Housing Speculation: Few Lights on in New Orleans

Current Affairs interviewed a local S.F. city supervisor who voted against new housing construction on a heavily-used Nordstrom parking lot:

ROBINSON Is that because it would just take such a colossal amount of new housing because a lot of what would be built is just going to be bought up and held as investment property? You know, it’s funny. I live in the French Quarter of New Orleans, which is similar to parts of San Francisco in that it’s a quaint historic district, and I look out my window at night and see no lights in the other windows because so many of the properties are so valuable that they are just held by people as assets. If you built 10% more of them, it would just be 10% more that were being held as assets without ever actually being lived in by the people of New Orleans.

Housing is a climate issue.


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Further Reading:

"Homeowners, already more than 40 times as wealthy as renters, were more likely to keep their jobs, profit from the stock market and have enough savings to take advantage of low interest rates."   nytimes.com

"The problem, they felt, was that the city seemed too staid, too homogeneous, too white — and each sale in this crazy real estate market seemed to be making it even more that way."   nytimes.com





This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.