The Maasdam, which was departing Honolulu for Pago Pago in the photo, has been sold on twice and renamed since then. In 2020 it gained a little notoriety as one of the plague ships, this one permitted to take on supplies at Honolulu but not to disgorge passengers or crew. From here it sailed to San Diego where the erstwhile passengers, now plague vectors, were allowed to debark.
Soon after that the ship was sold and resold, the second time for $30 million, or about five percent of what Jeff Bezos’s yacht cost. (Of course operating costs would be quite a bit higher on the cruise ship.) The Maasdam had been the 6th of that name in the Holland America fleet.
Some people live on cruise ships. Most people don’t, and among people who rent apartments and houses, an increasing number live in ones where rents are set with the help of an aggressive algorithm developed by a company called RealPage, which serves property management companies controlling nearly 20 million apartments and single-family rentals across the country.1
The original developer of the software, Camden Property Trust, tested it successfully on a block of apartments it owned in Houston.
At the time, the street behind Camden’s townhouses was shut down while a grocery store was being built. Leasing staff wanted to discount rent for the townhouses because of the nuisance, said Kip Zacharias, who worked with Camden as a consultant.
Instead, YieldStar suggested boosting rents. “We were like, ‘Guys, just try it,’” Zacharias said.
The units ended up renting for significantly more than staff had expected, he said. “That was kind of the eureka moment,” Zacharias said. “If you’d listened to your gut, you would have lowered your price.”
The practice of lowering rent to fill a vacancy was a reflex for many in the apartment industry. Letting units sit empty could be costly and nerve-wracking for leasing agents.
Such agents sometimes hesitated to push rents higher. Roper said they were often peers of the people they were renting to. “We said there’s way too much empathy going on here,” he said. “This is one of the reasons we wanted to get pricing off-site.”
Emphasis yr. editors. Surplus empathy. Who’da thought. Freed of it, though, property managers like Camden found themselves making more money, sometimes on the back of restricting the rental unit supply.
Fuckery. Wizardry. Housing can’t be a human right if one removes humanity from the equation. “It’s out of our hands.”
In theory the U.S. recognized the right to decent housing in 1948, when Truman signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In his 1944 State of the Union address, Franklin Roosevelt declared that the United States had a Second Bill of Rights, including the right to a decent home. In 1948, the United States signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), recognizing adequate housing as a component of the human right to an adequate standard of living.
The UDHR is a non-binding declaration, so the right to adequate housing was codified into a binding treaty law by the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in 1966. The United States signed the ICESCR, and thus must uphold the “object and purpose” of the treaty, even though the U.S. has not yet ratified it.
74 years since the country first recognized adequate housing as a human right. Ah well.
Most cities now require some percentage of new developments to include what’s called affordable housing: homes people below a particular income threshold can afford to buy. Sometimes the homes will include more generous financing than usual.
But these homes — almost always condos — are only affordable to people who have good enough credit and sufficient income to buy, and even then there aren’t enough of them to go around. Here in Honolulu developers hold lotteries for qualified buyers to win a chance to put an offer in.
And of course affordability is relative, and the individual definition of it can change overnight with an illness or a lost job. Raise your hand if you think getting sick or existing during a recession should be enough to put you out of hearth and home.
What applies to buyers applies to renters too. Illness or any kind of income interruption, such as what the Federal Reserve is attempting to impose on workers now, can put a renter on the street in relatively short order. A system like RealPage, the algorithmic, empathy-free one described above, can impose an untenable rent increase and send a tenant out into an increasingly tight rental market.
The obvious answer to a lack of supply at the bottom end of the market is more housing. But no developer wants to build a bunch of low income, and low profit, housing in sufficient numbers to relieve the pressure.
Pressure is good, really. Pressure is profit.
The obvious answer to that is circumventing developers by building social housing.2
“Social Housing in the United States,” a report by the People’s Policy Project,3 a left-wing policy think tank, shows how Vienna, Sweden, and Finland managed to produce such high-quality housing — and how the United States could do the same. Two takeaways stand out.
First: quality and financing. With upfront investment and intelligent policy design, you get glorious housing by pricing generous maintenance costs into tenants’ monthly payments. Then, for the poorest tenants, you subsidize out of a separate anti-poverty fund. One column for quality public housing. A second column for abolishing poverty.
The other takeaway: speed. In the 1960s, Sweden had about three million housing units. Many were crumbling; plus, they needed more. With some admittedly rough edges, Sweden built one million public homes in ten years. They increased their housing stock by roughly a third in a decade.
The PPP proposal is more modest: ten million public housing units in ten years, federally financed and locally implemented with financial structures similar to those used in Vienna and Sweden. The cost? Roughly equivalent to the Trump tax cut.
More modest relatively, that is.
“Social housing” means an admixture of state-supported housing with existing and new housing developed for all income levels, including rich-ish people, who of course would oppose this scheme heart and soul, but the mix is part of what makes the projects successful in the countries and cities taken as models.
Jacobin describes the plan as a “Green New Deal” for housing, meaning not just the scale of it but the development of energy-efficient housing built using energy-efficient construction methods.
If you’re telling yourself “that’ll never happen here,” go ahead and fill in the “because” and “unless” blanks.
Oso Oso is a new one to Hale ʻAlalā. “Basking in the Glow” now playing. Then playing. Steve Harley, “The Candidate,” now playing. Then playing. Tones on Tail, “Everything!” now playing. I don’t know if it was everything but it certainly went on for quite a while. Mannequin Pussy, “Patience;” one supposes it would be mandatory. Joanne Shaw Taylor has a guitar and the blues on “The Blues Album.”
Why do parents name their daughters “Brie?” You don’t see any boys named “Camembert” or “Gouda.” (I know this isn’t original but it’s bothering me today.)
Yesterday’s interceding events were some kind of eye weirdness and accompanying headache (not a stroke), which haven’t been resolved yet and so might intercede again.
That, comrades, is all we got. Be well, take care.
The principal obstacle to affordable housing (which, where actually developed can easily be rentals opposed to condo) is NIMBY as intimated in your piece. In Chicago, a federal court order requiring the CHA to build scattered site housing to replace the since torn down high rise projects was entered in the early 60's by Judge Richard Austin and has never been complied with due to zoning restrictions and aldermanic "vetoes" in the City Council. There are development companies that are focusing on affordable housing in the suburbs as well but they are frequently stymied by village governments influenced by neighborhood residents. In some towns, including my own, there are ordinances requiring new developments to provide for a percentage of affordable units within the project but the developers often (usually) avoid this by paying into a fund supposedly devoted to building affordable housing which never is substantial enough to be actually used. These problems are not limited to the west coast. They are national in scope. A principal motive for the resistance is concern for property values, a concern that can not be dismissed as pure greed. Many families have their major capital invested in their homes with the prospect of retirement and old age care always looming for them.
Don't overthink names. They likely weren't thinking cheese at all but liked the sound of the name. I didn't call my first 'Amber' after the sap. We both just liked the name (at the time, I'd only met one 'Amber' in my life.
We decided on Amber Rose, thinking of the Peace Rose.
As to the housing plan, one other thing that needs addressing is how cities segregate low income housing. I'd make the developers build some in upscale neighborhoods, for multiple reasons. Better for the tenants and better to get the snobby to interact with them. Connections like tthat increase the odds of social benefits for each and all.
And yeah, if our country doesn't fall to fascism, I bet it wiil happen here in some states.