I just mentioned your point about cheap housing in this comment.
I also agree about the increase in freebies. This is one of the explanations why so many poor people in general live in very expensive urban areas: that's where the various forms of welfare are collected.
this territory is moderated
Yes, and another set of regulations that I forgot to mention are everything that makes a city landlord-unfriendly. Many (most? all?) leftist cities are like this. Once you rent to someone, you basically can't get them out, no matter what. You start hearing stories of people needing to hire motorcycle gangs to get renters out of their home.
Small landlords can't handle this.
I knew a lady with a 4-plex - 4 townhouses, all in a row, in a leftist, west coast city. She lived in one, and had a trusted renter in another. She hadn't been renting the other two out because of fears over bad renters. Within a year she sold the place to a large company.
This type of thing, over and over, gets you what we have today.
reply
I have a friend who was a landlord -- owned like 12 houses in low-income areas, managed them all himself (he's a construction guy and knew how to do all the things). The stories he would tell about that experience would make a bestselling Netflix series, except it could never be told, would be canceled so hard it would wipe anyone involved from the face of the earth.
That was the beginning of a re-thinking for me about how human societies / governments work, actually. Never really considered that before.
reply