January
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News / housing
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1 min read
Floor Model
Read more . . . →Studio apartment. Water and wheel included. Inquire within. A man is crouched inside a pet cage in what looks like a department store, complete with hamster wheel, water bottle, and a tiny house he cannot stand up in. A well-dressed couple is browsing him the way you’d browse gerbils, leaning in, smiling, weighing the commitment. The price tag just says dollars, which is generous, because most landlords want first, last, and a credit check before they’d let you into a cage this nice. The retro ad styling is what sends it over the edge. Everyone is beaming. He’s beaming because...
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1 min read
Half Your Paycheck and a Picket Line
Read more . . . →Tomorrow Spain shuts down. Every sector, every city. The first joint general strike in 14 years, and the demand is the most basic thing in the world: people who work full time should be able to afford a roof. Spaniards now spend half their gross salary on rent. In Barcelona it’s 76%. An 87-year-old woman named Maricarmen got evicted, sparked the biggest housing protests in a generation, and then died. The government looked at all of that and called a snap election instead of capping rents or building anything. Which is the perfect summary of every housing crisis everywhere: workers...
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1 min read
Eighty-Three Percent and a Lease
Read more . . . →Half of American renters are spending more than 30% of their income on housing. Not the broke ones. Double-shift nurses and warehouse workers pulling overtime in cities where a studio apartment costs more than a mortgage did twenty years ago. Twenty-two million households handing a third of every dollar to a landlord while the construction pipeline collapses and material costs climb 42% since 2020. Nobody in Washington treats this like an emergency because nobody in Washington rents. The median member of Congress is worth well over a million dollars. They own property. Rising home values are their retirement plan. They...
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1 min read
Market Rate
Read more . . . →Five guys, one lever, and whatever number comes out they all agree to call it “the market.”
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1 min read
Grand Opening
Read more . . . →He evicted them in March and cut the ribbon on their soup kitchen in August. Vertical integration.
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1 min read
Make Them Sell At A Loss
Read more . . . →There are more than four thousand finished condos sitting empty in Metro Vancouver right now, a 76 percent jump in a single year, in a city where people can’t find a place to live. The buildings are done. The lights are off. Developers put them up as investments, the bet went bad, and now they sit dark while families double up and rents keep climbing. This week Mark Carney and David Eby walked out with the fix: up to $3.2 billion over ten years to slash developer charges in half and convert 2,200 of those empty units into affordable homes....
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1 min read
HUD Workers Had to Build a Website to Do Their Jobs
Read more . . . →The people whose literal job is to investigate housing discrimination are being told they can’t investigate housing discrimination. HUD civil rights lawyers got fired for going to Congress with concerns that the agency was gutting fair housing enforcement. So they did the most American thing possible — they built a website. “Dear America” is a collection of anonymous employee letters from inside HUD, and the picture they paint is grim: if a case involves race, gender, or sexual orientation, you’re not allowed to touch it. The agency that exists to fight discrimination has been ordered to stop fighting discrimination. Meanwhile,...
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