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That is a 100 million increase in less then 40 years.
But you won't hear about this by most of our politicians, big business or our corporate media. Screw future generations and the environment, there is to much money to be made by keeping things the way they are. No matter what the costs.
Is that clear enough for ya? THE ENTIRE WORLD has seen its population increase at about the same rate as the usa and going up by 50% in forty years sound just about right...
US population density is NOTHING. You are simply looking to blame immigrants for all of your problems.
the answer to the OPs question is simply ZONING. Most of our housing issues (not all) can be solved by rezoning lands to allow a lot more building.
Vested interests prevent this for a number of reasons. The most important of which is of cost the devaluation of their assets and the second biggest is the typical NIMBY, who wishes to maintain the status quo.
Many areas need to accept that they need to build full blown cities instead of part measures. China may have taken it too far, but the USA is a joke when it comes to building new planned cities.
People STILL want big houses apparently, and new ones. There are nice underpriced older smaller homes sitting on the market. I do not want to hear any whining about unaffordable homes in suburbs/exurbs. When I was first in the market, I would jump all over those types of homes. Now with everyone supposedly downsizing and downscaling their stuff, they should be perfect. Lower taxes and all.
Is that clear enough for ya? THE ENTIRE WORLD has seen its population increase at about the same rate as the usa and going up by 50% in forty years sound just about right...
US population density is NOTHING. You are simply looking to blame immigrants for all of your problems.
What an ignorant statement. I REALLY wish there was a way to vote people downwards.
Yeah, I am a racist because I am against overpopulating our country. How do you know me, do you know that I would be against letting a million Irishmen in a year??? I don't care about where the people are coming from, I just care about the numbers.
As for nationalist - yes I am a nationalist and I care about the future quality of life of this country. Maybe you should try it sometime.
The rest of your post about exploding world population has no bearing on the discussion of what is going on in THIS COUNTRY.
I remember that time. My dad bought a little tiny 1000 square foot house, and as the family grew, so did the structure. He more than doubled the size of the house by building out rooms, he put in a room over the garage, and dug out a basement by hand.
I visited our old family home back in Maine. There was a funny long, narrow room. At one time, it had been the porch, and was not removed, just added on to, as the house was expanded when the sons would add a new room onto the house when they brought their wives home.
My point is that during that period of time, from 1940 to 1960, it was very common for people to build their own houses, or add on to them.
The craftsman house of the early 20th century were homes that people bought plans for, and build themselves.
Part of the housing shortage is that people can't do that anymore.
When my father was a kid in the 1950s, he remembers there were farms in Nassau County (not to mention Suffolk further out). That is the county right next to New York City, our nation's largest city. I imagine it was the same thing around cities all across the country from Bergen County, Essex, Fairfield, Bucks, Norfolk, Howard Counties etc. all the way out to Orange County in California. Hell when I was a kid in the 80s, I remember farms in western Broward County in Florida. There are still some today but nothing like there used be.
All that rural open land or most of it has been developed now. Any new population growth is going to be adding and often competing with the already existing population for housing.
With competition prices will rise. It is the law of supply and demand.
Walking to school in Oakland California I would walk by abandoned homes the city was "Selling" for $1
These are homes that were abandoned and the catch is a person would need to move in for 5 years and spend 5k making improvements... a new roof, paint, etc would cover the improvements.
Several of these abandoned $1 homes have sold recently in the 300 to 400k price range that I know and some probably have sold for more.
Demand or lack of is what drives prices.
On a related topic it is very costly and with risk attempting to build in my city... friends have been in the permit process for several years and typically have more than a 100k in design and permit fees to build a single family... another friend simply gave up and lost a lot because the process with neighborhood design review, etc... simply proved to much for most not in the business.
People STILL want big houses apparently, and new ones. There are nice underpriced older smaller homes sitting on the market. I do not want to hear any whining about unaffordable homes in suburbs/exurbs. When I was first in the market, I would jump all over those types of homes. Now with everyone supposedly downsizing and downscaling their stuff, they should be perfect. Lower taxes and all.
That's not really the whole picture. The old rule of thumb was to never buy a house that cost more than 2.5 to 3 times your gross annual income. In today's age of zero job security, I would recommend staying on the low side of that range... but in many parts of the nations, that sticks you with falling apart trash homes and/or in high crime areas where you wouldn't be safe living. In the area in which I live, you only get old, crumbling trash for that type of money, with high crime tossed on as a possible factor, too.
While I do agree that the need for staggeringly huge homes in an era of fewer and fewer kids and married people is strange and, arguable, wasteful, there is no evidence for there being piles of truly affordable housing just "sitting around" because people only want to buy huge houses. This may be the case in rural America or places with few job and lots of land, but that's a different story. In the suburbs these days, there is very little that is affordable, and even the stuff that is has some horrible catch to it: it's a wreck, there's crime everywhere, it's a 50 mile commute one way to the jobs, etc. It's far worse than it used to be.
As for nationalist - yes I am a nationalist and I care about the future quality of life of this country. Maybe you should try it sometime.
I do care about the future of this nation, and I don't think you're a racist.
But I do feel that focusing on population growth alone is not the key factor. It is A factor, sure, but it's not the main one. The lack of good jobs is what matters most, and that is being whittled away more by global wage arbitrage and automation than anything else. Top it off with banks and house scalpers ("flippers") screwing up the housing market by making it a leverage-based game where the way to win is flipping, not buy and hold, and you have a pricy housing market that many people cannot afford to enter.
Even if you closed the borders and managed to keep the US population at its number today - or even half of that number - very little would improve on the housing front. Jobs would still vanish overseas to slave-labor nations - or just disappear thanks to more and more automation. Banks would still play games with the housing market to reward flipping and punish buy and hold. People would still have no job security and lousy pay, so taking on a big mortgage would be risky, and house scalpers would make sleazy fortunes flipping the newly vacated houses back and forth to each other, while piles of other now empty homes rot in newly crime infested areas.
People act like high population density or growth rates are something new - the numbers I've already presented prove that theory incorrect. The ONLY new factors are: loss of jobs to slave wages and automation, and the changing financial nature of the housing market to make it reward irresponsible leverage games and flipping vs. buy-and-hold. Clearly, those are the factors that are driving the current affordability in housing, not simple population numbers.
People are no longer able to remodel and expand their own homes. That was very common up until about 40 years ago.
People can still remodel and expand their homes, and new homes are often much larger than needed that they could house a pile of people, so I don't see what you're getting at here.
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How do you know me, do you know that I would be against letting a million Irishmen in a year??? I don't care about where the people are coming from, I just care about the numbers.
