US teachers grapple with a growing housing crisis: ‘We can’t afford rent’
Edit: Let me rephrase to be less strict, and express this as my personal belief rather than an absolute truth.<p>Edit 2: Genuinely appreciate the discussions on this. (Besides the one or two comments that got moderated away) I think many of the responses here are emblematic of what HN <i>can</i> be, where people who disagree can still come together and talk through their different lenses.<p>I believe we need to decommodify housing and provide additional support for tenants, as well as build more housing stock. IME, it&#x27;s not as simple as &#x27;build more&#x27;, because the interests and incentives don&#x27;t align -- adding new housing stock devalues existing stock, so there&#x27;s pressure to keep the commodity cost high.<p>Some combination of the following would achieve my goal of chipping away at the power of landlords, and reduce the power of landlords over tenants.<p>1) Build more housing stock<p>2) Remove single family zoning and allow density (congrats to Washington state for pursuing this)<p>3) Rent control<p>4) Guaranteed legal support for tenants<p>5) Affordable foreclosure insurance<p>6) Funded community land trusts<p>7) Social housing, specifically distributed low rise, well maintained<p>8) Cooperative ownership of apartment buildings<p>9) Vacancy taxes<p>10) Good cause eviction laws<p>11) Stiffer penalties for failure to keep apartments in livable condition<p>12) Right of first refusal laws (tenant opportunity to purchase)<p>Teachers are not the only ones impacted by this -- all the members of our communities are unable to live in them. My barista, bookshop worker, teacher, and firefighter don&#x27;t live in my neighborhood. We then need to invest huge effort into getting people in and out of this community.