People & Blogs
Why Are We Demolishing Homes During a Housing Crisis? | Olaf Grawert | TED
Every minute somewhere in Europe, a house is demolished — along with the memories and sense of community it holds, says architect Olaf Grawert. Exposing the human and environmental cost of demolition for profit, he highlights a bold alternative that could address the growing housing crisis. Learn how rethinking the value of the buildings we…
People & Blogs
How to Confront Your Inner Critic (W/ Anu Gupta) | How to Be a Better Human | TED
How do you quieten the judgmental voice in your head? Educator and entrepreneur Anu Gupta suggests you actually listen to it.Anu joins Chris to discuss the effects of human biases on our psyche and how to combat self-destructive habits by swapping out harmful emotions with constructive thoughts. They also talk about how individuals, when they…
People & Blogs
Fake news is everywhere — @DaveJorgenson says respond with a punchline #TEDTalks
What if the best defense against misinformation isn’t panic, but a punchline? Journalist and comedian Dave Jorgenson explores how misinformation has proliferated throughout history — from the age of Plato to the era of viral TikToks. With his own short, absurdist sketches that explain the news, he shows how humor can cut through fear, spark…
People & Blogs
Is Luck Random — or Can You Cultivate It? | Christian Busch | TED
When the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires destroyed his home and neighborhood, scientist Christian Busch encountered the opposite of serendipity: “zemblanity,” or bad luck by design. Drawing on more than a decade of scientific research, he explores how people can navigate unpredictability by adopting a serendipity mindset that transforms setbacks into unexpected new beginnings. He asks:…
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@anchor-10
January 18, 2026 at 11:02 am
jews
@recklesstactics4718
January 18, 2026 at 12:43 pm
found the leftist whining about “white privilege”
@Real_Commander_Shepard
January 18, 2026 at 1:20 pm
stop noticing
@cravo_official
January 18, 2026 at 11:27 am
Great idea 💡👍🏻
@tomquagliata9381
January 18, 2026 at 11:30 am
What is concerning is they demolish, then build with inferior materials. At lease when it comes to housing this is the case. In suburban Chicago, they almost never build single family. They build three-story townhomes with ZERO yard, a small “balcony,” astronomical HOA dues, and plastic flooring and tub surrounds and call it luxury.
@rcmen231
January 18, 2026 at 11:30 am
RV parks and high end luxury apartments and houses would stabilize housing.
@rcmen231
January 18, 2026 at 11:34 am
Jean on jean so ugly.
@jmfu
January 18, 2026 at 11:49 am
The housing shortage is 100% intentional. Did they build back Maui from the fires yet? Did they build back Pacific Palisades yet? Nope, not going to. government actively and intentionally preventing it.
@the_algorithm
January 18, 2026 at 11:54 am
Not government, but Corporations actively preventing it
They constantly buy houses and leave them empty to create artificial scarcity to increase property values
That is not the Governments fault. That is GREED
There are currently more EMPTY houses in America than there are Homeless people
@monicateicher3894
January 18, 2026 at 11:57 am
But isn’t some portion of it the toxicity left behind from the materials that were burned down and currently present in the soil?
@Triple_J.1
January 18, 2026 at 9:45 pm
Corporations only own 10% of houses in the states.
Almost all of them are rented out for cashflow. Or in the process of being renovated and rented out.
Palisades was a natural disaster waiting to happen. The insurance companies left BEFORE the fire, because they knew it was statistically certain it was going to happen sometime soon. It was dry, overgrown, scrub brush and pine trees.
@the_algorithm
January 19, 2026 at 12:28 pm
@Triple_J.1 Shilling for Billionaires
@LordAugastus
January 18, 2026 at 12:28 pm
The rich manipulated the market, now they get to endebt the massess, rent trap the rest, and blame it all ok russia or China or ‘inflation’.. Its brilliant. They gave out quick loans to investors who then proceeded to flip houses for a few years driving up the price. Everyone makes a profit esp the banks. It’s like a legal money hack, and it drove price of homes way up. Why, because in our free market economy, things magically grow in value….
@thepeopleslight
January 18, 2026 at 9:08 pm
You’re pointing at something important. The system rewards what can grow fast in price, not what helps people live well. That gap is where a lot of problems begin
@LordAugastus
January 18, 2026 at 9:50 pm
@thepeopleslightno, I pointed out an organised market manipulation by big finance and banking…. The gap is the failure of democracy to regulate the market so it’s competitive for everyone not just the 1%
@homewall744
January 18, 2026 at 12:38 pm
Another silly person who thinks everyone should have the values he has, thinks rulers are better able to control society through forced unity rather than free people in free markets with free speech and association. Nearly all bad decisions are from government bailing out bad choices, funding big enterprises, forcing interest rates lower than the market would have it, destroying the power of savings with speculation and fighting against Fed-induced inflation from money printing and debt spending and false interest rates.
@homewall744
January 18, 2026 at 12:40 pm
“Public money” is actually our private property extorted by rulers who claim to be the true slave masters who own you and all you have and produce. It’s why the EU is a failed economy and the people are revolting and cold.
@Fr0gSplashh
January 18, 2026 at 3:15 pm
@Jonok Probably Russia. But maybe USA nowadays.
@homewall744
January 18, 2026 at 12:41 pm
If markets produce this, fine. If it’s just government spending your money, then you think forced unity is best.
@jamescastro2037
January 18, 2026 at 1:40 pm
If there is a housing crisis, how did government give immigrants an opportunity here? Corporations got the cheap labor they wanted and are making the immigrants build your and their own home, welcome to capitalism, where pigs fly and you work for them not yourself, because in America there is no self, just selfish.
@luciancaprar514
January 18, 2026 at 2:14 pm
Since soft costs can be as much as 25% of home construction..One way to make homes more affordable is to design beautiful functional homes that use space wisely. Then make those Mostly Pr-approved plans available to the public. This way you don’t need to hire 3 planners, 4 engineers and an Architect for each house…. all so you can wait a year before your allowed to touch a hammer. It is possible that if we put an emphasis on quality, usability and re-usability of architectural plans that we end up building something that people don’t want to tare down, like in Paris.
If we are going to have a productive conversation about anything we should include the all of the dynamics that affect the outcome. While it seems to be a worth while project, adding balcony’s to a apartment building is a dishonest example for why homes are out of reach for so many people. To build a building for many sometimes a single family home was demolished. The thing Olaf Grawert is glossing over is that , apple to apples comparison, it’s often its more expensive and it takes longer to remodel, certainly not 1/3 of the cost as he suggested. Since people already can’t afford the house… making it more expensive may preserve memory’s, but at a higher price.. one that people could not afford to begin with. Also, France has demolished buildings many times in the past. One reason (among many) why homes get demolished is to make way for many more to be constructed. But he is right about one thing, is that we should put a lot more thought about what we build.
@0000Mojo0000
January 18, 2026 at 3:41 pm
I’ll give you a bold alternative : stop letting corporations get away with making basic human rights an expensive commodity. Over half of houses and apartments worldwide stand EMPTY because people can’t afford them. Hoarded by greedy motherfuckers with no conscience and no soul. There really is no need for some Tedtalk about it, just common sense that capital shouldn’t be the ruler of the world.
@schmonzo42
January 19, 2026 at 3:25 am
This
@hamsterg0d
January 18, 2026 at 3:59 pm
Artificially low interest rates encourage demolition due to making new long term projects artificially cheap.
@Triple_J.1
January 18, 2026 at 9:42 pm
^^^
Interest rates should almost never be less than 7% and banks should pay at least 3-4% interest to savers, just to match inflation.
@hamsterg0d
January 18, 2026 at 9:52 pm
@Triple_J.1 Well you’ll have to tell the Fed.
@dianatermine2318
January 18, 2026 at 4:03 pm
Even tho I didn’t pay capital gains, I payed high taxes on my home ,so the way I look at it the government gets everything that we built on .
@SoCalRocs
January 18, 2026 at 4:29 pm
Why is housing so expensive: GREEDY sellers and agents.
@Jonny-on-YouTube
January 18, 2026 at 4:48 pm
It’s ALL on purpose. It’s so the rich and corporations can enslave us for our entire lives. So we’re forced to work for them. They turned an essential need into an asset. Assets that are infinitely increasing in price to make the rich and corporations richer.
@thecoryguy
January 18, 2026 at 5:10 pm
Banks and investors turned the place you live into an item you’ll never really own.
@thepeopleslight
January 18, 2026 at 9:09 pm
That’s exactly the tension this video talks about: price goes up, but the sense of home goes down
@crawkn
January 18, 2026 at 6:19 pm
Grawert is using a state-subsidized social housing project as his “proof of concept” while applying his critique to the entire real estate market, including the private sector. The motivations and “math” of a private developer are fundamentally different from those of a public housing authority. Public housing indeed saves money versus replacement, whereas many tenants of private housing would likely be displaced by higher rents due to the costs of the enhancements.
@grawerto
January 21, 2026 at 3:27 am
But that is exactly the point! Public housing has to account for more than profit. It includes social, ecological, and long-term costs in its calculations because it is obliged to serve the common good. Referencing it is not a shortcut, but a way to show that different value frameworks are possible.
The moment we ask (as many people do in this comment section) whether housing is a basic human right or a tradable good, the question becomes political. So the real task is to look at what lies in between: how private development can continue to operate, while also sharing a fair part of the social and ecological costs it currently externalizes, instead of shifting them onto tenants, cities, and future generations.
@crawkn
January 21, 2026 at 8:37 am
@grawerto if the point is that all housing should be public housing, I missed it because he never made it.
@thepeopleslight
January 18, 2026 at 9:04 pm
A spreadsheet knows the price. It doesn’t know the cost
@grawerto
January 21, 2026 at 2:51 am
Exactly, but so many people don’t know and feel the difference.
@thierryvankerm8474
January 19, 2026 at 4:36 am
Great!
@Shri-Samson
January 19, 2026 at 4:52 am
This just makes existing units nicer. You can’t bring down housing prices and increase affordability without building additional units and eventually increasing density. You’re going to decrease rents a lot more effectively by tearing down single family houses and building three plexes or even up to eight plexes there.
@grawerto
January 21, 2026 at 3:14 am
I agree. We also need to build more housing, and density is definitly part of that!
But we also see in places like Spain, where tens of thousands of units have been built (also after houses have been demolished) that prices aren’t coming down. So the question isn’t just build more, it’s build in a way that actually improves affordability. I’d be happy to see examples showing how new construction by private developers has meaningfully reduced housing costs at the local or national level. Because right now, the data shows more supply doesn’t automatically lower prices.
@AaB-wc8le
January 19, 2026 at 8:26 am
The true problem is already written in Piketty. The amount of money you can earn with houses is too high, so the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This is a positive feedback loop
@akhilabraham317
January 19, 2026 at 9:02 am
India is suffering because of the social media companies of Satan’s servants in the USA. Tell Trump to ban it.
@moisespereira5010
January 19, 2026 at 11:12 am
What I see in my country is houses being abandoned by people who already have one and don’t care if it goes down.
@serta5727
January 19, 2026 at 7:07 pm
The ecoligical and social costs are not priced into this calcultion of profit searching property managers
@TheMagicLemur
January 20, 2026 at 2:16 am
Interesting but needs nuance. Sure: some demolition is wasteful, but the classic one house blocking an estate being built is also problematic.
In the UK: we have far too much of preserving every single old building… to the point that most building gets blocked.
@RussellFineArt
January 20, 2026 at 12:29 pm
Reality is, there are far, far less young people than demographers estimate, and most of them working, are working for comparitively much lower wages than their parents and grandparents, making housing unafordable, as there’s still enough Gen X’rs like myself, who can afford a $1 house, and are buying them. In the next 20 years, when most of the baby boomers are died off, there will be A TON of empty houses, we should preserve them for the next gen, at affordable prices.
@59seank
January 20, 2026 at 2:16 pm
@10:37 The renewed apartment building is an eyesore in my opinion.