I'll be there and so will a ton of the Jedi team! Stoked to catch up. Glad to hear things are on the up and up

Willl!!!!! Crazy it's been that long. Hope you're doing well and still crushing it

Josh Albrektson turned this tweet into a letter to the LA Times! www.latimes.com/opinion/lett...

Best thing to do is to write to your local leaders (city council, mayor, etc) about changing city code to allow for things like Single Stair Apartment buildings, upzoning R1 areas to allow for townhomes/duplexs/triplexes, abolishing parking minimums, etc and speeding up permitting for new housing

Today's affordable housing is the market rate housing that was built 20+ years ago etc. To make affordable housing now and in the future, we need to build housing period. That includes the kind of housing that's pissing you off. Most of Austin's housing that is driving rents down is this type

Here's a good video about specifically that idea. TLDR: Essentially higher income folks move into the "luxury" housing leaving vacancies for folks to move into the cheaper housing they currently live and so on and so on

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbQA...

Lack of diversity in housing options in what's being built is definitely a problem. A lot of that is in zoning codes and regulations (parking minimums etc). That being said, all of those apartments open up cheaper, older housing that otherwise would be taken by folks with the money to afford them

Anyways, that's my rant. Feel free to call me a developer shill or landlord sympathizer or something I guess. I just want more walkable cities and cheaper rents/mortgages

Fix the supply issue and companies like Blackrock have much less reason to buy and hold housing. Cities like Austin have been building and showing by example that building housing, even market rate housing, brings rents down for everyone.

Is corporate ownership an issue? Hell yeah and we should do something about it. Do companies like Blackrock explicitly say to investors the reason they are buying houses and apartments is because the US doesn't build enough supply thus making it a desirable commodity for them to invest in

Vienna is the classic example from the left of social housing done right and they deserve praise. The problem with that though is they actually built dense housing compared to cities like in the USA. Single family homes are the true luxury housing

Rent control is a great stop gap for stopping the immediate bleeding but long term all it does is trap people into staying in there current housing as the market around them skyrockets and makes it unfeasible to leave meaning the supply of rent controlled housing dwindles fast

I love affordable, non-market, social housing like the next lefty. I will always advocate for that. The problem is without removing the constraints that make it hard to build housing, there will never be enough housing to go around and only the luckiest or people who wait the longest get housing