rental activity. You actively participate if you are involved in meaningful management decisions regarding the rental property and have more than a 10% ownership interest in the property. This allowance is phased out for taxpayers whose MAGI exceeds $100,000 and eliminated entirely when it exceeds $150,000. Thus, it is useless for high-income landlords.
The other exception to the PAL rules is the one for real estate professionals. Unlike the $25,000 exception described above, this is a complete exemption from the rules–that is, landlords who qualify as real estate professionals may deduct any amount of losses from their other non-passive income.link
I clearly made the distinction between retail and commercial. What doesn’t change is the fact that landlords in both cases leave properties vacant due to nothing more than pure speculative greed.
I don’t know what country you’re living in, but here in the U.S. the banks that had to foreclose on mortgages that were underwater in 2007-2008 and were saddled with a bunch of houses they couldn’t recoup the value of the loans on did just that: left the homes (sometimes whole subdivisions’ worth) to deteriorate into eyesores and prey for copper strippers because they wouldn’t sell them at the newly discounted market rate and take the loss.
That’s an unusual example of low-level greed, but there are plenty of stories of starry-eyed greedpigs who try to get into the income property business by building or renovating on spec, only to end up leaving (usually sub-par and poorly maintained) units or properties empty because they won’t accept anything less than the top market rate in the area.
If there are concessions being asked for in connection with new construction, it’s usually along the lines of wanting an allocation of affordable units in a development, or a separate affordable development. Now, a developer can put together a nice little business exclusively building and managing quality affordable housing for working families, but most new residential construction in the Bay Area isn’t that in part or in whole. Which brings us back to greed.
That’s because, in the Bay Area (and other hot markets), developers want to build only new “luxury” housing on the assumption that their tenants or buyers are tech industry people making six figures a year, and they want to charge as close as possible to the city of SF’s market rate per sqf for that, even in Sacramento.
However, there are only so many suckers with more money than sense willing to pay those rates, leading to units remaining vacant for years at a time. Meanwhile, because the developers and landlords sticking to those greedpig rates, housing becomes even less affordable in the area as everyone else tries to wait things out until they can jack up the rents and force the market to “catch up” to their expectations.
And always waiting in the background are private equity vultures, waiting to swoop in when a landlord can’t sustain things anymore. They buy the building for a song, do some cheapo renovations, and – surprise – maintain the same jacked-up rent demands. They, too, can afford to wait things out and let properties lie fallow.
What most people don’t realize is the vast sums of money and overall size of the global investment pools involved in these schemes. Trillions of investment dollars are floating around looking for the largest returns possible - which is why asset bubbles are becoming increasing larger, more global in scope and more destructive when they burst. This is not a new phenomenon at all but it has been accelerating without brakes for many years.
That’s true if you’re building upwards, but not if you’re building outwards, as suburbs are usually built on prime farmland.
With this whole digital thing taking off, people can be happier is smaller spaces. As long as they have their laptop, they are home.
What no reference to The Fifth Element?
Corbin’s apartment is a MIRACLE of modern design and efficiency!
And BB has regular articles about HK capsule living. And the bunk bed ‘housing’ in SF and NYC iirc?
Enkwife and I would like to build a tiny home or maybe a floating tiny home or… well, it’s a pleasant dream. Back to the rat race, my treadmill is kinda squeaky!
I can point directly at one fairly recent case where the construction of over 400 units was blocked for well over a year in this housing miasma, not because there were no low income units, or even too few, but that none were premium units. Yeah, that is greed too… Even more so because it’s the dog-in-a-manger kind… “If I can’t get what I want, no one get’s any. Screw ya all!”
I can also point to a 400 unit one hundred percent low income development that has been under construction for nearly seven years. Thats the actual construction. It was being planned for nearly ten years before that, what the property sat vacant. Shall we discuss the darwin award winner who torched over 300 units with several of his temper tantrum fires?
Greed does NOT solely reside with those with resources.
And yes, with people flooding in from everywhere, there is ALWAYS someone willing to pay the freight.
But then again, look back a hundred years or so… Single hens eggs were selling for $25.00 each in San Francisco during the gold rush.
The San Francisco bay area has done this over and over and over, every time people get the idea that the living is easy “there” and they are entitled to be “there”.
No-one is saying it does. They’re saying it’s very prevalent amongst property developers and landlords (residential and commercial), and is a big driver in leaving properties vacant.
This is exactly the kind of assumption that greedpig landlords and developers make. And this is why this many properties are held vacant even in a boom market.
And landlords and home builders get greedy during the booms, which they think are limitless in terms of buyers and endless in terms of duration. Neither is true, which leads to vacant properties and long-term residents who aren’t workers in the boom industry (but who are vital to making the city or region work) getting hit hard.
The important thing is that he knows where everything is.
It is regrettable when property developers have that attitude. Their project could have been on its way, but they were so stubborn.
used to like container houses conceptually but discovered the many many ways they are a bad idea.
can’t use ones that have been to sea, so recycling is a no go.
they are built to withstand stress only at the corners and I see many who then have to fortify their crazy designs.
they are very tight and when you insulate them you loose even more space. cut into the walls? loose more structural support. need more strengthening and loose more money.
their floor boards are good for running wire and pipes though.
Just to add another angle, an expert panel in British Coumbia estimated that about 5% of real estate sales in the province were money laundering. Having extremely high rent means having an extremely high asking price on the market. Sure, a buyer who wants to actually rent the space and make money off of it will be concerned that no one has ever rented it and that no one will actually ever pay to rent the space. But money launderers just want a high on-paper value, not real-world usefulness, and they are probably just selling the properties among themselves anyway.
I think this would mostly affect high-end units, but people charging unreasonable rent probably also affects people’s perception of what the actual rental market will bear, which would contribute to the problem of leaving places empty hoping to get a rent no one will pay. After all, the guys who own the penthouse leave it empty and ask a high rent, and they’re rich, it must be a good idea, right?
