urbanism

US is short about 1-5M housing units and the surge in multifamily construction is ebbing. 

Solution: create a secondary market for construction loans to increase liquidity in the construction finance market. 

This would allow developers to leverage up their capital and build more affordable housing units.

US is short about 1-5M housing units and the surge in multifamily construction is ebbing. 

Solution: create a secondary market for construction loans to increase liquidity in the construction finance market. 

This would allow developers to leverage up their capital and build more affordable housing units.

https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/a-former-treasury-officials-radical-plan-to-create

The entire budget of HUD for housing/urban renewal is a minuscule $4B. We can do so much more. 

As Jim says, housing affordability is a major factor in the stability of our civil society.

I'm here to build global community. Artist, collector, father and husband, leftist, LGBTQ. Twitter @ OurCoOpFuture. pfp by xeriesjame. Creator of /solidarity

There are tax credits for developers that build affordable housing. The requirements are burdensome though, which limits their effectiveness.

What Jim is talking about is further incentivizing the building of affordable housing by making it easier for builders to get financing. This will lead to more units getting built, which increases supply, which lowers prices. Affordable housing for ppl who make 80% of median income can be further incentivized with better financing deals. You don't have to force anyone to do anything.

This is an extremely practical solution that will directly address the problem. And, it's only for multifamily housing, not single family, so they won't be $700k cookiecutter neighborhoods.

The problem is they don't actually build affordable housing units unless forced to. If you give developers more capital they'll just build more 2400 SF, $700,000 cookie cutter neighborhoods because it's the most lucrative for them. IMO we need mass scale, publicly owned housing, but short of that I'm not sure what can be done practically in the US.