The Housing Crisis is the Everything Crisis
[ticking] Every year since 1947, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists – a non-profit academic journal concerning science and global security – has published updates on a metaphorical “clock” counting down to the end of the world. The closer to midnight the clock hands are set...the closer we are to doomsday. Right now the clock is set at 100 seconds to midnight – the closest it has ever been.
Some dismiss the Bulletin and its clock as fear mongering, while others see it as a legitimate expression of the scientific community’s angst about the future. But whatever you think about it, it’s clear the 2020s have been a turbulent decade so far and the future course of humanity rests of the decisions we’ll make over the next few years. It is very likely that current trends continue; global temperatures inch closer to 2 degrees Celsius, millions in the developing world are displaced by drought and food shortages, citizens in the west continue to work unfulfilling, dead-end jobs for poverty wages, their children are mindless goons consuming a continual feed of garbage pushed by soulless influencers, while idiot populists keep getting elected, abusing our institutions and changing nothing as the gap between the Haves and the Have Nots only gets bigger, all the while repressive dictatorships with no regard for human rights reorientate the global order in their favour and destabilise the democratic nations of the world. But there is also a possibility that this doesn’t happen; maybe we get our act together, and start taking climate change seriously. We care for the poor, we fix our infrastructure, we revive communities, educate our children properly, plan for the future, and build healthy alliances. Genuine political reform rips out the rot our institutions have been subject to over the past few decades and our nations are put in the best possible position to challenge the unfree world. Then we can finally focus our efforts towards things like
going into space, mathematics, quantum mechanics, the secrets of the universe, painting, poetry, music, architecture. The things that make life worth living! What if I told you that the difference between these two futures is one policy choice so simple, so mind-bogglingly easy, that it is sheer elegance in its simplicity. It’s called BUILDING MORE GOD DAMN HOUSES AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. Across the western world, house prices and rents are soaring above what is remotely reasonable, caused by a steep drop in housebuilding since the Great Recession. And this, my dear friends, is why everything is so bad these days. Based on the evidence I will present in this video, we can pinpoint the root cause of most of society’s ills right now down to houses being so expensive these days. For example, In 2015,
two professors at Chicago University calculated that if the housing crisis had not existed, the United States economy would beeeeeeee……..this much bigger. That’s prosperity being stolen from YOU, buddy. It is estimated that the housing crisis is the single worst thing to ever happen to the economy of England since World War Tw-, wait, no, World War One- oh, the War of the Spanish – ah! The Civil War! No? Oh no. Oh noooo. The BLACK DEATH? ARE YOU KIDDING ME. Houses are the backbone of the free world. Solve the housing crisis and
you solve the other problems. To do that we need to build more of them. I don’t even care who does it. Private companies, the government, building societies, whatever. It is imperative! Because while western governments argue for months about if we can take one metre off of a “historically significant car park”, China has no problem building five new cities, 17,000 more miles of highway, and probably beginning work on a space elevator. No wonder they’re calling this the start of the Chinese century.
We are artificially making ourselves poorer, unproductive, unsustainable, and uncompetitive. And it’s entirely down to housing. Here is how fixing the housing crisis will solve nearly all of our problems, including but not limited to; climate change, poverty, inequality, poor public health, economic stagnation, crime, the cost of living, and more. In the immediate post-war era in the west, housing was a consumer good, like your microwave or your toaster. And it worked like any other consumer good in a capitalist economy. You produce as much as possible for the lowest cost to the consumer. And that’s why the UK government also
built houses, to compete with private business, playing along to keep supply high and prices low. But, after the government stopped building houses in the 1980s, houses have become more of an investment, like fine art or stocks on the stock market, because new houses are now rarer and increase in value over time, just like paintings. So like bids in an art auction, the price of houses and flats can only go up, taking up more and more of someone’s income as the population grows but the number of houses doesn’t keep up. How many people are in poverty right now who would be fine if they simply had cheaper rent or mortgages? Wait we actually have an answer to that. About half of the children and one quarter of all adults in poverty according to Child Poverty Action Group. Isn’t it strange how housing costs were basically not a factor in child poverty until 1980? I wonder what happened. When government housebuilding was at
its post-war peak, over 500 houses were completed every day in England, with the record being 1968 when they finished nearly 1,000 houses every day. This also coincided with the so-called “Golden Age of Capitalism” where everyone could afford a home, a car, three kids, and a holiday, on the income of one guy working in a mineshaft. In the 1950s the average Briton was spending more per week at his local pub than he was on his rent or his mortgage. Here’s some concrete proof from Tokyo; in 2015 they approved more housing construction permits than the entirety of England, and while both London and Tokyo had a comparable increase in population, the change in house prices is uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh... If we want to drastically reduce the level of poverty in our society, simply start treating homes as a commodity, like they used to be, and not treasure to be hoarded.
Finland is the only country in Europe where the rate of homelessness is falling. In the capital of Helsinki, there is only need for one homeless shelter that beds fifty people. They don’t need any more than that. And what they did was, they built enough affordable houses, and then they put the homeless people in them. This saves the taxpayer saves 15,000 euros per year for every homeless person that is given a home, because they no longer have to rely on social services. So next time you hand a homeless guy your spare change, bare in mind that you would get a tax cut if he was just given a free house. I did the maths with the current homeless population in the USA it’s $62 per taxpayer. I think we’re done with this section.
Ah, the iconic American suburb. The perfect place to settle down, start a family, go to church, play catch with Jimmy in the yard, beat your wife, see little Susie get married (she’s growing up so fast), and eventually die of a heart attack while watering the lawn. But as charmingly vacuous as this is, there is no other way to live that is more damaging for the environment. Yes indeed, it might sound backwards, but suburbs are worse for the environment than cities. Take a look at this map of the average household carbon footprint in each Zip Code; here’s New York City, and here are the suburbs surrounding it. Pretty stark contrast.
We can find out why from California, which is literally just one giant suburb. If we consult this low-res jpg chart of California’s carbon footprint, two of the largest sources of their CO2 emissions are from transportation and electricity. It’s no surprise that when everything is spaced out more in suburb, you need to rely on a car to get around. As opposed to a city or just somewhere with more density, where there is usually a store on your street that you can easily walk to. Also, because houses in suburbs are generally bigger, they cost more to heat and to power, while utility pipes and electricity wires need to cover more distance to reach every house.
Those sterile, mono-cultural lawns don’t provide much biodiversity either, and Las Vegas had to ban them entirely because watering equipment took up too much of the city’s valuable water supplies. Compare this with the cities who have massive biodiverse central parks or smaller community gardens with many types of plants. What has this got to do with housebuilding? Simply put, if you build houses taller and closer together, you can fit more of them in the same amount of space. That mean price go down as well as CO2 emissions and wasted water. You don’t have to drive as far to get places, and sharing a wall or two with your neighbours keeps the energy bills down. If you’re a staunch suburbanite, you might be saying “Ahhh nooo my idyllic bourgeois American lifestyle” I can’t do the voice I’m too tired. BUT this would be for your own good because
building houses like this might one day actually Save Your Life! As the most densely populated non-microstate country in Europe, the Netherlands has to be conservative with their space. “Suburbs” in the Dutch sense look less like this and more like this. Even in rural areas like farming communities, houses are really close together and most of them are huddled around the central village square, with a few detached houses on the outskirts.
Ignoring the fact this looks far better than your soulless cut-and-paste suburban tracts of boredom, it’s also the reason why the Netherlands has some of Europe’s lowest levels of obesity. For the simple reason that if everything is within walking distance...people tend to...walk more. Which is better for their health. The narrow, winding streets also makes it a hassle to take cars on short journeys – you’d be better off taking your bike to work. Which a lot of Dutch people actually do. Not only does this reduce carbon emissions and increase energy efficiency like we discussed in the previous section, but obviously makes the air cleaner and makes the Netherlands one of the safest countries in the world for road traffic deaths. That’s not to
say the Dutch don’t have a housing crisis too, but when they do build houses, they build them better. In a study of 14,000 people across the world, living in a dense suburb like those in the Netherlands cuts obesity by 9%. Mixed-use development like putting shops and businesses nearer to houses cut it by a further 8.3% and being within walking distance to a recreational
area like parks cut it by another 8.4%. Such a simple change with huge positive consequences, just because they built more houses, closer together. Poor mental health among young people is increasingly a problem in the developed world too – a lot of people blame the Instasnaps and Tweetbooks, but you know what? I’m blaming the housing for that too. You ever tried to rent a place in London? No? Me neither but look at these properties I found for rent online. How are you supposed to develop meaningful friendships if nobody can visit you? How are you supposed to exercise? How are you supposed to pay for luxuries and the things that make life worth living if all your income is going towards rent? God forbid the Sigma Variant comes along and forces people into lockdown here, it’s like solitary confinement. If we built
more houses, construction companies would actually have to compete with each other to make the best possible homes, instead of cramming everyone into these shoeboxes. One report published by the Ministry of Health in 2012 recommended that no house in the UK be smaller than 79 square meters, because anything below this was found to be detrimental to the occupants’ mental well being. Despite this, the UK still has no national minimum floor space laws – only “guidelines”.
The average new dwelling built in Britain is a pitiful 74 square meters, the same in the Netherlands. Compare this with Denmark, where the average home is double this size. And I don’t think the Danish are having a particularly hard time right now. Oh I forgot to mention; this report wasn’t published in 2012 it was published in 1912!! AAAAAAH!!!! As you may recall from the start of the video, it is estimated that the American economy would be 74% larger if the housing crisis had never happened. A second study partially confirmed this, saying that if just three American cities – New York, San Jose, and San Francisco – allowed many more houses to be built, this would translate to a pay rise of between $8,700 dollars and $16,000 dollars for the average American – even if they don’t live in these places.
Cities are where wealth is generated these days, so it figures that when you lock people out of cities through high prices, you prevent them from being at their most productive. How many great computer innovations are we missing out on because the smartest programmer can’t afford to live in Silicon Valley? How many kino movies will never be made because Hollywood is too expensive for upstart directors and actors? What if we never go to Mars because the person who knows how to do it can only afford to live in Clinton, Missouri and not with NASA in Pasadena. The same is true for any city or major economic centre across the world; New York, London, Berlin, Dublin, Auckland, Paris, Vancouver, Rome, Barcelona, Cape Town, Zurich. And for those that do manage to live in the cities, current housing costs usually negate their productive output anyway. For the average worker, most, if not all, of the wealth they add to the economy is sucked out by the real estate industry and put into a landlord’s checking account.
This is kneecapping your own economy. Build more houses, cut landlord profits, and these problems will just...disappear! Hong Kong has one of the lowest birth rates in the entire world, beating only South Korea and Puerto Rico. A birth rate lower than 2 children p er couple means the population decreases, but the average Hong Kongese woman has only one child in her lifetime, which you can imagine could cause quite the problem a couple generations down the line. It is very normal for fertility rate to drop when countries become developed, like in Bangladesh.
But the unintended consequence of this is that the national population begins to decrease – leaving a lot of old people and not a lot of young people to look after them and pay for their pensions. Not just in Hong Kong though – across the developed world, countries are projected to lose millions in population over the next few decades for this reason. You could supplement this with immigration, which is a perfectly fine solution, but it doesn’t address the root cause. When asked “how many children do you really want”, most women in the developed world answered two or three – above the replacement rate. So why don’t they have that many children?
You guessed it. It’s the houses! That’s what this video is about remember?? In Hong Kong, the price of housing is astronomical. One square foot of floor space over there can cost 2,700 US dollars, forcing many people to live in so-called coffin homes. It’s a miracle they can afford to raise one child, never mind two! The situation is less extreme but still present in the western world too. In the UK, for every 10% rent increases, births go down 5%. One study suggests house price
rises between 1996 and 2014 prevented the birth of 157,000 people. In 1976, nearly 40% of households in the USA were home to a married couple with children. Today that figure is 21%, with single person or childless couples making up half of households. Not because people don’t want a family, they just can’t afford it. The more expensive it is to buy or rent an extra bedroom, the less likely a family is to get one and fill it with a child.
OK, we’re behind schedule, so let’s finish off with the... Lightning Round!!!! Housing reduces crime. Increased home ownership generates significant reductions in property crime and violent crime. When mortgage costs get too high and homes are foreclosed,
the number of burglaries in the neighbourhood of a foreclosed home goes up. Housing improves education. Children who live in a crowded household are less likely to graduate from high school. Houses near high-performing schools cost on average 2.4 times as much.
Building more houses lowers this entry barrier to good schools and gives parents more choice over their child’s education. Housing promotes technological innovation. A study of 600,000 patents filed from 2000 to 2010 showed that areas with high-density housing produced more patents and innovations than low density areas. and the housing crisis made Coronavirus worse. You are obviously much more likely to pass a disease on to your parents if you still live with them. Cities with high levels of overcrowding fared much worse than cities with plenty of housing for everyone.
So, it’s pretty clear since the start of the 2010s that the western world is having a bit of a moment (to say the least). And surprise surprise, it can also be traced back to housing. In Britain, people living in areas where house prices were stagnant were more likely to vote for populists and their policies like Brexit, the SNP, Corbyn’s Labour or Boris’ Conservatives. In France, the same can be said for National Front voters. Sinn Fein saw a massive vote share
increase in Ireland, driven by young people sick of Dublin’s housing crisis. Trump’s voter base are Midwestern suburbanites who have seen their cities decimated after the Great Recession. Young people across the west can only afford poorly paid, insecure jobs that can barely cover rent and living costs – no wonder we have a generation of communists. The older generations sit comfortably in their overvalued housing and don’t see why the young are so entitled and demanding of change.
So...as a reaction they become... reactionary. This is incredibly dangerous. Populists all across the world have shown no respect for good government or managing the economy properly. The housing crisis is tearing our societies apart – it ruins the economy and stokes division, pushing people toward extremism. Extremism that plays into the hands of our enemies – there is nothing they want more than for the free countries of the world to withdraw inwards, destroy their own economies, and descend into chaos. So I think it’s fair to say that housing is pretty much the root of all of our issues in the world right now, and solving it by building more houses would greatly improve all of our lives. But how can we get developers to build more houses? What’s stopping us from doing this? Well
in one part of the world, the answer can be found in a small town, one hundred years ago... It’s the 1920s, let’s get in the car and drive to a party and listen to jazz on the radio and go to the movies. Meanwhile the city of Cleveland is getting crazy big thanks to its growing industry and more and more people are moving to the surrounding suburbs. In the suburb of Euclid, north east of Cleveland, the Ambler Realty Corporation wanted to build a set of apartments for all the new residents. But knowing the uhhhhhh demographics of the growing worker population, the suburb of Euclid passed a law banning anything other than single-family detached homes, in an effort to keep prices high and keep out the working-class “undesirables”. Ambler realty were quite annoyed at this, not cause it’s racist, they just wanted to build some apartments. They took it all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing that it violated
the Fourteenth Amendment because the city had confiscated their property without compensation. The local government of Euclid argued “No it doesn’t”. And the Supreme Court agreed. The law was upheld. This gave inspiration to many cities across the United States and Canada who also wanted to keep out black people and poor people through high prices. And so, across the United States, there are vast swathes of cities that legally cannot be anything other than single-house suburbs – including nearly all of the San Francisco bay area.
Building these lovely town houses is ILLEGAL and if you want to turn a run-down factory into an apartment complex then you are a CRIMINAL. No wonder housing is expensive; building cheap apartments is prohibited by the law! But did it work? Did Euclid at least get their all-white suburb? [disappointing steel lick from Spongebob] But not everywhere in the USA has these zoning laws; Houston Texas did away with their zoning ordinances in the 1980s. As a result, you can get this luxury apartment in down town for….375 dollars a week. I did some digging, here’s an apartment for the same price in Los Angeles.
Although, this only explains the problem with housing in North America. Over in the UK, we have our own terrible planning laws too. Prior to the Second World War, if you owned a piece of land in Britain, you could do whatever you wanted with it. Build houses, demolish houses, make a park, construct a statue to your favourite racist, et cetera.
In the 1930s, Britain was building four times as many houses per year as we do today. Because if you wanted to, you could just...build a house on the land that you own. This has its benefits – it was a factor in our recovery from the Great Depression and made up 17% of the country’s economy at the time. It also has it’s drawbacks; Victorian London was hideously ugly. But in 1949, the Labour government introduced the Town and Country Planning Act, and now you need local government permission, as well as the permission of all the local residents, to do any of these things on your own land: The Act made it unnecessarily harder to build more houses, and as such, set us on this path of economic and social decline.
Clement Attlee, widely regarded as one of the best prime ministers in UK history, actually did more damage to the British economy than anything since the plague. Now, those are the main structural barriers in the US and Britain, and I’m sure other nations across the world have their own unnecessary laws and regulations. But we can’t cover them all. But if there’s one thing I’m sure all countries with housing crises have in common, it’s the phrase “Not In My Back Yard”. A NIMBY is someone who opposes, tooth and nail, every potential construction of new housing in their area. This is the town they’ve lived in,
why should it have to change now. All these new residents will ruin the neighbourhood, taking up too much space, criminals could move here, poor people could move here. Worst of all, it will lower the value of their home.
Many of these fears are unfounded, as outlined in this video. But one thing that does come up a lot with NIMBYs is that they think it will ruin the “neighbourhood character”. Many European capitals are filled with quaint picturesque houses that would be ruined if you dumped a massive steel and glass apartment building next to them. Aside from the fact that a tent city of homeless people looks far worse than this building ever could, perhaps your time could be better spent arguing against ugly houses, not just houses in general.
One proposal in the UK right now is to allow individual streets to democratically vote on which pre-approved design they want the new housing development will be. Housing gets built, local resident have no reason to oppose it, and the new builds are aesthetic...ally pleasing. what's with zoomers these days using aesthetic as a synonym for beautiful? With these facts in mind, the solution seems simple enough. Remove barriers that prevent good housing from being built – developers want to build homes and make money from them, but we’re not letting them. It’s time to repeal and replace these outdated, unhelpful laws.
But these NIMBYs are smart. They have a whole host of excuses to justify their fear of change – even if the change is positive and benefits them. Let’s take a look at them in detail, so next time you’re at the next town planning committee meeting, if you’re boring enough to do that, I mean how sad can you get – you’ll know exactly how to counter argue against the Karens and Kevins of the world.
If you want to click off the video now that’s fine. Now some people out there might say that we already have enough houses and it’s just the greedy landlords and real estate sector that jack up prices. This isn’t true and we’ll get to that later, but the solution is not to put a limit on rent or house prices, otherwise known as “Rent controls”. I’ll be the first to admit that for people who are renting, this policy can help. It protects them from landlords who arbitrarily hit them with rent increases. But that’s the thing. It helps people who are currently renting; not future tenants. As evident in: Berlin, where the amount of available housing dropped 30% and landlords instead started asking for other, more expensive ways to extract money from renters like forcing them to buy their own furniture, in Stockholm, where after implementing rent control in 2011 the waiting list for an apartment is now nine years, up from five years before the law was passed.
in Boston, where, rent control was found to benefit mostly wealthy white people, in St Paul, where housing construction dropped 80% within the first three months of rent control being implemented, and in San Francisco, where a 2019 Stanford university report concluded; “[Rent controls] lowered the supply of rental housing in the city, but also shifted the city’s housing supply towards less affordable types of housing that are likely to cater to the tastes of higher income individuals. Ultimately, these shifts in the housing supply seem likely to have driven up citywide rents, damaging housing affordability for future tenants. By simultaneously bringing in higher income residents and preventing displacement of minorities, rent control has contributed to widening income inequality in the city.” I’ll summarise with a quote by Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck, who wrote in 1971 that "next to bombing, rent control seems to be the most efficient technique for destroying cities". The New Zealand political class love to blame rich Americans, the Chinese, and B-refugees as a reason why they need to cut immigration and ban foreigners from buying property in the country. This is strange because a government report in 2016 already discovered that, and I quote, because I couldn’t find a Kiwi to voice this bit; “visa-controlled immigration into New Zealand, and specifically into Auckland, in the recent past has had a relatively small impact on house prices compared to other demand factors”.
You guys are just lazy, build more houses. Thanks Kirstie, great advice. Maybe I should have done what you did and buy my first house in 1993, with my parents’ money for £51,000. Unfortunately I made the terrible career choice of being born 7 years later and now house prices have increased 440%. Oops, my bad.
There are currently more empty houses in the UK or USA than there are homeless people in either of those countries. So just give them a house like Finland did. Sure, on paper the number of empty houses is more than the number of people without homes. But it doesn’t solve any of the other problems with not having enough houses to go around. 50% of American adults under 29 still live with their parents. That figure is 35% in the EU and 40% in Britain. At least they’re not homeless but I’m certain most of them want a place of their own that they can afford.
The average American commutes about an hour a day, adding up to 9 days total a year. Think of all the centuries of human life collectively wasted every day that would be massively reduced if people could live closer to where they work. And not only is our time wasted, our health is too. People with long commutes are 33 percent more likely to suffer from depression; 21 percent more likely to be obese; and nearly half of them get less than seven hours of sleep each night. Building more houses lets people live closer to where they work. And just because someone has a home doesn’t mean they aren’t burdened by high rents or overcrowding. In New York City, 42% of renters pay more than a third of their income towards rent, with nearly 1 in 4 New Yorkers giving away more than half.
Aside from that, there is also the problem that not all of these “empty” houses are fit for human habitation. This is an empty house, but so is this. Or what about an empty house in the middle of nowhere with no job prospects or regional connections? On the opposite end of the spectrum, holiday villas and second homes also count as vacant. But how many low-income people do you know who could afford to live here? Speaking of rich people: Gentrification is a growing concern in working class communities, particularly in neighbourhoods that are predominantly made up of ethnic minorities. Many people worry that building new
housing will lead to predominantly middle class white people moving in and raising the cost of living with their vapid middle class faffery, pricing minorities out of their communities. In 2021, the NYC Department of City Planning used census data between 2010 and 2020 to figure out the effects of new housing on the racial demographics of the city. They looked at population change on neighbourhoods with low, average, and high levels of new housing construction. The demographic that increased the most was Asians. Hispanics also saw an increase no matter how many houses were built too. White residents get a less defined trend – sometimes
the white population goes down, sometimes nothing happens, sometimes it goes go up. However, in every single one of these scenarios, the black population decreased, and it would appear that the more housing that gets built, the higher percent of black people are forced to move out of the neighbourhood. That’s because when wealthy yuppies move into a city that doesn’t have enough high-income housing for them, they move into working class neighbourhoods, taking up all the cheap housing and raising the price for everyone else.
So what’s the solution then? Well, there is actually a fourth section to this graph – neighbourhoods with very high levels of construction. And the effect on the demographics was... [angelic music] It’s certainly not an even distribution by a long shot. But it’s the only scenario where no racial group is excluded. Massively increasing the housing stock massively increases racial inclusion.
Despite the clear evidence against these policies and objections, people still keep believing in them. Politicians simply don’t want to have to confront angry NIMBY voters, and so propose nice-sounding but ultimately worthless solutions to placate them. And this will come back to bite them eventually, as we are about to find out from the place that decided to implement all of these terrible, terrible policies... Mississippi usually ranks among the worst in the United States in terms of education, poverty, public health, or crime. But there’s one metric that Mississippi ranks the best in; they have the lowest rate of homelessness out of any state. This is because, despite their poverty and racism and so on, Mississippi goes the Finland route for solving the homeless problem – they build houses and they put the homeless into them. Good job Mississippi!
Contrast this with wealthy liberal high IQ California, with a homeless rate more than 11 times the rate of the supposedly backwards gun-toting redneck states. For whatever reason, California will do anything to reduce the homeless population, except building more houses, and as a result, their state just gets worse and worse. Zoning laws prevent anyone from building houses more than three stories tall, and when new three story houses or apartments are proposed, the plans can be shot down by angry residents so long as they act angry enough. The population of San Francisco has basically stayed the same since 1960, but rents are through the roof. Because every time a home is demolished or otherwise taken off the market, a new one can’t be built to fill the gap! When California passed rent control measures in the 90s, it actually led to renters collectively paying 2.9 billion more on rent than they had been. New constructions and luxury houses
were exempt from rent control, so landlords simply converted existing housing into luxury houses, obtained the “new building” sticker, and proceeded to increase the rent while not actually adding any more houses to the total, and taking away from the number of affordable houses. Sometimes it can take years just to get government permission to demolish old buildings and turn them into new homes or apartments – all the while developers are paying property tax, hiring security, and paying for maintenance, inflating the price of the apartments when they finally do get built so builders can make back their losses. The effect this has on Californian society is terrible. These mediocre houses sell for millions. People who have a salary of 140,000 dollars per year still qualify for government assistance to help pay their rent and mortgage! Want to visit the Walk of Fame? Too bad, it’s a makeshift homeless shelter now. San
Francisco city hall? They turned it into a real homeless shelter! Chinatown? Watch out for the heroin needles in your won ton soup. Here’s a fun game; put yourself on Google Street view anywhere in central LA and see how long it takes before you find a homeless tent. My record is 48 seconds. It’s honestly scarier than Alien Isolation. Not only is this housing and homeless crisis a great humanitarian disaster but it’s also taking a hit on the Californian economy. A lot of the wealth generated by Silicon Valley is just vacuumed up by landlords due to high rents. The once thriving film industry is now relocating elsewhere, with the state of Georgia and the UK predicted to be home to more film studios than Hollywood by 2025.
California is a warning bell for every other major city in the western world. The fate of California will be the fate that befalls your town, your city, your country, if you don’t solve the housing crisis. I don’t care if you’re a socialist or a liberal or a conservative or a libertarian or whatever this guy is, If you value the continued existence of free and democratic societies, if you want to fix the sorry state of the world right now, then support building more houses. That’s it. That’s all I have to say. Goodbye. Hello again, thanks for sticking around to the end. That was fun, wasn’t it? I promise I’ll never make a video about anything this nerdy ever again. Special thanks to these people, who helped with
the narration, and also all of the channel members, your names are on screen now.
2022-05-03 00:18
