Name: アメリカの住宅事情について質問ある？| Tech Support | WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2025-01-16T09:46:34.000Z
Duration: 17 min 4 s
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I'm Kate Nellisher. I'm a professor of urban planning.

Let's answer some questions from the internet.

Why does rent have to go up every year, but my salary doesn't?

The percentage increase is almost 100% increase in the amount of rent people are paying.

Of course, rents increase with inflation, but this is more than that.

A lot of the low-cost units are disappearing from the market because they have transitioned to luxury housing, landlords are charging more and more based on upgrades they've made, or they've transitioned to for-sale homes.

There's also been an increase in what's called institutional investment.

These are corporations buying up homes and also multifamily residential buildings to rent them out to make a profit.

In 2001, only about 18% of rental units were owned by corporations.

So it's really likely that you're paying your rent to a corporate landlord.

We are in a housing emergency and we're also in a housing crisis.

A housing emergency is actually a legal term.

If a vacancy drops below 5%, the municipality can declare a state of emergency and that allows them to access all these different kinds of policies, rent stabilization, rent control, or examples of this.

A healthy housing market has above 5% vacancy rate.

The vacancy rate in New York City is actually 1.4% right now.

Anything that charges less than $2,400 a month in rent, the vacancy rate is actually 0.4 to 0.8, a very low vacancy rate.

Houses are really f***ing expensive right now.

Number one, it's a supply and demand issue.

The US is short about 4 million homes to meet the current demand and a scarcity of any commodity means the price goes up, up, up.

In fact, 2023 was the least affordable year ever to buy houses in the United States.

Interest rates are increasing because it's very expensive to invest in development projects.

It also encourages developers to develop luxury housing rather than more affordable housing.

Because this wealthy market exists, developers are building to target that market.

They're building very expensive luxury homes.

That means that other housing isn't getting built.

So everyone's prices increase as a result of more luxury development.

Why are cities not using these abandoned towers to create affordable or homeless housing?

What the f*** is wrong with this country?

Depending on the age and condition of the building, sometimes it can actually be more economically viable to demolish the building and build something new.

Older office buildings or pre-war office buildings ventilation required that windows be provided for every office space.

So it's easier to convert these older office buildings to residential because they're already laid out like our residential buildings.

Newer buildings are very difficult to convert to residential and it's very expensive to do this.

If you want to convert this into a residential building, you have to replace all of these windows.

You can't have a bedroom without an opening window.

You would have to puncture a hole in the middle of the building

To provide window access, reconfigure all of the plumbing in the building to hook up to all of the individual bathrooms and kitchens, change the electricity supply, change the HVAC systems.

So this requires just completely transforming the inside guts of these buildings.

In New York City, there's about 94 million square feet of unused office space.

That's equivalent to all of the office space in Dallas and Houston combined.

It's a huge amount of vacant space right now and we have to figure out what to do with it.

At High for Housing says, what housing technologies are here to stay?

Modular housing can also be referred to as prefab.

Different components will be manufactured in different manufacturing sites.

They're all brought back to the site and assembled kind of like a jigsaw puzzle.

The manufacturing can take place where labor is cheaper and it also doesn't disturb the neighborhood as much.

Another newish building technology that I'm really excited about is something called mass timber where wood is laminated together with a special glue to create really large beams of wood that are very strong.

They have a lower carbon footprint as well.

Mass timber is now becoming stronger and so it can be used to build higher and higher buildings.

Previous to a couple of years ago, the highest building you could build in the United States out of timber was six stories.

So we're going to start seeing high rises built entirely of wood.

At Readlight says, it will be interesting to see how the value of oceanfront property changes as sea levels continue to rise.

So far though, it really hasn't affected home prices.

It's kind of come to signify any sort of racial discrimination in housing, but actually there's a really specific history around redlining.

In the 1930s, the United States federal government decided to start a new mortgage program to allow homebuyers to access federally backed mortgages.

The government created these maps to determine where their investments would be safe.

Green areas, where you see down here, it's where the federal government felt that their money would be well used.

They also created a D-class or red class, which was really a no-go zone where the federal government did not want to provide government-backed mortgages.

These redlined areas were where black families lived.

It made it very difficult for residents living in these areas, predominantly black residents, to access mortgages.

Many of these maps exist for communities all across the United States.

These maps were not made public until 1978 when a historian stumbled upon them.

If you look at the neighborhoods that were historically redlined, these are still some of the most racially segregated neighborhoods across the United States.

Many of the historically redlined neighborhoods have experienced disinvestment.

And more recently, many of them have become targets for gentrification, displacing many of these residents as well.

At Don Gotti says, is gentrification all bad?

There's something called direct displacement.

People are directly displaced from their homes because they can no longer afford the higher rents.

Something else happens as well that's called indirect displacement.

And so this is kind of making you feel uncomfortable in your own neighborhood.

I think a lot of people think about gentrification associated with these kind of design choices that hipsters make.

So you think of the Helvetica house numbers or sometimes the gentrification fences around homes.

Really, these are kind of an effect of gentrification.

Gentrification is really caused by institutional investment in lower-income neighborhoods.

Investors are coming in and recognizing what's called a rent gap.

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アメリカの住宅事情について質問ある？| Tech Support | WIRED Japan

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