Owning a Home Is No Goddamn Picnic Either

We all know that The Rent is Too Damn High. The affordable housing crisis is largely concerned with renters. In fact, though, homeowners are being screwed by the very same dynamics.

We all know that The Rent is Too Damn High. The affordable housing crisis is largely concerned with renters. In fact, though, homeowners are being screwed by the very same dynamics.

A lot of American cities have fucked up in a very important way: they haven’t been building enough housing. And just turning the shed in the back yard into a rental ain’t gonna cut it.
Airbnb is set for a new round of fundraising that would value the company at $30 billion. How do we regulate this ephemeral behemoth before it swallows our urban real estate markets whole?
If we ever want to address poverty and inequality in America, we need to start with housing—most people’s greatest expense. A new report quantifies just how devastating our affordable housing shortage has become.
A new startup wants to take a “deep dive” into the private social media activity of prospective tenants—their chats, check-ins, how many times they’ve posted words like “pregnant” or “loan”—and score their “personality” for their potential landlord. Why would anyone let this happen? Because “people will give up their…
Great news for Manhattanites looking to save a few bucks on their next apartment: according to a new report, rents in 40 percent of the market saw a slight downturn last year. Which 40 percent? Why, the top 40 percent, of course.
How bad is the housing crisis in California? So bad that cities are actively trying to stop the creation of new jobs, because they don’t have anywhere to house the people.
Nowhere is America’s affordable housing crisis more acute than in the California Bay Area. The problem: piss poor planning. Incredibly, an actual solution may be at hand.
New Census figures show that U.S. urban growth is slowing, “as a bulge of late-20s Americans reaches prime homebuying age and high urban real-estate costs are making suburbs and exurbs more attractive.” Good!!
Kids who grow up poor have a better chance of one day not being poor if they grow up neighborhoods where everyone isn’t poor. But in some cities, affordable housing crises are making that impossible. It’s a quandary.
In San Francisco and Silicon Valley, housing is expensive and in short supply. All throughout the Bay Area, cities are discussing where the hell all their schoolteachers are supposed to live.
A new report on the US housing market argues that one factor driving housing shortages is a growing gap in price between mid-tier and luxury housing (driven in part by rising incomes of the rich), which prevents homeowners from “trading up.” Dang it sounds like we need to build more housing.
Another week is here, and with it, another story about the affluent, techie-infested caricature that San Francisco has become. Hey, assholes: step one to surviving this trying time is to build more fucking housing.
“A majority of New Yorkers who earn more than $100,000 a year feel they’re likely to be priced out of their neighborhood, according to a new poll.”