[lbo-talk] Black (and Asian) in the USSR

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

Jordan:
> > the U.S., where a third of the population has serious
> > housing affordability problems?
> 
> Where does that stat come from?  I've read recently that 
> 2/3rds of US households are inhabited by people who own their 
> house; so are you saying that _all renters_ have _serious 
> housing affordability problems_ ...?
> 
> Or do some mortgage-payers also have this problem?

Households does NOT equal people.  You may have a multiple family
household, owned by one family, but inhabited by several other, grown up
children living with their parents (th eparents own the house, the
children have a housing problem).  A separate proble, is th ehomeless
populaion that is not included in the household count.  A still
different problem is the quality of the housing

And of course affordability.  To illustrate: my friends in NYC  both
have professional jobs, but they could not afford the a coop in which
they live, if daddy did not shell some $100k for the downpayment.  The
Chronicle of Higher Educsation run an article few years ago that
colleges in the Bay Area have problems recruiting faculty because of
housing affordability - if a professor's salary is not enough to pay for
the housing cost, something must be definitely wrong.

The insistence on single family dwelling, no matter how crappy but
surrounded by an acre of lawn - makes the US housing "system" very
costly and inefficient.

Wojtek