Um, have you visited Idaho lately?
Our population basically doubled in 25 years because we still have lots of farmland to convert to residential.
Printable View
This doesn’t look like 1920’s NYC:
Attachment 504755
(Also, Idaho population up 60% in the past 25 years.)
NYC alone - not the state - was building over 6000 new units a month, over a decade.
Someone’s gonna need to milk the cows In Idaho when the deportations begin.
There is a ridiculous amount of housing available in New York State.
My point isn’t that New York needs to be building at that rate, but that nowhere is building at that rate.
Overall, US is slowing down on building housing, while population growth hasn’t slowed. That’s going to lead to housing shortages, high prices, and homelessness:
Attachment 504763
Attachment 504765
There’s thirty-thousand undocumented working dairy, no more milk
Imho, the threat of mass deportations is just this political cycle's version of the border wall. It has served its purpose for the election but it's so ridiculously impractical that, like the border wall, it gets about 1% done before Trump declares it's a massive success and everyone moves on.
Trump had 4 years to do this stuff and he never did. He staged a couple media oriented raids on meat packing plants but that was it. The reality is Trump doesn't give a fuck about his promises to the red hat rubes. He fucks everyone over eventually...even the racists. All these nail pounding Trump Bros who think their competition is going to get deported off the construction site are going to be very, very disappointed.
Wonder what the stats on those 1920s NYC units are. I bet they were small by even today's NYC standards and I'd be curious how many are still standing in their original form. I bet half of them have either been demolished to build something newer or the units have been merged together into larger apartments.
Not that small is a bad thing, but just goes to show that unit count isn't the only measure. I don't think anyone is able to build 1920s NYC style buildings in Idaho...they are mostly building suburban sprawl.
Even texas republicans with full control of the government won't do anything about it:
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-po...xas-solutions/
They know how much the building and ag industries rely on the labor and they know that those business owners hold a ton of sway on local politics.
Musk will go down to Texas next summer with his cowboy hat on backwards and post some videos of immigrants being rounded up and then proclaim that they have deported 2 million immigrants since Trump took office 6 months ago. His base will cheer and say that things are so much better and they can see the difference with fewer brown people on America's streets. You won't see the Trump Admin. fining any business or probably very many ag/food processing businesses being raided.
Can you really blame them though? Build like NYC and it will be another place people no longer want to live. Maybe not in our lifetimes, but someday.
It's probably inevitable. The sprawl will be first, things slowly get rezoned, and then lots are demo'd to construct larger, multi family units. It's happening live right before our eyes.
Eight million plus but who's counting.
I get it, but I think it actually makes it worse.
The sprawl happens, which consumes far more land.
And then the people with the core non-sprawl land (which is now very high value) fight against any attempts to densify. So the density gets built in the crappiest spots in the midst of the sprawl. Which does three things: 1) traffic gets worse because your dense housing is further out, 2) sprawl gets worse because now you have more people living on the edge which encourages businesses to locate out there, and 3) nobody wants to live in the higher density housing because it is in a shitty location and crapily built to house the poor workers...so anyone with a little bit of money would rather buy into the sprawl.
The sprawl will eat what people love. And then they'll be forced to either drive through the sprawl to access what they want, or contribute to the sprawl themselves by moving to the outskirts to regain easy access to nature.
It is a nasty cycle, but it takes urban planning and pushback on the nimbys to avoid it. Obviously I don't actually think they should be building true NYC buildings in the middle of Idaho, but it is possible to develop dense multifamily housing that is actually high quality and desirable...not just crappy apartments next to the highway that people will only live in if they can't afford anything else.
This is where developers need to just develop around all the small <20k population centers. Just build it and they will come. Spend a few dollars on swanky advertisements selling the good life in rural America. Plus, if you want to milk some cows, we got that too! Sell nostalgia and 1920's roaring 20's. Boomers will eat that up and free up the urban homes for the millenials. It's a trifecta of winning. Winning for RE, winning for Boomers and winning for the cows.
It’s all just the selfish boomers trading amongst themselves. https://x.com/Shabanomics/status/1860023882633400702
The comments section is worth reading, which is also surprising.