No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Unironically the answer is "shop less."
Prices on goods rise when demand for goods stays sufficient to support the price going up. The less everyone buys, the less things will cost.
Prices for goods have almost nothing to do with the price of rent, but the mechanisms there are the same - it's just that you have to encourage building rather than "live somewhere less" because the second option really isn't tenable, for obvious reasons.
If you want rent to come down, campaign for, vote for, or even run for office to be the candidate that will change zoning laws and encourage building multifamily housing.
the myth of supply based economics, and other fairytales.
Realistically there is no reason for produce or rent to be increasing in price, there is not any actual reason for the hikes in COL other than "record profits"
Rent is increasing because there are millions more people but we haven't built enough housing since the 60s. The US is now 5million houses short, and this shortage is entirely caused by cities preventing construction of everything but single family homes.
"No reason for rent to be increasing"
What a bullshit statement.
I feel like I also hear that we have a ton of homelessness despite lots of vacant homes, where can I learn more about the nuance of this?
This is specifically about Australia, but essentially all 3 parts of this piece (and related linked essays) sum up how to solve the housing crisis worldwide.
https://theemergentcity.substack.com/p/how-to-solve-housing-unaffordability
Boils down to:
1: change zoning laws to allow more multifamily construction
2: remove incentives for homeownership and generally disincentivize single family homes
3: build for density in ways that reinforce and support density
If you want more info, basically every mainstream economist in the world agrees this is the solution, and that this is a manufactured problem. It's a result of regulatory capture by homeowners, essentially. There are many, many papers about it.
Here's an easily-digestible article
https://www.businessinsider.com/economist-how-to-fix-america-housing-crisis-rural-cities-2022-10
And a well-cited study in an economic journal:
https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2022/12/30/the-economics-of-the-housing-shortage/
All these sources agree, because this is the solution. Realistically, the only bad solutions are subsidizing more demand via things like rent control - these will only make our problems worse, kind of like how adding more lanes to a highway doesn't fix traffic.
Our city did this and it hasn't helped at all, because banks won't finance it. No minimum parking, no height limit, no maximum FAR, no maximum unit count.
What city is that?
yeah get rid of these next and you're set.
That's what I'm saying though, we got rid of those regulations, and it still doesn't matter. Banks want parking. Banks limit height. Banks limit unit counts. Developers routinely propose some pretty decent housing products, where they've run the numbers and they work, then go to get it financed and it very rapidly gets cut in half and turned to shit.
The only solution is for the city to finance and build themselves.
Cool. I'm down with that.
It'll never happen, even if there was the will to do it the city doesn't have the money (or the tax base to bring in that kind of money).
SUPER high level, and slightly biased explanation: corporate home buying.
Large investment firms like buying up property increasing the demand and raising prices. This prices normal people out of being able to afford a house. It also raises other housing related costs like rent, because these firms want to make a profit. This in turn prices people out of being able to afford ANY housing.
When we're just numbers on a spreadsheet, there is a certain level of vacancy and homelessness, that maximizes profits.
So I work in a field closely related to this, and the issue is less cities and more banks. The regulations in my city are basically: "if it's housing, no regulations". No minimum parking, no maximum density, no height limit, etc etc. But the banks? Won't finance over ~22 stories. Or over ~200 units. Or parked less than 2:1. So we end up with only these short towers that are 50% parking podiums, where units are expensive AF because they have to pay for $100,000+ of parking per unit, not to mention the astronomical land prices being less diluted.
The only solution is for the city itself to start financing construction (and realistically doing the development themselves too), but that's never going to happen.
Cities should def be funding more public housing.
There absolutely is. You think farmers don't have expenses? At the very least they need to pay employees wage increases to match inflation.
Rent is a different thing entirely and it's based on what people are willing to pay to live in that area. You can't charge a California rent in Ohio (unless you're selling a penthouse apartment) because nobody will pay it.
More quitter talk and apathy just like the other comment of yours I bumped into.
Fact of the matter is, if every 25% of people that normally bought X product stopped and got something else, that brand would drop prices. You can't make record profits off a 10% price hike if 25% of your sales just vanished.
There are so many people here ignorant to the basic principals of supply and demand. It’s starting to scare me how willful the ignorance is.
supply and demand is econ 101, and in econ 102 you learn that econ 101 is about as predictive as Nostradamus
yet the cost to produce hasn't gone up in any meaningful metric, and is nowhere even close to the price increase we saw in grocery goods.
rent isn't much different, there is no shortage of rent, and the (evil leftist word that means you need a house and food to live) Material conditions are the main reason why companies jack p these prices, you can't just not have a house and not have food
and pointing out that supply side economics in practice has just lead to an oligopoly increased cost of living, an increasing wealth gap, and a new class of super rich that make the fucking Rockefeller look poor. And the theoretical side is literally fairy tale beliefs that make revolutionary communists seem grounded with reality