Look up ‘Hell’s Angels’ by Hunter Thompson. He has a chapter on the economics of being a biker/hippie/artist in the early 1970s.
A biker could work six months as a Union stevedore and save up enough to spend two years on the road. A part time waitress could support herself and her musician boyfriend.
The issue here is buying power is dramatically dropping which is a function of both wages and prices. Raising the minimum wage alone won’t fix that; instead, price controls will have to be implemented such that all housing is bought back down to prices that are satisfactory to consumers. That can’t happen without federal legislation.
Rent control is absolutely not the solution. Building more is the solution.
How about regulating all the big companies - prohibit sitting on apartments to drive up rents, limit Airbnbs,that sort of thing.
How would limiting housing get more housing, exactly?
Where does he say “limiting housing”?
“prohibit sitting on apartments to raise rent” which idk what it even theoretically means, and limiting AirBnBs, are both means of constraining housing.
Gentrification even affects the rich. Welcome to the 1st world and it’s problems.
Gentrification is a good thing and being anti-gentrification is being pro-ghetto.
Wait, so you think the only two options are ‘gentrification’ or ‘ghetto?’
What does this even mean?
Gentrifying a place is investment of capital into formerly-poor areas in cities, and formerly-poor areas in cities were poor because they were ghettos, generally as a result of redlining, white flight, or both.
We should be gentrifying every inner city, subsidizing current-occupant rent as it climbs, and lifting people out of the ghettos we built.
So you think every neighborhood with poor people in it is a ‘ghetto?’
No I think when you shove a bunch of “undesirables” into an area by literally not letting them get loans or see houses outside of that area, you create ghettos.
You may wanna give “redlining” a Google, and then search up the history of places you want to “protect” from gentrification. You’ll find the two are nearly always connected.
We owe it to the people who live there to financially apologize for the atrocities we committed upon them and their families in the past.
