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The core fabric of society - the deal that was offered by society to the people - to work in a job, own a house, raise a family, have a retirement - has decayed away entirely for many people.
The housing part never 'decayed', it was actively blocked by the people who already had homes. That's why you see things now like California actively overriding local zoning.
There are plenty of places without zoning issues that have that same housing problems.

More people. Same amount of land, and features people want to live by - cities (which in the past often meant rivers but always meant jobs)/in my area, lakes. It’s really that simple. Everything else is missing for forest for the trees.

That's why you'll find in old economics textbooks that it's up to the government to fix these issues, by hiring and raising compensation for (all) their employees. This then forces other employers to raise compensation as well and so makes housing affordable again.
>, it was actively blocked by the people who already had homes.

You're not wrong but this is too simplistic and avoids holding up a mirror that really ought to be held up. Zoning was the "we're gonna regulate our way into utopia" of their time. The class of useful idiots who made it happen and the class of useful idiots who will go to bat for it's continuance because they make a buck on it is far broader than that.

It's not simplistic. It is literally the core problem with housing. Zoning had a first objective of preventing Black families from moving into white neighborhoods, and then, in the 1980s, assumed a new role of driving scarcity (and thus the price of houses in areas of opportunity, to the benefit of existing homeowners).
Well states need home prices to increase because the majority of their pension funds for their employees is invested in hedge funds seeking outsized returns that use single family homes as an investment vehicle.

This can never be solved until we resolve the public pension crisis.

Lawmakers in my state of Oregon are soon going to debate how the state invests in hedge funds but the simple truth of the numbers says that there's no possible way Oregon can meet its pension obligations without their stated returns.

This is quite a new deal and not one enjoyed by most people for most of history.
What is the purpose of what you're saying? Because people lived like serfs and slaves for a lot of history, we should be okay with that?

I don't mean to be shitty, and I fully understand that contrary takes are what HN is great at, but I genuinely fail to see what the point of your comment is other than a knee jerk nothing?

The first comment suggests that it was always like this and life has got worse. The second says it has almost never been like this, it was a short-lived condition only. That is in no way a normative statement on how it should be.
Is that not how the 95% of the population of farmers lived before industrialization? The only difference is the job being their own farm or trade.
They didn’t own their own houses.
We are very fortunate that my wife got to work at the local school. She now walks to work and I work from home about 4 days out of 5 workdays.

The benefits are huge in terms of time available and costs, and not needing childcare before or after school.

It’s hard to solve couples having two jobs in different places, but having at least one person get to work basically instantly and for zero cost is a massive boon to society.

The issue I saw is that the government department in charge of education is not the one in charge of housing and infrastructure, and there are no incentives to hire locally or make it easier to move locally. Instead you get teachers in suburb A travelling to suburb B and vice-versa, and no way that they can choose to swap roles. We lucked out.

It used to be like this in rural communities even up into the 70s and 80s. The town's branch manager would be young, shipped out for a few years and live in a house the bank owned and given a stipend to maintain it. Same with the postmaster and other professions.
Teacher recruiting wouldn't be so hard if pay weren't lockstep, as it is in so many places. Unions demand this, and it keeps some potentially-effective teachers out of the profession (and keeps old lousy ones in, unfortunately).
Maybe we could use college teaching as a model. College teachers are for the most part non-unionized.

Disclosure: I was one of those teachers for a semester, many years ago.

Also, teacher pay is not as rigid as it seems. In my state, the good teachers advance by moving to better paying districts. Very few teachers stay in rural districts for more than a year or two.

I thought the same thing regarding professors not being unionized. However, in top universities they are paid as much based on research (or outside offers based on research) as they are on teaching capability.

One thing that is truly bonkers about K12 education is that they can get tenure in just a few years. This is much faster (and easier) than a professor getting tenure. But they both result in the near-inability to be fired.

That’s funny, at least in my neck of the woods a lot of teachers prefer the rural jobs.

I’m not sure if the pay increase of moving the city balances out anyways with the increase in housing costs.

> Teacher recruiting wouldn't be so hard if pay weren't lockstep, as it is in so many places. Unions demand this, and it keeps some potentially-effective teachers out of the profession (and keeps old lousy ones in, unfortunately).

This is an unhelpful, anti-union sentiment with no actual relevance to the problem of teacher recruiting.

How would it be easier to recruit new, potentially-effective teachers if we had incentive pay based on meritocratic pay scales? There is no rational way to credit someone from a different area for their ability to run a classroom effectively until there's evidence on how that person runs a classroom.

You don't have to be anti-union to be anti-teachers-union. I know a guy who worked in private schools for a couple decades, and then couldn't get work in public schools because the union would have required a very high pay rate for someone of his seniority. He said they could hire 3 younger people for the same money. I guess freezing out one old guy and hiring three new ones is an increase in recruiting though, right?
Why do you think it is not relevant to the problem of teacher recruiting? I would be more likely to go into teaching if I thought it could be a good place to work and I would be paid fairly. My impression, from seeing my kids go through public schools, is that the lockstep pay (which can be bumped by getting mostly-useless online degrees) creates bad incentives. There is no way to move up quickly by being an awesome teacher, and mediocre teachers are impossible to get rid of. This hurts morale and drains districts of resources that could be used to pay better-performing teachers.
> Why do you think it is not relevant to the problem of teacher recruiting?

First, the issue with teacher pay is that it is low. OP and you would instead say that the issue is that it's not low enough for some low performers, and that such a correction would lead new teachers to enter the market. Is there an economics study that shows a similar phenomenon occurring?

> I would be more likely to go into teaching if I thought it could be a good place to work and I would be paid fairly.

I doubt this, because if you cared you would get enough of the mostly-useless degrees in order to get to a pay level that makes sense for you.

Anyway, there are private institutions you could go teach for; instead I hear you saying that you could do better than these unionized public school teachers if your assured brilliance were recognized monetarily.

I too would be more likely to be a public school teacher if it paid more.
My SO was a teacher before moving on and would see offers like this all the time.

A few of the rural school districts here offer this incentive to move out there. Sometimes they include a car too. Note they tdo not do repairs though.

The issue with taking one of these rural offers is that it's a dead end. Your schoolhouse of many grands gets smaller and smaller over time until they don't need you anymore. And then what? Your career as a teacher is essentially useless for any larger district as they do not care at all about teaching multiple grades at once and barely (or not) making state standards. And then you don't even have a house left over to sell (likely for a loss), it's the district's.

I know it's the reverse of the article, but the incentives are the same and they don't make sense for any of the parties.

A land value tax would fix this
I know the Georgism joke here, but we don't need an LVT to fix this; we just need states to override home rule on minimum density requirements for residential and mixed-use zoning. The core problem here is in fact very simple!
Exactly. I have a plot of land in inner Portland and they won't let me build on it. I mean they will, but not at the density needed to satiate demand such that home prices fall to the proper amount a home should cost. Should be a simple proposition with someone trying to spend his own money to build housing but it's not because they make it as hard as possible.
Not on its own. You also need to relax or remove direct (and indirect, eg parking minimums) restrictions on residential density.
A land value tax without changes in non-tax land use regulations would not fix, and a land value tax would not be necessary after removing the non-tax land use restrictions which this responds to.
How?
It would allow housing to be substantially denser.
Who eats the loss if home values fall before the resale restriction lifts?
Could just, you know, pay more…
Teachers in major metro school systems already have quite a good deal. Rural schoolteachers really do have the deal everyone heard about in 1990s politics, but urban schoolteachers are generally economically privileged.

(That doesn't mean they aren't impacted by housing scarcity in ways that disrupt the administration of school systems; they are. But the problem isn't compensation, the problem is corrupt regulation written to prop up homeowner assets.)

I genuinely need to see what data you're citing with this statement. Until recently, I worked in education and often worked with urban schools. Starting salaries of 55-60k/year living in a major metropolitan area is not what I would call economically privileged.
The other half of this is that with declining enrollment city school districts are finding themselves with a lot of land. They don't feel any pressure to sell the land. Nor do they feel any pressure to use it for other government services.
Why not make housing cost less instead?
Because we’ve been sold the story that your house has to appreciate in value 2-3 times over the period you live in it, consequently, homeowners vote against anything that lowers housing costs.
They're not mutually exclusive goals. Wanting a more affording salary and scalable housing both are valid goals.
The only way that works is to build more housing. Austin has shown the way.
In some areas like the San Francisco Bay Area, schools would have to pay astronomically more in order for teachers to compete against software engineers. I’m a community college professor in the Bay Area making a low six-figure salary, but even a townhouse in the neighborhood my college is in is easily $1 million for a two-bedroom, and rent for a two-bedroom apartment is easily $3500/mo. A modest salary boost can help me rent a two-bedroom apartment, but if I hope to buy closer to work, my salary would need to double, and there’s still the challenge of saving for the down payment, since there’s no such thing as RSUs in a not-for-profit institution.

At least teacher housing provides a way for teachers to obtain secure housing closer to work without having to directly compete against highly-paid corporate workers with RSUs.

Around here, similar to the Bay Area, community college and K12 pay is around $65k, and your typical new mortgage is $45k annually.
On net, that's no improvement - just more money handed to landlords since it's chasing the same limited supply.
Or allow pay that is not lockstep/tied to mostly-useless degree completion. Unions fight this stuff like hell because the people in charge have gone through the current system and therefore benefit from it.

It is not that hard to do outcome-based pay over a multi-year period, but this is the main criticism. You can either track kids over a number of years and track their relative growth in each year, or you can use bargaining up-front whereby teachers can vote on a "multiplier" for each class before they know who will end up with which class.