Groundwork Collaborative

One think tank argues the problem isn't simply a shortage of homes, but a shortage of affordable starter homes and a housing system that struggles to build them at scale.

Here to expand on that proposal is Alex Jaquez, Senior Vice President of Policy, Advocacy, and Research at Groundwork Collaborative.

Alex, thanks so much for joining me today.

It's really great to have you on the show.

Too much of it is kind of siphoned away by middlemen, by securitizers, by syndicators who are financing the building of the housing, but take, we believe, too much off the top to actually get the full value of the credit towards building affordable housing.

So part of the answer is the right tools, getting the right tools in place, and then part of it is actually the scale to meet the challenge that we have.

Alex Jaquez is Senior Vice President of Policy, Advocacy, and Research at the Groundwork Collaborative.

Alex, your proposal relies heavily on factory built housing.

It only takes a handful of successful people to leave to decimate the city's tax base, cautioned Ackman, while Catsimatidis suggested many rich New Yorkers would likely join him in fleeing to the promised land, Florida, which has no state income tax.

But the progressive think tank Groundwork Collaborative said that new Internal Revenue Service data should be the final nail in the coffin of the evidence-free perennial claim that higher taxes cause wealthy residents to leave their cities and states.

The agency released its twenty twenty-three statistics of income data covering the period before Mamdani became mayor and introduced a tax on second homes ranging from point eight to one point three percent for properties valued at five million dollars or more, which he estimated will raise five hundred million dollars annually.

The data shows how the tax base was impacted after the state imposed a separate tax policy in twenty twenty-two, raising its top tax rate on the highest earners.

Real hourly pay has been on a downward trend for a while.

Breon Williams is chief economist at Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive think tank.

So you have real hourly pay that's either been flat or falling.

At this point, about five straight months now, from April through now,

We already have an example from the grocery store industry where different people were shown five different prices for the exact same carton of eggs.

So last year, Consumer Reports and the Groundwork Collaborative recruited 437 people across four different cities to shop on the app Instacart.

You've probably seen it all at the same time and then look at the exact same products.

And 74% of the products that they tested for showed up for different people at different prices.

And maybe you have more of an incentive to pay more because you have to make it for a family tragedy.

It just becomes really concerning when we have companies like Amazon showing different prices or Instagart as the Groundwork Collaborative did that great study about.

And largely what it appears to be is inflating prices for consumers.

I think that can create a lot of other externalities aside from the pocketbook, general lack of distrust, a level of resentment between consumers and the companies that they pay products for.