The thing I don't understand in conversations around affordable housing is why does it have to be new construction?
Of course new construction is going to be expensive and full of bureaucracy. Many US cities have large stocks of older housing in moderate condition -- sure, it'd take some money to get them up to snuff, but nothing near what new construction would cost.
Right, you don't build affordable housing, and you don't even reserve housing as "affordable" (that's gratuitously inviting corruption via basically giving away underpriced housing as a 'gift' to cronies and associates). You build as much new housing as you can afford to, and let older housing filter down to "affordable" levels.
I completely agree. The idea that X% of new housing has to be sold at under market rate makes no sense to me. It just artificially increases the cost of the market rate units. You would build more housing if it were all sold at market rate (since it’s more profitable to build, and then more will get built/developers will be more incentivized to build) and have lower market rate prices. It seems fairer for the “below market rate” housing to just be the not-new housing at the actual market rates.
For some reason California is obsessed with the idea that housing is too expensive, so we need to force new construction to subsidize middle-middle class housing via a lottery system, which keeps housing expensive
Or at least don't want them in their neighborhood where they lower home values. This is where less local democracy would benefit the good for everyone. Especially, considering that out had been down in studies that folks who show up to community meetings are not representative. They tend to be older, wealthier and whiter and more male.
This exactly. So instead of having poorer people living in the apartment building next to you like you do in much of the midwest or south, you have them living in the van parked in front of your house like you do on the west coast. They still exist in your neighborhood, but in a way that's worse for everyone involved!
Perhaps this is where democracy meets principals...
The principal is that someone should be free to build on their land as long as they don't create safety issues or significantly impose on someone else.
Democracy at worst can be mob rule. Principals are important.
Japan does a good with federal zoning regulations. It's not impossible.
(utterly pedantic comment: I think the word here is "principle", not "principal" - principle is a foundational belief, principal is a synonym for "first".)
Define “significantly impose”. That’s the basic problem, existing near someone can have effects that are easy to justify in court unless you legislate that e.g. decreasing or limiting increase on future land values cannot be considered to be civil damages.
> Define “significantly impose”. That’s the basic problem,
I agree.
> existing near someone can have effects that are easy to justify in court
I had the impression this was a "mob rule" problem, that local voters were voting for zoning laws that limit the quality and quantity of new housing. I admit to not understanding the legal or moral justification. It just doesn't seem right to micromanage others to the extent that occurs today.
There are other countries that are much more flexible, like Japan [0]. Instead of single family single use zoning they start with three story multi-use housing. Some places in the U.S. are moving in this direction.
> decreasing or limiting increase on future land values
That can be flipped around. Someone who opposes new housing is taking value from the people who could have made use of that new housing, had it been allowed.
If we’re talking about California, “mob rule”[0] isn’t the right framing. This isn’t a majority of citizens suppressing the rights of people to build on their own property, it’s a minority using asymmetric political involvement to get their way.
The recent lawsuit against UC Berkeley is a great example. A handful of cranks angry about UC Berkeley admissions abused an environmental review process to impose their will on their town. Not the will of the majority, but rather the tyranny of the most rich and petty.
Indeed. Not getting a HOA was a hard requirement for us.
The fascinating thing about HOAs is that they’re all done under the guise that they “improve property values”, but I’ve never seen any evidence that this works. From my geographic location it seems like non-HOA factors drive prices (supply, demand, neighborhood location and nearby amenities like transit and shopping), not whether or not the neighbors flower bed matches the “neighborhood character”[0]. From what I see it just seems to let petty tyrants control their neighbors; the property value argument seems like a transparent excuse.
0 - You see this phrase a lot in zoning discussions and it makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills. As if neighborhood character is a concrete thing that can be pointed to and protected, rather than a constantly changing and emergent result of the humans living in a place.
Not only in condominiums. In suburbia they also manage commons, but also impose rules on what you can do with your house and on your land. You likely need permission for color changes, there might be limitations on what can and cannot be planted in your front yard. You might get fined if your house doesn't fixes when the HOA decides they are needed or when you repeatedly don't bring your garbage in quickly.
I'm not sure what to make of the choice part here. Once an area is under an HOA it's almost impossible to dissolve the HOA. Anecdotal evidence from my own HOA which my wife was president of for many years shows that only very few people get involved. The people who do get involved tend to be of the type who want to overreach. When my wife was president she probably spent more time trying to bring the other folks involved in the HOA back to what's reasonable. Fortunately management companies also help with this. I'm afraid that without management companies most HOAs would devolve into attempts to build a miniature fascist state that only would be stopped by prolonged court battles.
> In suburbia they also manage commons, but also impose rules on what you can do with your house and on your land.
Not all HOAs have infrastructure to maintain. I know a few people in neighborhoods with HOAs that don't have private roads or facilities for the HOA to manage, it's just purely there for property value.
Partially true. You're right that they don't spring up unannounced, but there is something distressingly feudal about a property contract by (probably long dead) founders binding future owners in perpetuity without any possibility for redress or change. Personally I think it would be much better if current home owners could create or destroy a HOA if they felt that it no longer met their needs, rather than tying it to the lot forever.
Also, depending on your state it can be very hard to avoid a HOA. If you're buying a home in California, Colorado, or Florida you've got a 2/3 chance of buying into a HOA, with the numbers getting worse over time. 2/3 new homes being made now have a HOA, so pretty soon you won't have an effective choice when buying.
What those kinds of people never realize though, is you'll never get rid of the 'poors'. The label just changes places on the totem pole. What was once 'well off' is now 'poverty'.
The "poor", as same as "homeless", is an intentional misrepresentation of the issue. People oppose the "poor" moving to the neighborhood not because they have less money. They oppose the people who have vastly different views on what are the acceptable behaviors in day-to-day life and interactions between neighbors.
You aren't wrong, not entirely at least. For instance, a person can be of very little means monetarily; but have great wealth in the stuff they hold due to its liquid wealth and inherent value.
For instance, I am by all means of the definition living in poverty right now; but I also have much more than even some middle class folk might have depending on their life style.
So poor is relative mostly to the compared 'true wealth' of each other person.
You might only make 1200 a month, but you own a house. Or you might only make 2k a month, but you have a vehicle and house and many luxury items with in it.
By our current standards if you made those amounts, you would be considered poor, like me. BUT, you will still be richer than someone who gets that same amount of money from some stipend, but without any where to live and all those basic things that should be an uncontested human right.
So again. It's all relative to the situation at hand.
If I sold everything I have and went back to just a laptop with bag, a duffle bag of clothes, a back pack full of my 'stuff', and a blow up mattress; I would have maybe 10k total in my account to reuse as a nest egg.
And that's if I don't get ripped off by everyone and their mother.
No, it's not the vastly different views per se. To be clear, Nordic immigrants have always been totally welcome in America but like totally, they are the model immigrant. Maybe Norwegians for some period of time weren't quite as welcome because they were poor, I mean I suppose this fact, I haven't encountered any evidence.
Witness the lack of slurs for Nordics, I have no idea which they are. I'm sure they exist. I know more slurs for doctors than Nordics...wait I think I know one, "dumb blonde", and "rusio" is another one, in Chile..."gringo" in Chile..."borsch" I think is one for Germans though, it's really old, there's others, but not Nordic. "Honkey" comes from "Hungarian"...some Hungarians are very fair...I'd need like a slur dictionary to find a slur for Nordics.
These slurs must all be said at some point, it's irrelevant if I say G-R-I-N-G-O or "gringo", because putting it in writing and spelling it out is literally the same thing, you can read either just as well. For these particular slurs nobody can figure out what the hell I'm writing about if I don't write them in full. Similarly, History professors in Chilean universities can't tell their students about the "n-word" without actually saying it out loud, for real, at some point. They otherwise will never know what the professor is talking about.
Back to Nordic immigration. So yeah, if Swedes arrive next door and the women dress differently, and they recycle all kinds of things Americans don't recycle, like I guess if they yodeled that would piss people off...it would take some work. And white Americans surprise surprise are very tolerant of very different views if they like them. The big thing with the "poor" or "poors" (the worst slur in my whole comment) is the poverty is related to entropy. Same thing pretty much. So more entropy in their nervous system, more entropy in their bodies, more entropy in their housing, more entropy in how they communicate and their habits, more entropy in their relationships, more entropy in how they deal with neighbors ultimately. Reducing entropy in one thing means increasing it in another. On the other hand, if the poor who move in haven't always been poor, or have an excellent reason to be poor, or are rapidly moving up in society, or something else of that nature, they are not as entropic and are therefore welcome.
And that's why there was such a huge social movement to make education free and obligatory, because then you reduce the entropy in the minds of the poor, and that order (meaning strictly absence of entropy) radiates from there into everything else.
This is not about race. I had been living next to two Section 8 neighbors, both were white families, both were extremely disruptive. One was not even that poor - they had at least five cars (with just three people driving), not beaters either. It's the state of mind when you decided that the society has to provide you with housing, I guess. I am sure there are good and decent people on Section 8 and other affordable housing programs but having lived several years with music blasting, cars honking, fights and screams every night I will err on the side of my sanity and vote down any affordable housing in my neighborhood. Don't care if it's for Norwegians, Swedes, descendants of Mayflower, Arian Brotherhood redemption program etc.
> It's the state of mind when you decided that the society has to provide you with housing, I guess.
Well I suppose there's some moral hazard because the government is more tolerant than rent-seekers (I find the term "landlord" gross because of the "lord" part, no nobility in America, and the whole point of the endeavor is collecting rent, they're synonymous. If they don't want to be called rent-seekers all they have to do is stop seeking rent). Plus Section 8 costs IIRC either 30 or 33.33% of your income, so it's not that they pay nothing for housing, it's just limited to a very high but still feasible amount. You're objecting to exactly what I was talking about, entropy. In this case you're using the synonym "noise."
So you built your own house from scratch, no help from builders, mined your own iron, wrought your own steel, the copper and all, because surely "you" wouldn't be talking about "it" online if it weren't up to code. And claimed your own land...loaned yourself the mortgage, did it all on your very own. Society didn't do anything for you, after all.
33.3% of my income or income of some family member who signs the lease and might not have any income he or she decided to show to the IRS?
> You're objecting to exactly what I was talking about, entropy. In this case you're using the synonym "noise."
I live in a neighborhood without section 8 now and, surprise, there is no entropy!
>So you built your own house from scratch, no help from builder
I am sorry, it might be some popular point on reddit but I need more context, what are you talking about? I bought my house and the land. Are you, by chance, saying that you are sincerely confused by my usage of the verb "to provide" and believe that I used it in a general way, only indicating that the society somehow made the housing available, and not given wholly or partially free?
then who do they expect to do everything for them? the only way you can have the lifestyle of the ultrarich is paying people. who makes their food who sotckes the shelves at their stores who waits their table mixes their drinks drives them around and the million other jobs that their lifestyle depends on. we aren't building better mass transit so you cant bus them in or take the train/subway in to work, they don't want to pay them enough to live near by how do they expect to have a functional economy? slave labor living in coffin the basement?
Why don't they rezone everyone's land as commercial then?
Not sure about California, but in most places that would double or triple the value of the land. If you did everyone all at once, it probably wouldn't be so extreme but would still be an increase.
Zoning in the USA isn’t expansive (zones get more lenient, including what could have been put in more restrictive zones), rather they are exclusive. If all land was zoned as commercial, it wouldn’t give anyone a place to live.
The easiest way to have actual affordable housing is to change the "single-family home" zone limitations (this might have changed recently IIRC but it might not)
The only alternative is subsidizing people moving to California. Why bother doing that? If you leave it alone the property values will equilibrate to what you can reasonably support.
Subsidizing people moving to CA by changing zoning to allow building market rate dense housing without going through years of zoning and environmental review? You don't actually need to even pay anything - it's just allowing developers to build what they want where they want.
I invite you to actually look at the housing market in CA and show me all the older construction that’s affordable. My friends in LA (not even nice parts of it) are buying houses that are literally 100 years old for over $1M.
The “fix older stock” strategy really only works in areas where people aren’t all that keen to live. Ex. It’s easy to do in Pittsburgh or Detroit. Not so easy in SF or Austin.
I was under the impression Pittsburgh is one of the currently hip gentrifying cities (like Austin or Portland were 10 years ago)? At least I know several people who moved there from other, already expensive, cities.
It's nice and it has some gentrification, but the housing stock is much bigger than the number of gentry that wish to become landed. There's much to enjoy there but also some sections that aren't so expensive.
I hope it remains that way for a while! Up to about 2010 Berlin had a lot more available housing than demand but it caught up and resulted in the current housing shortage very quickly.
Right but I was talking about the last ~10 years, not 72 to 32 years ago. Berlin (where I now live) also lost a lot of population from the 40s till 1990 but has seen a lot of growth in the past decade, thus the current competitive housing market.
People also used to occupy far fewer square meters/feet of housing per person in the past so even though Berlin (or Pittsburgh) had a higher population in 1940 than today it doesn't necessarily mean there's a surplus of housing.
All the political "solutions" to the housing crisis are not only expensive, they make things worse, because they are in denial of the Law of Supply & Demand.
No government has ever been successful at repealing that law, but they sure keep trying.
There are two problems with this idea. The first is that the existing housing stock is already occupied, and the people who occupy it don't have much incentive to go anywhere. If we could build a massive amount of new, high quality housing then in theory the demand for the older homes might decrease but in many places we're in such a deep supply hole that the necessary amount of new construction just isn't going to happen given the political environment. The second problem is that filtering takes time, but people need homes today. There's an argument to be made that it's in the public interest to allow for at least some units to be made available that are affordable to someone on a teacher's salary. Also, building homes at any price point is a good idea.
> There's an argument to be made that it's in the public interest to allow for at least some units to be made available that are affordable to someone on a teacher's salary.
I think there’s a good argument to be made that we shouldn’t do that: as it amounts to a government subsidy for that particular family or individual without solving the overall problem.
I think it makes much more sense for the government to build high quality housing, not sell it at all but rent it out, and use the income stream to fund further house building.
But that so conflicts with hyper-local (perceived, short-term) interests of the type of people who show up to community meetings who are concerned their home values will go down.
The problem with this argument is that it assumes the problem exists and isn't getting any worse. It is in fact getting worse. The crux of the problem is not necessarily the current steady state imbalance, but the continuous imbalance that results from metropolitan areas adding jobs faster than they can add units of housing.
As long as these high cost of living areas continue adding jobs, particularly high income jobs, you continue to have a growing pool of knowledge workers who can afford these market rates that are unaffordable to the working class pool. Give this pool of workers a big enough carrot, maybe its a fitness center or a pool or some astroturf for the dog, and they will gladly move out of that 50 year old dingbat and into this new construction with the golf simulator in the basement and a garage parkng space, freeing up that 50 year old apartment (which in its time may have even been a luxury building in its own right) for someone who can't afford the above amenities.
To this end its essential to build housing as fast as possible and to create as many units as possible. When you mandate things like x% of units as 'affordable,' often times that leads to developers going back to the drawing board and chopping off entire stories from the build, and fewer units of housing being added to the local area than there would have been had the developer been allowed to build full bore and actually cover costs on a larger build. This ironically hurts the very class of people who would have benefited from those affordable units in the first place.
> Give this pool of workers a big enough carrot, maybe its a fitness center or a pool or some astroturf for the dog, and they will gladly move out of that 50 year old dingbat and into this new construction
This is only partially true though. What you mean is some percentage of people will move into the new construction. But of course, some people will see that the unit they live in is becoming more affordable and decide that they would like to take advantage of relatively lower rent. Over time and on average you are correct - that building nice new homes will relieve pressure on somewhat less nice older ones, but it will take time.
Also, we aren't talking about mandating affordable units, which is a thing in some places, but rather a developer trying to apply for subsidies for building affordable units. I totally agree that we should not put up barriers to building market rate units, but it's also worthwhile to incentivize some artificially low cost units as well to help solve the problem for some people today instead of 10 years from now.
Existing housing won't be occupied if lots of shiny new housing gets built, such that for a small premium you can have a swanky new apartment. People in apartments - particularly the yuppie demographic that can afford luxury new apartments - move around all the time, either because they got a raise or they're moving in with a romantic partner or they just broke up with a romantic partner or they took a new job around town. It's that normal lease/move-out/move-in cycle that provides the liquidity: you don't need to entice people to leave, because people are already continually leaving, you just need to give them somewhere better to go so they don't take up the older affordable housing that lower/middle-income people need to live.
I think you should take a look at [1] and also consider that most people are homeowners, not renters. California is especially egregious because of its asinine property tax laws - an increasingly large portion of people buy a home and never sell it, opting to rent it instead and this permanently remove it from the available home ownership stock.
But we're talking apartments in this thread, not SFHs. Places where a single developer comes in and upzones a parcel to create affordable rental units. The context of this thread does not seem to refer to buying a large multi-acre tract of suburban undeveloped land and then building a bunch of individual homes; it seems more to be buying an individual parcel of in-fill development and then turning it into an apartment building or complex.
Long-term, the trend in most built-out metro areas is that SFHs are going to become a luxury good for the well-to-do, and most of the general population will live in apartments or condos. This is simply because of land availability: if it's built-out, there's no more land available for new SFHs, so future population growth will depend upon suburban tracts getting converted to denser multi-family dwellings.
No, you are talking about apartments. We are talking about units of housing built on property that various interested parties want. It could be used for apartments, but it could also be used by wealthy people to build single family homes or to build completely unaffordable condos. That's kind of the whole point here - the market demand is increasingly opposed to new affordable construction because so many people want to build low-density housing that they can make money on instead of higher-density housing that they can't. That then gets reflected in the onerous processes and paperwork that the author is talking about.
That doesn’t make sense, if there is a supply hole you need to fill it to give houses to the people that want them. Anything else is leaving homeless people.
> There's an argument to be made that it's in the public interest to allow for at least some units to be made available that are affordable to someone on a teacher's salary.
There's an easy way to do that - raise teachers' salaries, and let them choose whatever housing they want, not what you've arbitrarily designated as "affordable" (via a political process). This raises observable costs, but has plenty of less obviohs benefits.
Their pay is actually quite high. They get a scaled pension that lasts for all of retirement after 20 years of service. How many millions do you need in the market to generate that level of income in retirement? [Breaks out the world's smallest violin]
I think prop 13 should be fixed because it distorts the housing market but why is it necessary to pay teachers more. The state legislature can supplement school funding with income tax money. No referendum needed.
> There's an argument to be made that it's in the public interest to allow for at least some units to be made available that are affordable to someone on a teacher's salary.
Gotta pass some laws to prevent investors from snatching them up to resell at a higher price like what's happening now. Or prevent them from just turning into AirBNBs
That’s the Chinese method and it doesn’t work. Investors just hold on to empty apartments as a way to capture and retain weld that in the face of other worse options. You’ve got whole districts with sold out apartments and almost no one living in any of them (to the point that the city doesn’t bother building any services near them).
The lack of property taxes makes letting investment properties remain empty much more viable than in the states.
Well in Japan it just ends up that housing isn’t generally a good investment so you don’t typically park your money there, and then this is a non-issue.
If everyone expects their housing to appreciate forever it’s no surprise that their appreciated homes will become unaffordable to most people. Housing ought to be a utility not an investment IMO. A Georgist-style land tax would probably do a lot to tip the balance.
Yeah, this is the central thing that a lot of people don't seem to understand.
Housing can either be a good investment that outpaces inflation, or affordable in the long run. Having both is not possible.
Setting aside some amount of housing units to remain affordable is not a good long term solution - we have it here, and it's basically ended up as a lottery with a side dish of corruption.
In order to really fix this, a lot of property investors will need to lost a lot of money on their investments. Problem is they tend to also be political donors, so not many politicians seem interested in doing this.
Japan has a nice combination of “we already did mega property bubble and it didn’t work” and “population is falling.” Additionally, structure depreciate even if built
on land that depreciates (almost no one wants to
live in a used house). Perhaps that is the future of the rest of the developing world.
But the key is the new stuff has to not take up more land than needed and not have features that make it cost more than needed.
700 square foot condos in a fourplex or 2 story cottages in a cottage cluster or row houses could be built for a fraction of the cost at 4x the density. But in many areas they are prevented by setbacks, minimum lot sizes, coverage rules, parking requirements, and so on.
Internal material and design regulations similarly don't optimize for things that are safe/functional and affordable.
Another thing that adds enormous cost are balconies. Oh and that huge spacious mostly useless landscaped area you shuffle through between the parking garage and your elevator? Common area mandated by law, to be increased in size with the scale of your build. 1
You can't build a boring cheap brownstone anymore according to the law.
That's right, the solar panels decrease monthly utility costs more than they increase the mortgage payment. The law is written to mandate only energy efficiency that saves money, and it's necessary because contractors are too tied to tradition to actually examine what results in lower cost homes.
Where do those panels go? In Seattle, the current style is townhomes with almost flat rooftop decks, I don’t see a place for them, but we aren’t exactly the best place for solar.
I imagine the roofs are still probably the best places for them. I doubt you want to set them directly onto the roof anyway, so if you need a little scaffolding to get them arranged in a particular fashion then installation is probably the right time to do that.
Yeah, I guess the angle with the sun or something for most of the year makes solar a little more difficult up here? Thankfully we've got a lot of hydro-electric.
Actually the reason why a lot of apartments have rooftop decks now is due to laws requiring x sqft of common space with y units of builds, rooftops can be used for this space requirement if they are designed as such. If you want to make room for solar on the roof, maybe that means you now have to carve out some of your building to add a big internal void for a courtyard or something like that (pretty common to see these sorts of spaces in new builds as it were).
If there's no way to place the panels, or they would always be in shade due to trees, then it's not required.
Otherwise the builder can place the panels where they want. And if for some reason they don't want them anywhere near the site, they can also purchase shares of community solar projects elsewhere. (Which is often a good option for existing homeowners, too.)
> You build as much new housing as you can afford to, and let older housing filter down to "affordable" levels.
The question is what sort of housing you build. You have a piece of dirt ready to be developed or re-developed. You can put there a mansion which will house one family with enough garden to picnic a whole village and still have space to land a helicopter. Or you can build four detached homes with plenty of garden at the same place. Or you can build two 3-story buildings with 6 flats each and have space for a small comunal park between them.
And we can’t say that the market should figure out what kind of houses should be built, because we already have tax laws, and building codes, and etc which heavily influences what kind of building gets built. The question is not “should we put our finger on the scale” but “which direction should said finger push”?
You should build whatever puts the land at its "highest and best use". In any area with high housing costs, this will generally mean building the two 3-story condos. Which is why flats are generally found in cities where housing costs a lot, and large mansions are common in rural areas - market choice does a fine job of this already.
Yeah they problem is that highest and best use is probably also highest risk and longest flow so most builders just opt to put up a McMansion or 2, make their 20-30% and move to the next project
> You build as much new housing as you can afford to, and let older housing filter down to "affordable" levels.
In many larger cities, older housing occupy prime location where the value of the land is twice the value of a new building you could build on it, so all these would never filter down to affordable levels.
>all these would never filter down to affordable levels.
Another factor contributing to the same thing is that cities aren't closed systems. Building new units at the top of the market doesn't mean that everyone in the city will move up one rung in quality leaving the cheapest unit now vacant. Many cities will have a latent demand for housing that is being suppressed by high prices. When that exists, someone from outside the city will move to the city to occupy the new construction or the newly vacated units at the top of the market. All that latent demand needs to be satisfied before the benefit of the new construction will trickle down to the bottom of the market.
Then it's time to break out the one-two punch that would specifically address the land being disproportionately valuable: a land value tax + a citizens' dividend (a.k.a. universal basic income). If anyone's to benefit from that land being valuable, it should be the citizenry as a whole, not some cartel of landlords who lucked into it.
Could that really work at a local level where people can freely move cities? Local UBI seems hard to implement in a non city state.
But if we are talking city states, why not take the Singaporean approach? Just have the government build apartments and subsidize sale to citizens? Everyone gets a flat eventually.
I'm in Singapore and that's missing a lot of context. The supply of government housing is not nearly enough to meet supply and there are restrictions on who can apply and even then it's a lottery. Property is still considered an investment, and no wonder when resale prices for the HDB flats are significantly higher than the purchase price.
IMO the HDB flats should not be saleable on the open market and can only be sold back to the government (subject to inflation and depreciation adjustments that no-one's going to agree to) but I'm an expat and not eligible to partake in the upside so I might be a bit biased.
All that being said they have done a better job than most of making government housing both accessible and appealing even if it means that I'm having to find a new place to live in the middle of an inflationary period (even as the country is seeing net emigration for the first time in decades, wth is going on??)
> Could that really work at a local level where people can freely move cities? Local UBI seems hard to implement in a non city state.
Only if you overthink it. An "open border" LVT+UBI system is self-balancing; a flood of immigrants would drive up demand for land, which drives up its value, which raises LVT revenue, which raises total UBI disbursement, which keeps each individual's UBI stable.
That said, it would work even better at a state level, and better still at a national/federal level.
> why not take the Singaporean approach?
The Singaporean approach (IIUC) includes land leases, which is in practice equivalent to a 100% LVT (assuming the government prices the lease at the land's full value).
Land being more expensive than the improvements atop it is a great milestone that your restrictive zoning is truly out of control, and that your area has probably bumped up against serious geographic constraints.
Which is to say, what you've described is a signal to demolish and build higher intensity, while the filtering happens elsewhere.
No, at some point you tear down the old structure and build a new expensive one. Or in the Japanese extreme, you tear down and rebuild the house whenever it changes hands (since no one wants to live in a second hand house).
Can you describe an example? Generally in my high cost of living area I observe this trend pretty clearly. Pricier apartments are typically newer or nicer, cheap ones are usually at least 50 years old and unrenovated and scarcely maintained beyond what the letter of the law outlines, and these units could have identical square footage measurements, be $400 apart on monthly rent, and exist across the street from each other.
you're describing apartments or condos and I was referring to the whole building. In Montreal, the central neighborhoods are mostly made of duplex/triplex/fourplex where one unit is often occupied by the owner and the two others are rental units.
For rental apartments, the most expensive ones are both renovated and in a prime location which is often still a centennial building. Brand new buildings are most of the time outside of these locations.
>let older housing filter down to "affordable" levels.
you're forgetting the part where it is the older housing that is currently affordable that is getting demolished so that this new construction can use that land instead.
That's not what I observe in my city. They tear out a few single family homes that you would need a deposit of $200k to even be competitive for, thats probably why its a developer buying it vs working people anyhow, or its like a few old tire shops occupying a parcel caddy corner from a subway station or a few bus lines that really should be repurposed into something more useful the the community anyhow. Hardly ever do you see multi family older housing being demoed and rebuilt because these things get more complicated with more tenants.
I like this metric as well. However, if you displace X number of lower income residents with your new fancy schmancy high dollar condos, just increasing the unit count does not allow the displaced residents to be able to afford to live where they currently were. More than likely, they will be pushed further away from city centers. This causes more burden especially if the new location places them at a distance that mass transit does not reach.
let older housing filter down to "affordable" levels
That's the theory. The practice is that much of the "older housing" is by now 50 or 60 years old, twice the design life, and at some point renovation is just not economical any longer, you are looking at a teardown and rebuild.
That meme tells more about the profession of economics as taught in schools and universities. It doesn't tell you how the world works, but it provides support for the way things are. There's that old cartoon with a royal and a priest, and the royal turns to the priest saying "you keep them stupid, I keep them poor." That's applied economics.
Not sure what your point is. If it turns out you have built lots and lots of the highest-density housing and there's nothing affordable in sight even after that, then guess what - you're basically in Manhattan. There are far worse problems to have when it comes to urban development!
> If it turns out you have built lots and lots of the highest-density housing and there's nothing affordable in sight even after that, then guess what - you're basically in Manhattan.
Your point is good, but it turns out that a lot of really expensive parts of Manhattan aren't anywhere near as dense as they should be, such as:
I live in the area (in fact, I grew up there too) covered by the link you posted and don't know what you mean about density.
Yes, many of the older buildings are only 12-15 stories tall, although a bunch are 20, 30 or even 40 stories tall.
And yes, there are many brownstones (usually 4 or 5 stories tall, with 1-2 apartments per floor) on side streets as well. And there are buildings like mine (5 stories tall with 4 apartments per floor with a lot size of ~4,000 sq ft.).
But there are zero single family homes.
Or are you suggesting that we bulldoze Central Park and build 500-600 60 story residential buildings because Central Park is wasted space?
As a Manhattanite, not having Central Park (or Riverside Park, or any of the other greenspace in Manhattan for that matter) would make upper Manhattan completely unlivable.
Please do elucidate on this. What mechanism could significantly increase the density of Manhattan housing?
That's because its not about the number of apartments, its about the ratio of jobs to apartments and it being completely out of whack which leads to only those making above average income winning in the housing market (rental or buying). Manhattan looks like it should be affordable since its so dense, but it doesn't have enough housing for how many jobs there are there, especially high income jobs.
> That's the theory. The practice is that much of the "older housing" is by now 50 or 60 years old, twice the design life,
Not sure where this is coming from. 60 years old is 1960s. Across the US, particularly in older cities, plenty of houses are that old and much older (family members living in a 1930's house). As long as owners maintain it over the years, it should easily last longer than 60 years. Even in my relatively younger city, there are plenty of 1960's houses that sell about the same as the 2000's houses.
>Not sure where this is coming from. 60 years old is 1960s. Across the US, particularly in older cities, plenty of houses are that old and much older (family members living in a 1930's house).
Absolutely. The building where I live was built in 1920 -- 100 years ago. The apartments have (mostly, all but four out of 20 -- and not those four because the long-term tenants, myself included, haven't moved out) been gut renovated in the past ten years. All of the apartments were also renovated in the late 1980s-early 1990s as well.
I expect that they've been renovated many times previously too, but I've only been here for 25 years.
>there are plenty of 1960's houses that sell about the same as the 2000's houses.
Absolutely. The most recently renovated apartments are all at market rates, and those of us who have stayed have done so because our apartments are rent stabilized[0] (my upstairs neighbor is rent controlled[1], a different set of regulations.
Where I live, 200 - 300 years is fine for a wood frame house on a good foundation. You just keep maintaining it and upgrading the systems. They built them better in those days, prior to stick construction. They have a post and beam frame with non-structural walls which can be upgraded to improve insulation.
The reality, here at least. As housing was kept scarce, older housing never got a chance to fulfill its purpose. So we have swanky 60s shitbox apartments on their third remodel for $2k+ a month. Googie architecture, I think its called.
UK old construction is bricks, usually solid. US old construction is wood and sheetrock, and before that lath and plaster. It doesn't hold up terribly well. Even contemporary doctors' palaces are made from sticks and sheetrock.
US houses constructed in established areas prior to the 20th century are generally very solid. Take a walk around Salem MA (17th - 19th century) or any of the New England seacoast towns. There are shacks, but there are fine homes built by the rich merchants. Those homes, many in brick, are better than anything built today, though not thermally efficient. (The wind blowing through the walls keeps them aired out and rot free, LOL.)
It is amazing they were able to build like that three hundred years ago, only a few decades after the area was first settled.
When have landlords cared about design life? I've lived in 100 year old structures with floors so warped it looks like the tide and dealt with water flowing like a waterfall from the ceiling, or heating that only works on one floor. If its still barely legal to rent it will be rented out. Most landlords don't care if its a mere gust of wind from blowing over, until it actually blows over. Plus if they ever want to get out of the slumlord game, the new fad is for buyers to be waiving inspections.
The market price of houses has almost nothing to do with the buildings themselves, and the cost of internal surface materials has essentially no relevant bearing on the price either.
To get the market price for housing down; even a supply glut would not help as long as mortgages are subsidised, and defacto function as economic stimulus and retirement funds.
Exactly. Imagine ten people in various wealth from very poor to very rich - if you build a new better house for the richest, they can all move up like hermit crabs for not much comparatively- and the poorest house now opens up for someone who didn’t have one before.
Haha. Old houses become presents for rich persons grandchildren, so they can put them on airbnb while studying abroad/living in another country altogether.
I'm talking about market power to charge rents high enough to keeping capital tied up in a home, rather than some more productive use of it.
That sort of ownership of the land rents is exactly the problem, as it incentivizes the local land owners to use their political power to en chance their market power to charge high rents.
This makes no sense. The “capital tied up in the home” is the reason that the home was built — obviously someone had to pay for it.
So what you’ve stated is effectively a tautology. Either ownership embues the owner with the right to rent their property, or you don’t believe in ownership at all.
You vote where you live, not where you own. The “local land owners using political power” is a trope posted here often, but I’m pretty sure it’s the renters who are electing the local politicians.
After a home is built, somebody comes along and purchases it later. People are continuously doing this. When they do this to rent out a home, they are tying up capital in order to get rents.
And what determines the price level of rents? Scarcity of housing determines how far up the demand-price curve the market clearing price will go.
> You vote where you live, not where you own. The “local land owners using political power” is a trope posted here often, but I’m pretty sure it’s the renters who are electing the local politicians.
This is a very astute observation! And you will find that places where the landlords live in their voting jurisdiction, like San Francisco and Palo Alto, tend to vote for far less housing-positive politicians than places where the landlords tend to live elsewhere, like Oakland or East Palo Alto.
Landlords and homeowners have more money, more free time to influence local politicians. Every time you go to a public comment section, homeowners tout their homeowners status as if it gives them more clout with politicians, and often it does.
There's significant academic work on this power dynamic. One sub-genre of it is the home-voter hypothesis:
lol
yeah maybe if people had just one house that'd work out nice. you don't see hermit crabs renting shells either. think there is a fundamental flaw in your thought experiment here.
Many US cities have a massive shortage in needed housing, and none of it will ever be affordable unless quite a lot gets built quickly.
It's particularly striking in California, where they ended up passing multiple state law to outright override local zoning. (It will be interesting see what happens with San Francisco by 2025, when their inability to meet housing approval mandates will turn into developers getting free reign from the state to build dense housing anywhere in the city.)
Maybe if California finally begins to fix it's housing issues the overflow to other west coast areas (E.G. Seattle, Portland (Oregon), maybe even Vancouver BC) as well as surely all the other cities will feel a tiny bit of relief. Though most of these places have their own similar issues (E.G. urban growth boundaries or just lack of practical space without increasing density near cities; and also see a recent comment in my history about 'dense' housing not built to quality of life levels that make it desirable to live in.) * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30823426#30825978
You touch on the fact that it is a nation-wide problem. However the implication is that it would let more people move to California instead of other places isn't a sustainable solution.
the very cool systems integration between Federal and State in practice seems to mean that California problems are California problems? Similar to the legalization of marijuana by the states, it seems like problems are pushed under the rug until the rug is a few inches off the ground, at which point it finally gets addressed. By nature, this disproportionately impacts anyone who isn't able to simply travel to another state where their a particular issue is not a problem (abortion laws, various tourism, etc).
It sounds great for all the states to solve their problems individually, but where do you draw the line and have the government step in to prevent problems from getting bigger in the first place?
California has issues because people are flooding into it. You could just as readily blame Portland for not fixing their housing prices caused by Californians moving up.
Do you have much experience with construction? I own a construction company ($10m-20m annual revenue) as my side hustle.
It’s generally speaking not cheaper to refurbish something once you consider all of the factors. I’m on mobile so I can’t enumerate those but I’ll try to return on desktop where I can properly type and give an overview.
The point is satisficing vs optimizing. An old house or apartment is already livable, in a supermajority of cases. It "needs" nothing, in the strictest sense of the word, and putting it through capital repairs will very likely put it in the red, possibly even compared to building a new house.
Sure, some repairs and improvements may be useful. A universal coat of paint is probably the lowest hanging fruit, mostly due to the broken window effect, and especially if it includes common spaces. Very cheap credits for stuff that will definitely pay itself in a few years, like thermal insulation or heat pumps, depending on climate. Regular checks to make sure it passes very very low safety standards. And that's about it.
The discussion upstream is about building new non-affordable housing, which will automatically increase the supply of used housing, some of which is affordable. So in a way yes :)
We use spray foam insulation and good materials for flooring and trim that won’t wear out tomorrow.
We build for about the same as it would cost to take an existing house; demo out all the stuff that doesn’t meet code, make it meet code, then put back all the good materials that won’t wear out tomorrow.
Trust me your big line items are still there when you refurbish something to meet codes; and governments aren’t going to fund projects that don’t meet code. That is before you even get to the discussion of what people actually want their finishes to be.
At least around here (Boston), the old housing in poor condition is the affordable housing. This often gets called "naturally occurring affordable housing".
But it's not enough, which is why even housing in poor condition is so expensive.
Existing housing already has people living in it. Prices are so high because demand is high and supply is low; if your model for creating new affordable housing involves incentivizing for-profit developers to buy existing supply in this kind of market and sell or rent units to people who could not afford to do so themselves without the middleman, who is presumably being propped up by public money incentives, why even have the middleman? You could just hand out rent vouchers (or whatever) and achieve the same result for less.
New high-density construction on lots that were previously low-density is better all around: It's more likely to be profitable for the developer, and it increases supply in a market that sorely needs it.
Handing out vouchers will increase the demand causing prices to rise. If you give people $10,000 to buy a house, congrats! You just made houses $10,000 more expensive.
Do you live in a skyscraper? Does anyone want to live in a skyscraper? I don't.
There is a wide spectrum in density between single family detached houses and skyscrapers. I used to live in an 18-story 20s-era building and loved it. I can't remember if it had 2 or 4 units per floor. The ranch house with the two big yards and no commercial center within a mile was probably the worst place I lived.
> Handing out vouchers will increase the demand causing prices to rise. If you give people $10,000 to buy a house, congrats! You just made houses $10,000 more expensive.
To be fair, I think you are glossing over the fact that only handing out said vouchers to lower-income people will cause their buying power in the market to proportionally increase relative to wealthier buyers. However, you are absolutely right that this strategy will increase demand without increasing supply, and overall drive prices higher.
I should clarify that I don't think it's a good idea; in fact, I think it's an absolutely absurd idea for precisely this reason. How anyone can suggest making housing more affordable by taking actions that will obviously make it more expensive is beyond me. This sort of thing probably only makes sense in the eyes of wealthy urban "liberals" who want to appear virtuous while maintaining their property values, and from far-left perspectives with no qualms about making life worse for the middle class to achieve their social justice-oriented goals for a relatively small fraction of the population.
> Do you live in a skyscraper? Does anyone want to live in a skyscraper? I don't.
I’d love to live in a skyscraper (99th floor?) but those are pretty expensive. 30 stories is about the limit for economical concrete construction, and those are hardly considered skyscrapers.
Because its hard to find existing construction that’s
1. In the right location.
2. Dense enough.
3. Cheap enough.
4. In good condition and zoned properly.
The last bullet point is the real kicker. It’s very tempting to point at older real estate, often shuttered light industry or commercial, and ask about converting it. Unfortunately a lot of these buildings are illegal/hard to rezone as residential, or have an uncertain cost to convert them for habitation. And of course the financiers of any project hate uncertainty.
I’m not sure if you are aware of this, but the commenter is likely referring to US cities and their stock of abandoned, unlivable, or otherwise city-owned houses.
You can find houses for sale by a city where the asking price can be as low as four figures. Sometimes those houses even come with the full list of required repairs and an estimate of the costs.
Spending $20k to buy a house that needs $60k in repairs can work out for some situations.
This is why luxury housing and condos is actually helpful for lower-income housing - the luxury housing of 60 years ago becomes the affordable housing as the top of the market continues moving into better places.
Basically all housing whatsoever is helpful. But the optics of it makes it difficult to understand.
What you have seen is its corollary: Cities where building is so impossible, that a run down shack that will be extremely difficult to remodel goes for 7 figures, because it really is the best available choice for someone that can afford the luxury housing.
Housing is a sorting and ranking problem: Everyone gets to pay the best house they can afford. The richest man in town gets the best house, the second gets the second best, and so on. When what you can afford is fixed, it doesn't really matter much which house gets built: Everyone underneath gets, for the price they can afford, a slightly superior house.
The one thing that throws a wrench into it is immigration, from the same country or a different one. I am not moving to SF for the current house prices, but I would think about it really seriously if the housing I can afford, coming from far away, was good enough. But in that case, it's not as if building affordable houses is going to work either, unless you just say "Sorry, you can't buy this house, it's going to go to someone poorer, even if you really want it, and would pay more".
And that's really the ultimate problem of affordable housing in a place that is extremely in demand: You either make it so unattractive that nobody wants to live in it, or your affordability is really handing a giant subsidy to a set of chosen people that get to live there, while many other people would be willing to pay more for the same dwelling, but they didn't win your lottery. You have to stop the affordable buyer from selling too, because otherwise all you did is to let someone pay, say, 200k for an apartment that in the open market would be worth 1 million, handing out 800k to a lucky winner.
The end result is that you need enough new housing to satisfy the demand of not just all of the people who currently reside in or near the city, but also everyone who lives elsewhere but is currently kept from immigrating by high housing prices. This is a massive undertaking, but of course the only solution to the problem of insufficient housing in the places people want to live is to build sufficient housing. Anything and everything else is fundamentally just moving deck chairs on the Titanic.
I think might have misunderstood. I know low income people are not moving into fancy new condos. I'm just not familiar with older fancy condos being opened up to low income residents. They just stay high rent, but with "charm" since they are older.
That's because extreme scarcity distorts the market to the point that old housing never gets to its natural cheap point. If they stopped building but only a few cars, a pimped out Datsun 240Z from the 70s would still look a lot better than walking, and fetch a lot better than 70s prices. In fact you could raise them with impunity.
It’s not instantaneous but it does happen - go look at some of the random lower price housing in a big city - it’s often in older neighborhoods that have “fallen on hard times”.
Ever check prices for thirty year old BMW or Lexus or Acura? Those are old luxury cars, but they aren’t priced like luxury. In part because what was luxury then isn’t luxury today.
Building a new car doesn't tend to require scrapping an old one. Every car built increases the total supply of cars. Building new luxury housing often (not always) involves tearing down existing housing, leaving the total housing supply static.
Typically when people complain about "luxury" housing what they are talking about are dense condos or apartments where there are far more units than whatever was there before.
The only people that I've heard complain about luxury housing that's not adding more units are when YIMBYs gripe about single family zoning: it's perfectly legal to replace an existing single family home with a far more luxurious single family home without any community input or checkpoints. But more affordable "luxury" townhomes are blocked st every stage by legislative processes that enable single family homeowners to extract ever increasing land rents, when they enforce artificial scarcity. But YIMBYs have almost zero political sway in almost all jurisdictions, and their framing of single family homes as luxury is far from usual.
No, I've never compared the price of a car that old in that model. However, comparing a 30 year old car to a 30 year domicile is kind of not in the spirit of the conversation either though. Nobody expects a car to last for 30 years, and most just hope it lasts longer than the financing. Also, cars are rarely purchased as an investment, where someone's place of residence is precisely considered an investment.
> Ever check prices for thirty year old BMW or Lexus or Acura?
Why dont you compare houses to prices of 30 year old rotten piece of fruit, because thats what you are doing.
20 years ago my familt bought an apartment, is it now worth 3 times more. Our 20 year old BMW is worth approximately 5% of it's original price as scrap
Yes, I have written why, car decays and a house doesn't. Value of land only grows. Even the built up portion of the house only grows un value withing human lifetime.
I know a guy who lives in a 500 year old house, i know zero people who have a 30 year old car
I would say, "Chicago." People in Chicago get really frustrated that they don't get to ride the wave of housing appreciation, but the flip side is that housing seems to be overwhelmingly more affordable there. I'm sure part of that is the tax levels and general instability of the Illinois government, which put downward pressure on prices, like flooding insurance in hurricane prone areas.
If you can't see filtering where you live, that says either that you're not looking, or that it's a place where new housing stock is being severely restricted.
It varies by locale. In high rise condos, filtering may mean that the appliances are white, the floors haven't been refinished, and the bathrooms are original. In my hometown, it's houses without air conditioning; I can immediately recognize a house that has no A/C in my old neighborhood by its listing price, square feet, and bedrooms, which means that refraining from doing that retrofit keeps space open for lower income or lower net worth people.
In my area, those older houses have all been renovated by flippers. Flipped renovations were pretty depressing when we were looking: the house was priced like a new build, and the renovation wasn’t really to our liking (at least they all have A/C, usually modern heat pumps). So we just went for a new build.
The flippers (basically investors) are looking for those places that would have been a cheaper entry point into the housing market, and after they are done with their 1-2 month renovations, they are no longer cheap entry points.
I think your experience is pretty consistent with nationwide reality due to restrictive zoning, but it is more or less ubiquitous in locales depending on how tight the market is there.
And I sympathize, because I've seen horrible examples of renovations, like people on Facebook forums proudly showing off their renovated kitchens, which scream "usability nightmare" to anyone who has ever looked at design standards. When I lived in San Diego, I could always recognize the work of the flipper who did my house because they used identical kitchen materials and appliances every time.
I’m doing a partial renovation on our 2016 kitchen (when the house was built). Not exactly as bad as a flip, townhome builders make a lot of mistakes. Hopefully our reno isn’t a usability nightmare.
Unless of course the luxury housing gets periodically torn down and rebuilt or remodeled making it even higher end housing. If the core neighborhood is already high-rent and or desirable real estate, why would high cost real estate buildings somehow allow themselves become low rent?
If you don’t build new luxury housing, then the top end goes to the next best thing, and the next to the next best, and so on. Building more helps increase total supply which alleviates pressure everywhere.
That step down doesn't necessarily happen at all - old luxury housing may get upgraded in place, or upgraded to higher luxury housing which then becomes less efficient at serving many. The total supply may shrink from serving the luxury market.
My larger point is that knee-jerk opposition to luxury housing isn’t helpful, and actually damaging to the cause of increased affordable housing. In the OP you can see how uneconomic building affordable housing is - so build luxury if that’s all that can be done.
The luxury housing around here goes to high earners from cities that are far away, and then wealthy people's adult children from all over the world move into the homes in the city after they leave. Housing here and in the cities has only gotten more expensive.
It’s because of the time base. You need a diverse supply because you have a diverse candidate pool (both people with money, not all who feel like moving right now, and people without, who desperately do).
Also inexpensive housing is cheaper to build than high end housing so there’s more bang for the buck (more impact on the housing shortage/$) than building the same number of high end homes.
I want to throw up a gofundme and buy some land, and just start 'adding' affordable housing in rural areas.
Think 50 acres, 10% will be an airbnb glamp-camp for some revenue, 20% farm area, 20% common buildings for work and storage and things, then the rest will be traditional 'tiny homes' or yurts or earth-bag homes, etc. Maybe dig a deep hole and bury a container home, dig out some holes for a sunroof, etc... Good insulation. Very affordable design and dev.
Not everything needs to be old-school housing, it just needs to get the job done: Warm in winter, cool in summer, decent access to utilities and esp. clean water. The more eco-friendly the better and solar panels would be nice.
Probably because it doesn't meet the preferences of renters/owners. It seems preferences drive housing cost in general. There certainly don't seem to be many (any?) new Craftsman 800 sqft houses today. Although this article seems to be more about high density apt/condos, the resource utilization of the dominate preference (larger, fancier, sfh) can affect the overall housing system (material, local labor costs).
Edit: why downvote with no reply? It seems this topic must be highly political with all the unexplained downvoting with no debate.
It’s likely that the 800 sq ft house is actually illegal nowadays - the minimum zoning requirements continually climb and many houses couldn’t be built today.
There’s even special fire insurance riders to cover this.
Interesting. In my state, I believe it's 650 sqft.
Why would the fire insurance be high for smaller homes? I thought that smaller homes would be cheaper to insure since the asset is cheaper than a larger house.
Not for nothing, but, if you're a private developer looking to get the public's money to build something that you're going to sell and profit from either directly or through special tax breaks that the rest of us have to are up for, usually in special variance of zoning that the rest of us have to abide by, you SHOULD have to jump through a lot of hurdles to prove you aren't a grifter.
Grifters are perfectly happy to lie on dozens of pointless forms because they know they’re going to grift a bunch of free money at the end. It’s the people who want to get down to doing the actual work that don’t have the patience for it.
An overly complicated process just encourages grifters because there’s more ways for them to create confusion and conceal what they’re doing.
And massive corporations who are extremely profit driven.
I was born in a very small town in California. They didn't want to become just another highway stop for shopping. They wanted to keep their small town flavor/community/charm.
So of course they made TONS of rules and roadblocks to stop "The wrong people" from building there.
It's now a highway stop with a bestbuy and the like....because it turns out that the massive corporate chains can pay people to sit there and jump through your hoops, but the smaller well meaning community developer will just say fuck it and move.
By the principle of charity I sympathize with this, but this doesn't hold up without evidence. For example, what are the penalties for lying/grifting in this area? Does this all vary with the degree of corruption in the particular state/city/town? Or is it all corrupted to varying degrees nationwide?
Historically the penalties for grifting these programs are nothing in the vast majority of cases, if it's even discovered. The problem is a bunch of frontloaded vetting that is never followed up on.
So these forms and processes can be essentially spammed and nobody gets any real fine or other legal penalty, even when flagrant criminality is found? It seems like there would be major incentive for press outlets to expose this as government waste or capitalist greed, so I would be curious to see any existing journalism about this.
Jumping through hurdles to build confidence is exactly what con artists are good at doing though. They are more likely to invest and thrive in bureaucratic processes because they have a much higher expected return than competitors.
The more arduous you make it, the more likely you price out people who actually do work.
I don't believe that's simply a linear relationship all the way down to zero. You're talking in most cases about tens of millions of dollars in NPV over the usable capital life of the projects in question, if not an order of magnitude or 2 higher. I'm not equipped to critique the OP on every point, but I don't learn what's wheat and what's chaff from his Kafkaesque description of it all.
The government contracting system in my experience and learning, all the way back to Boss Tweed, is a MAJOR source of corruption and theft. ALWAYS sold with the best of intentions.
Just like a home lock, this won't keep out the dedicated grifter. But it'll make things a lot harder for someone looking to make a quick buck in an unethical way.
I think this example might be more telling that what you intended. A lock is meant to keep out everyone without the key, while the intent of the bureaucratic process is to keep out bad actors while letting the well intended ones through, without them needing a key to bypass the system entirely.
Maybe you missed it, but that's exactly my point. With the exception being that a dedicated bad actor won't have a real problem getting through (e.g. breaking the door, lock, or another window, or by picking it; it's really not difficult).
You haven't said anything real here. Everyone agrees you should have to do at least some extra paperwork to get the tax breaks. The point of contention is how much paperwork. Is it 1 page? Is it 100 pages? Is it 10,000 pages? A day of extra paperwork or 5 years of extra paperwork? How many hurdles exactly are needed? That's what the discussion is. Many people think that what this Twitter thread is describing is too many hurdles. Are you saying you think this seems like a perfectly correct amount of hurdles?
Yes. You're talking about people asking for special dispensation in money and legal rights that get granted by agency policies and board votes, something far removed from the democratic process of the voters who don't get these privileges.
I would draw a hard line at disparate arbitrary and capricious allowances, i.e., making an affordable housing developer in a poor area jump through a ton of hoops, but letting a polluting power plant developer sail right through.
But seeing as this process is an exception to equality under the law granted at the whim of a board that may not even be elected in some cases, I have no qualms with making it by default really hard.
You want to change zoning laws? Fair. Do it for everybody via the elected town council or state legislature where the public has input.
"The point of contention is how much paperwork. Is it 1 page? Is it 100 pages? Is it 10,000 pages? A day of extra paperwork or 5 years of extra paperwork?"
What is this argument?
If you hire a lawyer to defend you in coirt, wikk you measure how goos he is by the amount of paperwork he submittes to the court?
No, you should have to jump through enough hurdles to prove you aren't a grifter.
Whether "enough" means "a lot" or "each and every hurdle that is already in place" is precisely what's at issue here. But I suppose it's convenient to take the side of maximum administrative burden if your goal is to minimize the amount of housing that is built.
The end result of that is that low income housing doesn't get built and market rate housing that doesn't have unnecessary and burdensome regulatory requirements gets built instead.
> usually in special variance of zoning that the rest of us have to abide by
The solution is to remove the zoning in the first place, not add more requirements to get an exception to it.
Today's low income housing was yesterday's market rate housing. Single family homes do not have affordability requirements and never have any issues with zoning. Multi family housing does but then it has all these fees and affordable requirements placed on it, making it more expensive than it should be and reducing the potential output in # of units.
Regulations such as zoning are enormous social experiments.
Experiments should have control groups! Where are the control group cities?
Why do experimental social regulations have to be universal? Would life without them be great? Would it be terrible? I doubt that mankind evolved to require so much micromanagement in all aspects of life.
While Houston technically doesn't have zoning they do have defacto zoning laws that look like other city zoning just more broken up.
Deed restrictions, density restrictions, lot size restrictions, buffering ordinances, tax incremental investment zones, history preservations, airport zoning, neighborhood petitioning, etc.
There is zero technical reason why housing can't be cheap as hell in this day and age. It's all due to government restrictions. And I'm not talking about shanty towns either - that's what you get when legal housing is too expensive to build!
Indeed, housing can be very cheap. See military barracks or flop houses/SROs. Housing is expensive as a means to keep poor people away from the middle class.
Then why can't you build a perfectly fine cabin on your own rural property without government inspectors coming around and micromanaging.
US/Canadian automobiles are also needlessly expensive, there are many awesome vehicles sold in Mexico etc., like the Hilux, and I don't see it as a conspiracy to keep poor people down, but an overabundance of caution from bureaucrats covering their ass and regulatory capture.
It's really hard to argue the libertarian point of view because you're always trying to point out the "unseen costs".
The secondary market makes universal standards generally helpful. As much as everyone says buyer beware you have to beware a lot less when housing and vehicles were built to a certain standard.
Having to track down whoever built the house to figure out what standards they followed is painful enough when the house is a few years old let alone decades.
Similarly vehicles safety isn't just about the driver (although that is very important) some of the safety changes have been made to minimize impact on others. While everyone bitches about easy to scratch bumpers those bumpers help almost accidents not result in terrible things for pedestrians.
Not to say there isn't regulatory capture or that the rules are the correct strictness. It is just it is less "unseen costs" and more "things people don't think about" of course the only reason they don't think about it is the bureaucracy.
Dude, it's a cabin. It's made out of logs. You should at least be able to opt-out. If you're concerned about resale value then you can pursue a NACHI seal of approval.
You should be free to drive a car with friggin spikes on the front, and the insurance industry should be free to charge you accordingly for the liability risk. That's freedom.
On the topic of housing: As long as it is obviously not normal housing I agree. If people want weird bespoke things in the middle of nowhere then that is different. If you are building your cabin an hour from town I think the government getting ahead of a housing shortage by ensuring your house can be available when you inevitably sell it is fine for everyone.
After all the city gets a house for the supply and you get your money back when you sell. Statistically everyone sells on long time scales after all.
On the topic of cars: that is stupid. 16.5 people died per day in 2019 in the US from being hit by cars. It is in everyone's best interest to bring that number down. It was double that in 1979 and while no one thing necessarily explains a big change like that newer safety requirements have helped a lot.
To be clear while recently some vehicle safety tests that protect the passengers from weird impacts have come up nearly as many regulations are actually related to protecting pedestrians whenever possible. Obviously hitting someone at highway speeds can't be helped but you would be surprised how much technology can reduce injuries in more minor accidents (and by extension reduce deaths in the non-extreme cases).
So you're saying that people should not be allowed to build log cabins because they don't contribute to your definition of acceptable housing stock? What if someone would prefer to live in a log cabin than commie block apartment? Is there any human freedom safe from such communistic arguments?
Regulations are not the primary reason for safety in vehicular design. I know you'll never believe that, however, it probably goes counter to your entire world view, so don't bother responding.
Whether you like it or not, there is dollar number on the value of a human life, and liability insurance (and vehicle design and regulation) revolves around it. Safety has diminishing returns and there is a market clearing point. Brush guards are just as dangerous as spikes, for instance, would you like to ban them? Or would you make a government form to apply for an exception if the brush guard is for an approved acceptable use by you for someone who has a license for their proper use off-road by someone with an acceptable economic reason fitting the social and economic calculations for the current five year plan determined by your Ministry of Truth?
> So you're saying that people should not be allowed to build log cabins because they don't contribute to your definition of acceptable housing stock? What if someone would prefer to live in a log cabin than commie block apartment? Is there any human freedom safe from such communistic arguments?
Huh? That isn't what I said. I said "there are benefits". You can totally build a log cabin in jurisdictions that require inspections you just need to do a little more than setup some logs... Additionally I bet the definition of "house" is more flexible than you imply from your offhand information.
> Regulations are not the primary reason for safety in vehicular design. I know you'll never believe that, however, it probably goes counter to your entire world view, so don't bother responding.
I mean I can point to regulation changes resulting in additional safety but you don't believe that at all. The reality is vehicle safety has trended very closely to regulations if you pay any attention. Some minimal amount of safety is provided but it isn't like consumers are asking what happens if you impact a another care at 55 MPH vs 35 MPH.
> Whether you like it or not, there is dollar number on the value of a human life, and liability insurance (and vehicle design and regulation) revolves around it.
That is an incorrect statement. California has a minimum liability for injury of $15,000. We do not as a society agree that a human life is worth that little.
> Safety has diminishing returns and there is a market clearing point. Brush guards are just as dangerous as spikes, for instance, would you like to ban them? Or would you make a government form to apply for an exception if the brush guard is for an approved acceptable use by you for someone who has a license for their proper use off-road by someone with an acceptable economic reason fitting the social and economic calculations for the current five year plan determined by your Ministry of Truth?
You are just making shit up now. Feel free to quote any sources rather than making up stuff.
> and I don't see it as a conspiracy to keep poor people down, but an overabundance of caution from bureaucrats covering their ass and regulatory capture.
These are one in the same. Regulation is a euphemism for corruption, market manipulation, favoritism, cronie "capitalism", and so on. The intention might not be to keep the status quo (e.g., poor remain as such) but that - time and again - is the result.
Given these are the facts. This is the tradition. It's not all that difficult to argue the libertarian pov because if nothing else it's obvious what is not working.
I can put my money to work anywhere on earth anytime I want with a few clicks of a mouse.
Make it less profitable to provide housing and my money goes somewhere else, could be anywhere, I don't care. Make providing affordable housing the most profitable thing I can do, and you will have affordable housing.
I'm not jumping through any hoops for you. Your choice.
Affordable housing is a band aid at best. Mostly it’s not even that because of pathologies.
What I want is an affordable housing market. If I have to pay you to put up units and then impose rules about who and how you sell or rent them, I’ve already lost.
Affordable housing, roads, utilities, criminal justice, social safety net, healthcare, or other social needs may not be profitable but are still needed for the functioning of society. Hence, taxes are justified as charitable giving is insufficient to cover the costs and a functioning society is almost universally desirable over autarky.
At least, that was my takeaway from your original comment describing the behavioral characteristics regarding the affordable housing market.
Proving you’re not a grifter should not require $100k of forms, working around grumpy neighbors and useless counsel members, and dealing with the degree of arbitrary decision making that’s apparently involved.
one fundamental problem is that this many hoops for these small projects just don't make much economical sense. (that's why there's only so few of "free money" projects.)
basically this is the curse of the low density again. in denser cities where building a ~500 unit apartment complex takes the same approval more affordable units are going to enter the market.
I know someone who works on the deal side of affordable housing construction, and has an urban planning masters. From everything she’s said about it, it seems like it would be a really crappy grift. There’s basically no money in it even if you tried to cut a bunch of corners. She works for a not for profit developer that’s well capitalized and they can barely make it work.
These overly burdensome rules are just like all the rules and paperwork imposed on welfare recipients.
The conservative strategy is "fine, if we can't kill this social program, we'll just drown the whole process in paperwork to make people go away...under the excuse of preventing fraud and slash the funding of the agency that processes it, and do our best to stuff the agency full of conservative bench-warmers who will gleefully, but as slowly as possible, reject paperwork for the slightest infraction."
Getting WIC benefits (food stamps for pregnant or new mothers) involves multiple in-person interviews per year (which means taking off time from any work, and usually traveling to a regional office that isn't accessible via public transit)...those interviews seem singularly focused on making sure that the pregnant lady is still pregnant, then actually produced a child, and then later, still has the child under their care. Because, you know, there's all these women who file for WIC, get abortions but then keep claiming WIC benefits.
The government is very, very concerned about getting scammed out of a maximum benefit per month of: one gallon of juice, 6 gallons of milk, 2 pounds of cereal, 1lb of cheese, 2 dozen eggs, $11 for fruit and veg, 2lb of bread, 1lb of beans or other legumes, and 1 lb of peanut butter.
It's been my experience that the farther you let an undesirable process proceed, the higher the chance that it will reach its undesirable conclusion. The enforcers will make decisions based on sunk costs; there will be more loopholes for the grifters to exploit; the time demands of due process will let them manipulate to their benefit; and there will be higher consequences for disrupting the status quo (e.g. there will be people actual living in the buildings already).
Here's an even better suggestion: withdraw federal and state funding for roads, schools, water and sewage &c if housing targets are not met. The local NIMBYS will come around once the potholes become too bad and the school's roof starts leaking.
What's going to happen is that they will start voting for the most blatant grifters running for public office, because they're the ones who are going to lie to them about solving this without raising taxes.
Federal contribution to the things you mentioned is rather low in NIMBY areas, so NIMBYs will be more than happy to pay it. Seriously, do the math. The federal funds do not magically appear out of nowhere, they are collected from the very same NIMBYs, and it’s only a small fraction of their total federal tax bill.
> NIMBYs will be more than happy to pay it. Seriously, do the math.
Citation please.
We know what the math is due to towns near the border of Los Angeles along the I-15 corridor. Thsoe suburbs that decided they wanted to not be a part of Los Angeles received a very rude awakening as to what stuff really costs.
As I said, the NIMBYs are already paying for all this stuff. The federal money is not a charity of some third parties, it’s what the very same people paid in taxes in the first place.
Most of the hoops are things like performing endless studies of traffic and infrastructure with a narrow set of grifting consulting firms even if the same study has already recently been done.
They aren’t. It’s largely an endless stream of studies that have to be performed by big name consultancies and months of public hearings and community board meetings. Any slip up or unexpected delay can sink to project. None of it ever has anything to do with the safety or suitability of the actual structure. Maybe the architectural review is at least relevant.
one big problem is that elected officials are involved.
these rules should be set and the application validated somewhere around state level. if the city wants to do their own thing, sure, they can set up their own separate system (to provide more funds for example in exchange for more/stricter rules), but that should be optional for the developer.
> Not sure why you're complaining about this. You elected those those folks. If they aren't doing it right, then elect someone else.
This kind of assumes that the system is actually/legitimately democratic, and overlooks that one vote has the consequence (in theory anyways) of determining decisions on thousands of sub-issues. We vote for people, not issues, and it's highly questionable the degree to which the people we vote for are sincere in their stated goals.
> It's what's called "representative democracy." I hear that it's been tried in a few places and has had some minor successes. /s
Depending on how one measures it, ignoring that we tend to measure such things heuristically, on a relative scale, and tend to not consider counterfactual causality.
> Beyond that, "democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried."[0]
It is an extremely popular meme (particularly lately, perhaps in part due to an extremely successful guerilla marketing campaign), but it would be interesting to know what is actually true.
>This kind of assumes that the system is actually/legitimately democratic,
It's possible that I'm just tired, or that I'm just not so bright, but I don't really understand what you mean here, in the context of the discussion around housing inventories? To which system(s) are you referring?
>and overlooks that one vote has the consequence (in theory anyways) of determining decisions on thousands of sub-issues.
Again, I'm not at all clear on what, exactly you're talking about here. Are you advocating an Athenian-style form of democracy[0]? In case you're not familiar, that would be akin (although certainly not identical) to California's ballot proposition system.
Do you believe that all laws, from Constitutional amendments (or the US Constitution, for that matter) to local sidewalk width ordinances should be individually voted upon by every citizen affected by a specific measure?
>We vote for people, not issues, and it's highly questionable the degree to which the people we vote for are sincere in their stated goals.
Yes, we do. And yes, no one can really know the mind of anyone other than themself (and sometimes we don't even know our own minds).
That goes back to the statement you appear to be condemning -- [paraphrasing myself] that if your elected representative isn't doing their job or is untrustworthy, we have regularly scheduled elections to address such issues. What's more, we have mechanisms in place to remove elected (and unelected) officials who abuse their office or act in ways that are unacceptable to the voting public.
Is that insufficient in your mind? If so, how, specifically, would you change the system?
>> It's what's called "representative democracy." I hear that it's been tried in a few places and has had some minor successes. /s
>Depending on how one measures it, ignoring that we tend to measure such things heuristically, on a relative scale, and tend to not consider counterfactual causality.
I assume you're referring to this[1] sort of analysis. Unfortunately, while such an analysis is interesting, it doesn't provide real information. Rather, it only provides a platform for speculations that can't ever be proved. Stanislaw Lem made a similar "argument"[2] which demonstrates the (lack of) usefulness of such an analysis:
Everyone knows that dragons don’t exist. But while
this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman,
it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The
School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly
unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the
banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated,
there is no need for us to discuss it any further
here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem
analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of
dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely
hypothetical. They were all, one might say,
nonexistent, but each non-existed in an entirely
different way.
> Beyond that, "democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried."[0]
>It is an extremely popular meme (particularly lately, perhaps in part due to an extremely successful guerilla marketing campaign), but it would be interesting to know what is actually true.
Then you're in luck. There has been quite a bit of research into this area. Perhaps you should learn more?
Here are a few links to get you started. N.B., these are just a few, semi-randomly (selected because they address your question) selected items from the first page of a web search for "measures of success between political systems." I'm sure you can find much more if you're actually interested (rather than trolling -- which would make me sad).
In that context, what do you suggest as the least worst form of government? Or do you reject government completely (a la Anarcho-capitalism[3] or straight-up anarchism[4])?
I look forward to haviung a robust discussion of facts and logically consistent ideas around this with you.
> It's possible that I'm just tired, or that I'm just not so bright, but I don't really understand what you mean here, in the context of the discussion around housing inventories? To which system(s) are you referring?
Democracy - more specifically, the various implementations (both the abstract design and the comprehensive physical practice) that we use today, but most specifically American democracy.
> Again, I'm not at all clear on what, exactly you're talking about here. Are you advocating an Athenian-style form of democracy[0]? In case you're not familiar, that would be akin (although certainly not identical) to California's ballot proposition system.
And yes of course, there is no shortage of problems with simply implementing something like that.
> Do you believe that all laws, from Constitutional amendments (or the US Constitution, for that matter) to local sidewalk width ordinances should be individually voted upon by every citizen affected by a specific measure?
It's an idea worth considering imo.
> Yes, we do. And yes, no one can really know the mind of anyone other than themself (and sometimes we don't even know our own minds).
110% agree - hence, I prefer to think in terms of ~"plausible range of epistemically sound possibilities", since what is true is typically impossible to achieve, and is not necessary anyways.
> That goes back to the statement you appear to be condemning -- [paraphrasing myself] that if your elected representative isn't doing their job or is untrustworthy, we have regularly scheduled elections to address such issues. What's more, we have mechanisms in place to remove elected (and unelected) officials who abuse their office or act in ways that are unacceptable to the voting public.
Indeed we do - whether this design "works" as intended/perceived is another matter though.
> Is that insufficient in your mind? If so, how, specifically, would you change the system?
I think "we the people" would benefit in many ways from a serious first principles based investigation into a complete rewrite of democracy. At the very least, it would be an extremely educational and maybe even ~enlightening undertaking, depending on how one went about it of course (putting The Experts in charge might not be an ideal approach, for obvious reasons).
> I assume you're referring to this[1] sort of analysis.
Not really. I prefer something more along the lines of thinking in very strict (but dynamic / extremist) epistemology, ontological complexity, yadda yadda yadda. Perhaps some new styles of thinking will have to be developed along the way.
> Then you're in luck. There has been quite a bit of research into this area.
Has the truth been revealed?
> Perhaps you should learn more?
Surely! And perhaps you should as well.
> Here are a few links to get you started. N.B., these are just a few, semi-randomly (selected because they address your question) selected items from the first page of a web search for "measures of success between political systems."
This sounds like an investigation into that which exists - it's certainly useful, but I am also interested in that which does not yet exist.
> I'm sure you can find much more if you're actually interested (rather than trolling -- which would make me sad).
I think this touches on a very interesting phenomenon that can be observed: in internet discussions, it is not uncommon to encounter people shitting on the poor thinking of the members of their various outgroups and claiming that they should ~"think better". But what's interesting is that almost without exception (in my experience anyways), if a person is to engage with such people by doing the very thing they recommend, the typical response is: poor thinking (rhetoric, insults, memes, evasion, etc). It seems to me that all humans have an upper bound of ability to be serious, and an extreme aversion to discussing sacred cows.
> In that context, what do you suggest as the least worst form of government?
I consider such things to be unknown - if one would like knowledge, then there are no shortages of examples of how to go about acquiring it - this scenario is surely trickier than many, but human beings have demonstrated themselves to be quite clever, when they set their mind to something.
> Or do you reject government completely (a la Anarcho-capitalism[3] or straight-up anarchism[4])?
I am open to all ideas, but have a bias towards competent coordination in complex systems.
> I look forward to having a robust discussion of facts and logically consistent ideas around this with you.
Thank you for the kind words, and I look forward to it as well.
>> It's possible that I'm just tired, or that I'm just not so bright, but I don't really understand what you mean here, in the context of the discussion around housing inventories? To which system(s) are you referring?
>Democracy - more specifically, the various implementations (both the abstract design and the comprehensive physical practice) that we use today, but most specifically American democracy.
What, specifically do you find illegitemate about American democracy?
Getting some specific thoughts about this would be nice. Much better than what you did say, which I interepreted (perhaps incorrectly -- but the lack of detail is pretty telling) as a metaphorical rolled-up newspaper along with "American democracy bad! Bad American democracy!"
I have specific issues with the American political system myself, including but not limited to, the pervasive impact of money in our political system, especially as to how it strongly reinforces the current two-party hegemony.
However, I don't see it as illegitemate as you appear to do. So I'll ask again. What specifically makes American democracy "illegitemate?"
>> Again, I'm not at all clear on what, exactly you're talking about here. Are you advocating an Athenian-style form of democracy[0]? In case you're not familiar, that would be akin (although certainly not identical) to California's ballot proposition system.
>And yes of course, there is no shortage of problems with simply implementing something like that.
It's an interesting idea. And one that certainly deserves (and has/is getting) attention and investigation.
As you note, many issues with implementation of such a system including universal access, the role of money/moneyed interests and the time/capacity individuals have to investigate, comprehend and form opinions about the dozens (perhaps more?) of local, state and federal laws debated every single day.
That said, I support the idea of tweaking democratic processes to improve governance. Ranked Choice Voting[0] comes to mind.
>> Yes, we do. And yes, no one can really know the mind of anyone other than themself (and sometimes we don't even know our own minds).
>110% agree - hence, I prefer to think in terms of ~"plausible range of epistemically sound possibilities", since what is true is typically impossible to achieve, and is not necessary anyways.
I'm not really clear on what you mean here. I didn't say anything about "truth," which is irrelevant (as you note) to a person's state of mind/internal thought processes. As for what's "epistemically plausible," that's so broad as to be practically useless.
For example, it's "epistemically plausible" for someone to support the "decent, hard working people of this great nation." But such a statement is so vague that it's meaningless.
>>I assume you're referring to this[1] sort of analysis.
>Not really. I prefer something more along the lines of thinking in very strict (but dynamic / extremist) epistemology, ontological complexity, yadda yadda yadda. Perhaps some new styles of thinking will have to be developed along the way.
In that case, you shouldn't have used the term "counterfactual casuation[sic]" which has a well defined meaning.
I'm sorry, but that sentence is a word salad that doesn't describe, at least not in terms someone not living inside your head, what you "prefer." You make a statement about "strict epistemology" and "ontological complexity," but those must be employed in any reasonable discussion of just about anything beyond what I want to eat for dinner. What, specifically, is this "yadda, yadda, yadda" you mention, as it seems that's where some semblance of a reasonable argument might lie?
>> Here are a few links to get you started. N.B., these are just a few, semi-randomly (selected because they address your question) selected items from the first page of a web search for "measures of success between political systems."
>This sounds like an investigation into that which exists - it's certainly useful, but I am also interested in that which does not yet exist.
That's great! I'm glad you're interested. But you have made a whole raft of assertions which you haven't supported with any sort of data or even logical analysis, despite having the opportunity (and taking that opportunity -- twice) to elucidate your point of view.
What's more, understanding how current (and historical) systems (don't) work is critical to any attempt to tweak or rewrite the rules of any complex system.
That makes it really difficult to take you seriously.
>> I'm sure you can find much more if you're actually interested (rather than trolling -- which would make me sad).
>I think this touches on a very interesting phenomenon that can be observed: in internet discussions, it is not uncommon to encounter people shitting on the poor thinking of the members of their various outgroups and claiming that they should ~"think better". But what's interesting is that almost without exception (in my experience anyways), if a person is to engage with such people by doing the very thing they recommend, the typical response is: poor thinking (rhetoric, insults, memes, evasion, etc). It seems to me that all humans have an upper bound of ability to be serious, and an extreme aversion to discussing sacred cows.
I can't (and wouldn't try to) speak for anyone else, but in this particular case, I'm not doing any of the things you list here. As such, I have to ask why this is relevant, unless you're describing your own actions.
I don't insist that you "think better." I don't know what "group" (well, other than human -- and so am I. I guess we're in the same group huh?) to which you might belong, so I have no basis to class you (other than I noted parenthetically above) in any in/out group.
And I haven't engaged in any of the other things you mention. So I ask again: Why is that relevant here?
Or are you making the (unfounded) assumption that I understand you and what's in your mind (impossible, as we've already discussed) and am just baiting you. I assure you (the best I can do in this forum) that I am not. Rather, whether it's due to ignorance/stupidity on my part or poor communication on yours, you have not made yourself clear here at all.
That's what I'm asking for. Communicate clearly and provide detail as to what supports the ideas you're presenting. You have done neither. That's not intended to be an insult or reprobation, rather it's the minimum that's required to have a reasoned, fruitful discussion.
You go on at some length after this, but the low information density of your comments makes it difficult to discuss this stuff. You've layered vague ideas about governance on top of assertions that those ideas don't support.
I'm happy to continue this conversation with you, but I'm having a difficult time understanding what the hell you're talking about.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and chalk that up to me being a native English speaker.
Should you choose to provide specific, relevant and supportable ideas, I will happily continue to engage.
Preface: as per usual, I am continuing on with my combative/antagonistic/evasive/abstract/mumbo-jumbo-seeming speaking style - apolgies in advance, but I truly believe that someone should be trying something different, consider the state of affairs that we find ourselves in (~all the problems in the world).
Also: excuse spelling/grammar errors, I will try to do a cleanup pass a bit later.
> What, specifically do you find illegitimate about American democracy?
That it (at least implicitly) claims to be "Of the people, by the people, and for the people", that the projected and perceived as accurate narrative is that it exercises "the will of the people". When in fact, the will of the people is not known, because very little attempt has been made to determine what the will of the people is (and other things: "the people" are, generally speaking, "not too bright", and the causality behind this unfortunate circumstances is not known or well investigated, but if you were to dig into it, what you will typically find at the end of the strong is: the government).
I could go on and on and on, and based on extensive experience discussing such topics with a very wide range of people, I confidently predict that if we were to get into the fine-grained details, before long you would balk, you would accuse me of "overthinking", being "pedantic", start making various "ya well" style excuses, and so on and so forth.
Or another way of putting it might be something like:
select distinct behavior_type from human_activity where topic like '%government%' and reality_level='perception'
I propose to you here today that human beings have a way about them, and that by virtue of you being a human being (and being raised and shaped by the cultures you exist within), you (to some degree) exhibit these behavior, I suspect with not 100% conscious awareness that this is the way it is.
At this point, a typical cards that are typically played (by my counterpoint in the conversation, or dang if he was to encounter this thread) is something along the lines of "we can't know anything, nihilism", "you're talking metaphysical jibber jabber" "your words have no meaning", "HN is not the place for this sort of X", etc. This sort of thing, I propose to you, is your nature.
You want detail? I am at your disposal, and I suspect my willingness to discuss what is true (or may be, or not) can easily outlast your ability to remain curious about what is true.
> Getting some specific thoughts about this would be nice. Much better than what you did say, which I interpreted (perhaps incorrectly -- but the lack of detail is pretty telling) as a metaphorical rolled-up newspaper along with "American democracy bad! Bad American democracy!"
"the lack of detail is pretty telling" is an interesting (but not uncommon) phrase. When you say this, what are you referring to? I will take a guess: might it be ~reality?
> I have specific issues with the American political system myself, including but not limited to, the pervasive impact of money in our political system, especially as to how it strongly reinforces the current two-party hegemony.
To my style of thinking, this is one item (with an unknown epistemic status, and an unknown comprehensive-causality-weighted importance), in a set of utterly unknown (but perhaps imagined as known) size.
> However, I don't see it as illegitimate as you appear to do. So I'll ask again. What specifically makes American democracy "illegitimate?"
I propose that a highly optimal way to think about such things is as a tautological statement + question: "What makes American democracy illegitimate, is that which makes American democracy illegitimate. So then: what is it that makes American democracy illegitimate, accurately and comprehensively?"
Do you possess the answer to this question? Does it seem like you possess the answer to this question? Do you care what the answer to this questions is? And when considering such questions, be mindful if your mind is conceptualizing them as binaries (True/False) or a spectrum (the degree to which each "is" (or may be) True/False).
Do you like this sort of thinking? In my experience, most people not only do not like it, but they reject it outright, often with strong emotions and supreme confidence. I believe that this is our nature, at least for now. (Here it may be useful to consider the history of the aggregate conceptualization of (aka: ~reality) African Americans by the population of the USA, and elsewhere.) Sometimes humanity can modify the fabric of reality, but usually they seem unable (and unwilling).
> It's an interesting idea. And one that certainly deserves (and has/is getting) attention and investigation.
This reminds me somewhat of this homeless senior I know that hangs out at the 7/11 by my house - he too "is" "getting attention", in that I bought him a coffee last week.
> As you note, many issues with implementation of such a system including universal access, the role of money/moneyed interests and the time/capacity individuals have to investigate, comprehend and form opinions about the dozens (perhaps more?) of local, state and federal laws debated every single day.
Indeed. There's a surprising amount of complexity in reality (although it tends to not seem that way).
> That said, I support the idea of tweaking democratic processes to improve governance. Ranked Choice Voting[0] comes to mind.
Why only tweak? Do you support the general notion of society having a serious(!), mainstream conversation (substantial MSM coverage) about the merits of a complete rewrite?
>>> Yes, we do. And yes, no one can really know the mind of anyone other than themself (and sometimes we don't even know our own minds).
>>110% agree - hence, I prefer to think in terms of ~"plausible range of epistemically sound possibilities", since what is true is typically impossible to achieve, and is not necessary anyways.
> I'm not really clear on what you mean here. I didn't say anything about "truth,"...
Is "one can really know the mind of anyone" not necessarily intertwined with truth: that which is(!) the state of a person's mind? (Assuming we care about it of course.)
> which is irrelevant (as you note) to a person's state of mind/internal thought processes.
I said Truth cannot be achieved, not that it is irrelevant. Although for the vast majority of instances of mind, I would agree that what is true does not matter (at the perceptual level) - but there are exceptions here and there (me, for instance).
> As for what's "epistemically plausible," that's so broad as to be practically useless.
By what means have you come to possess comprehensive knowledge about what "is" "useless"? Useless for what? To what end?
> For example, it's "epistemically plausible" for someone to support the "decent, hard working people of this great nation." But such a statement is so vague that it's meaningless.
Vagueness erases meaning? Perhaps in your mind, but this is definitely not how my mind works.
>>> I assume you're referring to this[1] sort of analysis.
>> Not really. I prefer something more along the lines of thinking in very strict (but dynamic / extremist) epistemology, ontological complexity, yadda yadda yadda. Perhaps some new styles of thinking will have to be developed along the way.
> In that case, you shouldn't have used the term "counterfactual casuation[sic]" which has a well defined meaning.
Can you explain why the "well defined" "meaning" of counterfactual causation is somehow incompatible with what I've said?
> I'm sorry, but that sentence is a word salad...
The theory of relativity and many other things are also word salad to those who lack the necessary background knowledge to understand it. (And if you have the urge to point out that because this is true, it does not prove that what I've said is also true, then don't bother, I well realize this.)
> ...that doesn't describe, at least not in terms someone not living inside your head, what you "prefer." You make a statement about "strict epistemology" and "ontological complexity," but those must be employed in any reasonable discussion of just about anything beyond what I want to eat for dinner. What, specifically, is this "yadda, yadda, yadda" you mention, as it seems that's where some semblance of a reasonable argument might lie?
Herein lies complexity that would take essay length writing to even begin to address it with any precision. I think there's more than enough here already to measure the quantity of curiosity you can muster and sustain, taking into consideration the ~"utterly shit" communication medium (platform, language, etc) we are using.
>> This sounds like an investigation into that which exists - it's certainly useful, but I am also interested in that which does not yet exist.
> That's great! I'm glad you're interested. But you have made a whole raft of assertions which you haven't supported with any sort of data or even logical analysis, despite having the opportunity (and taking that opportunity -- twice) to elucidate your point of view.
I propose that reality (and communication about) is highly contextual, and that humanity's current norm is ~"good enough". When writing this, did you consider the distinction (that exists somewhere) between haven't supported in my model and haven't supported in this conversation? I do realize you explicitly specified which one (in this conversation), but my question is whether you had the other one in working memory when composing the above.
> What's more, understanding how current (and historical) systems (don't) work is critical to any attempt to tweak or rewrite the rules of any complex system.
> That makes it really difficult to take you seriously.
Agreed - this does indeed seem to be the nature of the default mind, as it has been trained (mainly in the AI sense of the word, but also in the ~propaganda/culture sense). But to your credit, you are exerting substantially higher than average effort to discuss and understand - credit where credit is due and all that (gosh....have I committed a cultural faux pas here? If so, sincere apologies, but limited).
> I can't (and wouldn't try to) speak for anyone else, but in this particular case, I'm not doing any of the things you list here.
Not at all? If you had, would you necessarily know?
> As such, I have to ask why this is relevant, unless you're describing your own actions.
> I don't insist that you "think better." I don't know what "group" (well, other than human -- and so am I. I guess we're in the same group huh?) to which you might belong, so I have no basis to class you (other than I noted parenthetically above) in any in/out group.
A basis to (subconsciously) classify someone is not necessary, much of that is performed for us automatically (thanks evolution!).
> And I haven't engaged in any of the other things you mention. So I ask again: Why is that relevant here?
In return I ask: what is it you are talking about here? Reality?
> Or are you making the (unfounded) assumption that I understand you and what's in your mind (impossible, as we've already discussed) and am just baiting you. I assure you (the best I can do in this forum) that I am not.
Very approximately, I would say what you are doing here is "humaning".
> Rather, whether it's due to ignorance/stupidity on my part or poor communication on yours, you have not made yourself clear here at all.
See "theory of relativity" above.
> That's what I'm asking for. Communicate clearly and provide detail as to what supports the ideas you're presenting. You have done neither. That's not intended to be an insult or reprobation, rather it's the minimum that's required to have a reasoned, fruitful discussion.
Which portion of the infinitely large, logically inconsistent/paradoxical/illusory/ virtual idea space would you like to discuss? And in what way? With English text on a forum? Houston, we have a problem.
> You go on at some length after this, but the low information density of your comments makes it difficult to discuss this stuff. You've layered vague ideas about governance on top of assertions that those ideas don't support.
You're not wrong!
You know what? I am starting to get the feeling that you may not have a proper understanding of the complexity of the problem space you are working in, it's composition and behavior, and so forth and so on. Nor do I, of course, but then understanding is not a binary.
> I'm happy to continue this conversation with you, but I'm having a difficult time understanding what the hell you're talking about.
Perhaps the complexity is beyond the capability of our tools. It seems to me that science has similar problems in a wide variety of ways...I wonder what they did to deal with this problem such that they could advance their field.
> I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and chalk that up to me being a native English speaker.
As am I, although I am "on the spectrum" (to put it nicely and imprecisely), so I think a common language is only a small slice of the problems we are experiencing.
> Should you choose to provide specific, relevant and supportable ideas, I will happily continue to engage.
99% of the general population is focused on object level details, or some bastardized illusion of that, my interest is in where that comes from.
> I hope you have a good day.
Thanks, you as well. I realize that the way I write is hard to understand (and not only because of the subject matter), but be that as it may, I propose to you that despite this, "something" does indeed exist here, and that it is worth understanding (or at least trying to understand), assuming that you ~truly care about the things you seem to care about (generally: the well being of the people within overall humanity - now, and in the future).
PS: for some extra fun: what do you think I am "up to" "here" (and elsewhere)? I will give you a hint: I propose to you that there is a "level" of sorts that ~exists, that this level can be ~seen, and that you currently do not have the means to see it.
How's that for provocative (and hyper-confident, plausibly bordering on sheer delusion) rhetoric!!?? But then at the same time: what if it's ~true? Or maybe even more interesting: what if it scales?
(It's an interesting site, this genius.com - I wonder if there may be some unrealized and unharvested value there. I sometimes wonder if the same is true of the one we are on.)
I'm not even complaining, at best I'm armchair quarterbacking :)
I made an observation that mixing local politics with getting approval for an already set rules seems ripe for conflicts of interest, inconsistency, arbitrariness, predictably bad optics when local special interest groups get favorable treatment compared to less special (ie. poorer) groups.
basically separation of powers is missing at the local level. the executive branch (ie. civil service) should be separate from the local "legislature"
>I'm not even complaining, at best I'm armchair quarterbacking :)
>I made an observation that mixing local politics with getting approval for an already set rules seems ripe for conflicts of interest, inconsistency, arbitrariness, predictably bad optics when local special interest groups get favorable treatment compared to less special (ie. poorer) groups.
Fair enough. My apologies if it seems I pushed a little hard on that. It's just that far too many people seem to take every opportunity to metaphorically roll up their newspaper and take swipes while yelling "Gub'mint bad! Bad gub'mint!"
I'm emphatically not claiming that's what you were doing, but knee-jerk condemnation of "gub'mint" is far too common in the US these days, which makes me a little over sensitive on that topic.
That idea is, at least in the US (and other democracies), ridiculous in the extreme given that we are the government, or at least we elect the folks who run it.
I agree. There are many opportunities for conflicts of interest, arbitrariness and outright graft, especially in state and local government.
That said, I'll repeat my statement from the comment to which you replied:
You elected those those folks. If they aren't doing
it right, then elect someone else.
If your representatives are inept or inefficient, find some folks who aren't. If your representatives are corrupt (here's a particularly lurid case[0]), then boot them out and prosecute them where appropriate.
>basically separation of powers is missing at the local level. the executive branch (ie. civil service) should be separate from the local "legislature"
Not sure how it is where you are, but we have separate "branches" where I live in NYC[1]. The Mayor (and myriad city agencies) makes up the "executive" and the city council (as well as local community boards -- at least in an advisory capacity) makes up the "legislative" branch.
They are separate entities and, just as it is in the Federal government, no legislator can simultaneously serve in the executive branch or vice versa.
I know that many (most?) parliamentary democracies don't operate that way, with sitting legislators from the ruling party/coalition serving in executive roles.
That's just not the case where I am, or in most other state and local governments in the US AFAIK.
Ok I feel you, what if I own a sports team and promise promise promise that that stadium you are going to pay for is going to improve the community? Is that enough proof?
How about an Amazon warehouse?
But yeah, to your point, building more housing in a supply constricted market requires like way more proof.
> But yeah, to your point, building more housing in a supply constricted market requires like way more proof.
Having lived in downtown San Francisco for 7 years now, I can’t help but notice how all the new highrises and fancy apartments have pushed down the prices of the normal stuff.
My current landlord tried to sell his house before we moved in and couldn’t get “enough” money for it because why pay $1,000,000 for a house from 1906 when you could pay the same for new construction across the street? Instead he had to settle for renting (to us). 3 years later and similar apartments in the area are now selling for $800,000 because there’s even more new construction around.
Rents are down too. Why pay $4000/mo to live in an old house when you can pay $4200/mo to live in a luxury highrise across the street?
What makes you feel that it's easier to build a stadium than subsidized housing? How many people, man-hours and money do you believe is spent on the efforts to get a ballpark or Amazon campus approved? Really believe it's less than a multifamily development?
adjusted for cost-benefit to taxpayers and profitability for developers the stadium suddenly doesn't look so good, or, um, looks amazing for those special interests.
Would be interested in an actual analysis of that, not just hand waving. A devil's advocate might say that a stadium comes with built-in jobs and attracts 10,000s of intercity spectators every week who have a lot of money burning a hole in their pocket, whereas subsidized housing brings a few families, most of whom have very little money or income.
Of course there are other metrics to consider than economic impact.
> The consensus among economists on the question of sports facility subsidies likely stems from the basic economic intuition that government subsidies ought to address some “market failure,” and economists sense that there is no compelling case to be made for sports subsidies.
Not sure if you're either sarcastic or not. The issue is that the housing to be built is below market, and needs some special dispensation of permits, tax breaks, or direct grants.
Those commercial and leisure entities you're talking about often push for these elements too, but they usually have to promise something in return, even so far as accepting clawback provisions and fines for failing to do so. Affordable Housing builders AFAIK never have these strings attached. If you'd counter to me with examples where this wasn't part of the agreement for commercial/leisure or where it was for affordable housing, I'd completely agree those are exceptions worth a closer look.
My favorite are the developers that promise a certain percentage of affordable housing in their high dollar developments, but never ever come close to that and never get penalized later.
You can't "affordable housing" your way to cheaper housing or rent. It can help with reducing displacement, but it increases the cost of the market rate units. The overall problem is a lack of supply. Portland recently passed an IZ ordinance and it had devastating effects on new housing construction.
The municipality that I'm in lets developers ignore the state-wide law that mandates certain amounts of affordable housing to be built in new developments. The developers and real estate investors that are government officials also don't like to recuse themselves from such matters, either.
Who would do the suing? The people that can barely afford the housing? Surely it's not going to be the city, as the developer is more than likely in cahoots with the people that would be doing the investigating. Maybe I'm too cynical, but I've been in/around this world too long to see it as anything but cynical.
It seems like either a typical class action suit. The city's negligence/unenforcement led to higher rents in that neighborhood.
Or could be even easier to show that the lack of said units led to displacement for actual families.
I'm not saying it's easy peasy but if affordable unit advocates believe they are important then logically enforcing the regulations they fought for shouldn't be just shrugged off, at least as a signal to cities and developers.
There's a difference between affordable housing and "affordable housing"(tm) qualifying for a LIHTC.
Affordable housing is simply developing new housing that serves the market you intend to serve. It might be more humble, etc., to make it affordable for that market.
Part of the equation is realizing that there are also poor people who simply don't have enough to pay the rent on any place at all that is built according to building codes. Developers can't solve that problem, even with some kind of tax credit bible and tax consultants.
The problem is that the difference in market price of a house built to regular standards and one built to be "humble" isn't all that large. Most of the costs are fixed – land, permits, designs, materials and construction that are all up to code, utilities hookups, inspections, listing, sale process. So the distinction comes down to finishings and appliances, which are overall minor.
So whenever you force a developer to build affordable housing by placing caps on price, they will always be doing so at a loss and making up for it by inflating all the other units, skewing the market further.
Homes in the US now are about 1000 sf bigger than they were 50 years ago. I would bet this is mostly market-driven to maximize profit, but it's also politically created by zoning and ordinances, with the added bonus of keeping poor people who might afford a smaller home or a portion of a duplex/triplex out of your neighborhood.
Maximizing profits would mean building more units on the same land. So, subdivide lots, allow multi-family construction, increase the number of floors. The same people who disallow this then turn around and demand affordable housing.
"Affordable housing" always means "affordable high value housing for well adjusted middle class families" in politico.
Sure, the poor elderly, the homeless, and those with mental health and addiction challenges need a place to stay too, but it can't be here. We don't have people like that around these parts.
NYC affordable tm / connect housing is like must make less than 75k and pay 2.5k rent. If you make 75k you probably get to keep 48k and rent would be 25.5k, more than 50% of disposable income. Objectively worse off.
The assumption here is that housing can't be affordable by nature, but has to be made affordable by government intervention. Is that the case? Would it be possible to build an apartment building that simply will be affordable, without the government giving the developer a pile of other people's money?
I also wonder about the incentive that's created when artificially affordable housing is provided in an area that's expensive because of high demand: doesn't that prevent a shortage of low-skill labor that would otherwise be a limiting factor in that demand? That is, if it's too expensive for many people who might work low-paying service and manual jobs to live nearby, the rising cost of that sort of labor might begin to lessen other people's desire to live there and businesses' desire to locate there, mitigating the housing problem.
IMHO after being a landlord and homeowner: home affordability is doomed. Homeowners vote to stop new construction to prop up their investment. Homeowners pretty much own local legislation: mayors, supervisors, boards etc. There is really no hope. People don't want affordable homes in their neighborhood - they want affordable homes in your neighborhood. The only way to stop this madness is to inversely tax homes based on their share of affordable homes in their area through state laws. Good luck passing that.
From my own professional experience: it costs a minimum of $350 per net rentable square foot for new construction of mid-rise rental apartment buildings. This includes all materials, labor and design/permitting costs, and the cost of land acquisition in the urban core of a second-tier U.S. real estate market (NC Triangle). $350,000, 1000-square-foot three-bedroom apartments are affordable housing. But good luck finding one in a new building!
In both cases, we have quite a lot of historical evidence. There aren't many prominent examples of housing at all income levels being created without government intervention. And when there's an affordable housing crunch in a desirable city with a wide spectrum of jobs, people commute and live further away, which is bad for everyone involved.
If they simply did not charge income tax on home sales we would have an army of solo developers and house flippers engaging in a flurry of small builds. There is still cheap land to be had where single family 1500sq ft homes can be built but developers can't do it because of the up front costs and taxes making such a thing impossible for them. Solo builders can do it...until they factor in the governments' cut. The margins too thin, risk too great. Eliminating income tax on home sales is dead simple, has no cost, and would enable a lot of one-off projects.
I am trying to build a two bedroom house in a small country township in Ohio. My upfront costs just to get county, state, and township approval are already at $15k with me doing all the work. No approval yet. The piece of land (1ac) I'm developing was held by various corporate builders for years until I bought it from another individual for $7k. This house is for myself but it could easily be built on speculation and sold but I would have to live in it for three years to avoid the $30k income tax on the sale. No way am I fighting through all this red tape and risk to hand over $30k in taxes. That $30k is another piece of land brought to shovel ready for another build...pissed away. Income taxes are a regression to solo builders that make each build a daunting risk. The government is not allowing profit on smaller single family homes...period.
Can’t you avoid the income tax by incorporating and rolling profit into the next project expenses in the same year? I don’t see any reason to distort the market by removing income tax on income.
Perhaps, that sounds like more expense and red tape. Another barrier/wall that demonstrates my point exactly. Just to build homes? The people with these skills can't use them because of all the administrative, tax, and obscure compliance munitia hamstringing the process. The market is already distorted to hell.
This might be totally true for Ohio. Most of the attention on the housing crunch is in cities where there is zero cheap land and the only development that should happen is high-density.
> Would it be possible to build an apartment building that simply will be affordable, without the government giving the developer a pile of other people's money?
Sure it’s possible. How often, statistically, will it happen when there is a complete lack of financial incentive to do so? Basically never. My question is, what evidence and metrics show that it is always a net negative when the government creates incentives for affordable housing?
We don't really have that problem with other goods: is it possible to make cheap and expensive bed sheets, or kitchen scales, bookshelves, or phones? Yes, in all those cases, and there's a financial incentive to do so: people who cannot afford an expensive version will pay for one they can afford.
Where exactly is the difference between those goods and housing? At first I thought land, because the same land could be used for expensive or cheap housing — but that's the case with the raw materials for those other products, and just as in the case of land for housing, not all raw material is equally desirable.
As to your question, we really can't have good evidence one way or the other, because there are too many variables. I'm attempting to reason about it, and am not really sure I have answers myself, but I'm not comfortable assuming that having government take care of a problem makes the problem go away.
The difference is if you want to make a cheap phone the people who don’t want you to are few, but if you want to build a cheap home there are lots of people who will try to stop you.
The presence of the opposing force in numbers is what is damaging.
you can build a home for under 10k, nice ones too using earth bags. It's not up to code/zone everywhere and that's the catch. They're not dangerous to live in, and in fact - many are more structurally safe.
Bini-shell homes can withstand hurricane force winds and earthquakes and maybe even lava-flows assuming your door is shut and you don't get completely blocked in and suffocate.
Tiny homes cost about 50k to get and are portable. Yurts can make nice homes too. There's a TON of youtube videos on alternative housing 'ideas' beyond normal builds.
If I had a million dollars I'd build an intentional community with some glamping spots for revenue, and charge like $100/month/family member hoa fee or something, put whatever home you want on it. Camper, tent, yurt, earthbag, earthship, etc. Have to work out some legalities of ownership when people move/etc.
- Put some common buildings and share a lot of things like lawnmowers, 4-wheelers, power tools, etc. Things everybody owns but is really a waste of space when you could just have a community library of these things to checkout when needed.
- Outdoor games like horseshoes, frisbie golf, rockclimbing walls, movie screen.
- Locate it near Zion national park, or Grand Canyon.
- Glamping camp for additional revenue while building things out.
- Farming area and rain-capture tech to get the most use of our rainwater.
- Solar array.
- Commercial Kitchens, with weekly potlucks and volunteer-chef-supplied dinners (maybe tip your chef).
...etc
> Where exactly is the difference between those goods and housing?
The first difference is elasticity of demand. Housing is relatively inelastic in the short term due to land availability, time to build, and government regulation. This simply means that as price increases, quantity demanded does not decrease as much as it would for another good. For example, cereal is pretty elastic with good substitutes. If the price of cereal goes up, a good portion of consumers will switch products. In the long term housing is more elastic as people build more.
So, demand isn't changing a lot with price. And the second difference is that housing is a basic need. Let's make the assumption that housing is a truly competitive market without government regulation. The market will settle at different prices for different qualities of housing. It will be incredibly efficient and maximize consumer and producer surplus (economic goodness). But, people will be left out of the market. A perfectly competitive market DOES NOT guarantee that everyone will be able to purchase the product. It will just maximize consumer and producer surplus.
Okay, so we as a society think that we should provide some government assistance for those that cannot afford housing in this market. We have some options. We could implement a rent ceiling. Unfortunately, and this is well proven, price ceilings create shortages and inequities. Most economist do not agree with price ceilings. https://www.factcheck.org/2009/02/when-economists-agree/
We could provide programs as detailed in this article which effects the supply. As this article highlights, all government intervention WILL create market inefficiencies. The pie will get smaller. I'm not saying that the government should not act, I am simply saying that government interaction is a tradeoff between equity and efficiency in a competitive market without market failures.
I am a proponent of a voucher based system to give a credit towards rent for those in need. This reduces the government intervention on the supplier side. To be clear, these vouchers will slightly raise housing prices, likely not be implemented without exploitation, and make the overall economy slightly less efficient due to the tax. But the vouchers will also reduce inequity and provide people in need with a basic good.
I think a lot of the problem is from too much government intervention. For example, people get a lot of tax breaks as a landlord. This makes it more desirable to buy and then rent out a house. This shifts the demand curve right raising prices and removing some people from the market (it reduces home ownership rates). I think those tax breaks should be removed, especially if the house is not your primary residence or is your second or third home. People will make the argument that this hurts the poor because people won't build for them. But then the discussions above about a competitive market and the voucher system are better in my opinion than giving tax breaks to companies that own hundreds of homes.
> For example, people get a lot of tax breaks as a landlord
As a landlord that is wrong. You get to deduct the expenses you have for running the property against the rental income, but that's just how business works. Landlords have enormous deductions because operating a property is really expensive.
In fact, you pay higher taxes in a lot of cases. It is very common to give people a property tax deduction/reduction if it's a person's primary residence. Landlords don't get that. Many places also impose direct revenue taxes. So your city/county/state will take several percent of your revenue off the top.
Finally, after higher input taxes, paying all those business expenses, you get to pay income tax on what's left over.
Also, primary residences are subject to a $250k/$500k capital gains exclusion that rental properties do not get.
Pointing out that primary residents get great breaks does not mean that landlords do not also get tax breaks. They just don’t get those. And of course you pay tax on the income left over after expenses.
About the direct revenue tax. Government can impose a tax on a producer or consumer, but that doesn’t matter. The proportion of who pays that tax is purely based on the elasticities of both the demand and supply curve. Because demand is inelastic, that tax probably is paid mostly by the consumer through rent prices. I don’t live in a place where there is a direct revenue tax on rental income.
There are still breaks landlords get like the 20% pass-through deduction, 1031 exchanges, and interest rate deductions (similar to small business loans - which the government also wants to promote). Keep in mind that if some of these tax breaks apply to other types of businesses, they are still tax breaks for landlords incentivizing people to be landlords vs deciding not to enter the market. That is not a normative statement. I kept deductions for depreciation (which is huge), repairs, employee fees, etc out of the list since they are the expenses you mention.
it could happen if the regulatory environment were "right-sized" with a heavy emphasis on ensuring clear and concise information to potential buyers/renters to counteract the natural information asymmetry that arises in markets between producers and consumers. this is often a key missing piece to laissez-faire flavors of economics that leave markets more distorted and less competitive than ordinarily regulated markets.
that's not the only condition, but it is a necessary one, to create affordable housing without shoveling piles of tax money at developers. the market must also be made fair and competitive in other ways, and there must be enough volume for prices to equilibriate to new information quickly (which also requires new information to spread widely to consumers, as in the first condition above).
I find it odd that you almost never hear about the car's role in the housing crisis. And in the US it has been a massive factor since WWII.
First, it allowed the building of suburbs, which just wasn't feasible before. This in turn led people to push zoning laws such that building anything other than a SFH became illegal.
Second, it contributed to the dismantling of street cars and other forms of public transportation.
Third, all these cars new housing developments needed roads and this typically led to the destruction of poorer and usually more ethnic neighbours.
Fourth, driving everywhere is like living in an insulated bubble. You don't have to deal with your fellow man. Things like Skid Row (LA) or the Tenderloin (SF) don't touch you because you can just drive around them in an airconditioned bubble. I honestly think this contributed to making people care less about the plight of their fellow man.
Fifth, voters routinely complain about the cost and taxes of public transportation but think nothing of all the subsidies governments provide for driving (eg building roads, having gas stations, building so much parking, having cheap or free street parking even in densely populated cities with good public transportation like NYC). Yes there are fuel taxes. No they don't pay all these costs.
Lastly, we seem to be comoletely comfortable with the cost in death and crime of car ownership because of the personal convenience. Tens of thousands die in motor vehicle accidents every year. There are crimes like being a serial killer or kidnapping that almost require having a car. Do we really wonder why such things exploded post-WWII?
The affordable housing crisis is depressing because it's another stark reminder of just how little a fuck people give to people who aren't in their tribe. The many barriers erected are simply aimed at making poor people go away. That's it.
And the problems are at every level of government.
> I find it odd that you almost never hear about the car's role in the housing crisis.
This trope is repeated on HN almost every time any article resembling city planning comes up. It’s discussed here ad nauseam. Anyway, let’s do it again.
First, if you think cars are the problem, why is the housing crisis still persistent in NYC and Chicago?
Second, this is not a US-specific issue. Rent is just as bad in Europe and people just get by on much less space there that would be unacceptable to most people in the US who aren’t accustomed to paying $2k for an old 1-2br apartment in a transit friendly location in a city.
Finally, the reason car usage exploded was because it enabled people to have cheap housing and work in the city. All of the cheapest housing in the US is in small towns and exurbs where you can have a 3 bedroom house to yourself for $1300/mo. Houses with access to good public transit (not an hourly bus) cost significantly more.
On a square footage basis, the US has some of the cheapest housing for a developed nation.
While it legalized residential towers in DUMBO and other areas that have since gentrified, that also meant that the amount of redevelopable lots shrank. This increased the value of the remaining developable lots and made it harder for small developers to compete to get the remaining lots.
I can't find these links because they're from years ago and Google isn't great about looking up older links, but because of these policies the small-scale (<10 unit) developments did not recover their previous figures after the Great Recession, when traditionally that is how a good chunk of new housing gets built. (They also tend to be more affordable, because building a small building has a lower capital cost than building a large one and so more people can compete.)
---
As far as the square footage concern goes, I think that's valid, but I think the distinction is that the housing that people would find "unacceptable" in the US is also illegal. This raises the bar on what the minimum you need to rent any space is, and increasingly we are seeing ever larger segments of the population struggling to meet that bar. At some point we're going to have to ask if we dislike SROs so much we would rather have people on the streets.
"A few years after the 1900 riot [in which whites attacked blacks in midtown following the stabbing of an undercover police officer by a black man], as Harlem land values increased with the first subway line nearing completion in 1904, the black residents, once sought as renters in Harlem, became the targets of an organized removal effort by some white Harlem property owners."
"The [New York Herald] article also suggested that a rent increase “which the parlor car porters could pay, but their colored inferiors could not,” had previously been used as a strategy to remove the undesirable tenants."
> First, if you think cars are the problem, why is the housing crisis still persistent in NYC and Chicago?
This is a deep topic.
Homelessness is just one metric for an affordable housing crisis. I see estimates that there are ~80,000 homeless in NYC, being roughly 1% of the population. That's a lot and unacceptable but there's also a far bigger segment of the working poor and low-income.
I would argue that these people are less worse off in NYC than Chicago and certainly LA or SF simply because there is that transit system. Put another way: the homelessness situation would (IMHO) be significantly worse without that system.
For cities you need to consider a number of factors that play into this:
1. Minorities typically didn't have the option of moving to the suburbs post-WWII because they were excluded from purchasing or borrowing for homes;
2. Affordable neighbourhoods were demolished at a disproportionate rate to make way for freeways and interstates;
3. This all snowballed into the Great White Flight that lowered average incomes in cities, which diminished the tax base of those cities (among other things); and
4. When it suddenly became fashionable to live in cities again, those who had previously been abandoned there effectively were priced out or otherwise pushed out of their homes.
> Second, this is not a US-specific issue. Rent is just as bad in Europe and people just get by on much less space there
European countries have more of a social safety net. Some quick googling claims there are 10-11,000 homeless in London out of almost 9 million people, a rate roughly 1/8th that of NYC or LA.
But "Americans just want more space" is propaganda. We don't know that because it's extremely rare for Americans to have that choice due to almost all population centers only allowing single-family homes to be built. Low-density apartments, high-density apartments, row houses and multi-family dwellings are incredibly rare in the US because it's illegal to build them almost everywhere with exceptions confined to very narrow areas.
> Finally, the reason car usage exploded was because it enabled people to have cheap housing and work in the city
It enabled some people to do that, which is kind of the point.
When cities are designed around cars, you must have a car to participate in society. As a result, it's a significant tax on the poor. The recent oil price spike has caused many people to worry about being able to afford to work.
That's a whole separate topic: Americans are like "just drive" and a large chunk of them just hate the poor for not having enough money to have and maintain a car.
But what about the people who actually can't drive? Epilepsy, vision, etc. There are a ton of reasons. But like what do these people do? There are so few places you can live without a car in the US compared to any other country on Earth.
It is very much untrue that the rent is just as bad in Europe. In reality, it’s much, much worse in Europe than in US. In terms of income-to-housing costs ratio, most expensive US cities like NYC or Bay Area are below average of biggest 100 European metros, and more typical places like Boise or Las Vegas are an outright steal, compared to what Europeans pay.
It's also hard to define "income" without going into all the direct and indirect subsidies and income, e.g. is it adjusted for US health car spending coming out of "income", which you'd get for "free" in universal health care countries. Ditto living in Paris and not needed a car. v.s. that being the case in the US.
Yes, as you can observe, most of Europe less affordable to locals than US is, some places quite a bit more so. But I specifically said metros, where the situation is much worse. Rural housing, and housing in third or fourth tier cities in Europe can be indeed quite cheap. However, housing in second and first tier European cities is insanely expensive.
Here's an example: one of the countries that looks more affordable to US is Italy. Let's take a look at the the top metro in Italy, Milan.
Milan is now at around 4800 EUR/square meter. Average individual income is around 32k EUR/year, so average household income will be probably under 60k EUR/year, i.e. 5k EUR/mo. That means that a 100 square meter (~1100 square feet) dwelling will cost you just under half a million euros, your monthly mortgage will be something like 2k EUR, so your mortgage will be 40% of your before-tax household income. If you're unmarried, and making average wage, your chances of affording anything bigger than a one-bedroom are extremely slim, and even that will stretch your finances a lot.
The above is by no means extraordinary. Try doing the same for Rome or Florence, they are just as unaffordable as Milan. Bologna is slightly more affordable than that, but still less than NYC. And Italy is relatively affordable as far as Europe goes! Do the same for Netherlands, or UK metros, or France, or Germany. Truly, urban housing in US is very affordable all across the board.
Italy has been in headlines about this for years, young people living with parents into their 30s due to low incomes and high unemployment. At the same time income stats vs other WEU countries are problematic as the shadow economy is much larger.
It is true that Italy is not affordable at all for young, unmarried people, despite being overall more affordable than Europe average. It only makes it clear how bad the situation is in Europe, and how Americans have no idea how good and affordable housing in US is.
At the same time, prolonged living with parents, and multi generational households have, for many past centuries, been rather common in southern Europe, much more so than in the western, or, especially, northern Europe. Very high rates of living with parents is not necessarily indicative of economic situation, one also needs to consider cultural patterns.
That’s an interesting metric, price per sqft. Where’d you come across that in light of this context? I always heard of price per sqft on the context of building and as one of the metrics on Trulia and the like but as a high level metric to compare countries with and what that number rolls up to I find it fascinating and am curious how it would render as a heat map overlaid over counties and cities etc across the globe. Do you know of any such visualization/analysis? Even a table would be a good start.
Price per square foot is the metric to compare and classify like property in region.
It’s usually the best quick way to determine home valuation or reasonableness of price. Typically the scale will vary by metro area.
To visualize it, you’d need to control for different income tiers and local taxes. In my small city, a good condition average quality existing house is about $150/ft. The same house in a nearby suburb with fancy school district, etc is about $200/ft. That home in Queens, NY would be about $400-500/ft.
In most places, you need to build higher density as 3 decades of subsidized mortgage rates built out all of the usable space. Usually condos cost around 25% less per unit to build than a single/duplex home.
>why is the housing crisis still persistent in NYC and Chicago
Using Google data, New York has a land area of 783.8 km^2, where as SF has 121.4 km^2. New York has around 10 times the population of SF, with around 5.5 times the area. Yes New York has a housing supply issue, but it's able to host twice the density. Housing would always be a problem in a place that's desirable to live, but NY is much better at meeting that demand than SF.
You’re basically tilting at windmills talking to Americans about even slightly reducing their car use.
Many people simply can’t imagine a life without a car.
Many people gush about how they would love to drive less but suggest they walk anywhere or ride a bicycle and you’ll get a million excuses about why it won’t work for them.
Very few people are willing to put their money where their mouth is and choose to live a low or no-car life. Personally, I have. I grew up in the country, never learned to drive, managed with my feet and a bicycle, then rode the bus during college, and finally I moved to a city as an adult. Yes, I gave up a lot to do it, but it’s worth it to me.
Great. Cars are a significant contributor to the housing crisis. Would have been much better if that hadn’t happened.
Unfortunately, we need to build affordable housing in the cities we have, not in the cities in some magical world where the car didn’t take over.
Unless, of course, you want to wait a couple of decades for good public transportation to show up before housing the underserved.
Talking about how society should have done something different and casting blame moves the ball forward exactly zero steps, and talking about it in this article is an utter waste of time.
The public transpiration problem needs to be solved, but won’t be solved in the even the medium term and is a distraction from solving other problems we have today.
There's plenty of easy and cheap options that can be taken to shift cities away from car dependence without tearing them down and rebuilding them.
step one would be to abolish mandatory parking minimums. if a developer wants to use their entire lot size for housing and not provide any parking, they should be able to. if the market demands parking, the market can build market-rate parking. it's ridiculous that we have legal requirements for how much housing there is for cars, but not how much housing there is for people.
This, really, after growing up in NYC, then suburban Florida and then living abroad in Cities such as Tokyo, Manila and Jakarta, owning a car in those places, motorcycle and just walking around is really night and day in terms of disconnect and comfort.
Cars are a comfortable bubble and 100% in many high dense cities, useless or worthless, but necessary to get out of the cities sometimes (Tokyo is a large exception of course, but a car is def a nice option to experience while in Japan)
The thing is, outside of USA, zoning and such do not exist to the same extent so you do have much more owner consideration w/ whatever they want with their land which is good and bad, cheap housing across asia, but parking or getting around even outside your place to the main road is def tricky, open sewers, poorly closed sewers, no car parking (which is acceptable) no/minor motorcycle parking, no bike parking, the right of way of the road and the property ingress can be really close, and it's pretty amazing.
I agree 100% with your post, I just think many Americans do not know how things used to be, and never had the experience of going to places abroad which do not have many american problems. .
>Fourth, driving everywhere is like living in an insulated bubble. You don't have to deal with your fellow man. Things like Skid Row (LA) or the Tenderloin (SF) don't touch you because you can just drive around them in an airconditioned bubble. I honestly think this contributed to making people care less about the plight of their fellow man.
I'm not sure the car is to blame for this one.
When I'm driving a long drive with the same cars around me for an extended period of time, I think how in the past travelers would be able to chit chat and get to know each other. Cars prevent that. So why do I say it isn't the car's fault?
Because even in public transport, people isolate themselves from each other. Even when packed together so you are physically touching, you don't interact with others. People walk down sidewalks don't chat with each other unless they already know one another.
If cars were the problem, we wouldn't expect to see this behavior where there aren't cars, including in countries that don't have anything like the car culture the US does. But we do. Something else is at play. I'm not sure what it is, but it doesn't seem fair to blame cars without some stronger evidence.
I've also noticed that attitudes towards the homeless are completely different between those who walk and those who drive. I'm personally willing to pay whatever it takes in extra taxes to get them shelter and deal with the current crisis in my city, but I've noticed that people who drive are often far less willing to support action here.
There are people that talk about the effect the car has. This is probably the best explanation of what we've become because of it: Not just bikes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
Cars have been at the center of western urban planning for many decades. This crisis is a recent development. And it happened in partbecause we’ve STOPPED building freeways, suburbs, and in general neighborhoods people want. Instead we build giant fortress style apartments and crowded “condos” that no one wants to live on if they can avoid it, driving the existing single family home prices through the roof. It’s not car culture that’s killing is, it’s mythical thinking about what actual influence climate doomerism and squealing about NIMBYs has on the electorate.
>First, it allowed the building of suburbs, which just wasn't feasible before. This in turn led people to push zoning laws such that building anything other than a SFH became illegal.
Possibly, because blaming the car by taking a detour through a motivated political movement doesn't make sense to people? Suburbs would be impossible without cars, true, and airstrikes would be impossible without airplanes, but that seems like a poor case for blaming government policy on an inanimate object.
>Third, all these cars new housing developments needed roads
All economic activity needs roads. Those roads get wider because of cars, but their existence is felt most strongly in the wider economy because of trucks. Being able to transport goods anywhere with low latency makes a huge difference to the operation of thousands if not millions of businesses.
>Fourth, driving everywhere is like living in an insulated bubble. You don't have to deal with your fellow man.
Just earlier tonight I was driving and nearly got hit by some other driver who ran a red light.
>Things like Skid Row (LA) or the Tenderloin (SF) don't touch you
Liberals really need to work on not sounding like they want people to get robbed.
>I honestly think this contributed to making people care less about the plight of their fellow man.
Someone in Utah honestly believes that the reason Californians won't deal with the homeless problem is because they don't go to church. But neither of you gave me any evidence.
I agree. I don't want the government to subsidize housing by 4-20%. I just want them to stop pursuing policies that drice up prices 2-10x. This includes things like minimum size requirements, minimum parking requirements, maximum height requirements, excessive permitting, community review requirements, environmental reviews, mortgage subsidies, and more.
Solving housing is "easy", there are just tradeoffs, none of which to me seem like so bad. I typically only see NIMBYs on the other side.
Haha, yes! That's so annoying, that we've contorted the language to the point that one can end up saying things like, "I support making housing affordable, but I'm not for Affordable Housing(tm)."
I’ve always understood the process (in a certain US state that will remain unnamed) to be that apartments can dedicate some portion of their units to be Section 8 which then allows the owner to get some fat tax breaks. In return, the owner agrees to submit to periodic inspections to prove that the units are well-kept and to only offer those units to tenants the city seems low-income/needful.
This idea of purpose-building one entire low-income/needful apartment building seems insane. Apportioning units from regular apartment blocks seems like a much better approach. At the very least, the investors aren’t holding their breath for the profit to come in.
Why don’t we make all housing more affordable by drastically increasing the supply of housing?
How do you do that you might ask? Look at that list of blockers and uncertainty. Stack rank them by importance and start removing them.
If we want more affordable housing the answer is supply.
And if we (god forbid) decide we want the government involved in building it we should copy the one place with an inarguably successful project. That’s Vienna.
It astounds me we can be this bad at picking policies that lead to the outcomes we actually want.
Initially it started out as a brilliant idea - a Twitter thread that serves as a bullet point hook for an article with more details and upsells. Reader gets quick value and the writer gets exposure, clicks and leads - everybody wins!
On the other hand some managed to completely miss the point and mangle this whole scenario to the point where the effect is essentially reversed. Impressive really.
I think it's due to most users' preference to stay on the same platform and not have to go to another (e.g. browser) to read about something. Even if moving from Twitter from chrome takes just as much time as opening a thread, most users would prefer to open the thread rather than chrome.
This could be a good opportunity to figure out why users prefer to stay on the same platform. Some interesting psychology must be at play.
Can housing be something like a college dorm? Ie individual bedrooms with shared dining/kitchen areas or even a cafeteria. Ie could that be offered outside of a college campus.
This is a technical answer ignoring human factors, as you can often see on HN.
Poor areas are prone to have more violence, and sharing intimacy will make the consequences of that dreadful.
It's already hard to be weak or a pray in the dangerous part of town. But if you have to be in close contact with aggressive groups for your daily living, it will turn into a nightmare.
Imagine a woman having the pee at night, how safe would she be if she had to exit her flat, cross the corridor and go to public toilets where people also sell drugs ?
Doorm rooms are fine in universities or back packers because people seeking education or travelling are usually not the same ones are those who will mug you.
But as someone who went to a poor high school: the rules are not the same there, and the law is going to help you.
In short, such proximity would allow a minority of destructive people to make the entire neighborhood hell.
Not all dorms have shared bathrooms. Like put that stuff at the back of it. There’s even probably a way to combine all the requirements into one living area with minimal partitioning at another extreme. In a sense people are already experimenting with this with tiny homes. People will be people, but a good portion of your concern can be addressed through design.
In France we used to have a lot of common living areas. And we got rid of them.
Why ? Because indeed we realized that we could address those problems with design.
In this case, the good design is called a private appartment.
Honestly those things are so important that anybody stating they can create them differently should be forced to live in them for 10 years in the worst part of the city, like roman bridge builders were forced to sleep under their construction.
Your assumption, as stated, is that “poor places tend to be prone to violence”. That actually leaves no path for a nonviolent situation by premise of building housing for lower/lowest costs.
I agree that the problem is nuanced and need to carefully avoid the people making problems for one another. If France has solved the housing problem I’m sure the world is ready to listen.
"if the community is full of idiots" - When you are so condescending to other people and society rules, I really can see why there are so many rules and regulations preventing other "non-idiots" to build houses.
Je. Sus. Can anyone give an example of this process in another (easier) country? I guess what i'm asking is, is this a local, state or federal red tape issue?
Housing is yet another example of how the more government - The Fed + Federal and local - weighs in (read: thumb on the scale) the more things get distorted. Slapping "fixes" on top of that isn't going to fix anything, as we keep seeing time and again.
Those calling for more and more of that same? You're part of the problem.
In the US, at least, a majority of development is largely dedicated to SFH developments or multi family housing (ie, "duplexes"). We have a large emphasis on encouraging urban sprawl rather than scaling vertically. Any remaining land that is not zoned for SFH is mostly sold to private developers where it only makes financial sense to develop luxury condos (especially in some hostile markets where the building code is constrained).
Solving the affordability crisis in the US will require a multifaceted approach involving radical changes in existing land zoning and building code; decoupling our city planning from roads + cars to alternative modes of transportation such as walking, biking, or public transportation; and having the O&G and auto industries pay their share for getting us into this mess.
Legal code is identical to software in the respect that they are bounded by complexity and human understanding more so than physical constraints, and so both need to be periodically refactored to reduce complexity.
Software engineers get this, politicians seem to not.
"Administrative burden" is the phrase that pushed to the front of my head. So much bureaucracy.
Hearing tales from my activist friends, this LIHTA tale most reminds me of the gauntlet exfelons brave to get their voting rights restored. My own state had 20+ steps. Like getting the original sentencing judge to signoff. For people who already have the legal right to vote, were it not for the paperwork.
My second thought is about the strategy of housing advocates. Instead of lobbying, maybe they should be underwriting. PKIs showing how many units got built would mosdef help with fund raising.
I wonder what is actually looked at or calculated for number of bedrooms and services offered. In my opinion, people's preferences for more stuff/room/services are what drives housing prices in general, especially location.
It seems racist to call people who are concerned about the project racists. Some of them may be, but some of those people concerned about traffic may have legitimate concerns. I've seen it for fancy developments too.
I'm onboard with the notion that a significant amount of opposition to low-income housing in many areas stems both from racism and fear of racist stereotypes. That said, I think a lot of home owners are very defensive regarding their illiquid assets and generally just don't like things that affect their property values. Low-income housing is one of those things. Less wealthy folks moving in nearby is one of those things.
Put simply, I don't think you have to be a racist to be a classist. Whether that is any better, well, probably not, but call it what it is.
It's poor form to point out that a racism accusation is one of the most effective political attacks/responses. Said effectiveness is not that dependent on the "truth" of said accusation. (The sneer quotes are because "you're a racist" is somewhat ill-defined, vague, etc.)
It's twitter! He is going over the countless hurdles one has to successfully jump. Each has been designed to do something sensible but may turn out quite senseless. Twitter has room for a single example of that not an elaborate write up. He also illustrates how frustration grows and one might not have the patience to sensibly respond to the thousand cuts.
There should be a single government body that deals with the hurdles in a timely, professional and affordable way.
You have a point, but it may be a bit obtuse to call racist accusations themselves racist. Those call outs may or may not be correct, ignorant, or even a calculated dirty way to discredit someone, but how are they themselves racist?
Pretty much why I worded it the way I did - to bring attention to they potential hypocrisy or lack of standards around calling people racist based on a concern (traffic, or claiming racism) that does not display racism. So yeah, my calling the accusation racist is only as founded as the author's, which is essentially based on stereotypes and supposition. In my case, that supposition is that the person making the accusation must be relying on the race of the person raising the traffic issues in calling them racist.
You don't need a view into someone's soul to call them a racist. Racism in this context isn't necessarily about individual interpersonal malice.
If a development would greatly help members of a historically oppressed group and somewhat hinder members of a historically powerful group, and you knowingly argue against the development on those grounds, you're supporting a policy that has unjust racial consequences.
"A racist" is a useful shorthand for a person taking those actions in that context. It's not a permanent immutable judgement about the inner workings of their mind or motivations. Just an assessment of some of their actions.
> If a development would greatly help members of a historically oppressed group and somewhat hinder members of a historically powerful group, and you knowingly argue against the development on those grounds, you're supporting a policy that has unjust racial consequences.
That's not racist, though. I mean, it can be, but that's just caring about your own property value more than caring about righting unjust racial consequences. It's still selfish and kinda shitty, but racist? C'mon... I feel like the term is getting watered down by everyone who likes to use it to shut down discussion of something they don't like.
> "A racist" is a useful shorthand for a person taking those actions in that context.
"If a development would greatly help members of a historically oppressed group and somewhat hinder members of a historically powerful group, and you knowingly argue against the development on those grounds, you're supporting a policy that has unjust racial consequences."
Are they arguing against it on those grounds? The tweets don't go any further than calling people racists that bring up traffic or environmental issues.
Look I'm trying to find a charitable way to read this, really. But why is your project here establishing a narrow definition of racism with a high burden of proof?
Systems and policies that have disparate racial impacts are racist. Resisting changes to those policies that would narrow the impacts is somewhere on the wack-to-definitely-racist continuum, yes depending a lot on the specific details of the situation.
What matters here is the impact, not the intention. If someone is supporting a policy with a racist result, or resisting changes to them, I'm gonna call them racist too. If they don't like that assessment they can ignore it or stop those actions.
"But why is your project here establishing a narrow definition of racism with a high burden of proof?"
I don't believe my statement is looking for a narrow definition,
just a valid one. I'd like some level of proof. It doesn't have to be high. The real problem here is the insinuation that people who bring up potentially valid issues related to a low income housing project are racist. Their concern could be a valid one with no racial basis.
"What matters here is the impact, not the intention."
Please, do show me a definition that shows intent is not a component. The dictionaries I looked at do not agree with you. Even then, would it be racist for you to assume a specific race is disproportionately affected by low income housing? If a race is affected disproportionately by lack of housing, are you inviting any of the affected people to share your home? Does that make you racist?
"Systems and policies that have disparate racial impacts are racist."
No, they have "disparate racial impacts".
By your definition, what system isn't racist? Every system has some disparity of racial impact, even if it is meritorious (take the recent posts on here about Harvard quotas and Asians). I firmly believe that without intent, a system is not racist, but could have racial disparities - there is a difference. The definition you're trying to push seems to be more worthy of the insults you're pushing at me.
You mention a racist policy. What policy is that? As there is not one mentioned in the context of sentence mentioning racism.
If a development would greatly help members of a historically oppressed group and somewhat hinder members of a historically powerful group
There are a lot implicit assumptions in here of outcomes you cannot predict, and which I'm frankly a little dubious you can precisely define and measure in a falsifiable way.
I didn't see any context that would support that, given that the only mention of people it these sorts of concerns were labeled as racists. Did I miss something?
The thread talks about hypothetical, rather than specific people who oppose development in bad faith using other reasons to hide their true, often racially- or class- tinged reasons. You decided to call the author of this thread (a real person) a racist because they mention imaginary racists.
"You decided to call the author of this thread (a real person) a racist because they mention imaginary racists."
Did I? You might want to read back. I said calling people racist for bringing up traffic issues could itself seem racist.
"The thread talks about hypothetical, rather than specific people who oppose development in bad faith using other reasons to hide their true, often racially- or class- tinged reasons."
Did I miss the part about classist people? I only saw NIMBY and race mentioned.
Are these hypothetical people? It seems the author is using real life experiences in this article, so in this context I assume they are talking about real, yet unnamed, examples they have witnessed. If not, it seems odd that they would offer up detailed, named, real examples for other parts, but not for this. Seems a bit hand wavy about it happening at any significant scale as well as in it's implication that people concerned about a traffic issue are all racists since there is no mention of the legitimate concern.
I'd rather not read back because then I'd have to read a really lousy comment in which you decide to focus on a single detail of this thread you find provocative, deploy a horrid flamy 'who are the real racists' trope and then complain about downvotes, all of which the guidelines ask you not to do. Beside just being kind of awful. Just don't this shit.
"I'd rather not read back because then I'd have to read a really lousy comment in which you decide to focus on a single detail of this thread you find provocative, deploy a horrid flamy 'who are the real racists' trope and then complain about downvotes, all of which the guidelines ask you not to do. Beside just being kind of awful. Just don't this shit."
Please do read back because you have you're facts wrong. My comment mentioned the racist labeling issue. But it primarily was focused at bringing up the issue of how housing preferences are a big part of costs. It seems nobody wanted to talk about that part and instead chose to go after this other part.
I don't believe I violated any guidelines. My comment was intended to talk to the substance of the article (housing costs) and also call into question the validity of insinuating that people raising potentially valid issues in their communities is somehow racist. The author doesn't even address the traffic claims in detail. It's possible the person rasing the traffic issue isn't opposed to the project based on race but on another reason like cost to the community to re-engineering the intersection (it's quite common to make developers pay for the traffic modifications and allow the project to continue).
I don't see my comment as being flame bait. I had no intention of it spawning such extensive replies. I believe all of my comments have been high quality and served a valid point/correction/etc. If you can't see that, can you explain why? You claim I'm employing a horrid troupe, yet this seems to violate the HN guideline to be charitable. I'd much rather discuss the actual content than this discussion about each other's comments.
I don't believe I complained about downvoting. I merely asked why. To me this seems fair to ask as discourse can generate new knowledge and that curiosity is a big part of hacker culture. There are a lot of other users on this site who have seen downvotes abused and would like to see comments attached.
The guidelines, linked at the bottom of the page, say "don't comment about the voting on comments", which is what you did. Please don't do that anymore. That there are a lot of users who would like to see discussions of downvotes is why the guideline is there.
If you are enforcing the guidelines (no idea if you're a mod or someone else), can you remove the main post since it clearly violates guidelines for being a political topic that is not a new phenomenon, and also counsel the other individuals for violating the guidelines by misinterpreting my comments and calling my opinions/discussion and curiosity "shit"?
I try to abide by the guidelines. Would a better way to be curious be "why disagree without comments?". I would like to facilitate discussion in accordance with the hacking principle and HN guideline of being curious (it would really suck if I'm not allowed to be curious here). I'm not sure how we can facilitate this discussion without asking for additional clarification or reasoning. This should lead to discussion of the content, and maybe provide one or more parties with additional knowledge or clarify a misunderstanding. Certainly it provides more value than downvoting a comment just because one disagrees with it, as votes don't contribute to discussion nor curiosity.
Allowing for (even encouraging) downvotes without comment or explanation is an explicit goal of the site, which was designed by someone who was irritated with the clutter of superficial negative comments.
Oh, thats different from what I've heard. Do you have a source? I'm wondering what the context and details were.
My understanding was that downvotes without comments are appropriate/encouraged for specific types of comments, like bots, spam, comments without any substance, or violations of the guidelines. Essentially, comments in reply to those do not supply any additonal content or contribute to the discussion (hence the additional clarification in the guideline about boring reading in relation to comments on voting), and responding to them can just turn into a thread of comments that lack any substance. However, a comment that seeks to discuss various points related to the article and are downvoted simply because people disagree seem to violate the principle of curiosity and discussion.
Basically, I thought questions out of curiosity, even around downvotes were ok. Also that downvoting is more or less targeted at guideline violations and not just disagreement. But Maybe I'm taking dang out of context. Like I'm not trying to argue my downvotes and change their minds. I just want to know why I was downvoted so I can learn.
The guidelines couldn't be much clearer about this: Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
This thread is fulfilling the Guideline Prophecy now, so here's where I bow out.
That's odd since you were the one to resurrect this thread that I thought was finished. I'm still waiting for your source on this:
"Allowing for (even encouraging) downvotes without comment or explanation is an explicit goal of the site, which was designed by someone who was irritated with the clutter of superficial negative comments."
Although, again, the guidelines are super-explicit about not going on about voting, not dingleberrypicking one thing that irritates you in a post, etc. And generally, you can just type author:dang [your topic of choice] into search and get a learned opinion. You'll find most of your interpretation of the guidelines above to be inaccurate.
"Although, again, the guidelines are super-explicit about not going on about voting"
I merely asked for additionally context for a conversation. Others have instigated this longer conversation. They don't seem super explicit if two guidelines conflict with each other, especially if it conflicts the core principles of curiosity and discussion.
"not dingleberrypicking one thing that irritates you in a post"
Again, if you read back you can see that it wasn't one thing in my comment, but that others decided to engage on one part of my comment and largely ignore the other.
"And generally, you can just type author:dang [your topic of choice] into search and get a learned opinion."
Which I did, and posted the previous link that seems to indicate that downvotes are more for comments breaking guidelines than for disagreeing without comment. However, I do see that the links posted by you have pg stating that downvoting is used for disagreement. Seems a little odd though, that it's purpose is for disagreement but we can't downvote replies that we disagree with. This logical issue seems to indicate that it's not just for disagreement, and that debate and discussion is also valued (as stated in the guidelines).
"You'll find most of your interpretation of the guidelines above to be inaccurate."
Or perhaps you are misapplying the guidelines because you misunderstand the facts of this scenario.
No, the facts are you dingleberrypicked, used a trope and complained about downvoting. You also think political discussions aren't allowed here, that the goal of 'curiosity' is more or less whatever you want, that downvoters owe you receipts, etc. You can literally find big dollops of moderator comments directly contradicting all of these - you simply happen to be wrong about these straightforward things. They aren't any less straightforward because you don't like them and you haven't even got around to acknowledging you are wrong about even the straightforwardest. Let's wrap up here.
This is a chance for you to meet the folks on your city council. Most will believe that supporting affordable housing is correct, but many are worried about the “public perception” of voting for low-income housing.
Not where we live. Perception is they are voting for mostly high end, luxury housing at the behest of the developer who of course is trying to maximize profit.
With statements like this, it’s important to define “government” — for example, the specifics in the Twitter thread are hugely helpful in identifying the actual bottlenecks.
Tenant protection laws seem like failures to me. They don't prevent landlords from being bad actors (by neglecting maintenance and not giving a shit about the quality of the property) and they don't protect landlords from bad tenants. All they do is allow a few people to get evicted 6 months and thousands of dollars in legal fees later instead of in a week.
Our previous landlord was an absolute nutjob (we found out later he'd been doing all sorts of strange/illegal things and had a ridiculously high tenant turnover; shame since it was a nice unit).
Eventually, his wife came on one of the inspections and decided we weren't fit to grace her property, so we were given 120 days to vacate. This is the minimum in Victoria for "without cause" eviction.
While incredibly stressful (and I still don't think the laws are strict enough; "without cause" eviction should be as difficult as "without cause" firing), it was long enough to find another suitable property to move to. I couldn't imagine how terrible it would be to only be given, say, a week's notice until we were homeless.
I've lived in the East Bay for years (this is _the_ worst housing market period) and being evicted is hardly the worst outcome:
Apartment which we applied to but didn't rent:
- owner insisted that we follow her rules about living habits (e.g. get up/sleep times) or we wouldn't be allowed to rent (this was a large building of 20+ apartments)
- subtle hints during our tour that she profiled everyone and only rented to those people she considered to be "responsible" people
- threw a tantrum at us and returned our rental application when we asked for a few days to sort out the contract signing and then proceeded to lecture us on responsibility
- heating was controlled by her for the entire building (imagine what it would be like to live there)
Apartment 1:
- mouse/rat infestation which the landlord addressed by saying they put up traps instead of calling an exterminator
- rampant spider infestation which landlord refused to do anything about (seriously, I've never seen so many different colored spiders)
- landlord started arguing with us at our door when we threatened to report them to the city for above
- our downstairs neighbor's shower stopped working and still wasn't fixed by the time we moved out
Apartment 2:
- mold growing in the bathroom and sharp splinters coming out of what must have been 50 year old hardwood floors, no fix from landlord so we taped the floor where there were nails/splinters
- only 1 burner worked on the stove (no fix from landlord)
- power to the entire building would flip on and off at least once a month
You couldn't get out without paying for the rest of the lease. That's what made it so much worse than what you're describing. I would have gladly been evicted from these hellholes.
It ended up being the case that the corporate landlords in the area were actually much better behaved than the local ones.
Affordable housing is such a loaded term that means different things to different socioeconomic groups. Are we talking about project based housing? Section 8? New construction for applicants with x% of the the median income? In any event almost no one working a full time job will qualify.
Governments only want other people money (so called taxes/donations), and, sometimes, be elected.
Thinking that governments can not provide themselves affordable and usually free housing is somehow contradict reality.
This Twitter thread hits the nail on the head. Imagine this process in California, where just working with PG&E to get utilities to the site may be a six figure adventure, then another $40-60k for an electrician to wire the house. That could be close to $200k for electrical alone. This could be for a 1,000 square foot shed in Oakland, not somewhere around Malibu.
Add on the planning costs that the Twitter author goes on about, and your "affordable housing" is now near a million dollars. Is that really affordable?
I can build the entire house with everything included. And not from those pesky woodsticks, but from a real concrete and bricks. For around $40k. Something in US is seriously wrong. I understand that labour cost difference is huge, but it can’t be the only factor.
I was just thinking the same thing. I was involved with a development project in Colombia, a three-story tract of 3b/2b apartments. The total construction cost was about $40k each. Permits and fees was maybe $1000 plus a year of waiting and a few bottles of gift-wrapped tequila. Selling prices were $50–70k, some rented at $250/month.
There are a lot of articles out there covering the basics on everything from environmental review to open space requirements to labor, but they can be summed up by just saying that local government in most American cities has never not been somewhat corrupt all through the past and going on to this day, and politically connected people stand to make a lot of money from this status quo that doesn't take an expert to see hurts the average working person. I think the FBI has indicted three sitting LA city councilmembers within the last couple of years now? It's amazing how the headlines don't seem to stick though, uncanny really.
This is an example that I just found. It’s almost ready and without internal decoration. Cost is $50k but keep in mind that it includes 1800 sq.m. of land. Electricity, water seems to be done. Internal decoration with good materials I’d estimate to $10-20k. House is 160 sq.m.
The old world associates US construction with 'houses made of paper', where anyone can break into your house just by kicking in a hollow wooden door.
Even in UK it was shocking to find out that walls between apartments are just plaster, that's totally unacceptable in continental europe, When i tell my folks that I could break through to the neighboirs with a kitchen knife, their brain implodes (It would take a while)
That's weird. Living in Ireland I found the houses to be crap, with blown bricks, no insulation, terrible draughts, and no eaves (encouraging water ingress). I was delighted to build myself a proper stud frame home insulated with 200mm rockwool throughout.
And that's why you pour the concrete directly into walls with rebars inside. Much stronger than cinder blocks and 10 times cheaper. But hey, nobody wants to actually do quality work, let's just fuck around with lego.
Don't know where "here" is in your case but do you have skyscrapers? Because if you look at any documentary how a skyscraper is build, it's with pouring cement over rebars, not with stacking cinder blocks. Do you think those guys would not rather prefer stacking cinder blocks over rebars instead of pouring if would've been cheaper?
Skyscrapers have to hold the weight of the skyscraper, cinder blocks wouldn't work. Cinder blocks probably max out at two or three stories unless you do brick on concrete frame like you see in some countries.
Wood also maxes out at some point, and even poured concrete - which is why the tallest skyscrapers are glass on steel.
Do you think they build skyscrapers and two-story houses the same? That's like saying Honda Civics and Abrahams tanks are built the same because they're both vehicles.
Both have engines, and both have crankshafts. So, yeah, at least partially, they are built the same. Now, translating that to our comparison of 2-story house vs. skyscraper, both have floors. Do you see on skyscrapers, when doing said floors, using concrete pouring or cinder blocks? Because if cinder blocks are cheaper, they would've been used for decking/ceiling a floor, but they always use concrete pouring.
Unfortunately for most Americans who are building a house, a primary concern is the eventual sale, and anything that is not the standard house is a harder sell.
Which means that if you're willing to stray from the beaten path you can find some deals, and some disasters.
Many of the trades can make good money. Especially in areas that forbid owners to work on their own homes, even to replace an existing water heater (like NYC).
Well, I think NYC made it law that hardware stores can only sell hot water heaters to licensed contractors. Not sure what other restrictions there are.
Very true. Depending on the modifications (like electrical), insurance could deny claims if they find unapproved/unpermitted work, even if it wasn't the cause, or the cause was unknown (depends on the policy).
Around here, if you don’t want to buy a house with un-permitted work, it’s no problem; there’s another buyer standing right behind you (often literally) who will.
Around here they make about $150 an hour if they are contractors and work for themselves. So I would guess 80-100 for an electrician with 5+ years experience. About the same as most other semi-specialized trades.
I’m a slow as hell perfectionist DIYer and I can’t see any way I could take even 2 months of full-time work to wire a small, simple new construction house. How can it take a pro 4 months? (Or 2 months solo and 1 month with a journeyman electrician?)
My parents place was new, custom construction (not small, but only 3BR/3Ba) and there were 2 sparkies there for 1 day to set the temporary power, 4 or 5 days to rough the house in and, after drywall, they were back for 3 or 4 days to trim everything out.
I watched my house being built. We'd visit the site pretty much once a week or every other week.
One day we showed up, and all of the electrical had been done. Power, internet, pre-wired home alarm, panels, the whole kit. Plumbing was the same way. One day, plumbing. (It uses that flexible plastic tubing internally, that has to go up fast.)
Did I see it being done? No. For all I know 50 folks showed up and wired it in a day. "2 man months". But, I'm guessing that's not what happened.
The most interesting anecdote from this is that I actually met one of the guys that did the work. He did, at least part of, the internet wiring.
Know how I met him? He was driving a dump truck delivering landscaping material. He liked the work better, I guess his family owned the hauling business.
I don't know what he was getting paid to route CAT 6 cable, but, apparently, all told, driving a dump truck is better.
You pay $300/hr for electrical work, and by the time it trickles down to the actual apprentices doing the grunt work it’s $20-40/hr. Even the electrician officially in charge is $100/hr at best unless he owns the company (and then it’s often lower due to bad accounting).
Wiring a simple / small home, it takes well over four electrician months, minimum.
It’s hard to take these numbers seriously - they don’t pass the sniff test for anyone who has had it done. Wiring a 1000sq ft home is a job that is measured in days, not months. While I only have experience of the UK, it is difficult to see any possible regulation which would mean installation being quite literally an order of magnitude slower.
But let’s use some Fermi estimation. California builds around 100,000 new houses a year, give or take. This suggests we’d need an absolute minimum of 400,000 electrician-months a year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics thinks there are 70,000 electricians in California in total. Assuming they have an availability of 90%, then we could say that California has about 750,000 available electrician-months a year in total.
This would mean that over half of all available electrician time in California would be spent wiring new-build houses, if we assumed they were all small properties. It seems clear this can’t be a credible result.
I’m not saying you’re necessarily wrong, but it’s hard to swallow without some idea of what possible thing could cause this betone vague hints about “code being insane“
He may just have gotten bad contractors. A friend of mine lives in a council run appartment in the UK and some simple jobs that have been carried out on his building have run into years, with multiple people on site every day (mostly doing nothing or doing stuff so badly that it needs another team to come in and rectify).
Recent example, upgrade to fire doors in corridors on 3 floors. Halfway into the job they realise each corridor is a different height and the doors they have already bought are the wrong size. Some levels of incompetance are hard to imagine until you see it happening in real time.
I’m a little skeptical. California code is not that dissimilar to the national code in terms of labor and materials. I’ve had extensive work done to my California house by electricians for a (fully-permitted) remodel and it’s been pricey but not that slow or pricey.
That's probably the cheapest upgrade in the history of the state. PG&E claims the average service upgrade in California is costing somewhere between $8k to $25k.
You also have situations like my friend - his current 100 amp service is arial, but if he wants to upgrade to 200 amp service he will have to pay for buried line.
Amusingly enough you can add a separate 100 amp service arial if you convert to a duplex even if just on paper ...
Personally I think they are exaggerating how long the actual work takes. However trades are in high demand due to significant remodels and commercial construction so it might long time to find someone.
On an unclad, sanely sized house that's still like two days for the apprentice to install and pull cable, tops. $200 for the poor sod doing the work, $80p for his boss, and $2k for the company is still nowhere near 2 electrician months of labour.
Every state requires pipe in many places, industrial, most commercial, large multi-unit buldings. The only place in the USA that I know requires pipe in resi is Chicago.
That seems... not true? The wiring in my 12-year-old home in CA does not seem to be particularly complicated, and I doubt code has changed much in the past decade. With all the drywall off, I can't imagine it taking more than a few days (for 2-3 people) to completely wire my (~1900 sqft) home.
I worked some construction. It was 15 years ago, but I, me, nobody else, wired up the whole small house in a couple days. The walls were open. It was fast, easy work. The only thing I didn't touch was the service panel and the connection to the pole.
Materials are not a "small percentage of the cost". Wire and switchgear are painfully expensive these days. On the other hand, two guys with hustle can rough in a typical house in 2-3 days.
> but that was never actually an economically viable product
There are clearly lots of these buildings. And have been for decades. It may not work "forever" but it has worked.
Your argument reminds me of the economist who steps over the $100 bill on the ground since it couldn't possibly be there because if it was, someone would have picked it up by now.
>but that was never actually an economically viable product
It is the most economically viable product, which is why they dominate.
>for four to sixteen units that seems like it could be fine?
Those costs have also skyrocketed because now you have additional requirements like fire, egress, additional structural when going over two stories, etc.
It's why most new apartments are "luxury" apartments. The costs have grown so out of control that the only way to break even is to make them outrageously priced.
>It is the most economically viable product, which is why they dominate.
Only because they are the only thing that most zoning codes in the U.S permit to build. With U.S zoning being what it is, there's literally no honest discussion to be made on what type of housing is most economically viable.
I think it’s quite viable if we look back to when it started. Back then hones we’re 800sq feet. Even 100 years ago an average home was about there. Today they are 2400 so feet on average.
So if we go back to smaller places it’s viable. The only reason it’s not viable in places like Europe is because there are so many people in a small space. In the USA we could get adequate population density with 1200 sq foot homes and 1/8 acre plots.
The land has gotten so expensive that the kind of people who can afford a SFH lot for their personal use, not to become a duplex or quadplex or whatever, can also afford to build a 2400 sqft house without it really mattering. Now a quadplex in the same spot could split that lot cost across 4 families.
In places where land is cheap, infrastructure is expensive. Roads, electricity, water, sewers, internet. Higher commute cost is also a cost in productivity.
This is often touted, but I just doubt that electricity, water, and sewers are more expensive outside of the city.
My father managed several factories in the LA area. Upgrading the electrical for new equipment in the close to downtown factory was going to cost something like a 6 to 7 figure sum. The factory in the boondocks upgrade was a quarter of the price.
Factories are themselves dense in resource usage, so it's different. It's a matter of scale.
A suburban neighborhood that hosts a few dozens of families requires more infrastructure, but can be replaced by a single 10 to 20-story building. An large apartment complex can serve hundreds of families.
Now, it doesn't have to be a dichotomy. It should be even more cost effective to build tall apartment buildings in the suburbs near the city. City-nations tend to expand capacity by creating new towns in suburban areas and extensive planning. That's much more efficient than US-style suburban sprawl.
> It is the most economically viable product, which is why they dominate.
It's the only legal product.
Very different.
If you ban shoes that aren't made of gold, everyone is going to have terrible, expensive shoes. This would not be evidence that gold shoes were economically viable. Especially if every locale that adopted this rule was deeply in debt.
Where’d this nonsense that the only thing you can build in the US is SFH come from? All over the US, in the same areas where there are SFH, there are apartment complexes, condos, and townhouses. The reason there’s so much SFH in the US is because, believe it or not, many people prefer living in a detached home with some semblance of a yard.
>Where’d this nonsense that the only thing you can build in the US is SFH come from? All over the US, in the same areas where there are SFH, there are apartment complexes, condos, and townhouses.
Because it's very often true. Many neighborhoods that have apartments and townhomes mixed with SFH are full of grandfathered-in buildings that would be illegal to build under current zoning codes, due to setback/lot-fill/height/unit-count requirements etc. In fact, one reform idea I'm particularly fond of is allowing (e.g. at state level) any property to be rebuilt to the existing use (so that people aren't living in decaying, unhealthy buildings).
I feel like one thing that is often not said enough is that solving housing solves a lot of things for fucking everyone. When everyone isn’t dying to rent or get a house, then you get more sane prices and inventory everywhere. This literally the most important issue in America because it is simply the largest cost for every single American across all classes.
> it is simply the largest cost for every single American across all classes.
I don't think that's quite correct. It's the largest expense for almost everyone, but it's a huge source of income and wealth for a much smaller non-overlapping group. Also totally coincidentally I'm sure that same group is disproportionally represented in all seats of power.
This is what happened in big cities in India. There was so much demand and apparently few regulations, so builders just kept building huge apartment complexes which sold for millions of $. Then at some point the demand was satiated and prices didn't increase in the last decade or so as much as they have in Europe and NA + Aus/NZ.
If the state and city are putting up the money to build it, they are the customers -- and it looks to me like they are making a terrible mistake in the name of having a free market.
Publish sets of acceptable plans, put together an expert committee to approve variances, make all the variance decisions published and binding precedent. Size the expert committee suitably for the workload. Then get the towns to specify where they want the housing to go and acquire the land. Pay contractors to execute the plans.
That's socialism, of course, so it won't work in America.
>9% credits. If it scores well, but not top 10% well, then the non-competitive 4% credit is the path.
>Because you are pursuing 4% credits, you will also want to pair that with tax-exempt bond financing
>it's a rough ride that will take 9-12 months if you're hustling.
What is this BS. You have to be an idiot to burn 12months for 4%.
>A problem you will likely face, is that 4% credits, bonds, and traditional bank debt aren’t enough to close the funding gap.
What funding gap? How about you build what you can afford instead of burning time for some magical 4%?
>You need more subsidy to make this project viable.
Ah. So this isnt a story about bureaucratic hurdles when trying to build affordable housing. This is a story about people trying to milk subsidies/tax credits an complaining about the approval process.
I don't want to live in "affordable housing." Does anyone want to live in affordable housing? It's cheap for a reason: it's small, it's not in a good location, construction materials are cheap, it's packed with people.
We don't need affordable housing. We need people to stop buying houses they don't live in-- especially if they are renting them out to others. We need to cut population growth. We need to stop subsidizing home buying.
Of course new construction is going to be expensive and full of bureaucracy. Many US cities have large stocks of older housing in moderate condition -- sure, it'd take some money to get them up to snuff, but nothing near what new construction would cost.