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this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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Hot take: the dealership system is just a useless middleman system that should have been dismantled long ago as the "only way" to buy a car.
Boston will never have enough supply to meet demand. This is the one example I know very well, there are countless others. A thousand bucks a month in podunk land is enough to rent something entirely and that will 100% be exploited by landlords, after all it's free money for doing nothing.
Nonsense. Dealers make up a critical localized component of the US automotive feudal system. They are the local barons who form the political foundation of the automotive industry. They vet (and occasionally are) candidate for local and state office, based on support for the industry. They gobble up enormous amounts of real prime real estate all along the interstate system, raising property values for everyone else. They spend a fortune on advertising, which is central to the function of professional sports and news media. They bankroll mega-churches and private schools and strip clubs. They employee a host of middle-managers and salespeople who comprise the substrata of the moneyed class.
And, of course, they provide the singular status symbol for the American consumer outside of one's home. That affords them enormous clout, simply as the folks who will always have the nicest vehicles in town. It also makes them power brokers of a sort, as they get to decide who takes home the nicest ride and at what price.
They are an irreplaceable symbol of prestige and influence. If car dealership owners did not exist, we would have to invent them.
If China can meet the demand for housing, I'm confident Boston can find a way through.
But that would require... idk, civil engineering and city planning and a political class with a vested long term stake in the city. Yes, we could have dense multi-family homes connected by mass transit corridors to city centers and schools and shopping districts and industrial sites.
But why do that when we could just let it be someone else's problem?
China is... huge... There will still be places with housing shortages alongside places where tons of buildings will sit empty. Still a very different scope and problem there vs here.
Either way though in the US there doesn't seem to be any sign of an oversupply problem coming in my lifetime (another 40 years if i'm lucky.)
The Chinese solution to housing shortages is to restrict (legal/official) migration between districts when housing isn't available. This has its own basket of problems. But in the end, China has (on paper, at least) solved homelessness through guaranteed residency and even home ownership. Folks who are homeless in China are most commonly rural vagrants who technically have homes back in their native districts and simply do not want to live there anymore. They are not people who have nowhere to live, because the Chinese economy has been enormously efficient at constructing dense housing stock nationwide.
By contrast, the US housing system has a surplus of housing that is entirely bound up in the speculative asset market. We have over half a million people with no legal home to reside and millions more who are living in RVs or shelters or other functionally temporary housing. Tens of millions more are renters, entirely exposed to the whims of the short-term tenant's markets, and potentially homeless in the next big wave of rental increases.
The US oversupply is largely bound up in areas of the country where industry has collapsed or social services have failed. You can find plenty of cheap housing in Flint, MI for instance. You just won't have public schools or drive-able roads or tap water you feel safe drinking.