People debating about what kind of housing to build are getting ahead of themselves. The housing crisis is intentional. Homeowners demand the value of their home keep going up and they vote. They way to do that is to keep supply lower than demand. The first step to fixing the housing crisis isnt to figure out what kind of housing to build, it's to convince enough of the voting population there is a housing crisis that needs fixing.
This is sort of true, but confused, because it's land that has value, not housing, and the value of land increases when it's upzoned. [0]
[0] It's of course not increased when government unilaterally constructs low-income housing without reference to market conditions, which is why it's important to assure homeowners that this is not what upzoning entails.
There is land, there is housing, and then there is who lives there. Some people bring value, some people take it away. Naturally the people who bring value get to keep some of it, as they can chose to bring it elsewhere if they don’t.
I'm not american but if most people in America can right now classify as low income (paycheck to paycheck) then open up the floodgates on low-income housing everywhere?
"Paycheck to paycheck" is not an official term or (to be frank) even a meaningful one. The fact is that Americans are extraordinarily wealthy and by no reasonable measure are "most" of them "low income."
That same logic applies to cryptocurrencies. Nobody actually cares about the "utility" of Bitcoin or Ethereum. An expensive cryptocurrency also means expensive fees which diminishes the net benefit of the cryptocurrency. So in practice homeowners and cryptocurrency speculators are making money off the collapse of their community.
There are big differences between homes and cryptocurrencies too though. You can actually live in your home, for example. Crypt I currencies have zero useful value and are somewhere between gambling and a ponzi scheme.
Doesn't matter what you do, some places are more desirable than others to live in, and the end up attracting a premium.
> Homeowners demand the value of their home keep going up and they vote.
Bypassing the will of the voters is ... difficult. It's not impossible to force your moral mores onto voters who don't want it, but it sure ain't easy, and it ain't easy for good reason!
> The first step to fixing the housing crisis isnt to figure out what kind of housing to build, it's to convince enough of the voting population there is a housing crisis that needs fixing.
The "convincing" is never going to be persuasive enough to convince the specific voters that they need to take a financial hit of several years of salaries "for the greater good".
The only permanent fix is to make less desirable places more desirable. With remote work a large and significant percent of the population can just buy somewhere cheap and far off from where they work.
By draining the currently highly contended places of workers, those accommodations will cost less, and the migrating workers will pay less anyway because they are, by definition, buying in a cheaper CoL area.
Highly contended centers that everyone migrates to is going to expensive no matter what you do. it doesn't matter if you double the housing in the next year, the demand will grow to fill it at current prices anyway.
The only solution is to reduce the contention for those centers. It's not a full solution, but it's a damn good start: leave the downtown offices all empty of workers and prices will adjust to reflect reality.
Your alternative is more sprawl that will need to be supported by more new infrastructure that we already struggle to build out and maintain? I think we need to keep looking.
Well the consolidation to make things cheaper isn't working out so well at making things cheaper, is it?
You can't have both "everyone should want to live in the same place" and then also want "everyone should be able to afford to all stay in the same place".
Highly contented areas aren't going to get cheaper even if you double the accommodation. The expensive areas are expensive because people either want to live there or need to live there.
If you reduce the amount of people who need to live there, prices will reduce accordingly.
> People need to have affordable access to medium-to-high density housing for reasons of physical and mental and cultural health.
Physical and mental health is better out of the city than in it.
And cultural health is purely subjective: what on earth makes you think that what you consider good for culture is the same as what everyone else considers good culture.
This is what I meant by attempting to enforce your moral mores on everyone else.
> Concentrating people in medium-to-high density housing makes it easier to achieve our decarbonization goals
Well that's not the problem being discussed here, is it?
We're talking about how to make certain centers more affordable wrt housing.
Removing need is a good first step, as that lets people who want to live elsewhere, live elsewhere.
> Physical and mental health is better out of the city than in it.
For some people.
I'm one of those out-of-the-city-is-better people. However, I would never try to force it on anyone as it would make them miserable and ruin the country for people who want to be there. Sadly, it is difficult to keep city lights in the city.
I wrote medium-to-high density, which means anything between city and "walkable town with a core". This doesn't preclude detached homes. It does preclude sprawling car-centric suburbia, which is similar to rural isolation in terms of the effects it has on the most people's mental health.
ah, I understand. I've lived in both city and "walkable town with a core. I now live 2 miles outside of a New England mill city. The value of each place has been for what I can reach, not the place itself.
> It does preclude sprawling car-centric suburbia, which is similar to rural isolation in terms of the effects it has on the most people's mental health.
Come on now: "Surburbia has more negative effects of people's mental health than high-density living" sounds like both pure conjecture and wishful thinking on your part.
Were there any measurements actually done? What are you basing this assertion on?
> If the market doesn't cooperate, the problem is the market and how it's set up, not the goals.
Market schmarket, the thing not cooperating is people — families. Any plan that operates on the premise that people will be fine and willing to give up detached homes with useful amounts of land is doomed from the start.
Who is asking them to? The US has an enormous supply of such housing, after decades of restrictive zoning codes which make it difficult to build much of anything else. Some fraction of the US population live in single-family detached suburban-style homes not because they value those features but because that was all they could find. People who might prefer city living often can't have it, because the old forms of development which used to cover the spectrum between the single-family detached house and the downtown high-rise have generally been banned.
In order to solve the housing crisis, we must fix the zoning codes to allow a much greater variety of development patterns, allowing gradual small-scale infill. Nobody is going to stop building single-family detached housing so long as there is a demand for it - but relaxing the zoning codes would mean that the existing, unmet demand for other types of housing could also be satisfied.
Just want to point out that people already "take a financial hit" in the form of taxes. I don't agree with it, but we pay taxes for a reason. So the answer may not lie in asking for "more", but rather in doing "better" or more "targeted" things with the money we already give out every month "for the greater good".
I've many times recommended we allow the populace to take a more hands-on approach when it comes to determining where tax-money should be allocated. E.g. I want 20% of federal war spending to be redirected to housing. Oh, what's that, we don't all agree? Well then, good sir, take 20% of my portion of tax money that currently goes to war spending and allocate only that to housing.
/not being snarky with the quotes, btw, that's just how it came out of my brain.
While I agree with your general premise, I'm not convinced that remote work is the driver we should rely on. As a peer comment mentioned, infrastructure is a weak point right now, and remote work would add another dynamic that would make the situation more risky instead of less. Up front though, I should clarify I am a huge proponent FOR remote work. The rest of this is focused on why remote work should not be a foundation to build American housing on.
Prior to the normalizing of remote work and cloud computing, the infrastructure risks that a company needed to consider were related to hubs. Cloud computing moved a lot of the processing out of the hub, which is good from a risk perspective. This leaves the need to ensure the infrastructure related to workers accessing the computing is resilient.
If remote work becomes the foundation we building our cities on, we now expose our companies to the additional infrastructure problem related to internet connectivity while not resolving the connectivity issues inherent in the other grids of roads, power, and water. This is fine for companies that are natively born to this, but this is dangerous for the existing large cap companies and governments that are not.
And just as we're pushing for an increase in remote work, we are also in a period of time where our infrastructure is regularly attacked remotely.
Again, this is not to say remote work is bad. There's just a lot of transformation that needs to occur and I personally feel we should not take a darwinian approach to this when state and local governments are involved.
The instability we would introduce through this would likely lead to corporate funded infrastructure being stood up to ensure remote workers maintain access to cloud computing. I believe the company town concept [0] would make a comeback.
My main fear is that we would inadvertently create remote private corporate fiefdoms that would lead to corporate scrip [1] being used for local goods and services and non-transferable to other regions. The flexibility of remote work would, if my fears are realized, lead to a world of less flexibility than we have today. Not more.
I don't know what a better driver is though. How does one generate desire for a traditionally undesireable location?
> The instability we would introduce through this would likely lead to corporate funded infrastructure being stood up to ensure remote workers maintain access to cloud computing. I believe the company town concept [0] would make a comeback.
I'm not following this argument for two reasons:
1. I don't see corporate-funded infrastructure being stood up nationwide across a nation because the local services in a few places are not up to scratch. IMHO, those few places just won't get the migrants from the cities.
2. Even if the corporations built private infrastructure to support WFH, I don't see a probability of that leading to something like a company-town concept. IOW, I don't see how "Microsoft built private infrastructure to ensure WFH works" leads to "A Microsoft town in those places that has the MS infrastructure." After all, even if the alternative is unreliable, it's still there!. In company towns, your actual dollar was close to worthless - you had to spend it elsewhere.
I'd argue that this is caused by two factors, both which would be really simple to fix if we cared enough.
Easy access to large amounts of debt allow people to become heavily dependent to the value of their home, and we have been sold a story that your home is an investment that should play a large factor in your future net worth.
Go back in history and two things are true, debt wasn't much less common in general and homes were more often built to last. I honestly don't understand considering most homes built in the US today as an investment. The average home is poorly built using cheap materials that won't last. Most major components of the home will need to be replaced in a couple decades if not sooner, meaning you're left chasing large repairs and remodels when you should be paying off the loan and building equity.
I'd propose that the best way to solve the housing crisis is for us to stop treating it as a get rich quick scheme.
It's not the home itself that's the investment. It's the plot of land on which you are allowed to build a certain type of home and in an area where you are banned from doing other things that would reduce the home's value, like building high density housing.
That's what you are investing in and voting to protect.
But yes, that is the core of the issue. You need an off ramp for the people who bought into this Ponzi scheme or they'll vote to perpetuate it.
If you're getting at revoking building codes or zoning laws, I'm all for that!
Unfortunately I don't know what an off ramp would be other than a housing crisis similar to or larger than 2007-2008. A ton of "wealth" is locked up in real estate, and more importantly in mortgage debt. That can't be gently removed or wound down, the loans would have to be allowed to fail before we can move on from this idea that taking on huge amounts of debt is an investment in our future.
Another problem is a vast majority of people want to / have to live in a very few select places. We could alleviate housing costs by changing that as well; back to supply and demand. I hope that StarLink and WFH are big pieces of the puzzle that will move people away from mega-dense population centers. We certainly have the acreage.
>Another problem is a vast majority of people want to / have to live in a very few select places.
It's been like this since the dawn of civilization, and it isn't going to change. There's no substitute for physical proximity, unless you can invent the teleporter.
>We could alleviate housing costs by changing that as well; back to supply and demand.
No, you can't. You can't force people to want to live in the sticks.
>I hope that StarLink and WFH are big pieces of the puzzle that will move people away from mega-dense population centers. We certainly have the acreage.
Maybe you like staying at home all the time and never leaving your 40 acres, but other people actually like to go places, socialize, go out to eat, see cultural events, etc. You can't do that over a satellite internet connection.
Unfortunately I think the bump to WFH during the pandemic just further underlined this. A lot of tech people moved places away from where they work, or took distant remote jobs, only to suddenly have their employer demanded (some) physical presence.
If a significant amount of jobs truly were completely remote, those people could disseminate away from the big population centers and alleviate housing shortages, but that can't happen because full remote is fairly rare and can evaporate with an abruptness that isn't suitable to build big decisions like mortgages on. If you lose your job and your mortgage is tied to a place with a lot of work, you're probably okay. If it's tied to the sticks, you might find yourself trapped.
In Sweden I haven't heard of a single person moving to a shithole because of WFH. Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö metro areas are nicer to live in than bumfuck nowhere.
Probably related to public transport existing and commuting being less soul crushing.
That's Sweden though, there's a huge difference in the major metros and remainder. In the US it's far different. Outdoor recreation is a huge driver which in Sweden is very much comparatively limited. Rural / non-major metro areas homes have values have been increasing even faster as well as the rates of new construction in those areas.
For one thing, public transportation is absolute garbage and basically useless outside of NYC. DC, Chicago, and Boston are pretty much the only other cities where being dependent on public transportation is really viable. Of course you can do it in other places and millions of poverty stricken people do but it's rarely by pure choice.
Then it basically boils down to what's the point of living in the city? If opportunities for work are removed from the equation, it is mostly just going out to eat / drink and to the big ticket events that don't exist in smaller towns.
The dining and entertainment options are increasing and vast in small towns while urban venues are closing and there is a huge trend of the major event centers moving to suburban areas. The preference for outdoor recreation vs big ticket events means you are simply driving into the city for those things but able to enjoy much more of the things for which you had to previously drive out of the city.
The remaining big factor, which is probably not prevalent in Sweden to the extent that it is in the US is crime and the reality is you are far more likely to be victimized in urban environments. Police responses are lacking and most people don't even bother reporting low level property crimes anymore.
As someone in the US who has lived in small/er towns for over half my life and now lives in a major metro area, the benefits of denser urban areas greatly outweigh smaller towns at this stage in my life. Outside of the western states, much of the US is private land, so outdoor recreational opportunities are limited even in rural areas. In my personal experience quality local entertainment and dining has not increased in small towns, if anything its gone down as more people source entertainment online and big corporate chain restaurants take over real estate. In my experience denser urban areas have more to offer in terms of diversity of art, culture, and thought. Economies of scale make it possible to sustain niche endeavors. Access to international airports is also a major boon.
I don’t know. I know the news is often flooded with companies reversing their remote work policies, but I’ve had no issue staying remote since 2020. Maybe my anecdotal experience is unique, but I happily moved “to the sticks” in 2022. I’ve never been the only one at work, either. One guy I work with even has his own farm in rural upstate NY.
Still, I recognize it’s a gamble and I recognize some would prefer not to risk it. But I think more people are willing to do it than you might initially think.
> No, you can't. You can't force people to want to live in the sticks.
"You can't force people to want"?
What are you trying to say? That sentence does not parse for me.
Of course you can convince people to happily move elsewhere: "Look, you can keep your current job, work remote, and instead of crammed into a 1-bedroom flat in a high-density block of multiple loud families, you can raise your kids here in Sleepyville, in a 3-bedroom house with a garage, a garden and an attic/basement for your hobbies."
People aren't stupid. The majority of them work to live, not live to work, and the substantial increase in quality of life afforded by large spaces let them live more than work.
The QoL increase in having an attic/basement for hobbies/workshop/kids/entertainment/whatever alone would get people to move. Then you add in things like usable private yard, much nicer room sizes, etc and for many people it's a no-brainer.
> people actually like to go places, socialize, go out to eat, see cultural events, etc.
You can, and many do, all of this just fine in all small towns and cities. You should, ironically, get out more.
I think the biggest factor that decides where you live is work. You move where the work is, that’s how you survive. You don’t have to use a hyperbole like living on 40 acres. There’s many cities and towns that have social events but aren’t as crammed as SF or NY.
Starlink and WFH only matter if you assume jobs will primarily be online.
There would be plenty of new opportunities popping up if people began leaving population centers and distributing more evenly across the land. We wouldn't have the economies of scale that make large, centralized industries viable.
We would almost certainly need more locally sourced food for example. That would come with huge benefits that most would probably prefer, from health benefits to reduced pollution and animal cruelty.
if this is true won't market forces attract more builders? If there is no promise of a healthy profit (and with growing material prices worldwide you can't keep property prices flat) - there won't be a lot of construction? If anything you need to address construction materials shortage/supply issues.
You can only build what the zoning allows, and that's what the issue is with SFH owners in big cities and how they vote. Many of them don't want to allow denser development in order to keep those market forces in their favor by keeping housing pricing high.
As soon as zoning here in Minneapolis was changed to allow for denser housing city-wide a lot of smaller multi-family units started construction almost immediately.
Why do housing prices go up? Partially inflation. But mostly because purchasing a house and renting it out is massively profitable, state subsidized, and a safe way to invest a store of wealth. Owners of capital seek out niches with good risk:value ratios. Look at housing prices over the last 5 years: even if your investment home sat empty, it's probably gone up 70% or more in price. Rent is just profit on top of those (also state-subsidized, way more than any other asset class!) asset gains. Mortgages that are all-but-guaranteed by the state allow even the least-qualified investors to massively leverage themselves into multiple million dollar properties.
The housing market is broken because moneymakers would rather maximize profits and render everyone else homeless than participate in a functional society. Consider a world where investors own 80% of housing in the USA: would they rent it all out? Or would the small number of corporations collaborate to keep _most_ units off the market, massively spiking the cost of housing and increasing the value of their portfolios? Our healthcare market suggests that when it comes to necessities, people are willing to pay literally any price. And our society has become more and more unequal in the past couple of decades, with the top 1% controlling as much capital as the bottom 50%. Logic dictates that the small number of that 1%, or perhaps the top 10%, if forced to pay insane rents for housing, will provide more profit than setting rent prices that everyone can afford.
I don't think we should vilify the average homeowner who doesn't want to end up underwater on their mortgage. We should vilify the government that has allowed market forces to increasingly distort the residential real estate market, to the point where we're starting to squeeze essential jobs like teacher, firefighter, waitress, and nurse out of the market entirely. Both for rentals and purchases.
Right now it doesn't matter if we double the US housing supply in the next year: it'll still get bought up by investors with far deeper pockets than the average family, because those investors have a strong incentive to prop up the real estate bubble -- they've got more skin in the game than anyone else. And they're less discerning, waiving inspections and paying 10% over asking in cash because if the house turns out to be a lemon they'll just absorb it into margins. Or write it off as a business expense -- depreciation!
The US housing market needs a massive overhaul to disincentivize residential property ownership for anything other than owner-dwellings, co-ops, and small, local landlords (to provide flexible rental options for those who move around too much to justify one-time buying costs). Much like a monopoly or oligopoly in the any other industry, large market forces in the housing industry have deeper pockets, more lawyers, more lobbyists, and more time than any small-time player. And those large market forces have a tendency to squeeze everyone else out.
Housing should, first and foremost, put a roof over the head of every person in the country before anyone profits at all. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either directly or indirectly profiting from homelessness.
If there was any validity to what you're saying, why do places with more permissive zoning and less insane permitting processes see consistently lower rent and property price growth (see: Austin, Minneapolis)?
This was built close to my house, so I got to watch the frame rise. It was an interesting process, and it makes a certain amount of sense to emphasize timber construction in this heavily-forested region. I have to agree with the headline, though.
If there is one industry that is the most resistant to change, it's the construction industry. There are still people who have been roofing for 50 years and refuse to change a single thing they do and learned 50 years ago.
Saying a bunch of glulam will solve the issue is just incorrect. Wood is fantastic material. But using half a forest to build a 2000sqft house is certainly not the direction we should be going, we should be finding ways to build with 1/2 the amount of wood we currently use. Or perhaps melt down all of that trash and form it into a house somehow...
> There are still people who have been roofing for 50 years and refuse to change a single thing they do and learned 50 years ago.
This is at best a huge exaggeration. For one thing, roofing is not a 50-year career. If you know any 70 year old roofers, they've either been retired or moved on to other things decades ago - the toll that roofing takes on a body makes it a 10-15 year career at best.
Secondly, I've been working with roofers a lot lately - I have a very old style of roof that was common 50 years ago, and it's very hard to find people who can work on it, because everyone wants to do things the modern way.
> This is at best a huge exaggeration. For one thing, roofing is not a 50-year career. If you know any 70 year old roofers, they've either been retired or moved on to other things decades ago - the toll that roofing takes on a body makes it a 10-15 year career at best.
The person who taught me how to lay asphalt shingles 20 years ago has now been doing it around 50 years. I know a number of roofers who have been doing it 20 to 25 years. The toll on the body probably isn't as bad as you think.
haha, I used to have a torchdown roof and I sympathize. Finding folks to do a similar style (with integral gutters and tarred gravel, etc.) was a bit challenging. Plenty of folks that'd put down some foam and shingles though
Counterpoint: I spent several years in construction, and the assistant superintendent on the project, who was at the end of a ~50 year career, often complained that so much had changed he had no idea what was going on. The tools, machines, materials, techniques, schedules, laws, etc. all changed so dramatically he was really only able to remain expert at the human elements.
And things that used to be quite rare are now quite common, which can make it look "slower" depending on how you frame it. 30 years ago full wrap insulation was possible, and some did it, but it was quite rare.
Now it's standard enough that I can recognize it in new developments.
The difference between a 90s house and 50s one is way less than between a 2000s and now, even.
Melting down trash that will offgas for the next few decades and putting it in close proximity to people sounds like a great way to boost cancer rates.
> Wood is fantastic material. But using half a forest to build a 2000sqft house is certainly not the direction we should be going, we should be finding ways to build with 1/2 the amount of wood we currently use
Wood is inherently a carbon sink. I suspect stimulating forest production via added lumber demand (similar to how Christmas tree demand stimulates tree farms) would be a net pollution win, albeit potentially at the cost of a nice looking forest somewhere.
Timber is a crop. Wanting to build houses with less wood is like wanting to make clothes with less cotton or wool; there’s no fundamental reason to economize on a renewable resource.
Understandable, I’m in the desert southwest, so not a concern here.
I did recently attend a workshop by Dr. Ronald Rael (Professor of Architecture @ Berkeley), and he mentioned that as concerns building with adobe bricks, with proper roofing, rain is a minimal to non-existent issue. I am not entirely convinced, however, and have also heard of solutions such as using “plasticure” on the outside of the walls.
Any industry that warranties it's work. They're far less likely to take on new and disruptive technologies if there's no guarantee they're going to be supported for the necessary amount of time.
> we should be finding ways to build with 1/2 the amount of wood we currently use.
Different houses have different requirements. Some roofs see snow, others don't. Some roofs see hurricane winds, others don't.
Also - warranties their work, it’s expensive to build/replace, has high damages if it fails, and is exposed to the elements and unpredictable animals/weather.
Frankly it’s shocking they try anything new at all.
I’m not sure if this is entirely fair. I know people in the trades that have updated their technique and tools every few years the same way a software engineer would. They may be more resistant to change, but local building codes and such inherently force tradesmen to adapt at a certain point.
Honestly, if I had to choose between buying a house built 50 years ago, or one today - I personally would take the older one. Nothing scares me more (relative to owning a house) than buying a brand new one.
If it has been around for fifty years, it has been tested - may have some things wrong with them, but you usually know what you are dealing with and usually the skill was better and materials better. Heck, my parents house is now 250 years old, and still as solid as can be.
A brand new one where the builder was trying to save money by using the latest and greatest techie products, and may or may not how to install it properly? No thanks.
To each their own though - I know plenty of folks that wouldn't even consider buying a 'used' house.
Well we recently upgraded to a new build, selling off our 50 year old house. We had to relocated to a different area, because the only houses in our area were...50 year old houses. And swapping from one 50 year old house to another one didn't make a lot of sense to us.
Mind, we had done remodeling, new kitchen, new baths, new roof, new windows, new HVAC, insulation, "more sound proof" dry wall, structural engineering changes (original owners underspec'd a new addition, and we had to get that fixed), relined the sewer. The two last things on our list were redoing the electrical panel, and landscaping.
So, it had some modern elements, but at its core it was a 50 year old house.
When we had the work done, the contractor mentioned how the house was well built. "Good bones" as he said.
Our new house is VASTLY more efficient. The foundation is 50-100% thicker than our old house (which had other issues). We have that lined plywood in the attic (one side has some material for efficiency), lots more insulation. The only "exotic" thing in there, IMHO, is the plumbing, as its the clear plastic tubing style plumbing (there's a trade name for it that escapes me), vs copper. No idea how long that will last, our old house was already re-piped with copper when we bought it (can you say "slab leak"?). But I'm assuming that the new plumbing is not simply cheaper (copper, oh my) but actually "better" for more values of "better" than not.
I saw the house go up, I got to learn house geek stuff, and this is a solid house. We already have stucco cracks, which is not surprising -- I've had 4 felt quakes so far this year, and it's only March. 3+, one was at least 4. Been rocking and rolling for some reason this year, this activity is unusual, and, hopefully, not foretelling. But the house is solid. California has codes for a reason. We use stick framing for a reason, particularly in Southern California.
I wish we didn't have to leave the area we were in, but this house is so far so good and appears very well built, more so than our older house was.
The tubing is called PEX I believe and it seems to be what is used these days, replacing cemented PVC and soldered copper.
Some codes (commercial buildings?) may require copper but I believe PEX is used everywhere it can be, it's easy to work with, durable, and connections almost never leak.
Yes. PEX is a specific type, and general term for, modern polyethylene supply tubing. Both materials and labor costs are around half of residential copper. Unless you have a really specific reason new plumbing is going to be PEX supply and PVC/ABS waste. PEX service lifetime is in the 30-50 year range, copper is 50-100 depending on wall thickness.
I'm going to try it on my next project. I've done copper, I'm OK at soldering ("sweating") but far from a pro and sometimes I get leaks which is super annoying. And depending where you are working there's a real risk of starting a fire.
PVC and CPVC has never leaked for me but the cleaning solvent and the cement is messy, once you apply the cement you have only seconds to join the fittings, and the fumes give me a headache.
PEX sounds great because you can run it around bends (up to a point) without extra fittings and you don't need cement or solder.
50 years I think puts here them highly in danger zone... That means 1970s... Which have whole host of very well known issues. Now 100 or even 70 year old houses... If not ruined in 70s-90s by renovation...
Fair enough - but point still stands, newer is not always better (to me). Give me a house that is still standing decades after mother nature threw everything it could at it, over a shiny new one any day.
There are many 50+ year old homes that are basically held up with thoughts and prayers. Many of the building methods and materials were very questionable. I would not recommend buying an old house in the USA without a thorough inspection by someone who works on old houses regularly. Many are fine, many are death traps.
Yeah, when I was looking for a house several years ago I didn’t remotely consider anything new. Aside from the fact that almost all new construction has HOAs, I also assume any new house was shoddily built with poor labor as quick as possible, and the main goal is to sell it to someone else in a few years before it collapses.
I'll trade you my 40s house for a todayhouse any day of the week.
Sure, there are bad builders and if you're having something custom built you need to educate yourself (or hire someone trustworthy to monitor), but there are so many things much better than a 50 year old house, at least if you're in a climate that has lots of degree days.
Maybe in San Diego it doesn't matter as much.
Of course, the shittiest 50 year old houses have mostly been knocked down, so the remaining stock gets better and better ...
It's a tradeoff, as you allude to at the end. Our house is a mid-1800s build. Thus it's safe to say that there's some survival bias at work and it was solid enough to persevere. There are things our friends with newer houses go through that we never experience. On other hand, we have our own issues. retrofitting modern benefits is difficult, at best.
It also varies on location, too - around here the 1800s houses are decent "all around" except for what you'd expect for an almost 200 year old building.
But in other areas I've lived houses that old will have major issues that have to be remedied eventually (as my builder there said, the tops and bottoms are shit, the middle is great - because the river rock foundation would crumble to dust eventually, and the roofs were basket cases) - costing hundreds of thousands.
And most of them were marked historic, making it even worse.
> If there is one industry that is the most resistant to change, it's the construction industry. There are still people who have been roofing for 50 years and refuse to change a single thing they do and learned 50 years ago.
I think your comment is misguided and lacks reflection. Change for the sake of change is never good because by definition there is no upside. Construction technology is also expected to be reliable and have long service life, and traditional techniques ensure that by the fact that the are tried and true.
Just the comments on my comment alone justify my comment. I never said it was negative, it just is a fact. There are plenty of good new and old methods for everything. But it is resistant to change because it has to have a long service life.
I am building a house in a rural area, where land is cheap. Building is not.
Timber is certainly expensive, but you know what else costs a lot? All the other stuff, much of it subject to state building codes that get more restrictive every year.
Asbestos survey, assessment, abatement: $10k
Asbestos air monitoring: $1k
Tipping fees: 20k
Spray foam insulation: $27k
Foundation $50k
Solar: 40k (not including rebates/incentives)
Requirements for outlets. Requirements for windows. Setbacks from a utility pole on our property, 50 yards/meters from the nearest road. We have to deal with that mess and pay extra to site the foundation, not National Grid!
Even if we were getting a manufactured home (built to looser FEMA standards) we would still have to deal with some of these costs, such as asbestos, tipping fees and foundation. And the cheapest double wide is $300k.
If you are building from scratch, why do you need an asbestos survey? What are you surveying?
And does your state really require spray foam insulation and solar? Or does it require an R-value for insulation and spray foam is the easiest way to get there with your design?
Spray foam is the most expensive way to get R-value. Unless you have space constraints, or existing air sealing concerns, you should not use spray foam.
It makes sense that the asbestos stuff would be required for a building that has asbestos. Improper remediation can cause harms outside of your property.
The R-value also makes sense IMO. "You can't build houses that aren't properly insulated" is probably a net good -- although only if the insulation level makes sense for the region. If it's too high, I agree with you.
I don't think it's fair to complain about the cost of solar if it's not required.
> I don't think it's fair to complain about the cost of solar if it's not required.
I didn't read the solar comment as a complaint but rather an additional enumeration of costs. They wanted solar so it's a non-zero cost on the house. They could have also gone with the cheapest-to-regular slab thickness and saved money but didn't.
Got to say using spray foam to insulate the wall cavities instead of using external insulation over the structural elements is about the worst idea ever.
Also how much solar can you buy for $27k? Enough to supply 60kwh a day to run a heat pump.
Building a perfect wall with external insulation is kind of expensive and hard to get approved by an inspector. It's much easier to just do it the way everyone else does and follow national building code.
When land is cheap, do what the locals do - out buildings abound!
It can be worth your while to sit down and map out house areas, purposes, and requirements, and change as many of them as you can to avoid mandatory features.
Really the issue is the PoS terminal the builders use default to a 20% and all the options presented are higher. You feel like a real creep tapping other and typing in 0 in front of them.
Isn't this obvious? I thought it is well known that zoning is the biggest problem. Add to the fact that land values in cities are out of control.
For example, I'd like to rebuild my old house, but it doesn't make financial sense to build under 4000sf as I'd be losing out to potential value as well as matching the neighborhood. I can't build a duplex or detached ADU. I don't want to spend 2 million on giant house I can't use.
I think that construction timber benefit as a Carbon sequester is too often downplayed or simply ignored while it could be significant.
Timber has many advantages compared to concrete, including longevity.
The housing shortage won’t last forever thanks to demography, but we’ll need to replace many badly aging buildings anyway, and it takes time to grow trees and build the whole infrastructure around this construction technique, we should try to not sit and wait for a change.
Ability for timber to sequester carbon is really complicated. Most studies that arrive at positive conclusions for industry ignore land-use change associated emissions. I.e razing an old-growth forest only to plant plantation trees. Old growth forests sequester carbon in the soil and their roots. They also allow for an ecosystems that itself sequester carbon (various bacteria). Forestry IS not currently sustainable managed. All the IKEA and FSC scandals attest to that. European old growth forests are for some reason disappearing.
It's really irresponsible to gesture at this vague idealist future when the present is anything but. Yes, technically wood sequesters carbon. Yes, when trees rot and decompose they release carbon. Yes, if you turn the tree into timber or furniture that carbon will be then locked for very least couple decades.
No, forestry is not sustainably managed. Nowhere close. Europeans are razing down their old growth forests for heating. And wood pellets have higher carbon emissions than coal per unit of energy produced. See NYTimes coverage: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/07/world/europe/...
It is to be said though that rebar in concrete does not last. It is also to be said concrete industry is highly innovative and there are alternatives in the market and in R&D to steel reinforcement. Fiber-reinforced concrete for example.
All the old structures that still are here used concrete without steel reinforcement. We also have such structures today. Dams are made out of roller compacted concrete that don't use steel. Those structures last hundreds of years. There's also shotcrete which is used to stabilize soil.
Of course timber won't fix the housing shortage. The housing shortage is artificial. There are plenty of empty units across the country. It's a distribution issue of: owners holding vacant units, people wanting/needing to live in specific locations, and individual preferences for bigger, fancier, better school, sfh, etc attributes. With an almost stagnate population growth this isn't really a building issue even if it is a supply side issue.
Owners holding vacant units is not a significant cause of the housing shortage. Overly restrictive zoning and subjective reviews exploited by NIMBYs explains almost all of it.
"Overly restrictive zoning and subjective reviews exploited by NIMBYs explains almost all of it."
You seem to be ignoring the main part of my statement - distribution and preferences matter. "NIMBYs" can't be a retort to that when NIMBY is by definition local - there are many other areas to build in across the country.
"Owners holding vacant units is not a significant cause of the housing shortage."
It may not be the biggest cause, but it is "significant". It is more pronounced in some markets and sectors (apartments).
"Yes, we could all sleep in tents and live off the land if we truly wanted to."
Great strawman.
"Tell me where I could move where housing hasn't doubled in price in the last 5 years AND has employment for a family."
In the vast majority of country housing cost has gone up but has not doubled in the past 5 years. Many medium sized cities and suburbs have employment to support a family while not being outrageously priced. You can even find lists made by various organizations for the most affordable cities. Also, if you care to read the context in this thread, I do acknowledge that a part of the problem is people wanting/needing to live in the same place.
Those studies are so often flawed will pieces. Houses begging sold or between tenants are counted as vacant. Vacancies in rural Pennsylvania and Kentucky don't matter much for the homeless in Oakland.
What do you even do with that information? Ship the homeless around the country?
Other studies should that the higher the vacancy rate the lower the homeless rate and the cheaper housing is. So we can just allow people to build where people want to live and solve both problems.
If you do the right "step-up" programs and purchasable housing becomes extremely cheap around the country, it will solve itself. There are a lot of homeless people in Oakland that if found out they can buy a house in Kentucky and afford it with a restaurant dish-cleaning job, they would move. Stop treating the homeless as "shippable containers" they have agency.
I think you missed the thread - we're making it nearly impossible for someone to own a rental, it would flood the market with purchasable homes - cratering home prices potentially making the medium drop from $400k to $100k (at least for a certain class of homes), create programs for homeless people to get loans - some kind of step-up, combined with a job, and the homeless would suddenly be home owners and become people contributing to the world again.
I don't think I missed the thread. Crating home prices is basically recreating half of the 20008 financial crisis when people are underwater and unable to move, nor have any financial flexibility. Giving homeless people a program to help them out of homelessness and into some form of housing can be good, but jumping them up to homeowners seems a giant leap. If you get them into a stable job and apartment, they aren't homeless anymore. If they're stable, they'll eventually qualify for a loan like everyone else.
I believe that if you offered homeless people in Oakland a job and a house in Kentucky that they could pay off in 10 years while working as a dish washer, you would have very few takers.
I would also suggest that the town that has the dishwashing job in Kentucky - that business is likely to close in 5 years and there won't be any more unskilled jobs in the town and they'll be out of a job and unable to pay the mortgage, get foreclosed and be homeless again -- they know that story.
Better the devil you know than the devil you don't - homeless in California is known while a homeless in Kentucky is something else with even fewer opportunities out.
Plus that town in Kentucky is likely already dealing with a homelessness epidemic of their own before you start bussing people in from out of state.
Also ignoring that many people who live in California would face non-trivial threats to their health and livelihood if they were move to a regressive Bible Belt state. That is not a theoretical concern, but one born out by numerous tragedies.
"Better the devil you know than the devil you don't - homeless in California is known while a homeless in Kentucky is something else with even fewer opportunities out."
Sounds like when homeless people or people on various assistance sometimes turn down opportunities because they're afraid (sometimes rightfully do) that it will ruin one of their other assistance. How do you help people who don't want to be helped?
The dish washer jobs pays less than minimum wage under the table, beacuse the government flew desperate people from the poorest part of the planet to town to compete with the existing dishwashers.
> The Center for Immigration Studies found last year from January 2023 to December 2023, at least 320,000 illegal immigrants were allowed to fly into the U.S. from their home country through a controversial program of the Biden administration using the Customs and Border Patrol app, the CBP One app that was created to let migrants apply for parole into the US.
> The Parole program allows for two-year periods of legal status during which adults are eligible for work authorization.
The humanitarian parole program was created to allow 30,000 Cuban/Haitian/Nicaraguan/Venezuelan nationals in per month on a two year work visa as long as they have a US sponsor that will financially support them and pass background checks.
In return, Mexico is allowing the US to expel 30,000 illegal migrants per month from those countries to Mexico rather than their home countries.
It reduced illegal border crossings by people from those countries by more than were admitted through the program, so housing requirements should be reduced overall.
The parole process has reduced the number of aliens from those countries entering the US and government spending and lets us do background checks, capture biometrics and cap how long they're allowed to be here.
There's a reason why the court tossed Texas' lawsuits against it this week. They couldn't find injury.
I agree. It's government policy at this point to bring in as many people as possible for some reason. My guess is to drive down wages, some others have guessed that it's due to a belief that global conflict is rising and the native population is unwilling to fight.
This perspective seems to be missing the forest for the trees. Bribery isn't illegal for Congress, it's just called lobbying. Insider trading isn't illegal either.
Loose immigration policy and the lack of border enforcement obviously exerts downward pressure on wages for low skill workers. It also bids up rents since illegal immigrants are willing to pile into a 1 bedroom apartment. The elite own businesses and real estate, both of which benefit from illegal immigration reducing wages and increasing demand for rent. If you take a minute to think about the incentives, then see the effects in the world around you, it's pretty obvious what's going on.
This is wrong. Homelessness scales with affordability, not mental illness or addiction rates. This is why San Fransisco and LA have the highest rates in the country. Noah Smith writes about this at length, the data is very clear.
Homelessness in San Francisco doesn't kill you from the elements in January or July. A homeless person in Minneapolis or Chicago in January may die from the elements on an excessively cold night. A homeless person in Arizona in July can also die from it being too hot.
It's rarely ever too hot or too cold in costal California cities.
> Homelessness in San Francisco doesn't kill you from the elements in January or July.
This would be equally true of other large cities in the southern half (including July for many), and none of them have anywhere near the same rate. Notwithstanding, northern cities have indoor shelters and if the cold mattered that much, the rates would be quite small, but they're not. In expensive cities like NY, homelessness rates are high.
> Between the lines: The county is also trying to address other health factors that put people at increased risk for heat illness or death, including drug use and unsheltered homelessness, by embedding social workers at cooling centers to help with finding housing and harm-reduction strategies, Sunenshine says.
> More than half of last year's heat deaths were people experiencing homelessness and two-thirds involved substance use, she said.
> Green was among the 334 people in Texas who died from heat in 2023, according to data compiled by the Texas Department of State Health Services between Jan. 1 and Nov. 30.
> The heat killed more Texans in 2023 than any other year on record, according to the figures, which are not yet final. The state’s heat-related death records began in 1989.
> Heat-related deaths are typically associated with a secondary factor such as mobility problems, mental illness, drug and alcohol use or homelessness that prevents people from escaping extreme heat, Dwyer said. That’s one reason why elderly people have a higher risk of heat-related death, she said.
California has 4.2 heat related deaths per million. (all of California - including Fresno).
Arizona has 71.9 heat related deaths per million.
Texas is 6.7.
San Francisco had the third lowest ER room encounters for heat related emergencies at 5.1 per 100,000 residents (it was behind Marin and Santa Clara).
While hot weather in San Francisco should not be ignored, it is no where near the mortality rate that is seen in other southern cities.
---
You cannot have the same rates of unhoused people (note: using unhoused here because a person who is homeless living in a hotel room is homeless, but not unhoused) in northern cities because you will die in Minneapolis in the winter if you don't have a place to stay.
San Francisco has 887 homeless people per 100k residents. Boston has 657. Denver has 670. Minneapolis has 209. Chicago has 141. I'll also draw special attention to page 9 with the percent of the population that is unsheltered.
The unsheltered per 100,000 residents:
San Francisco 420
Denver 184
Boston 18
Chicago 46
Minneapolis 38
I'm well aware of Texas. It isn't the only other city around.
> Boston has 657.
This supports what I said. You also forgot NY.
And check the rankings by State. CA is second behind DC, and after that there is VT, OR, HI, NY, WA, ME.. and so on. Not exactly pristine weather year-round. The common factor is affordability.
"Or to put it another way, while 33% of the homeless population suffers from mental illness, nearly 100% of the homeless population can’t afford housing. 100% is a much bigger number than 33%. Which is why mental health, while a factor in homelessness, cannot possibly or statistically be a lead factor."
The quality of the analysis and arguments are terrible. We can just ignore factors if they don't explain everything? And why is it missing a section on the biggest correlating factor - lack of employment? The severe mental health and substance abuse (with other factors like criminal records) greatly impact one's ability to get any job. Affordability is a moot point for people in these categories as without a job, you can't afford anything. It would be better to do more granular analysis on those who are employed but homeless. That is likely to be the marginal diffence explained in the housing cost section.
> We can just ignore factors if they don't explain everything?
No, we just can't rely on them to explain everything! As you purport.
Only 33% of the homeless suffer from mental illness, and it certainly is not a strong predictor as to why rates are high in some cities but not others. That's the data.
> Affordability is a moot point for people in these categories
It matters to everyone, but even if we pretend it doesn't, that's 67% percent of the homeless.
The data does not support that. You cannot simply subtract 33 from 100 and claim affordability is the primary factor. Mental illness is not the only factor affecting employability. You have substance abuse, criminal records, etc that all prevent people from finding employment.
> You have substance abuse, criminal records, etc that all prevent people from finding employment.
Those all respectively represent a small fraction of the whole, and there's usually overlap. You cannot add them all up as though they are completely separate parts of that 100%.
Ultimately affordability is the primary factor, it's indisputable.
I'm not saying to ads them up! Please read my comment, as I very clearly stated that there was overlap.
"Ultimately affordability is the primary factor, it's indisputable."
What comprises affordability? It's cost and income. It does not matter what the cost is if you have no income because you have employability issues. Until you fix the employment aspect, the cost aspect is moot.
You can point to a poor quality blog post that doesn't examine all the factors all you want. Perhaps that makes it "indisputable" in your own mind, but thats not going to convince people who want to have real conversation about the root of the issue.
It might be correlated, and it might making a difference at the margins (eg the people who have a job and can afford to live in a car). But the vast majority of the homeless population does not fit in that margin. Most of them do have other problems preventing them from getting any job, like severe mental health, substance abuse, or criminal records. Affordability is a moot point when employment is unattainable.
Your link didn't address the other factors preventing a job, such as criminal records. Sure, severe mental health issues are only a quarter. And substance use is something like 40%, but significant overlap. Add in felony convictions and see were we land.
"Except we know it's a building issue. Housing starts are lower than they were in 2000 despite adding 50 million in population."
Check the timeline and distribution though. Housing starts dropped in 2008. Measure the population from that point. From 2008 on, you're looking at .5% population growth and it's dropping. Housing starts are still reasonable at about .5M-1M units.
The problem is distribution. Population growth in certain cities has outpaced building in those cities. However, there are other cities where the inverse is true.
"Vacancy is good - higher vacancy is related to lower prices. Vacancy rates are the lowest they've been in decades."
Vacancy is only going to lead to lower prices if those vacant units are on the market. That's not necessarily the case with the corporate owners.
Mixed density and smaller builds are almost nowhere to be found, and small developers have incredible difficulty securing loans from banks to build them. The large developers focus on expensive projects that have more overhead and checks, and even there they don't build that much because they are few in number. People would opt for mixed density were it actually available.
Zoning and regs are actually among the factors that make certain projects riskier, so reform helps in this regard. Just see Minneapolis. Zoning reform works. It works so well that there is some push back from NIMBYs in those cities pissed off that their areas are changing fast.
"Where the jobs are, yes."
"Check the vacancy rate in major cities."
What are the vacancy rates in the smaller cities and rural areas? What are we doing to utilize the vacant units by bringing jobs to those areas? Is it really more effiecnt to build new housing rather than take advantage of the existing housing? Should we just concentrate everything in a few major cities and leave everyone else behind?
Sure, reducing zoning will mean less rules and people can do more things, like build. The interesting thing is that building mfh was only a small part of the change - a change that CA also made state-wide but isnt seeing much benefit from. The change that made the real difference was increasing density for apartments and reducing parking requirements. The rents for apartments dropped, but sfh values have continued to climb as population declines. Bringing me back to the preferences and distribution part of my original comment -affordability is mostly driven by preferences and distribution.
> What are the vacancy rates in the smaller cities and rural areas?
Also not amazing. Many have fled the cities to purchase properties in rural areas, which drives up the prices there too. This is particularly pronounced in Canada.
> What are we doing to utilize the vacant units by bringing jobs to those areas?
Bringing what jobs? You're going to move a company HQ to the middle of nowhere? You're going to move manufacturing there? Be serious.
> Should we just concentrate everything in a few major cities and leave everyone else behind?
"We"? These are municipalities with their own policies, and people go where they want. If they want to make a life in the middle of nowhere with few prospects, they are welcome to, but you cannot force people and their businesses there to satisfy some notion that it would make their lives "affordable".
Raise prop taxes for non-rented vacation units by 150%
Raise prop taxes for rentals by %350.
Raise prop taxes for airbnbs by %500.
Everyone will own a home, and home prices will plummet as people try to unload extremely expensive property taxes.
And if it doesn't work, double my percentages. Or just make it 100k per year. Those people crazy enough to keep holding them, will fund the creation of homeless housing. DV's are just landlords and other types of bottom feeders.
- Make it illegal for corporations to own residential homes / any property in residentially zone locations
- Generate policies to eliminate real estate parasites (illegal to have percentage profits off of sales, open data, low friction technological avenues to remove those jobs altogether)
- Marginally increasing second / third / fourth property taxes on individuals (first home untaxed, second taxed at 20% market-rate valuation per year, third taxed at 50%, fourth at 100%, etc).
- Create avenues to easily demolish HOAs when they go off the rails
- Multi-unit housing can no longer be owned or managed by a for-profit entity (rent goes exclusively towards building upgrades and paying works for upkeep & administration, all transparently visible
- Limit Big Lumber's ability to export Lumber outside of the US -- trees grown in the US should stay in it to house people.
This would be a start to fixing the issue. The objective being, of course, to utterly collapse the housing market, and make houses homes again.
For what it's worth - you come across as completely unserious if your suggestion to fix housing shortages is genuinely to levy a $100k tax for property owners who aren't currently renting out their units.
I'll tell you what's unserious - people wanting to actually solve the housing crisis. Every solution is 100% idiotic. The way we currently operate is to build more housing, they are building a dramatic amount of housing, and the price of a house is still $400k medium. It is telling me they are not selling to families but instead to corporations, bnbers, rentals, foreign governments.
Maybe they still cost $400K, because the purchase of the land, the labor and the materials and the interest to finance the project eat up most of that $400K, not to mention some places charge you building permits that cost ten's of thousands of dollars - if not more.
Nobody is going to build houses and sell them at a loss or at break-even price, they need to cover their costs and make some profit as well to keep the business alive.
I was speaking to my house builder in the middle of 2023 and he noted that it had become impossible to build a starter house (2/3 bedrooms, 1.5-2 bath) for less than $450k CAD (~$300k USD) -- excluding land, utility connection, and financing costs.
He also mentioned that new requirements going into effect this year were going to add $10-15k per house.
People tend to have a poor grasp on what building a new house actually costs. They cost a lot to build with no gouging whatsoever.
Coming from a construction background, I can confirm all of this. Permits are out of control, material prices are nuts (not COVID nuts, but still at least 300% higher than the good old days), and subcontractors are both hard to find and more expensive. It's not crazy to build a decent 3-4 bedroom house and have it cost $400k all said and done, even in my small-big-ish town.
A lot of people in here arguing, bet there are very few of us that have actually built houses before :)
Raising property taxes on rentals increases cost to renters. Raising taxes on vacant units is a good idea though (but perhaps hard to enforce).
Remote work is solving the housing shortage already though, through opening up living to much wider geography (and locales that don't impede building, such as TX and FL). It will just take a decade or so to normalize.
In-person work forced people to compete over limited housing in small areas
I would say it is doing the opposite of solving the housing shortage right now. It is exporting it instead while also not doing much about the shortage at its origins.
All those cute picturesque towns in the Mountain West don’t have a large supply of homes to begin with, so it only takes a few wealthy Californians to seriously upend the local market with wages paid much higher than what locals can get for their skills.
I mean, landlords are going to pass on their costs directly to tenants. If you raise property taxes, then rents simply go up. None of these tax increases are going to magically make a 20% down payment appear in someone's bank account that they could use to purchase something outright. None of these tax increases are going to prevent people who legitimately want to rent from renting. (Some examples: apartments that are $30k a month for rich people that need to live in some city for 3 months of the year. $8k/month assisted living facilities for rich people that are now old and need access to care while still living alone.)
Probably the most realistic thing to do is to simply implement rent control. "You can't legally collect more than $X/month in rent" fixes the problem of rent being too high. If that makes owning rental units unpopular, so be it.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with allowing someone to rent a unit for $30k per month - even if there are thousands of them. If we're collecting 100k in property taxes earmarked for certain programs - that would effectively fund building an entire ADU on a property per year for that expensive rental to exist.
Couldn't agree more. I'm tired of the HN crowd that espouses the benefits of building more supply, yet consider the AirBNB and rental-afflicted homes to be totally untouchable. Even worse are the ones that seem to strongly believe in environmentalism, yet have no problem tearing down forests to build more supply on them...for AirBNBs and rentals.
There are so many people that think drugs or poor decisions are leading to the homeless tents all over the place. The drugs and poor decisions are things that come AFTER going homeless. The studies are showing that rising housing costs have directly caused the homeless crisis. WE neeed to do something fast.
On top of the house that took the space where trees previously were? There’s only so much space for trees. Seizing it for AirBNBs seems like a massive waste when we have hotels that use space much more efficiently.
Or just a tax on nonprimary residential holdings. Couldn't hurt to take a couple bucks off the folks keeping multiple pie-de-terres or managing a ton of rental units. After all, they can definitely afford it.
The article says it's trying to rebut a recent FAS article - which starts with:
> Mass timber can help solve the housing shortage, yet the building material is not widely adopted because old building codes ...
> Mass timber can help with housing abundance and the climate transition.
And the FAS article's call to action seems to be "Congress needs to increase the USDA's budget".
So, yes. Easier than rebutting "warm water is dry and crumbly". One wonders whether the Federation of American Scientists has ever heard of "NIMBY", "zoning", or "environmental impact". Let alone "house-poor" or "local government".
Not a very convincing article. The fact that mass timber uses more wood is right there in the name. Everyone knows this. The point is you get a better building. The cavities in a wood-framed building cause all manner of problems with respect to heat, draft, cold, damp, and noise. Filling the cavity with solid wood variously solves such problems.
All the stuff about the capital cost of making laminated wood is irrelevant. Only the marginal cost of the assembly matters.
Mass timber isn’t meant to replace stick built buildings that are 5 stories or less, it’s meant to replace reinforced concrete for buildings over 5 stories, up to around ~25 stories [0]
I suppose there are certain locations (Bay Area, for one) where the property values are high enough to include 5x the cost for framing and still net a nice profit, but a ‘typical’ developer maximizing their margins will almost inevitably stick build a 5-over-1 due to cost savings.
> Filling the cavity with solid wood variously solves such problems.
Solves some problems, sure, but not heat/cold. Wood has just over a third the R-value of fiberglass batting, IIRC. Better to increase the cavity size and uncouple the inner and outer studs.
It’s not mentioned in the article, but the Brock Commons that was the tallest timber building is at UBC! I was there as it was built and finished. It’s an 18 story dorm building one of several nearly equally sized dorms (!!) on campus. It went up fast - it was started and done between the 2 years I was there.
UBC is huge for specifically timber engineering research, they claimed at one point to be the best in the world.
>...Canada a population of 40M bringing in 1M population in an year was a terrible move.
Do you have a citation for that number? Most sources say Canada takes in about 1/2 that:
>...Currently, annual immigration in Canada amounts to almost 500,000 new immigrants – one of the highest rates per population of any country in the world. As of 2023, there were more than eight million immigrants with permanent residence living in Canada - roughly 20 percent of the total Canadian population.
the problem isn't the people, is that most of the country ranges from "fairly uninhabitable" to "dangerously uninhabitable".
foreigners aren't moving to rural Manitoba, they're all going to a handful of areas, most of which are in the furthers south parts of the country (e.g. Vancouver, and Greater Toronto), which also happen to have the mildest weather.
Australia is seeing a similar trend -- influx of people, not much (viable) land.
also keep in mind this demand is simply to keep up with population loss, and demand on the system for pensions, healthcare, and support for the Boomers. the Liberal party is ultimately still pro-capitalism, and they need to balance out these dying old people; "stonks only go up", so we need more consumption.
The housing shortage is so straightforward to solve, but government officials and citizens alike block most measures that would easily solve it. It's very frustrating. Rents in Austin are down double digits, and the reason? They changed zoning laws and built more housing. Seems like every major city should be doing that, but apparently, it's too complex.
There are actual mass timber projects to look at. The article mentions one in Milwaukee. I am familiar with the T3 project [0].
It was delivered ahead of schedule and below cost relative to a traditional steel/concrete plan. No huge issues of which I am aware in the 5 or so years since occupancy, but someone else may know better.
Los Angeles has a housing shortage. It also has a car traffic problem a d argubly needs 40 train/subway lines, tons of bike infra, and re-zoning so more small business can open in walking distance to people. building twice ssany homes won't work if we can move around twice as many people
> the mass timber framing uses four to five times the volume of wood as the light-framed wood framing.
I recall helping nail 2x6's together into big composite beams, in the 80s in Florida. something like a 32 foot clear roof span was needed and I think we were doing 3 layers for a 6in x 6in final profile. Good job for a kid: "Here's a box of 150 nails. put them all in these boards"
I've seen a meeting hall floor that was made by laying 2x4's up side by side and nailing them together. They were knotted, warped, reject pile boards and someone collected a big pile and planed one side straight then laminated them into a 20ft or so floor over the basement of a church building. Big massive center beam under it and no other supports but the walls. 3+ in thick and that heavily nailed; no worries.
It was fine finished and lovely from the top; the bottom was moreso to my eye: you could see how woven together it was and how far from perfect the individual boards were.
In both cases the design was inefficient and used profligate amounts of wood compared to what could have been done with steel or other methods. In both cases the wood was extra cheap or free and someone was making expedient use of it.
> It was fine finished and lovely from the top; the bottom was moreso to my eye: you could see how woven together it was and how far from perfect the individual boards were.
This seems like a fitting description of society in general.
I had an addition done where they had to bolt LVL and steel plate together for a rather large span with cantilever. That bit of support isn't ever moving.
Of course mass timber won't solve the housing shortage.
The housing shortage is entirely a self-inflicted problem arising chiefly from insanely restrictive zoning laws that prevent construction of high-density walkable neighborhoods.
It's not only about NIMBYism, though that alone is enough to cause the current crisis. Building an apartment complex in an area fille with single-family units is nearly impossible. Building a high-rise? Forget about it.
It's also the fact that mixed-use buildings are still a taboo in the US (God forbid people could work and shop where they live, just look at the hell that is Brooklyn, the EU, and Japan, and ..!).
And sticking a high-rise in the middle of a suburban sprawl immediately faces the classic opposition of "but what about traffic and parking", because we can't build public transportation networks either (the opposition to those, of course, is "but nobody uses public transport").
That's why the article misses the point: housing shortage is not a problem about houses.
European here, I recently build my home in wood-frame with thick enough elements I suppose they fall in this "mass timber" category, well... It was NOT cheaper than concrete, I choose wood for various reasons but well, cheapness was not one of them at least not in France where this tech is not much widespread.
I have some advantages:
- much more personal future changes are possible, it's far easier posing new wires/pipes and so on since all I need are small tools, I do not made much dust with them and so on;
- thinner perimeters walls (with good insulation), in some cases they are a nice thing;
and some disadvantages:
- exterior exposed wood last far less than concrete and demand more regular upkeep work (though it's relatively easy);
- eventual water spills might be more impacting;
- last but not least, noise insulation from the ground floor and the second one are far LESS good than concrete.
So well, I'm happy of my choice for various reasons, but I do agree with the author, only adding a point: homes need to change as tech change. Having homes we can "recycle" an create again after let's say 50-70 years means having a kind-of industrial home evolution path that allow for well performant and well designed homes in the long terms, a thing we can't much have with concrete. At a certain rates trees re-grow, rocks do as well, but in a sooooooo large timeframe we can't count as "renewable", so potentially a wood based civilization might be nearly circular, a concrete based one can't (at least, seen the actual known tech).
Aside while light buildings suffer more extreme weather, they suffer less some kind of hydro-geological problems like soil stability, earthquakes and so on, all demanding far simpler foundations.
You don't even have to do that - a lot of 3/4/5 story style flats (can be owned or rented) that are not concrete soviet blocks would do wonders in most cities. See: western Europe.
The Chinese/Soviet style of a tower in a park builds tall, but it doesn't actually tend to give more density than more US style dense areas with 3-5 stories mostly filling a block. With the Chinese approach you get better views, but with the US approach you get more walkable neighborhoods and I'll take the later.
> with the US approach you get more walkable neighborhoods
Have you actually ever spent time in a post-Soviet country? Their cities are an order of magnitude more walkable than literally anywhere in the US. And that's ignoring their much better mix of uses (ground floor retail, etc) and access to public spaces (by foot).
No I haven't but I'm not trying to draw a distinction between the average post-Soviet neighborhood and the average US neighborhood. I'm trying to draw a distinction between Le Corbusier's vision of urbanism (still better than US suburbs!) and Jane Jacbos's, which in the rare cases where the US builds dense it actually hits decently well.
The UK's social housing scheme was/is a stonking success, right up until about 1980. it completely reset the minimum standard of housing from slums to actually decent. It wasn't all a success, skelmersdale and thamesmede sucked balls.
The problem with the uk's social housing came as follows:
1) the change from needing a job to have a council house to being a dumping ground for troubled families without support
2) removing the ability of councils to fund new housing
3) overly complex centralised funding of repairs and upkeep
4) selling off housing and then taking the money away that was needed to replace them
I don't know the UK situation in much depth but one of the things I read was how they were disconnected from the rest of the community (socially, services, transport, etc).
southwark has the most council estates. the further out boroughs did try and put their estates far out. Places like thamesmede (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thamesmead) failed because there was literally nothing else around (thats improved significantly, 50 years later)
Mixed use. And also mixing all types of social, free-market rental and owner occupied. Quality for later two could be better, but it should still be next to each other using same services.
// To solve the housing crisis you have to build up like the Soviets
My family lived in a communal apartment[0] for about 30 years in the USSR waiting for a place of our own. Whatever definition of "housing crisis" you are operating with, is heaven on earth compared to the Soviet housing reality.
Please be honest, the vast majority Russians and other Soviets didn't live in communal apartments for the past 60 years. Not only did they have access to new construction commie blocks (small and ugly, but warm and well connected), well over 50% of them had summer homes (datchas) and many still do today.
Anyways, you're missing my point. Which was to solve the post-war housing crisis by building up with prefabs. And it worked - rapidly.
Why not bricks - they are eco friendly, we are not running out of clay soon, amazing thermal buffers and isolation, while energy intensive to produce you could fire them with renewables eventually. Change the shape a bit so they are easier to lay fill the cavities and we are in the business.
I bet it's less expensive in the PNW and more expensive in the midwest and southwest. There is a LOT of timber here and a lot of mills to take advantage of plantation-grown trees that don't exist elsewhere.
I hope large scale timber construction doesn’t occur exclusively because of the impact on our forests.
Between the pine beetles, fires, the many many stumps from the last round of serious logging years… our national forests and surrounding un-designated forests could use a break from a possible sharp uptick in demand.
If you support ideas like this which help largely sub/urban areas by using out of sight out of mind rural resources, and you also go out to Yellowstone and the West once in a while and see/wish how our forests weren’t in such bad shape, then consider not supporting this.
I wonder what the impact of the production of concrete and steel has on the environments where it takes place. I like the part of the article where they point out that mass timber would be better for carbon sequestration. I also think that buildings should mostly be built with a death period in mind because everything in this world requires maintenance and can be upgraded lol. So why not use a building material that literally grows itself? I agree with your point that destroying all the forests to build housing would be a bad idea, but we can and do sustainably log---all you have to do is plant some trees and wait!
Sustainable logging at its current levels makes the logged-out areas in the West look like it does now (stumps, new growth forests which aren’t 1:1 replacements, etc).
To get back to “how it’s supposed to be” as sustainable logging promises, we’re talking 100 yr+ timeframes to even make solid progress, not a full easy replacement. So, the environment is still degraded under that approach.
I’ve lived rural and urban coastal, and your view highlights a perspective I started to notice only when I lived rural West, and it’s frustrating:
To support pro-environmental needs of the densely populated and often coastal urban centers, the last remaining near/wild environments bear the cost and get carved out under the banner of pragmatic sustainable use - logged out, REM mines, wind farms on mountains, etc.
For instance, if every rural wind farm was met with a wind farm in SF Bay or Cape Cod or… I’d be ok with it, but the reality is it’s not done this way, and in fact heavily resisted due to vacation home views and so on. Bitteroots and Bighorn ranges have massive REM deposits discovered. This was spun as a positive env news story vs a massive mining threat to some of the best un-impacted/well managed areas of the Rockies. On and on.
So let’s raid our mountains and last wild places to support environmentally unsustainable lifestyles in the dense areas, who get to avoid none of the tradeoffs I describe that the actually wild areas now face. Doesn’t sit well with me. What’s the point of environmentalism if we destroy the last best parts of the environment.
Concrete is bad for the environment and strongly arguably worse than mass timber, which is a reason why folks are pushing mass timber.
Concrete development for buildings produces a lot of CO2 and from that POV mass timber is better. Logging harms animal habitat, but so does gravel mining.
Concrete sequesters carbon from air. In its lifetime, it is expected to sequester all the carbon associated with its emissions. And of course, concrete lasts much longer than any timber structure even in idealized conditions for timber.
And concrete industry is innovative. R&D is being done how to reduce emissions associated with kilns.
Concrete will long be zero carbon before forestry becomes sustainable. We have massive deforestation everywhere to prove that.
Mass timber construction will reduce the amount of lumber needed for housing. A large timber 100 unit multi-family dwelling will use WAY less material than a hundred single family homes.
All of the construction related solutions to housing problems are missing the point. Housing is not expensive because it's difficult to physically build. We are pretty good at construction. A single family home could probably be put up in two weeks or less if all that mattered was doing the actual construction.
The problem is zoning and all the red tape and NIMBYism that prevents the construction from taking place.
Much of the conversation here derails the original post: we desperately need less expensive construction processes (overall, including permitting etc). Even when the local community makes it not-worthwhile to build affordable housing.
The article points out a range of tradeoffs for mass timber (and I'm not arguing that mass timber should by itself solve the construction cost issue - it's more interesting as one more very different direction). More directions will be helpful for finding more cost effective solutions for different buildings.
For one thing mass timber allows far more floors than current "5 over 1" construction - because of better fire behavior. In current cities that is certainly a useful feature. At least in cities that do grant construction permits...
That should be helpful even in cities that grant ENOUGH construction permits for that to influence unit affordability.
Not sure the article ("original post") makes that claim either. It just asserts that mass timber is (probably) not in fact cheaper, and has not been/is not going to accelerate building of more housing. A solution, i.e. what "we desperately need", is not covered in the article.
It's a false equivalence, light-wood framing is typically used in single-family homes or shorter (<5 stories) multi-family homes.
Steel and concrete is typically used for 10-20 story multifamily housing.
Mass timber is being pushed by the timber manufacturers as an alternative to steel and concrete, no one's seriously proposing you build your 2-story 2500 sqft home out of laminated beams instead of studs, trusses, and joists.
You can do things with it that you can't do otherwise. For instance, you can create extremely large spans that weren't otherwise possible in wood framed construction. This creates really cool opportunities when designing the interior of a home.
Framing can be done with LVL as well and the benefit is that it's very stiff. This means a better frame when you have high ceilings and the ability to go 24" off center so you can have more insulation. Can do this with 2x6 as well.
The common argument against this is that these buildings were not built for residential units (plumbing, electrical, building codes) and bringing them up to residential code is prohibitively expensive. This is not untrue, but I think this is a cop-out.
What we need to do is create the systems that allow us to develop office spaces into residential spaces instead of complaining they don't exist. Create building technologies that safely convert these spaces into residential. Create the building codes that allow these conversions to be done safely but also economically. The demand is there, the supply is there, and our downtowns need this.
We’ve heard from people in construction that this is often a tear down situation. The needs of office space and apartments are very different. Somehow they see this as different from the old warehouse-loft conversion process.
This can work but many buildings are unsuitable. Office buildings tend to have too much interior space where it’s difficult to give all residential units access to natural light. There are also differences in building code for safety issues.
Obviously someone who is familiar with the field but it's kind of strange that they compare these two technologies since they aren't used for the same construction. You've not going to use glulam and CLT to build your one story house. It's about building taller places.
Actually CLT is wonderful for one story house. The foundation becomes much cheaper because of walls being low weight. This can massively reduce home cost (as concrete is expensive). The bad thing is that CLT itself is more expensive. The costs need to go down. Edit: I realize I made a mistake here. Americans use stick framing, which already is low weight. This was in reference to bricks and concrete (cast on site or pre-cast) construction. CLT allows to use its members much like concrete (slabs get mounted exactly same way as concrete slabs, etc). In such sense CLT is much better than stick framing.
I bet there are some single story houses with glulams. Certainly plenty of two-story houses do. I have a 30 inch tall glulam that spans 35 feet across my garage holding up a good chunk of the second floor.
I don't think there's much, if any, of an over supply of apartments. The people I've seen who try to teach vacancies show that new buildings get to nearly full occupancy within a year or so. That's pretty reasonable if you need to rent a few hundred units at once.
If anything, there's a massive under-supply of 3+br apartments large enough for families, due to double-loaded corridor designs that are almost required to meet fire codes. The only good spot for 3brs is in the corners, so you get at most 4 per floor.
The undersupply of 3 bedrooms is real, in many neighborhoods in my city you just can't find them. Anecdotally, the lack of 3-4 bedroom apartments has been the major driver of couples I know, who were aiming to start families and who would otherwise love to stay in my city, leaving the city for the suburbs. 3-4 bedroom units are also popular with younger folk, who are often happy to have roommates, and share amenities in exchange for lower rent.
You can skate by for a few years on a 2BR, or even a 1 BR with a bonus room, but not all bonus rooms have windows and raising a baby in a cell is probably not conducive to success as an adult.
Once your second child hits grade school they should have a proper bedroom.
But in “you damn kids don’t know how good you got it” news, I’m of an age where I knew people who had to share a room with a sibling. And there was lots of talk about how that used to be more common. Those boomer kids with five siblings weren’t living in 7 bedroom mansions. They were doubled up in a four bedroom house.
I’m not sure if you’re talking about a specific metro or just generally but there is an ongoing financial crisis among multifamily developers. The idea that every new apartment complex is filled in a certain time is a very broad and incorrect statement.
> There's a shortage of detached single family homes in desirable cities and suburbs.
You have this backwards, it's essentially physically impossible for this to not be the case. Past a certain point you just cannot squeeze more detached single family homes into a reasonable distance from a city. Single family homes, suburbs, and the required car-centric transit they require are massively space and transit inefficient. If you want there to be affordable detached single family homes within a reasonable distance to a desirable city your best bet is to push for increased density within and around the core of the city, with walkable streets and excellent public transportation. The increase in livability and affordability in the center encourages more people who might otherwise be pushed out to stay and leaves more single family homes for those who really want them.
There is absolutely not an oversupply of apartments in my city, nor in Seattle proper. it should be non-controversial to let the market supply as many apartments in the locations people want to be as people are willing to rent. Especially any regulatory changes that enable family sized apartments to be built at relatively lower cost should be encouraged.
Even if there were an “oversupply”, if someone could build new apartment buildings at 50% the cost with larger, safer, more comfortable units than most apartments nearby, it would drive rents down for existing buildings while still allowing the developer to make a profit. We should be enabling these opportunities as much as possible.
> I pulled up Zillow Rentals around downtown and there's a comical number of listings available.
And how does that tell you that supply exceeds demand?
Even when there's a housing undersupply, units will still be available at any given moment. It's not like people stop dying, moving out or building altogether.
To determine oversupply, you need to look at something that also tells you demand as well. Like, what's the average time available units are on the market? What's the vacancy rate look like?
There’s generally not room to build the desired number of detached single family homes (with desirable lot sizes) in desirable cities and suburbs. Which is why you end up with exurbs and hour long commutes.
We need to build higher density housing in the desirable areas, which is often disallowed by zoning.
I think you're operating on maybe 5+ year old thinking on this problem. Post-COVID, the "exurbs with hour long commutes" have become significantly more desirable, as people have gone fully or partially remote. The "penalty" of the long commute has gone down while the benefits of space, affordability, and community type have gone up. The world is obviously figuring out the Return to Office thing but overall the commute is a less big deal than it once was.
This dynamic means that folks who own what you correctly categorize as owning "detached single family homes in (or close) to desirable cities" who no longer care about the commute might be overall willing to sell these homes in favor of larger/more affordable homes further out, freeing up these homes to those for whom city proximity still matters.
I think there are really two core demographics at play with a small middle. There are those who are all about the city life - don't want a car, don't want a house, want to walk to work and to the tinder date, be around a large number of diverse people and experiences, etc. Then there are those who primarily orient their life around home/family and want the space/affordability. Distance to city mainly matters as a factor of the commute, which itself is less relevant than it was before.
Then there's the relatively smaller group that both wants a house and needs to be close to the city life. This group will continue to pay the highest costs because they have the highest demand but I think that's reasonable.
The number of people working remote is still fairly small compared to the overall workforce. Many jobs simply don’t allow for it. If you’re in tech you’re probably overestimating how big this shift has been.
There will always be a shortage of detached single family homes in desirable cities and suburbs, because that style of housing takes up a great deal of land. The only way out is up.
Yes, and I’m saying that there’s plenty of available high density apartment complexes in cities with a shortage of detached homes, yet people still want a home for a dozen reasons.
America is not a country where people want to live in an apartment long term if they have the resources to buy a proper home.
> America is not a country where people want to live in an apartment long term if they have the resources to buy a proper home.
You are projecting your personal preferences on the American population. Some of the highest occupancy apartment buildings in my area are full of people who can afford to buy a house anywhere they want to yet clearly choose otherwise. Apartment living has significant advantages that don't disappear just because you ignore them. It is an explicit preference of several people I know.
Every single major population center that has distorted (high) housing costs relative to income, also has very strong protections for the existing home owners (NIMBY).
"There are no coincidences..."
The solution is terrifyingly simple: don't allow existing residents to block new housing developments. If they don't like it, they can move.
This will probably never happen in the U.S., because the government no longer functions as intended.
The incredible thicket of state, county, and municipal rules all layer and combine to make housing incredibly difficult to build. It's the technical debt of the material world.
Seriously, look up your local zoning rules. It's not "you can't build a chemical plant next to a preschool" like it's so often portrayed. It's minimum size for the lot, max square footage of the house based on lot size, max/min frontage, height allowances, max garage sizes, minimum number of trees, number of windows.... etc.
It really just goes on like that, and then to top it off, you can be totally compliant with code and still not be approved. Either because of local incompetence (building permits stuck "in review" for years) or because of local opposition.
Many of the zoning rules you list, and far many more that you don’t, exist for valid reasons. Those reasons may not be as obvious as the chemical plant/preschool rule, but that doesn’t mean they’re not just as valid.
I live near a cove that comes off of the Chesapeake Bay. We have many of those zoning rules here for environmental reasons. Water movement and erosion are huge concerns here. Rules that affect density, frontages, trees within 100’ of the water…they are all necessary for the common good of the entire area.
We actually have a case on the other side of the neighborhood. A guy bought some land near his property for cheap. It’s not zoned for development because much of it is wetlands. He thought he could pressure the local zoning board to rezone it so he could make a handsome profit reselling it to a developer. As part of that effort, he diverted a creek and filled in the wetlands…and now several houses in the adjoining neighborhood flood (and there are legal repercussions for our entire neighborhood).
This is exactly the kind of Motte-and-Bailey argument the commenter you are replying to is talking about. Sure, you can justify some of the regulations, much like you can justify not allowing a chemical plant next to a school, but there are, in many places, hundreds to thousands of such rules and the vast majority of them are _not_ that important. How does not wanting houses to flood relate to setbacks, minimum square footage, lot size, etc. requirements? Literally no one is saying "get rid of every single development regulation". So bringing up one of the _extremely_ small number of regulations that are worth having does not address the argument about the _hundreds_ that are not worth having.
> …hundreds to thousands of such rules and the vast majority of them are _not_ that important.
And you base that on…?
> How does not wanting houses to flood relate to setbacks, minimum square footage, lot size, etc. requirements?
Here, minimum lot sizes are based on public/private water/sewer. We’re on well water so we need room for the well. We’re on public sewer, however, so we don’t need room for a septic tank.
As mentioned in other comments, minimum lot size also relates to infrastructure requirements. Here, it’s not as simple as just widening the current road or building another road through the narrow parts of our peninsula.
Setbacks are also related to stormwater management. Tree protection requirements, again, stormwater management and erosion control.
> Literally no one is saying "get rid of every single development regulation".
But you think that there are only an “_extremely_ small” number of valid regulations. You and the other comment I replied to seemed dismissive of specific rules that are vital to the survival—not just value, but physical survival—of my neighborhood.
Don’t the many zero setback cities invalidate your setback argument? They’re not drowning in stormwater - clearly it can be managed in a number of ways.
Why not admit to yourself that you just like exclusionary land use regulations, and are comfortable with the impacts on the cost of living, increased commutes, etc.?
It’s not your neighborhood under threat, it’s your status quo.
> Don’t the many zero setback cities invalidate your setback argument? They’re not drowning in stormwater - clearly it can be managed in a number of ways.
This means nothing without knowing the specifics of the local geography and ecosystem.
> Why not admit to yourself that you just like exclusionary land use regulations, and are comfortable with the impacts on the cost of living, increased commutes, etc.?
I’m not denying that our current zoning is exclusionary. It absolutely is. It’s excluding developers who want to sweep through and enshittify the place for a quick profit without regard to long-term viability.
> It’s not your neighborhood under threat, it’s your status quo.
In our case, the status quo many of our rules are meant to protect is, “the peninsula still exists and remains accessible by land,” so it’s both.
Do you think zoning rules like this - that Washington state is currently trying to change - exist for valid reasons? I really don't see a good reason, other than `NIMBY-ISM`.
I definitely listed the most egregious rules first. Those silly and overbearing laws exist though and have the same force as entirely valid ones like keeping trees along the coast to avoid erosion.
In isolation each rule is defensible (to varying degrees), but when we step back and look at the whole, we've created a regulatory environment that is hostile to development at every step. It's death by a thousand cuts. Big government through a massive collection of tiny rules.
Therein lies the real problem and why this keeps getting worse. There's no political will (probably because there's no political reward) in doing that sort of systemic analysis of the rules. What is actually essential? What is nice to have? What would be great but increases costs so much that it's not worth it?
> because the government no longer functions as intended
This seems contrary to what you're stating - local government exists to represent the interests of local residents. Protecting those residents from external forces is completely in-line with their mandate.
> If they don't like it, they can move.
A person who owns land somewhere should have more sway over local politics than a megacorp developer from another state or country. How about that developer moves their project somewhere else if they don't like it?
There are limits to the acceptable protections Home Rule local governments can supply, and a growing consensus that single-family zoning is not one of those acceptable protections, which is leading states to preempt local governments on that question.
The point of the comment you're responding to is that we're approaching a policy equilibrium where local governments don't matter anymore on this question, because they're not allowed to rule on it. See: California.
Why doesn't the same logic apply to people who don't like the high prices of housing in some areas? There's plenty of affordable housing in the country, but it doesn't all exist in the places people want to live.
Affordable isn’t only about price, but price relative to income.
Not everyone can have a location independent job. Many places that seem “affordable” lack decent paying jobs. And the areas with the highest paying jobs are filled with people who scream that people should go live somewhere else.
These are people who started the race a mile ahead and think they are superior runners. They’ve done very little to earn what they have and are fighting like hell to avoid even mild inconveniences to themselves (e.g. an affordable development for low income seniors or teachers).
Before you say “well this is what voters want” voters at the state level got legislation through that mandated changes and the minority of voters in a handful of well off areas are actively disregarding that law.
> Affordable isn’t only about price, but price relative to income.
> Not everyone can have a location independent job. Many places that seem “affordable” lack decent paying jobs.
We don't have to hand wave about areas that "seem 'affordable'": we actually have the data for both income and home prices. The math isn't complicated: housing is affordable to the average person in much of the US [0].
The conflict here isn't driven by people who couldn't afford to move elsewhere, the conflict is driven by the sheer number of people who choose to live on the west coast. One group of those people already owns homes along the west coast and wants their neighborhood to stay the same. Another group would really like for there to be affordable housing along the west coast.
But at the end of the day, there isn't anything stopping either group of people from getting a job in one of the green or yellow areas in the map below and living there with a very decent ratio of income to expenses.
Why should people get to build walls around the gardens of edens and kick out the ladders of those on the other side?
Property rights are a shared fiction we adopted because they're (largely) in the best interest of society. When they instead act as subsidies and hand outs to some fortunate few, we need to rethink how things are done.
Exactly this. We should be giving people incentives to move the Midwest where there is affordable housing. Not everyone can live on the coasts. Here in California, the infrastructure has not kept up with the population increases. As a result, houses are being built in areas that were previously wilderness and now we have fires burning through entire towns.
San Francisco, the densest city in the state, is 3/4 suburbia. There's no reason why it couldn't host 4 times the population without resorting to Hong Kong style urbanism (which would be great IMO, but that's a separate story). The infrastructure argument would make sense if homes in remote areas didn't also need that infrastructure, while suffering from lower efficiency in all measures.
It all depends on where you draw the lines. When people think of LA they think of that whole sprawling metropolis between the mountains (what is technically the LA basis or the LA metro area) - but the City of Los Angeles is a smaller denser portion of that.
And when people think New York City they think Manhattan, but New York City includes quite a bit more.
The Census has recently started adopting population-weighted density because census areas are defined at the county level, so can be misleading due to differences in county definition by state. https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...
During/post covid there has been a massive migration out of urban centers into rural places. Thus far the effect has been that affordable places are less affordable, while expensive places stayed expensive.
Many people find the Midwest winters unpleasant, and many Midwest states lack variety in outdoor terrain.
On top of that, finding a job can be quite a bit more work if it is a career that can't work from home and you don't want a long commut., Many types of jobs are much easier to come by in urban areas, even in the Midwest.
That said, there's plenty of great places to live here, and significantly lower costs of living too.
Or to factor it out, the incentive should be (perhaps) for businesses to allow "state agnostic" remote work, or give incentives to move to lower cost of living areas.
The problem with those things is the main decision is made by people who are not affected by the high cost of living; Musk doesn't notice the difference in housing cost between Texas and California, even if his employees would.
the problem is also that a lot of tax and insurance and whatnot are defined by the state you live in. supporting remote work means having to be compliant in every single jurisdiction an employee could possibly live in.
> Why doesn't the same logic apply to people who don't like the high prices of housing in some areas?
Because the cities in question green lit the office buildings that have the job I need. If a city chooses to grow its economy, it has an obligation to allow enough housing for those new people.
Plenty of people (dare I say a majority?) commute to cities without living in them, and that often has nothing to do with the cost of housing and more personal preference.
I, for one, don't want to be forced to move every time I change jobs. I would much rather have the opportunity to take jobs in near by communities as well (assuming I didn't work from home of course).
It's possible this conversation about housing is not [yet] relevant to your area. By city I mean metro area, not the municipal boundaries. There's a predictable path:
1. city keeps adding dense office buildings
2. city and suburbs resist new housing
3. new housing is greenfield development outside the existing suburbs
I'll pause here to point out the resulting trend: average commutes get longer because the people in the new housing are driving more miles each day than existing residents. Traffic is a function of miles driven. So traffic is super linear on growth.
4. housing closest to offices become extremely expensive [rich people will pay to save time] and existing residents have longer commutes because of increased traffic
Commuting into a city is a thing everywhere. But the American "sprawl forever" model has broken down in the places that have grown the most in the last ~30 years. It screws the people with extremely long commutes, the homeless, the people spending the majority of their paycheck on housing, the people want to have kids but can't afford to, etcs
1. High population areas are also concentrations of jobs. It doesn't make sense to both say "They" can live somewhere else and "They" should please work here.
2. Governance problems is unfortunately not a monopoly of high population areas.
A major issue with housing is that it is a primary driver of wealth for many Americans. Obviously, this comes at the expense of our fellow Americans who do not own a home. I was able to buy shortly out of college (1% down loan) so rising home prices don’t impact me as much since my home has also gone up in value. I was able to sell the first house and roll that equity into the next house.
As long as it’s the main store of wealth for your average citizen, there will be very little incentive to change that.
> A major issue with housing is that it is a primary driver of wealth for many Americans.
This was a very unfortunate trap that many western governments fell into in the latter part of 20th century. It's not really about wealth per se. but forced saving for retirement (i.e. reducing government responsibility for elder care).
> reducing government responsibility for elder care
That's a bit of a non-sequitur. The economy pays for elder care no matter what, and mostly our governments remain responsible if people haven't saved.
Plus we get emergent outcomes in our economies for systemic reasons - blaming our governments as though they are effective at controlling everything makes little sense.
Even if true it seems unlikely to be a primary reason, although it could be a partial reason.
> and mostly our governments remain responsible if people haven't saved.
That's the point of it being "forced saving".
Look, I'm not saying the government steered everything or even that they thought it through very far. I'm saying that they constructed a bunch of programs (in US, Fannie/Freddy, mortgage tax break, etc. similar other countries) to subsidize and incentivize house ownership in ways that economists hate (creates market distortions). Couple this with policies that support growth of houses as an asset class effectively has people saving pretty aggressively in a way that will typically be available to them in retirement. Less people with no assets upon retiring means less load on government programs. Implicit in this is left to their own devices, most people don't save as effectively.
The trap part is this: once this system has momentum any abrupt policy change will result in a lot more people being directly dependent, or more directly dependent on government programs in their old age. This will have massive budget impacts and governments know it.
The second part of the trap, which we are seeing now, is that if you make housing too effective as an investment vehicle, it will be financialized and further distorted away from effectively functioning as housing.
It's not just financialization of housing - as you note there are emergent outcomes in complex systems. For example, end of life care would probably look a lot different if it wasn't often effectively drawing down some of these savings.
It isn't really savings: it is a giant Ponzi scheme that depends upon the population cohorts aging and working and getting mortgages.
I'm in New Zealand and immigration is a primary driver for our house prices. Overseas owners will also drive house prices when we allow that again (our economy is strong but I suspect we will need to sell the family silver eventually).
If you are below 50 it is difficult to apply your implicit knowledge of the current steady-state to the future.
Italy and Japan have houses for sale at $0.
> saving [that] will typically be available to them in retirement
Currently.
I'm suggesting to try and take care to avoid inductive reasoning when looking locally at older cohorts and applying your knowledge of their experiences to your planning.
Of course as an individual you don't have a lot of choices to avoid the economics of your particular cohort. Understanding and mitigating your personal economic risks is trés difficult.
Using the word "savings" for your house is extremely self-deceptive in the longer term IMHO. Especially because the vast majority of what you spend is on interest not principal. I'm not saying paying for interest is avoidable or worthwhile, just that using the word savings misleads oneself.
Plus I deeply mistrust governments to do long term planning. The biggest drivers of our economic wealth seems to be unplanned emergent results of capitalism. Governments will turn to taxation and other means when an aging population turns out to be a problem. Our Green Party in New Zealand with about 10% of the MMP vote already suggested a policy of a wealth tax if you had saved over $1 million.
Ok if you dislike technically "savings", call it "incentivized regular investment" - the point remains. As a policy issue countries are stuck a bit because they are reliant on the asset value of these houses to help support non-working people later in life (that is, they have "saved", in some sense). Does that make it a ponzi scheme? No, of course not. Is there risk in the investment? Absolutely, and more than most people like to think about.
I don't think we are really disagreeing here, which is why I described it as a "trap". Governments will go to great lengths to keep this market stable, probably more than they should, because they are in a bind. People will respond to the incentives and keep buying when they can - probably more than they should. So long as there is net growth in economy and population on the whole they can keep the plates in the air, if either or both of those fail to be true, harder. And of course this is only on average, individual areas are not all protected.
Detroit has houses for sale for $0 (or near enough) for the same reason as some places in Japan and Italy (and others). Namely, fewer people want to live there than housing and infrastructure exists for. Same deal with unfinished subdivisions in Florida, essentially worthless.
Upzoning is a win-win for existing homeowners. Land doesn't get expropriated to build multifamily; it's purchased. Multifamily is a more efficient use of a lot than SFH, so it's purchased at a premium.
NIMBYs worry that the mere existence of nearby multifamily will decrease their home value. In rare and unsympathetic cases (places like Winnetka in Illinois) that may be true. But in the bedroom neighborhoods of big cities and their inner ring suburbs, it's not; allowing missing-middle multifamily will revitalize neighborhoods and help shift the cost burden from SFH property taxes to sales tax (retail follows rooftops).
> NIMBYs worry that the mere existence of nearby multifamily will decrease their home value. In rare and unsympathetic cases ... that may be true.
It's not rare. I've known multiple people, myself included, who have decided not to make an offer on a single family home because it neighbors a gross apartment building.
The vast majority of home buyers want single family homes. I don't know where HN obsession with vertical housing comes from, maybe because the majority are young and still live in apartments, but this isn't reflective of most home buyers
The only adults I know who will even consider purchasing a condo are single with no pets and no intention of having a family. Even among most childless couples, once they live in a single family home they would never go back.
You're allowed to have preferences! You don't have to live next to a "gross apartment building". You can achieve your preferences by (a) paying more or (b) accepting a larger commute from the nearest urban center. Property values don't scale with your particular preference. Among many things, they're a function of:
* (Probably foremost, in IL at least) the perceived quality of the school districts
* The property tax burden
* The diversity and quality of amenities
Missing-middle multifamily improves all of these things.
SFZ neighborhoods and munis are locked into a death spiral on property taxes and schools: residents are incentivized to plow money into schools (attract new residents -> increase home prices; you "get the money back" you put into schools) which quickly gets you across a threshold where the only rational buyer of property in your muni is a family with children. Multifamily allows for aging-in-place (rather than moving out when your kids graduate, a phenomenon sometimes called "renting the schools") and diversifies the tax base.
Amenities scale with foot traffic and usage. Expensive bedroom communities tend to be commercially moribund. In addition to not being fun to live in, it also shift the levy towards property taxes and away from sales tax and licensing fees, which in turn depresses home prices.
The first answers you get on this policy question always seem to come from people who think it's dispositive that they and people like them don't want to live near apartments. Municipalities make policy decisions for the welfare of the entire mix of people who will reside there. When you do the math on overwhelmingly SFZ munis you sometimes realize that the people loudly complaining about multifamily are a minority interest to begin with.
Your list of drivers of property values is missing the single most important factor:
• how much can one borrow?
Mortgages drive house prices so long as demand outstrips supply: which it always does in desirable places. Demand can always increase in a healthy city - I want to have multiple houses in different parts of the city and I could even AirBnB them out to defray costs or make a profit.
I live in Christchurch, where we had a lot of houses selling at below ½-price for a while because the bank rules forbade giving mortgages on those houses. This was after our 2010 earthquake and banks would not lend on uninsurable houses. The houses were often safe and liveable but uninsurable due to fine print (e.g. require even floors <50mm drop across entire footprint). They were often economically fixable, but to fix them needed money or a mortgage! There are still "as-is" uninsurable houses on the market - the price discrepancy isn't because of demand per se but because of mortgage/insurance restrictions - although the pricing gap has significantly narrowed (flippers and cash-buyers create enough demand for the very few as-is properties that now go on the market). I bought a spare as-is property and there's reasons not to sell it (even though I can't insure against say fire).
Christchurch zoning rules were relaxed for a while plus our government was committed to more housing so Christchurch now has many more houses than a decade ago. House prices are going up even though you can effectively only get variable mortgages in New Zealand at 7%. We have more house supply but demand is outpacing that because we also have high immigration (30% of NZ population was born overseas and we still encourage immigration).
As an individual buying a house the market dynamic is visible - I borrowed as much as I possibly could to buy the best place I could afford for my home. Bank lending rules drove my pricing. The "market" price for the house did not set my price (low competition blind deadline bid - I could not know what others bid and a price could not be accurately calculated for my property). Market price is set by competition between buyers - most buyers are borrowing as much as they can.
The economically worst part is that it is a zero-sum game with everybody competing for how much money they can give to banks for interest payments. We all lose.
The graph of sold house prices in a city looks strange - a severe cut-off just below the median price. Investigate the underlying cause for that and everything will be revealed?
> We have more house supply but demand is outpacing that because we also have high immigration (30% of NZ population was born overseas and we still encourage immigration).
This is a huge part of it, as is anything that drives housing demand (for example, as more people end up divorced, more housing is needed).
And most people go to the bank and ask how much house they can buy (based on what monthly payment they can stomach), and then go looking for the best they can get for that.
But there is another floor even without banks and mortgages; the cost to build new housing. If the minimum viable house is $250,000 to build (assuming minor builder's profit, etc) than you're going to be hard pressed to find new housing less than that.
> there is another floor; the cost to build new housing
Mostly irrelevant in an older city so long as there is a large number of older less-desirable houses in the market. And new houses become old houses in 2-3 decades.
Only the people that can afford a new home need to buy a new one.
Building prices do drag up prices, but I don't believe they set a floor unless most everything available is greenfield.
But if you're densifying you're often knocking down those older homes. And so the only way to keep the older homes is to have newer homes being built somewhere - which fights against density.
Yes, it’s totally rational to want to live in a SFH. That’s the beauty of allowing (not requiring) other types of construction: people like me who don’t want to live in a SFH can and people who want to live in a SFH can continue to.
I even suspect SFH owners will see some benefits. Their underlying land will become more valuable as the parent explains but SFH buyers will no longer be competing against people who don’t really want a SFH but have to rent or buy one because that’s all that’s available. A lot of my friends end up doing a group house thing with 4-5 people because they have to live somewhere without apartments.
Conversely, I know several couples who have gone back, especially after child rearing.
What people want is far more complicated that "single family homes", but a range of preferences. Most prefer a detached home from any thing non-detached. Most prefer access to good schools (while/if they have school age children) opposed to poor schools. Most prefer being close to work over a long commute. Most prefer easy access to cultural/social aspects of a city over not having access. Etc. etc.
Every buying choice is a set of tradeoffs unless you are almost unfathomably wealthy (20m detached home in a dense city with a helicopter pad ticks a lot of boxes). I think a lot of focus not so much on "vertical housing" but density and "missing middle" housing is just the fact that current (US, anyway) city design is hitting some walls, and "more of the same" isn't going to work.
> The vast majority of home buyers want single family homes.
The vast majority of home buyers have a quality of life they want to achieve at a given price point, and SFHs as built in America fulfill the requirements (other than costs) better than the MFH that gets built.
Moved out of a townhome into my current house when we had a kid, I actually looked at quite a few condos and townhomes first but multi-family housing in America is, ironically, not built for families.
The townhome community I had live din actually had a lot of families in it, but my particular unit was not conducive to family life.
The complex had 2 yards, one huge field for hosting parties complete with a fireplace, lots of tables and chairs, and bathrooms right off the court yard. Kids are playing together outside all the time! The other smaller grass patch was for people with dogs to take them out.
After moving into a house, my yard is now smaller than what I had before, go figure. Also there are fewer kids running around on my block than at the complex I moved out of.
Unfortunately those nice lifestyle complexes aren't being built anymore, instead what you get is 8 or 12 narrow townhomes scrunched up together with the government required minimum amount of greenery outside.
IMHO the 4 story town homes that are being built all over the place are foolish on many fronts. They aren't good for babies (stairs) they aren't good for anyone over 50 (stairs) and they waste a ton square footage (on all the stairs).
But if I could buy a 3 (+ den) or 4 bedroom flat in a large complex that had huge green spaces and places for activities? Sure! The QoL of living in a well managed complex is better than doing all the home owner stuff myself, and it turns out when services are being ordered for 100 households (window cleaning, pressure washing, deck cleaning, etc) you can get some good group discounts!
The large complexes that I do see being built around my city (Seattle) are all rental units, which has a ton of down sides - bad for the local economy, money doesn't stay in the community, residents don't build value in their house, prices go up dramatically year over year, etc.
I don't want to live next to a huge building, so I selected a town where that was not allowed. So don't tell me changing this is a win win for me. It isn't.
I suppose you didn't buy the entire town, so you can't preclude your neighbors from wanting their property to appreciate, their lives to become more social, and their environment to change.
Once upon a time, neighbors also collectively agreed to zone by race and ethnicity, until Buchanan v. Warley in 1917 put an end to that practice and created the minimum-lot-size SFZ proxy system we have today. You can argue persuasively for respecting SFZ, but you probably can't do it from a moral high horse (which is just to say: you can't rest your argument on a moral right).
What about the 100 people who also owned homes within a few blocks of that apartment building and are also opposed to the change that it brings to the neighborhood? Zoning laws don't exist because of one loudmouth, they exist because solid majorities of the people who live in a given area like having them.
In your example, your side is outnumbered by the residents of a single apartment building.
This whole thread is kind of silly, in that high-density apartments aren't what's going to get built on SFZ blocks in cities and inner-ring suburbs; 3-flats are.
Nor do you apparently care about the fact that "NIMBYs worry that the mere existence of nearby multifamily will decrease their home value" is a false stereotype.
A NIMBY straight-up told you that their motivations are about lifestyle and not money and your response is "I don't care about your preferences".
Well but aren’t you giving a great example of how that wealth is illusory?
The purpose of this comment is to make this conversation interesting instead of rehashing BS about NIMBYs.
Don’t get me wrong, measuring billionaires’ wealth by multiplying stock price and stock count is flawed too, for a different reason. But both your wealth and that wealth are really measuring “taxable wealth in the marginal transaction case.” Not a super interesting measurement IMO.
If you were an immigrant from the Soviet Union like my parents were for example, sure you were dirt poor but you might have an education, which turned out to be much more valuable in every sense, in most cases, than a house, for baby boomers this century.
Like isn’t being educated being “wealthy?” On the flip side, Russia today has 30 percentage points more higher educated people than the US, so tell me Obama, what did that education get them?
There’s no reductive lens for this stuff. One POV is that maybe the average American is myopic, their house value number goes up and they regard that as real wealth, just like billionaires do. But it’s not just a matter of understanding what house values are because “that number going up and therefore you become wealthier” isn’t strictly speaking flawed. IMO what we lack is leadership: politicians who have the patience and motivation to figure these things out and inform the public, as opposed to merely being reactive to the hottest crisis on social media.
> Well but aren’t you giving a great example of how that wealth is illusory?
It is mostly, since your purchasing power doesn't increase because all house prices rise.
But: people don't live forever, and when your home-owning parents die, you now have two homes instead of one, and you'll get much more than if housing price was half the price. Same when your in-laws die too.
Obviously this is entirely unsustainable and is a huge driver for the political despair that is spreading in Western countries.
> and when your home-owning parents die, you now have two homes instead of one
While I absolutely believe it's a thing for someone.
It's not a thing for anyone I know.
Two factors there.
People live longer. An then parents die (70+), they kids ( avg. 2) are at the age of 55+. At that point they housing situation is figured out. Also if ( big if in Canada) house was paid off you inherit half of it ( unless you are single kid which was rare 50+ years ago in Canada).
However in Canada what I see is that houses were reverse-mortgaged to supply income on pension and/or live in a retirement home, and thus my friends got trivial inheritances in a tune of tens thousands of CAD dollars after estate liquidation.
> People live longer. An then parents die (70+), they kids ( avg. 2) are at the age of 55+. At that point they housing situation is figured out.
That's exactly what I mean when I say people end up with two homes. In fact, if the home was given to children not owning their home, we would still be in the wealth illusion situation.
> However in Canada what I see is that houses were reverse-mortgaged to supply income on pension and/or live in a retirement home, and thus my friends got trivial inheritances in a tune of tens thousands of CAD dollars after estate liquidation.
This is not something we see a lot in my country (France) because so far we had decent pensions… But obviously situations vary a lot between countries.
The wealth may be imaginary, but the debt I took in via my mortgage isn’t haha. I get the point you are making though. Thank you for sharing your perspective.
This is a common refrain from the YIMBY crowd, but I'm skeptical that the driving force of NIMBYism is wealth.
My own experience is that I couldn't care less about my property value: I view my mortgage as mostly a locked-in monthly payment, a guard against rent increases and against being forced to move if the landlord decides to do something different.
However, I would actively campaign against a large multi-family housing development being built within a few blocks of me. I don't want the added traffic it would bring, I don't want the added noise, and I don't want the more frequent turnover. I enjoy being able to recognize all of my neighbors, not just because it's nice but because it makes me feel safer.
If you actually went out and interviewed NIMBYs instead of just reading the stereotypes on the internet, I suspect that the motivations I describe above are much more common than wealth. It's not as exciting or provocative as "the upper-middle class just wants to get richer", but it's the reality that many of us live in.
You can live in what ever reality you want, but NIMBY behavior is inherently rent-seeking.
That being said, I don't hold it against people from paying themselves rent and taking a profit when they sell. But if you have kids, you do have to come to terms with the fact that you're creating a situation where they likely won't be able to afford to live in the neighborhood where they grew up or near you at all.
You seem to be coming from the perspective that people who don't live in a place should have more say over the nature of that place than those who do live there.
To put it in your terms, why does it make more sense to tell existing residents "your place has to change and you can move if you don't like it" vs channel the new residents to other places where more housing is available and is available cheaper.
> I think people mainly think of it as "their home and their community" rather than "economic extraction"
It doesn't matter what they think. Some people also talk of "protecting property values".
At the end of the day it's all ways to restrict the allowable number of units per square foot of land.
Those people are enriching themselves sitting on a piece of land. It's not the value of the building on the land that is going up.
This modern landed gentry are not improving the economic value of their land. They are extracting the economic value through higher resale prices. Because *other people* are doing productive economic activity nearby.
It's the same idea as "everybody works but this vacant lot" [1] on a large scale.
> Doesn't that strike you as obvious bullshit?
No. You can go read the paper, come back and argue methodology.
The economic GDP gain for a person from West Virginia to NYC is large.
The NIMBYs don't only block new residents moving in. They also block existing residents from building new housing that reflects changing tastes and trends.
"But a government should represent the interests of the locals" when it comes to housing seems like a motte-and-bailey argument where you use an agreeable platitude to launder in the less agreeable scenario of local home owners just voting for "fuck you, I got mine" and suggesting that's best for a city and the rest of its residents.
Thats the core of cities, they change! Imagine if 150 years ago, all the farmers and ranchers could block their neighbors from selling/buildings because it "ruins the rural character and will bring bad humors". Most of these communities would have never been built.
Which government? Your block? street? school district? Transit district? region? state? country? Even then, a country that needs immigrants to operate?
Even then in a town here, most of the electrorate is renters, but most people who actually vote are homeowners.
And a public library district found it better to "protect themselves" with a card fee for non-residents rather than open access to all state residents (like nearly all other public libraries around them, and like the state financially encourages.)
So yes, it makes sense for the voters to have only so much power and influence. Sometimes it would be nice if someone in that pile concerned themselves with a longer term vision than "my lawn, right now". And that doesn't mean their political hobby either.
You could make third parties viable with an alternative electoral system such as Ranked Choice voting.
Replacing First Past The Post voting with an alternative voting system will eliminate any chance of a spoiler effect. People could feel safe in the fact that if the party that best represents them doesn't make it, their vote will continue to be counted throughout the election.
More political parties means more representation, and a bigger portion of the population being involved in the electoral process.
More competition means higher quality representation, even from established parties.
It's part of the real world, and the problem still exists. A solution is still needed. But sure, in day to day life most people better focus on something else!
Currently in California, there is some push at the state level to try and move things along - and override some city rules. Also one surprising city noticed that their past gridlock is not helpful (Berkeley, CA! Surprising because they are said to have invented restrictive zoning).
Then some cities in the Los Angeles area somehow managed to never get in that rut at all, and allow construction. And they are not exactly hellholes because of that.
While I agree with you, places that used to be 'burbs - are now under an obsolete civil engineering design... you think SF is going to be able remain SF over the next 50 years?
So all the outlying neighrborhoods/cities/areas -- MANY of which were built out in 40s to support the war effort as we were building liberty ships in the bay at an alarming rate - and all those women workers needed housing (rosie the riveter)...
So all these tiny packed neighborhoods needed for the 1940s workforce resulted.
Now we have a 2040 workforce need in the exact same way for building Liberty LLMS! (Expect of poisoning the dirt with war chemicals - we will find another similar metaphor digitally)
(most of saily city, alameda, treasure island, hunters point, candle stick, dog patch, etc - were all heavy industry for these ships and the naval base - and they were massive amounts of toxics buried in the dirt.
This is why hunters point was always ghetto - because they knew it was a Super Site - and so many people have gotten sick from it. Which is also why it was a very slow process to build stuff out new because new laws require environmental impacts which include soil sampling which reveals Super Site chemicals...
The very tip of Alameda Naval base was also a dumping pit now Super Site -- they decided that its cheaper to pound giant metal posts as a barrier to prevent the chemicals leeching into the bay - rather than spend 10 times as much to clean up the site properly.
and this just happened in the last 20ish years.. its been leaking into the bay since WWII
They absolutely did not say that non-residents should have "more say over the nature of that place." Simply and narrowly that residents should not be able to block housing development, a much different and more straightforward position.
Residents do have the most influence and the most concentrated control. That's not quite the same as being the only authority, or having absolute influence however, and this is a correct allocation of power.
Residents don't and shouldn't expect to have the final say on who can live in their area. This is explicitly acknowledged by, for example, racial housing covenants being illegal these days.
Well, depends on the level of government you're talking about. If it is local, then if local homeowners (who are local voters) don't want the development, it is eminently 'democratic.'
If I stop my neighbor from building an extension that's 1v1. Doesn't map easily to "democracy". Now, if I and the neighbor on the other side stop our middle neighbor building an extension... it's sort of democracy? The majority decides. But what if everyone else on our street wants to allow it? Now blocking is undemocratic. Thoughout all of this my neighbor might insist they don't care what anyone thinks and they should be able to do whatever they want with their own land.
The citizens of a particular city neighborhood blocking development is democratic when looked at up close and undemocratic when looked at from afar. There aren't any easy answers and anyone pretending there are is fooling themselves.
Democracy is not an easily defined concept in practice.
In theory, Democracy is simply the idea that the government is formed from the will of the people... but there is no single will of the people. How do you decide, then, what the will of the people is?
Many of us have grown up with the idea that 'majority rules' is democracy, but why? What makes 51% a magic number?
Most modern democracies don't like the idea of a majority suppressing a minority, so we put restrictions on what the majority can do. Is that undemocratic? Is the Bill of Rights undemocratic because it blocks the will of the people?
The problem with your example, and the problem in real life, is that people are making decisions at too low of a level and property rights (never mind the needs of society) are being overridden. They end up voting on how something directly affects them, and place little to no consideration for the rights of others. They push the problem onto someone else, on people who have less of a voice in the democracy.
You're right about there being no simple solution. Even voting on higher level issues (like providing affordable housing) is perilous. Deciding upon something without specifics just opens up the floodgates for abuse. I've seen housing built on land unsuitable for construction. I've lived in a couple of neighbourhoods that narrowly escaped being razed for highways (to the point where parts were razed and some infrastructure was built).
Even long term urban planning, something specific enough for voting on and distant enough to avoid being personal, has proven to be less than successful.
The whole thing gets complicated because people end up not being willing to hash out exactly what they want, and what others want, and how to work out compromises.
And general ideas always lose out to specific ones (which is why you can have an entire city that is pro-affordable housing but each example thereof is strongly fought against).
Two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner is democracy, illustrating a common failure mode of the worst form of government except for all of the others.
Claiming "DEMOCRACY!" doesn't prevent people from having rights. Rights are not about majority rule but about the kind of place "people" (sometimes a minority) think "people" (often a minority) deserve to live in.
In this case, it is fair for the middle neighbor's outcome to depend on more than his two direct neighbors. And it's also fair for the middle to balance their own wants with the ones of their neighbors. But for sure everyone gridlocking each other is not a solution for progress.
I usually use "democracy" to describe a situation where there are regular transfers of power through reason, persuasion, and cooperation and not through violence or the threat of violence. I'm not sure that it applies to this case about your neighbor, unless you are stopping them through a threat of violence, in which case it is certainly undemocratic.
Given how loosely the Interstate Commerce Clause has been interpreted in the past, why not say people from out of state want to live there and it's interstate commerce?
>There's plenty of places in the US that you can still get a house for under 200k.
I bought 3 houses all for under $20k each over the past 2 years. I use them all as rental houses. You can get waaay under $200k. The problem when you bring this up to people online is they say, "well I would never want to live there". So they are very happy to tell people that already live somewhere that they can move if they don't want new large housing complexes built, but if you tell them that they can move to somewhere more affordable, they act like you are attacking their human rights.
Also the building restrictions in a highly-populated area. I remember a person on here breaking down the costs of building multi-family housing. Basically in SF or LA you can only build high-priced multi-family housing to make any profit, otherwise it would be at a high loss and that is assuming something like rent controls, because otherwise the price would be driven up anyway.
Often the easiest thing to do is increase luxury supply (because by definition the rich have the money to buy).
And unless you have literally infinite incoming new residents or people who want to squat on unrented property, increasing the top-end supply will also increase other ranges. It might still not allow someone on minimum wage to live there, but the total number of units increases - unless you replace cheaper units with more expensive same or less density units.
On the other hand it seems like it's functioning exactly as intended. The interests of the people who live in <area> and who elect the city council are being represented just as they should be.
The argument could equally be if you don't like it, build somewhere else.
Do you believe communities have any right to self-determination? I would feel a bit peeved if I and all my neighbors built this nice neighborhood and then am told too bad people really like your neighborhood so we're letting Alliance Residential buy up a bunch of property for a huge apartment complex. The neighborhood I grew up in is going through this. They were a bunch of lower-middle class people who bought houses in a "rough" area because it's what they could afford, made it nice and then developers saw dollar signs. They don't have the kind of pull to keep them out so it's about to get steamrolled with gentrification.
This gets problematic as what is the right of others over your private property. What is the right of an individual property owners self determination versus the communities?
If you've got an answer for how to strike that balance you'd best start writing essays for the Federalist Papers 2nd Edition.
Because obviously you can do whatever you want with your property: well not open a business because it's not zoned for that, and not build too close to the property line, but anything else! Oh and you can't make too much noise after 9pm that's just rude, or fix your own electrical work because if you do a shoddy job it'll catch your neighbor's house on fire, and...
Well, clearly it was someone else's property first, and what *they* decided they want to do with *their* property is to parcel it out and sell to newcomers, but with some strings attached such as: no opening businesses, no building too close to the subdivided property line, no noise after 9pm, no fixing own electrical, ... :-)
It is funny how people criticize the US "colonialism" yet feel entitled that they should be able to move into any neighborhood and drive out current inhabitants.
"drive out current inhabitants" by offering one of them an entirely voluntary and mutually beneficial deal?
Or do you mean that existing owner should be required to get their neighbors' consent to do what they want with their own property?
Anyone selling their home would, all other things being equal, prefer to sell their home to an neighbor with which they have a relationship then to a random person. The neighbors should make an offer if they really care.
The market is not deciding when municipalities are legally prohibiting denser, lower-cost housing from being built.
To use your example, it's as if we were to restrict car production to mostly only Ferraris. And then if someone can't afford a Ferrari, we tell them to buy a Honda - but there aren't many of them to buy.
But there are reasons for municipalities to do that. Namely infrastructure. The city next to mine allowed uncontrolled building of housing and that city is a shitshow right now. The roads are clogged and often gridlocked. They deal with all kinds of failure modes in their utilities due to high usage. No.
My town is being more strategic about it. They allowed businesses to come in first and expanded out the robustness of the local coop's electric grid and only then did they allow appartments and they are doing them in stages to make sure the area can handle it. This is important in an area where not everyone is even hooked up to the city's water supply or has access to city sewage.
Sure, municipalities do need to consider infrastructure. I was just responding to someone saying that the market decides who can live in an area, which just isn't the full picture.
In areas where the power grid is struggling to keep up with demand, the municipality will need to plan with that in account. If you expand housing in an area where you've made driving the only transportation option, that will straightforwardly lead to more cars on the road. And so on.
But at least in my area, municipalities largely seem to be trying to keep housing density at or below the level it's at now, which is a problem when we're facing a housing shortage.
Why not - there are a lot of non-citizens in a lot of places with very hot markets. I don't see good reason why they should enjoy all the freedoms that the citizens have. This will destroy some of the demand.
Strong homeowner protection is almost universal throughout the developed world, including regions where the cost of housing is low relative to wage levels, so whilst it may be true to say that expensive parts of the US and Europe are homeowner friendly and have restrictive planning laws it doesn't indicate any actual correlation. New York isn't super expensive because other places take advantage of greater ability to build to a higher density.
In most lower middle income countries with relatively limited property rights, urban housing that can actually be bought is actually much more expensive relative to local median incomes, though these do have more options in the form of dorms and slums...
> The solution is terrifyingly simple: don't allow existing residents to block new housing developments. If they don't like it, they can move.
The problem with new housing development is that only large corporate investors are allowed to develop. I am very NIMBY as it relates to building apartments next-door, because I am prohibited from building apartments on my lot.
I'm all for reducing land use restrictions, but it should be done in a neutral fashion that doesn't advantage those with the capital to hire real-estate lawyers.
I agree LVT is at least worth trying. There seems to be something about simple solutions that makes people distrust them.
We are more likely to get a 10000-page micro-managing land use policy with a whole new agency that can never hope to be as efficient as a single flat tax and free market.
LOL. So people who have been living in an area should have no say but people from planning to move must have a say.
> This will probably never happen in the U.S
Thank god for that.
Maybe checkout in other countries like Canada, UK, France, Germany or even eastern europe, further in Asia on how they are doing on housing front. For sure they couldn't be having housing policies as bad as US.
You are falsely assuming an equivalence between homeownership and residency. Renters and household dependents make up a significant portion of residents in large cities.
I'd guess that is the point of the comment. In the US we can blame zoning, NIMBYs, and car-centric society for housing problems. But what about those other countries? What's the reason there?
I suspect important drivers of home pricing are:
- Young people not getting married and starting a family right out of school, making average household size drop considerably
- Increased standards for construction and rental quality
- Everyone wants more space, houses are pushing twice the size they were 30+ years ago
I think these are more plausible than just zoning and cars. I'd guess those are only serious problems in a handful of very dense cities which are constrained geographically.
The household size issue will probably level out, you can't really go below 1. Lowering standards won't happen. But smaller homes might. Bring back starter homes.
The same. Canada's population grew by 3% last year but housing supply remains inelastic. Small developers have difficulty getting loans, zoning, NIMBYs sue projects, etc.
> I think these are more plausible than just zoning and cars.
It may be more complex than "just" zoning, but it's certainly more-so zoning than the conceit that people want larger houses. People want houses period.
Agree with all of it. I will give an example of place where in practice there is no NIMBYism, one can build more or less any shape or size of building depending on lot size. Apartments are priced as much as $200-250K which adjusted to purchasing power parity would be like 2 million dollar condo/home in US. Now they are suffering huge water shortage due to over exploitation of resources.
This is leading to people running away from the city[1]
Another thing to add is that Boomers would rather age in place than be shipped off to a nursing home until they require extensive care hard to administer in a non-hospital setting. There's nothing wrong with that sentiment, but it does somewhat restrict the housing inventory that otherwise would be freed when they downsize or move into a facility.
The "old way" that nobody talks about is that part of the city would become a slum/shithole, drop in value, be gobbled up by redevelopers, and made into nicer/denser city.
But the other thing is that density is only the solution if you insist people live in certain areas - the US has experienced tremendous growth in many time in history, and not all of them were handled by densification.
> The solution is terrifyingly simple: don't allow existing residents to block new housing developments. If they don't like it, they can move.
I think that most jurisdictions already have the legal tools they need to put the public good in front of special interest groups, in the form of eminent domain laws.
It's just that the policial will is just not there.
> Eminent domain is not cheap to use given the fair market value compensation and the almost guaranteed legal fights.
I don't understand what point you tried to make.
Fair market value is what you expect to pay anyway, and the point of eminent domain is not to fleece property owners.
Legal disputes are also not a problem, and quite expectable. It's part of the checks and balances of not having corrupt government officials just steal property to hand it over to the highest bidder.
The key factor is political will. Government officials need to fight to get this sort of project through, and be able to invest their time and effort to navigate political chicanery.
My impression is that you don't need eminent domain takings for this, you just need higher level government (e.g., states) to set more rules around how restrictive local residential zoning is allowed to be.
It takes significantly less materials to build a multi-dwelling apartment/condo/townhouse structure than a single family home. In addition, the required square footage per person drops by huge amounts when people can walk to nearby community centers, restaurants, kitchens, theaters, and bars.
We are building massive 3-4k sq. ft. homes for families of four because all of their food, entertainment, and social needs are not met by their community. Everyone has their own bar, restaurant, theatre, and community center. There are 8 unit apartment buildings that are smaller than some of these houses.
I find it amusing that many folks here are ready to clap back at this comment about how "but people want single family homes" as if that weren't why we are in a housing crisis. Yes... people want single family homes, it's just not feasible to put 3M people into single family homes in a metro area without absorbing an unsustainable amount of costs.
Here we are talking literally the cost of construction, but there is also the cost of infrastructure, and the cost of transport. The reason we have a housing crisis is because as much as we all love single family homes, they aren't universalizable. If everyone were to live in a single family home, then after the transportation infrastructure reaches capacity, there is a cascade of issues that leads a region becoming totally unaffordable and ultimately unsustainable.
I would recommend the Strong Towns organization for anyone more interested in the interaction between long-term affordability issues and surburban infrastructure problems: https://www.strongtowns.org
You can easily get housing affordability crises even without single family homes, as is plainly evident right now in non-North-American cities.
It's a bit of a red herring. You end up sitting in traffic for an hour instead of standing on a bus or train for an hour for your commute, and other knock-on differences like that, which can be debated for various other reasons like ecological impact, but you still end up running into the same issues around ability to do new, denser constrution, desire of new, denser construction, and political issues and resistance to change regardless of if your urban area is full of SFH or 5-story buildings.
Is "make today's cities larger and denser forever" really the solution? Or can we figure out ways to disperse and decentralize things instead of just feeding more money back into the hands of those who own and control the current cities?
You don't sit on the train for an hour. In properly designed large cities the metro beats the car by a huge time margin unless they made cars so expensive by policy that nobody has a car and there is no traffic at that city as a result.
Americans often think the shitty experience they have in their country applies universally. Ex: The bus & light rail is bad and slow, so therefore it will always be bad everywhere. Americans haven't lived or even travelled to places in europe and asia with functional transit systems and do not realize what they are missing.
Another common american assumption is: apartments are only for the poor, so they will always be made shitty with bad soundproofing when you can make them with good soundproofing as a standard and a good amount of square feet. Or metros are always dirty, dangerous and the gross homeless live there, while that is also a pure policy choice of america.
I grew up in north america, lived in places with good metros and good apartments, and then moved to America. America doesn't know how bad they have it.
> You don't sit on the train for an hour. In properly designed large cities the metro beats the car by a huge time margin unless they made cars so expensive by policy that nobody has a car and there is no traffic at that city as a result.
You should meet some of my old coworkers in large cities in Asia... (you don't SIT on the train at all in rush hour!)
In a smaller city it can work great! But in a small NA city, everything is a 5-to-10-minute drive from everything and everyone's also happy about that. That's easy mode. But London, NY, Paris, Beijing, etc - those are the cases that are somewhat broken everywhere, affordability-wise and commute-wise.
We only have 2 cities in the United States that even approach a "medium sized" Asian metro in population. Los Angeles and NYC. Only NYC has a usable public transit system.
This is actually an argument for transit systems. Los Angeles, San Francisco/San Jose, Dallas, Phoenix -- could be (and should be) a global metropolises, with a populations and cultural relevance rivaling Tokyo or Hong Kong. They would be, if not for the car. There are people who commute daily from the suburbs of Stockton to the SF bay area.
> Los Angeles, San Francisco/San Jose, Dallas, Phoenix -- could be (and should be) a global metropolises
Yes!
> with a populations and cultural relevance rivaling Tokyo or Hong Kong.
YES!
> They would be, if not for the car.
...what?
They are not because their local governments prohibit construction and actively oppose growth, which is only vaguely related to the car. Approximately zero "global metropolises" have single-family zoning in 95% of their inner core land area. Not "have single family homes", sure maybe Tokyo has that. But zoning that prohibits denser development in such a way that most (yes, most) current housing in those areas is too dense to be built today under current rules. (This last part is true even of NYC.)
The US went hardcore anti-density in the 70s. And sure, that has something to do with the car.
I think we agree. But the car is a much bigger part of it than you're letting on.
The reason we zone this way is because people are unable to imagine their lives without being able to drive around. The very first thing people say in my town when an apartment tower goes up is "where am I going to park? Do they have a plan for moving the parking spots that this tower displaced? Traffic on tower St. is going to get so much worse!"
If the expectation is that everyone owns a car, upzoning is a huge problem -- it actually is, because everything that scares a car brain ("I can't park!" "It's going to be loud!" "This will increase traffic!") is actually true. Rather than limiting cars, of course, we choose to limit zoning. Which is actually quite a logical thing to do if everyone is to own a car.
If you get rid of cars you get rid of collectors, arterials, onramps and offramps, turn lanes, parking spots... Those are things that are fundamentally incompatible with a major, dense, vibrant city. You can easily fit 50,000 people, their workplaces, senior care homes, schools, and restaurants into the land area of a 4 way cloverleaf that is designed to service 50,000 round trip commutes by car.
It's not even the car that is the problem. It's the lack of viable alternatives to the car. In my city in North America there are almost 1.5 million people, I live about 4 kms from the city center and it's extremely uncomfortable without a car, even though I live on multiple bus and one LRT line within ten minutes of walking. I purposefully bought and built where I am because of all this connectivity, maybe 5 % of the whole city has it as good as I do, the rest have it worse to much worse. I basically live in the best situation in the city for alternatives and it's worse than the crappiest parts of the city for alternative sin places like the Netherlands.
To make alternatives you can look at what the Netherlands does. They have much more relaxed lot coverage, height limits, parking requirements, etc. so they get the same single family square footage in way less geographic area and they intermix that with much higher density so their cities proper are 3-4 times denser than where I live while not feeling cramped. They didn't get rid of the car, what they did do was ensure people had great walking, biking and transit options to fulfill the normal trips that make up their lives. That is vs where I live where I am fine getting downtown with transit, but to my kids schools, groceries, or any other workplace outside of the core, I am screwed. The extra density makes providing these transit options possible (along with reasonable regulation on other areas leading to reasonable density)
But in the US, at least, the underlying argument is about class, and race. If you haven't already, it might be worth reading about redlining, the historical practice of outlining which neighborhoods were "safe" to issue mortgage loans in because they were white and not at risk of non-whites moving in. This was about race, primarily.
Redlining became illegal starting in the '70s in many places, and its replacement was exclusionary zoning---a practice that continues to this day that relies instead on race's strong correlate, wealth. Apartments and other similar higher-density arrangements are much more affordable--and as a result, accessible to racial minorities (and the crime, etc. that racial minorities were "associated" with).
All the modern arguments around traffic jams, neighborhood character, transit, etc.---these are all modern-day variants of the same old arguments, because again, who can afford a 1:1 ratio of cars to people-in-household to get around the low-density suburbs?
So when you hear people say "I can't park! It'll be loud!" consider if they're really saying "I don't want those other people who rely on transit in my neighborhood", but using the words "there won't be room for me to park!"
The idea that if you remove cars from 90% of the population that you won't sometimes need to drive something into these areas is laughable. Even Tokyo has roads.
Tokyo has roads, but household car ownership is 41% prefecture wide; that's well under 1car:1person. In inner city, it is probably close or above 90%. That inner city traffic is pretty much taxis and commercial vehicles. The same is true of any place which is properly built-up with options to get around. Manhattan is another good example: 20% car ownership. In a 2 person household, that's your 90% number!
Building subways is impossible for no good reason nowadays. But it's quite easy to put light rail, bike lanes, and BRT in. People find a way to get around.
You don't need to take cars by force; you just need to let market forces do it. That starts with getting rid of parking, setbacks, and exclusionary zoning requirements for new development in areas of town that are underdeveloped (it's not hard to find these areas in even medium sized American cities). If people really do want cars in those built-up areas, they will rent a monthly space. It's a funny thing though, people seem to re-evaluate how valuable a car is once they have to pay $400/mo for a parking space.
If what you say is true, and everyone truly must have a car, rents will fall in those areas to compensate (developers, not having to deal with onerous parking and setback requirements, still turn a profit). In practice, this does not happen, because places without cars are nice places to live. They appreciate and attract investment, which puts money in the city coffer to improve transit options.
It does not take much land to do this. An area the size of 10,000 single family homes -- often a single neighborhood. In San Diego that's Midway, in SF it's Berkeley and the Sunset, in NYC it's Staten Island. These places all have developers who will break ground in months on collectively hundreds of thousands of new housing units if they are allowed to do it and earn a profit.
It is not fundamentally hard to do this, at all, if you can picture in your mind a human being not owning a car.
In the 1970s, beside the prevalence of cars, there were two more factors hollowing out cities: "white flight" and the fear of a nuclear war. A nuke hitting Manhattan would certainly affect more people that a nuke hitting some suburbia, and why would a nuke be targeted there in the first place?
Most people who currently live in San Francisco/San Jose don't particularly want to turn it into a global metropolis and don't give a damn about abstract concepts like "cultural relevance". Cultural elitists should have some humility and not presume that they know best.
Another option would be to set policies that encourage greater economic development and job growth in Stockton so that residents aren't forced to commute long distances. There's nothing special about the SF Bay Area: it's just another place.
The Los Angeles example pretty much proves that spinning out employment into multiple areas does not mean people will just move to the closest area to their job; it just adds another destination to the list of "places people drive an hour to."
It is not really that people living in Stockton already are commuting into the Bay, but Bay Area workers are being displaced into Stockton. The Bay Area has added more jobs than housing for a while now.
LA _could_ be much more like Tokyo if USA cared to make mass transit work.
# Service accurate enough to set a clock by.
# Service mesh that provides walk-able freedom.
# Safety and cleanliness (both a culture and enforcement issue)
Yes, there would need to be a slight increase in density as well as much more transit service; but that metro area could scale up were there enough water.
Most people move to the Bay to get a good job, which is only possible in a large, vibrant, globally connected city. Everyone -- every single person -- who buys or rents a house in the SF bay today does so because they either have or want have "a good job." Is there a single person alive who has bought a house on the peninsula recently because it's a quiet place where nothing much happens?
The Bay Area is extremely special. It's the only place to go to get a good job! There are probably 500,000 people who would move in next week if we had the apartments to house them. That is absolutely not true of Stockton.
Someone who commutes to SF from Stockton isn't a resident of Stockton. They're a resident of SF who is priced out!
Are you being sarcastic or do you actually believe that nonsense? There are a huge number of places outside the SF Bay Area that have good jobs available. Lots of openings in North Dakota for good oil and gas production jobs. Plenty of high paying work in Cleveland for anyone with healthcare skills. The list goes on and on.
Personally I wouldn't want to live in SF proper even if it was cheap. Most of the city is kind of a shithole and the governance is atrocious in a way that goes far beyond just failed housing policies.
You cannot replicate the Tokyo (or Seoul, or Taipei, or Singapore, or Hong Kong) model in the US without making certain societal choices that are either impossible or unpalatable here. We will never have anything remotely as nice as the Tokyo transit system for that reason.
I love taking the Tokyo subways whenever I visit. I make it a point to avoid the NYC subway if at all possible.
The traffic in a medium sized NA city like Atlanta or Dallas can be a lot better than it is now, and it's definitely not comparable to Shanghai, London or Tokyo.
Do you have any examples in mind of 6-10M cities with stress-free comfortable commuting and affordable housing for all? Off the top of my head, but without a lot of first- or second-hand experience, Rome seems like the commute is probably a lot better than the larger cities, but my perception is that the affordability is pretty poor? Otherwise most of my experience is in larger or much smaller places.
Something that I think often makes this discussion tough is that there are a LOT of well-known historical European cities that are at under-2M population that I don't think Americans typically realize are THAT much smaller than, say, an Atlanta. I think the challenges of serving a growing city of 5M+ are much harder than a well-established old city of 2M.
Internationally the statistics depend quite a bit on how the data is collected and aggregated, so do it's hard to international comparisons accurately.
I will say using US definitions, commute times are very sticky around the 30 minute time period. Longer commutes and people have a large incentive to move closer, short ones and they don't generally bother.
So in the US Tulusa Oklahoma population 400,000 (1M metro) has a 20 minute commute and NYC population 8,800,000 (20M metro) is 50% worse at 32 minutes average and ~100 cities between those extremes. https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/planes-trains-and-...
Edit: This suggests allowing people to move easily move around the metro area would meaningfully lower the need for transportation infrastructure. I suspect NYC has issues with people living in rent controlled apartments having long commutes but being unwilling to leave their cheap apartment, but don't have data backing it up.
If you want stress free comfortable commuting, you're going to need to build an efficient way to move people.
Cars are not really an option when it comes to moving people en mass. It's just too low capacity.
Rome's metro system in particular is stymied by buried Roman artifacts and laws for archaeology. That's not really the worst thing, given that NYC subway construction cost are some of the highest in the world.
That said, I saw what Atlanta looks like. Aside from down Atlanta, a lot of Atlanta is literally just low rise, even downright suburban sometime. It's a smaller city than people thought, given that only half a million people lives within its border proper, but nonetheless traffic is somehow a nightmare.
The big question is what counts as a city. American urban / metro areas around a central city are often large, because there are no other major cities nearby. A similar area in Europe may contain several independent cities. For example, if you take Atlanta with wide enough borders to get the population to 5+ million and drop it in the Netherlands, it will probably cover Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht.
Fun fact: the vast majority of the NYC system was built between 1904 and 1940 when there were several competing subway companies. Since the subway companies were unified in 1940, essentially no new lines have been built.
The NYC Subway is a relic from a foregone age, from a time when we built things and wasn’t mired in bureaucracy and carbrained thinking.
They don't need many new lines, having already built them. They also haven't built many new bridges to Brooklyn in awhile nor midtown tunnels under the Hudson nor large parks in the center of Manhattan.
Not just in China. China is maybe the most interesting point of comparison with big cities in the US, though, since its cities are both much denser than most AND more sprawling than most.
And I don't follow your second question. If the trains OR freeways are full of people who can't afford to live closer to their jobs and have hours-long commutes, isn't that bad? And if it can happen even with extensive public transit, what does that tell us about fundamental assumptions about "city should grow forever, number must always go up!"?
The urban mega cities are a prop that the CCP puts on display for the world. There's a reason that China's GDP-per-capita lands somewhere between Kazakhstan and Cuba.I would know because I've been there. If you go to a random exurban part of China you're going to find people living in makeshift tin structures, a lack of running water, oxcarts used as serious transportation, and a society that is functionally in the 1930s.
The CCP are masters of propaganda though, and flood Youtube and social media with influencers riding around on maglev trains and showing off new airports and architecture. Even on American Social Media, if you look for videos of "The Real China", or "Chinese Poverty" you'll get carefully curated propaganda that does not line up with what I saw first hand.
The SerpentZA YouTube channel is somewhat sensationalist, but it has good firsthand videos showing the real China from someone who lived there for years and is fluent in Mandarin. The reality is a lot darker than what most Westerners see.
China, Korea, Taiwan, Japan... I can break it down by city, but the idea that people don't commute more than an hour in any of these places is pretty laughable. HK is a bit better, because it's so small, but unless you're really wealthy or willing to live with your family in 100m2 even that is challenging. It's not that there aren't places to live (eg in Tokyo), but most people with a family and moderate incomes would rather live outside the city, and that means long commutes, standing during rush hours.
I once had a commute longer than 15min in Silicon Valley and decided I'd never do it again.
> In properly designed large cities the metro beats the car by a huge time margin unless they made cars so expensive by policy that nobody has a car and there is no traffic at that city as a result.
What’s a properly designed city? Even in Tokyo a car usually beats the train unless it’s an inter-regional trip. Im a huge Japan nerd and love their train system. But I just got back from carting three kids around Tokyo and daily life is just far easier in my American exurb.
I would rather sit in a train for 69 minutes than sit in a car for 45 minutes. In a car if my attention slips for a second I can kill myself and others. In a train if I fall asleep I may have to take another train.
Cool! You do you. I’d personally rather spend an hour in the car comfortably vs 20 minutes on public transportation where I’ve got a stranger sitting next to me, no privacy, and potentially no seat during rush hour commute times.
Having to stand for 20 minutes is not such a bad deal if you’re in decent health. Hell it’s probably good for you if you spend most of your day sat at a desk.
and if you're not? Not all bad health is a character failure, you know. Some people just have diseases like multiple sclerosis
in the public vs private transit discussion, all I know is that I've never been harassed by someone else in my car on the way to work, but the subway was a different story, and I've spent a lot more time commuting by car than train
You seem to be under the significantly confused impression that working to density cities and improve transit options is somehow an attempt to pry your car and single-family home from your cold, dead fingers.
It isn't.
It's about changing incentive structures over the long-term, so more people choose options which have a better set of societal externalities.
I am failing to persuade my brother of this. If someone desperately wants to live in a single-family home an hour away from the city center, they should want the city to be nice and dense and lots of cheap housing with great transit, because that will also make their dream home cheaper!
I used to live in a major city in the US. My commute by public transit was 45 minutes and I lived close to a major hub. I now live outside of that city. I can drive into that same job in 60 minutes. Public transit from here is over 2 hours.
Outside of Boston and NYC (well, maybe not NYC right now), I hear of no one happy with public transit in the US. We need to stop pretending that if we just move into cities, the problems will address themselves. Make public transit attractive and more people will want to live there.
This is the fundamental problem. One an individual basis moving to a 8k square foot house in the suburbs is the thing to do. For the aggregate this means the mass transit gets worse, the traffic gets worse the emissions get worse, the tax base gets smaller.
The solution is policy. Use public money to make that 2 hour transit shorter and everyone wins, not just those of us with cash
With mixed zone neighbourhoods with 30.000+people/km² you get everything for daily needs in Walking distance and close by metro. There is also a 120 years old concept for such neighbourhoods.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockrandbebauung
> Americans often think the shitty experience they have in their country applies universally.
Whether this is true or not, what matters to me - a person living in the US - is that public transit in the US is a relatively poor experience compared with driving. Until that changes, I will keep driving and I will resist efforts that would force me to use public transit. I don't care if it's better elsewhere because I don't live there nor do I want to move there.
I want our public transit to be good, but that simply isn't the case right now. Walkable cities with quality public transit and good community infrastructure sound great, but until they are a reality here I will have no interest in living in a dense urban location.
About 10 years ago I had a project and stayed in an apartment in haugong, a residential area about 6 miles from my office. Uber was the only realistic commute - about 15-20 minutes. Public transport was about an hour to do the journey.
This may be changing. You see a growing awareness of the shabbiness of certain American norms in parts of so-called "populist" circles (left and right).
Metros are pretty slow. 20mph/30kph is about par, less if the stops are spaced closely, more if they're further apart. If you factor in time to walk to and from the metro, and time waiting for your train, you can almost always beat them with a bike. Here's a chart of a few systems [1]. Where the larger European cities do better is the density -- what you mostly care about in a city is how many people you can reach in a reasonable amount of time, say 30-60 minutes. In the Bay Area, I can, with my car, reach about 3 million people in 60 minutes, about the same as I could using transit in Berlin, which has an excellent metro system, and Berlin doesn't have to deal with the geographic barriers that the Bay Area does.
I think that shared ride self driving cars have a lot of potential in both types of cities. They give you a lot of what's good about private cars (door to door, good average speed, comfort, some privacy), and a lot of what's good about metros (higher density on the road than private cars due to sharing and less need for parking)
I don't know that "less need for parking" has ever actually panned out. If the car is not parked somewhere, it is milling around waiting for a ride, which might actually be worse in terms of congestion.
Yes, you don't want empty AVs roaming around the streets. There probably needs to be some sort of government intervention to discourage this behavior. Here's what's possible though:
1. Shared ride AVs can deliver multiple people per trip to their jobs, and they can also make multiple trips in the morning, and multiple trips in the evening. Private cars generally take one person, have to sit in a parking spot all day, and then go home.
2. AVs can park relatively far from their destination. After they drop off their passenger, they can go somewhere else to park.
3. AVs, if they can coordinate or be remotely controlled by a parking lot, can park way more densely than normal cars. In a normal parking lot, maybe half of the space is aisles for cars to drive to and from the parking space. If cars could dynamically get out of the way, you would only need a small portion of the space empty. A very simple strategy would be for there to be only room for one aisle for a big parking lot, and all of the cars would just move forward or back to make the single aisle appear wherever it was needed.
In all, this probably reduces the need for parking by maybe 6x relative to human driven cars.
Traffic is just cars times miles. If all your cars are parked far away from their final destination, all you are doing is adding total miles traveled. Those don't just have basic operation costs, but create yet another kind of traffic: Just like how an elementary school creates more traffic than a high school, because pickups and drop offs require more miles than just having the car parked in the right spots.
So instead of, say, having rush hour start at 4pm, with people leaving work, you have a new, free, bonus rush hour at 2, of empty cars driving near the places where they'll need to be picked up. Same thing near any other rush hour: Every added mile kills. It's not even just cars that have this problem: You'll find that in American cities with transit, which often are built with very few key destinations, there are large depots for trains downtown! Bart has no need to use most of their trains most of their day, so you'll find trains that just go downtown and stay there, parked.
What drives efficiency, always, is fewer miles traveled, and having the need for transport be as even as possible. Something like car-centric stadium is terrible: You need major infra to support a game, with many lanes, and many parking places, just to support game days. But then there might be as few as 10 game days a year, so all that extra infrastructure is wasted the other 355 days.
Self driving, rented cars probably make the first worse, and don't really make huge differences in the second. I think that they have advantages: fewer people dying from drunk driving, or someone doing 80mph in a city street running people over, like we had last week in St Louis. Younger people and older people retaining some independence in areas where now they are wholly dependent of others to go anywhere. But the efficiency gains story is a pipe dream. We will see more miles driven, and therefore more total congestion.
First, there's traffic, and there's parking. The claim you're making is that the lack of need for parking in dense areas creates traffic while the SDCs go to park. That may be true, but if the SDCs are delivering say, 5-9 people to work every day between shared rides and multiple trips, the fact that one SDC then has to make an extra drive out of the business district, at the end of the morning rush hour is not that significant.
The hope is also that SDC driving behavior is also a lot more consistent and predictable, leading to more smoothly flowing traffic. Sometimes a few crazy drivers, or worse, drivers that cause accidents, can foul up traffic massively. I'd expect that this would be reduced in a mostly SDC world.
Metro systems even in the best examples don't give easy anywhere to anywhere access. There are places you cannot access because there is no direct route and unlike a car there are no 'shortcuts' around going where the train goes.
So you walk the last mile? Not accessible to everyone. Neither is accelerating a two ton slab of metal to move one person around from exactly point A to exactly point B (and now you need parking at both points, which adds to the sprawl issue)
> Is "make today's cities larger and denser forever" really the solution? Or can we figure out ways to disperse and decentralize things instead of just feeding more money back into the hands of those who own and control the current cities?
We should be aiming for some degree of density. I would hazard a guess that size is largely dependent upon what a person wants out of life.
Infrastructure is very expensive to build and maintain, and everyone demands it in multiple forms (roads, water, sewage, and power at a minimum). Containing the costs by reducing either extent or capacity would allow us to allocate those resources to other things, things that could improve the collective quality of life.
As for decentralization, it depends upon how it is done. I've lived in or visited towns with a few thousand people. Nearly everything one needed was within walking distance, though people often left town for things they wanted. I've also lived in similarly sized urban communities where virtually nothing one needed was within a reasonable walking distance. Suburban communities often take the latter to the extreme. What was the difference? Everything in the small town was centralized, yet businesses and services in those urban communities were effectively decentralized.
Let's say you build a bunch of small towns to decentralize the population and get away from feeding money back into the hands of those who own and control cities. You now have another major consideration: are people going to live most of their daily lives in those towns, or are they going to live in one town and work in another? A big part of the reason why people spend so much of their life commuting, whether it is by car or train, is because opportunities (may it be home ownership or careers) don't necessarily fall in the same place.
>You can easily get housing affordability crises even without single family homes, as is plainly evident right now in non-North-American cities.
Yes, you can get an affordability crisis anywhere you make it illegal to build housing. Nobody is arguing that. The point is that you also get an affordability crisis simply by pushing the transportation infrastructure to the point of failure, and then reject density.
>Is "make today's cities larger and denser forever" really the solution? Or can we figure out ways to disperse and decentralize things instead of just feeding more money back into the hands of those who own and control the current cities?
This is literally what's happening in every tech satellite city, the point is that many-if-not-most of our urban centers are already at their transportation capacities, simply because that is the suburban development model: it's extremely cheap until suddenly it's no longer functional. The suburban model has no equilibrium, it's a cascade, once the planned automobile infrastructure reaches capacity, you cannot increase it at a rate that is sustainable. Thus, once that capacity is gone, suddenly the real estate in the core becomes extremely valuable -> which incentivizes density -> which further strains peak infrastructure -> which increases the value of core real estate -> which further incentivizes density -> etc. -> etc. -> etc.
We can't wish this away, beyond wishing other people just didn't exist. It's like wishing that other people would take the bus, but not wanting to take it yourself. Nobody in the bay area wants to move to affordable Red Bluff, CA, without a reason, much less the CEO of a major corporation moving their entire company there out of the kindness of his heart we he or she already has a house and friends in Atherton.
All I can say is thanks, but yes, every thread of this variety gets a bit tiresome hearing the same things over and over that tend to be some variation of "my peeve local issue with the US is the reason the US experiences a problem experienced by hundreds of other countries with wildly different policies."
Not to say, in a vacuum, multi-family housing won't provide more housing units per unit of land area than single-family. Clearly, it will. But unless you build every city from scratch to house 20 million people, whether you started with single-family or multi-family, the most desirable cities will end up in a future state whereby more people want to live there than housing exists for, and even if regulations and zoning allow you to build higher and denser than is currently done, to do it where people want to live, you'll have to tear down existing buildings, including existing housing, and many of the owners and occupants of that housing won't want that. You'll also need to run more utility lines, build new pipes, run them under existing roads, which means shutting down those roads, and even if they're perfect utopian European roads that have zero cars on them and only have pedestrians and bicycles, the user of those roads are still going to get annoyed and inconvenienced, and it's going to cost more to do this than building new housing where nobody currently lives, pretty much no matter what.
You end up sitting in traffic for an hour instead of standing on a bus or train for an hour for your commute
Why are you acting like driving a vehicle and being a passenger in a vehicle are the same experience? One is clearly more demanding and inhibiting than the other.
On a train you can work, read, listen to a podcast, sometimes eat... Lots of things you can't do while in a car. Unless your job is driving. Which, if you commute for work, it kinda is.
You can do those things if you get a seat, which you generally cannot during commuting hours in any city where public transit is good enough to be popular.
I commuted for awhile between Baltimore and DC on Amtrak and apart from being hellaciously unreliable it was great for working. But my commute from the upper west side to east midtown when I lived in NYC was completely different—being crammed into the 1/2/3 and then fighting through the masses to take the S across town.
> You can do those things if you get a seat, which you generally cannot during commuting hours in any city where public transit is good enough to be popular.
I see lots of people watching movies/series or reading books (physical or ebooks) while standing up in various Paris transit during rush hour.
You can listen to music or a podcast while standing.
I just plugged in upper west side and midtown Manhattan into google maps... It said 18 minutes via transit. Maybe your commute had more complications, last mile and so on.
You can listen to music or a podcast while driving. You can even hear it over the din of your car engine, which is much less loud than being shoved into a box with a hundred other people.
> On a train you can work, read, listen to a podcast, sometimes eat
I do all of those things in my car while driving too. Maybe not read but I’ve listened to audiobooks. I also sit in Teams meetings, read and respond to emails and IMs on my phone as well when I’m at a stop light. Maybe some people can’t do these things while driving but plenty of us do.
People are attacking single family homes and commuter culture. Okay, but my solution is different.
The pandemic showed that millions of us can work from home. My office was closed for about 2 years. Our stock price shot way up.
There were lots of stories about the environmental benefits. Air pollution in big cities decreased dramatically. Wildlife started returning in places.
We keep building commercial real estate and most people I know have little desire to commute to the office and sit in a cubicle disturbed by other people constantly.
I would severely limit commercial real estate building permits, encourage companies to have employees work at home via tax breaks or whatever. This will help with the housing issues, greenhouse gas emissions, decrease the need for new roads because of less traffic.
Everyone wins except dumb control freak managers and restaurants that do lunch in the business areas.
This would imply that a company's stock price is directly influenced by its productive output; in reality, it's only very tangentially so. Especially for low-profit, high-growth tech companies, I'd wager the federal funds rate's effect on the stock price is way higher.
My company's profits were up in 2020-21 and then we went back to the office in 2022 and our profits and stock price dropped. We had 500 openings in 2020-21 and then we laid off 8% of the employees in 2023.
I joke in meetings that we just need to go back home and we will make more money.
I work for a fabless semiconductor company that makes chips for data centers and other applications, not a software company.
No argument against your company's WFH productivity! But:
> 2020-21 and then we went back to the office in 2022 and our profits and stock price dropped
The broad stock index rallied like crazy 2020-21 with ZIRP, then all of 2022 was a bear market that followed rate hikes. The S&P 500 rose almost 50% from January 2020 to December 2021, then lost about 20% in 2022. So it's not unreasonable that your company's stock price followed that trajectory.
The government wants people in the office because it helps boost the economy.
I suggest the exact opposite.
Are we serious about climate change? Which is a more effective strategy? Encourage people to switch to electric cars or just have them drive their existing gas car less? My monthly gasoline bills dropped from $250 to $70 during the pandemic.
How much are we spending on health care? How many people don't have the time to exercise? I had an extra 60 minutes a day to take a walk instead of commuting.
The solution to dispersal, and density, is to simply allow that type of building everywhere, and then they just kind of randomly pop up whenever/wherever works out.
Unless forced to due to scarcity, dense development does not really clump up together all at once for good reason, since clumping up will drive up costs in a hyper local area. Tokyo for example, has a lot of detached housing, even in the central wards. The density there is more pockmarked and random, and notably never really concentrates all that highly; there is not a single Japanese building in the top 100 skyscrapers, because skyscraper concentration is an artifact of how we force dense developments only in certain places.
Uninhabited land is empty of people for a reason:
- it’s protected
- it’s undesirable (too hot/ dry/wet/far/steep/close to a pollution source)
- it’s agricultural land
If it’s not any of these it’s owned and thus controlled by someone.
> Uninhabited land is empty of people for a reason: - it’s protected
Almost the entirety of coastal California (and Oregon and WA as well.) It's insane. It's the best climate on the planet and the most protected from climate change.
> Is "make today's cities larger and denser forever" really the solution?
Tokyo Metro handles 6m+ riders a day with a population of 40m. So, yes, at least until you surpass 40m people.
> Or can we figure out ways to disperse and decentralize things instead of just feeding more money back into the hands of those who own and control the current cities?
“Disperse and decentralize” is exactly how every city I have ever been to is built.
We are decentralizing things. That's what the housing crisis is: people being forced to accept less central locations than they would like. It turns that being the one who gets decentralized sucks, people it happens to generally resent it, and others are willing to make serious tradeoffs to their household budgets or else the dignity of their living conditions, in order to remain central.
I spend a lot of time in São Paulo, and no matter how you slice it, housing is cheaper there. Adjunct professors and freelancers can afford houses there. Maids can afford houses, albeit far from the center.
Everyone complains about the city’s endless verticalização (verticalizication) because they like the idea of old houses, but I say keep it coming.
That’s not the reason we have a housing crisis. If you look at cities like Houston, where housing is relatively affordable, the vast majority of people still have single family homes. The reason we have a housing crisis is because regulations make it too hard to build housing.
Despite their reputation for car centric design in the suburbs, Houston is actually building a LOT of multi-family dwellings. This is helping with affordability.
These things are not in conflict. It's very easy to build 100% car-dependent high-density residential. Just cut a subdivision off an arterial and chuck a 5-over-1 or some townhouses in there. That's the vast majority of multifamily development by volume.
Multifamily housing is valuable against car-dependence in the context of a city street grid with mixed use zones or at least somewhat proximate neighborhood commercial zones. Then the people living there actually have destinations they can walk to, and routes they can bike or take transit on that aren't "snake around to the subdivison's one interface to the 6-lane arterial, and try not to die on it."
Houston is just second-to-last in line in Texas to face the affordability crisis (followed by San Antonio) because they have the highest capacity automobile infrastructure, but it's already regularly ranked with the worst traffic in the United States.
While I agree that Houston does a lot of things right, especially just literally allowing density, I do not think they would survive an influx of folks while maintaining affordability any better than Austin has.
Considering that Houston is significantly bigger than Austin--metro area of 6.6 million vs 2.2 million--one could argue it _is_ handling a significant influx of people better than Austin.
Right... agreed, but what? Are you not following the argument? Austin is on the exact same trajectory as the West Coast. It's just about 10-15 years behind.
No, it isn’t, because Austin allows building to keep up with demand. The policy failures of West Coast states aren’t a law of nature; they’re policy failures.
>No, it isn’t, because Austin allows building to keep up with demand. The policy failures of West Coast states aren’t a law of nature; they’re policy failures.
The policy of building out is a law of nature, simply because it is impractical and unaffordable to upgrade the transportation infrastructure. The only real development you're getting in Austin is vertical construction downtown (which is net good for affordability), and then you're filling in the remaining wilderness east of Austin (Manor, Webberville, and the area out to Bastrop).
That's the last remaining unconsumed land that is viable for commuting, as the highways are already overcapacity out to Leander, Georgetown, Buda, and nearly Dripping Springs along the Mopac and 35 corridors.
If Austin starts building multi-family homes in existing SFH neighborhoods, then more power to them.
> The reason we have a housing crisis is because as much as we all love single family homes, they aren't universalizable.
In the US, which has lots of land area, single family homes are the norm:
The majority of the housing stock in the United States is single-family detached houses. Of the total 128.5 million housing units in 2021, about 81.7 million were detached homes and 8.2 million were attached single-family homes. In comparison, roughly 31.8 million units were in multifamily buildings.[1]
The US only has a housing space crisis in over-urbanized areas.
>The US only has a single family home space crisis in over-urbanized areas.
FTFY, but fully agree.
In urbanized areas (where most people live), we have hit the capacity of the automobile transportation infrastructure. This causes a cascade of real estate prices in urban cores, making the vast majority of these areas unaffordable for normal folks. This is leading to myriad crises, like a massive teacher shortage in California, simply because lower-income people cannot build normal/desirable lives for themselves.
The issue is that automobile-centric infrastructure makes this cascade inevitable in areas where cities grow to the point of infrastructure failure, but the cost of maintaining the infrastructure creates financial problems in areas that do not grow to this point.
None of this would be an issue if jobs were not clustered in big cities, but they are.
Ah, if it was just jobs. Imagine you have a very smart kid that goes faster than grade level. In a rural area, your option is home schooling. In a small metro, there might be enough kids to have some sort of gifted program that works. In a really large metro, there will be many specialized schools, where people that are used to not just random gifted children, but those that share very similar strengths and weaknesses. You'll also have more medical specialists, a far wider variety of quality entertainment options, and more people sharing whatever weird hobbies you have.
The advantages of having more people living in your metro are are massive even if one is a remote worker. The advantages might not be needed for one's special case, and you might prefer to, say, live near a beach with great surfing opportunities in Portugal, but you'll still be accepting significant tradeoffs for not living near more people.
Strong Towns is not a reliable or neutral source. They aren't necessarily wrong, but they do cherry pick data to suit the urbanist narrative that they're trying to promote. It can be a useful source for understanding the issue but don't take anything you read there at face value.
What on earth do you mean "neutral" as if there are two sides to caring about long term infrastructure sustainability. If by "cherry-pick" you mean, explain a falsifiable hypothesis and then point to example of the hypothesis playing out exactly as predicted (Detroit, Jackson, etc.).
If you really think their hypothesis is totally wrong, we're currently living in a real time experiment of the thesis in the Phoenix metro area. Due to water concerns, the suburban development model is no longer feasible. It's unlikely that Phoenix will suddenly become density mecca (as it's not feasible with automobile transportation), so we should expect to see a massive hole in the metro cities' budgets sooner rather than later. If Phoenix turns out to be fine a in 15 years, I'll happily concede the point and will have learned a lot.
That is exactly the cherry picking that I mean. You can point out a few examples that appear to fit the Strong Towns hypothesis (although causality isn't clear) but there are many other suburban cities which are quietly doing fine and have sustainable budgets.
The Detroit metro area would be a mess even if it had higher density housing and better public transit. The problems there are more due to federal trade policies, toxic labor relations, and failed progressive social policies. It isn't valid evidence to either support or refute the Strong Towns hypothesis: too many confounding variables.
Their thesis is clear and falsifiable, it's just that the timelines are very large. If you are going to criticize the thesis, it would make sense to address the actual arguments of ongoing cost-per-resident of various pieces of infrastructure, rather than just calling the organization 'biased'.
The Strong Towns "hypothesis" is at least partly falsified by objective economic data. Many suburbs/exurbs have been around for decades now. If the costs per resident were truly unsustainable then we would expect to see a surge in Chapter 9 bankruptcies, or at least a major spike in muni bond insurance premiums. So far that isn't happening. Most cities manage to muddle through and patch their infrastructure well enough to keep things working.
I mean, the main argument against their thesis is just that most people will pay more for services than they otherwise would have and be poorer, but not collapse. On the other hand, the trouble in the mid-west and rustbelt we are seeing more and more bailouts on infrastructure (the $1B Blatnik bridge fix, for example, will be paid for by the US Gov't), while also seeing more deferred maintenance.
The good news is that, again, this is falsifiable, and I'm an empiricist. If Phoenix doesn't can weather their future lack of growth without adding density, then I'll wave the white flag.
While suburbs certainly are financial sinkholes, there are other factors. Housing in cities like NYC is expensive in part because there is a housing crisis in NYC, because nothing is being built. And what is being built is preposterously expensive and beyond the teach of a typical New York family (not to mention cramped; you can barely fit a queen-sized bed into many of these bedrooms). Another issue is that developers have been snatching up real estate to cater to single yuppies who will accept living in a rathole-sized bedroom. An average bedroom is split in half to accommodate twice the occupants so that rent can be raised. This can make real estate hostile to anyone but such renters. And never mind pied-à-terre apartments, a controversial practice for which we can come up with pros and cons.
I'm not arguing that blocking housing doesn't also cause a housing crisis. I'm just saying, given the choice of living in Manhattan in a single family home, or a six-floor walkup, I'm taking the single family home. And if everyone in Manhattan made the same choice, Manhattan would be ridiculously more expensive. The best parallel is probably Beverly Hills, but for the entire island.
we had no problem building houses for people in the 50s and 60s. Why all the sudden we can't do it in the last 20 years? There's plenty of land out there. Even in the CA, the most densley populated state, there are more acres in CA than people and yet somehow there's a huge land shortage and ridiculous amounts of regulation. Even 100 miles away from the city, you'll see houses squeezed together like some kind of concentration camp, with open land in every direction and a 5 lane highway to service the equally insane commuting distances created by these land use policies: talk about terrible for the environment.
>we had no problem building houses for people in the 50s and 60s. Why all the sudden we can't do it in the last 20 years?
Yea, it's actually pretty easy. Just get in a time machine and go back to 1956 when the Federal Highway Act made all that development possible, and just tell them to build sixteen-lane highways through every major city instead of two-lane highways. Explain that in 70 years, those highways will be operating overcapacity, so that a commute in and out of the city will not be able to operate at optimal speed of a vehicle, so that traveling 30 miles will not take 30 minutes, rather it will often take 60 minutes or longer, thus making central real estate more valuable. Which, in turn, creates a feedback loop that makes the viable transportation range of the urban center smaller and smaller. And, thus, makes the real estate in that smaller area more and more valuable. However, if you can get those highways doubled or tripled in size it should stop that feedback loop for now.
Once you convince them to do that, feel free to come back to 2024, and all our development concerns will go away for another 70 years, at which point, someone will have to get in the time machine to make it 38 lane highways.
Those poor souls living in cities. I read somewhere that Austin (or another place in Texas), despite being the dominant settlement in its metro area, had much lower representation than the rich and less populated suburbs.
I grew up in Austin, so I'm intimately familiar with it. I don't really understand your comment, but I'm happy to talk about Austin if you have any questions.
> Even in the CA, the most densley populated state
California is far from the most densely populated state! It is the most highly populated, but it's also one of the largest.
The most densely populated states are on the Eastern seaboard: NJ (1263 ppl/mi² or 488 ppl/km²), then RI, MA, CT, MD, DE, FL, NY, PA, and OH. CA is 11th, at 250ppl/mi² or 97 ppl/km², approximately 20% of the NJ density.
the key is to balance the number of jobs in an area with the amount of housing and to have mixed use land policy so housing and commercial and industrial can be much closer.
Even giving people the single family housing they want, there’s ways to increase the density massively that aren’t being utilised right now. Bringing back terraced houses in the US would be a great first step, and is only an improvement over the insanity that is the Bay Area’s houses in every back and side garden while still enforcing setbacks.
The hilarious bit is how confident they all are about people wanting SFH development, yet refuse to legalize everything else.
Imagine banning every android device from the US, while also proclaiming that no one would've purchased android anyway, because Apple is so popular. Apple is good because they compete and then win.
If SFH demand is so high, surely legalizing vertical development would be no big deal, just like android still struggles to gain adoption in the US.
Last I heard, Android has about 50% marketshare in the US. That's pretty far from "struggling to gain adoption". It's not winning, but it's not losing either, it's a tie.
Right, this kind of talk is completely disingenuous from the "single family homes only" crowd.
Upzoning almost always means you can build more densely, not that you absolutely have to. People can still build single family homes if they want.
Single family home zoning is really mandatory single family home zoning. You aren't allowed to make anything else on that land, no matter how much of a housing crisis there is. But that doesn't mean upzoning somehow bans single family homes.
Oh, I believe it. That's great! I don't mind that people who want to live like that CAN live like that if they can afford it. But it should not be the ONLY way people can live. Right now our laws prevent us from building affordable and livable homes like I mentioned above. Only the richest get to live in such communities.
Google 'missing middle'. There are tons of laws restricting what kind of homes can be built so we end up with whole swaths of cities being a single kind of home that is unaffordable and doesn't work for a lot of people.
We no longer build the types of urban homes that were popular when this was primarily an agrarian country, and this only happened because of zoning laws?
it sounds ironic, but much of the shift to suburban development patterns in the USA was indeed driven by the Great Migration into cities – specifically, the migration of formerly-enslaved Black Americans out of the rural south and into cities. US public policy was very explicit about disinvesting in cities and destroying vibrant urban neighborhoods, replacing them with freeways and parking lots.
today, large portions of US cities are zoned for exclusively single-family homes, and other zoning requirements like parking minimums, and minimum setback and lot sizes continue to slow urban, transit-oriented redevelopment.
> the migration of formerly-enslaved Black Americans out of the rural south and into cities
My understanding is this is where it started but the mass migration of everyone off of the farm really started to happen when gasoline engines became standard equipment and replaced beasts of burden.
> and lot sizes continue to slow urban, transit-oriented redevelopment.
I'm not convinced this is the entirety of the problem, fortunately US policy is not a monolith, and several cities are experimenting with different configurations. It will be interesting to see if "developers" start opting for the multiplex configurations that are now being allowed in traditional single family zones.
Do these laws serve no other purpose other than to prevent building? Which of these laws can be discarded to 'solve' the housing problem? Which should we keep?
Some of the housing regulations were legitimately put in place for safety reasons to protect people. Others were put in place to keep black and Asian people out. Especially after government initiatives to prevent discrimination in housing like the 1968 Fair Housing Act, efforts to keep out minorities became cloaked in the garb of "public safety", and minority-excluding regulations were sanitized into affordability-excluding regulations.
but it's a lot more than that. Blue cities are by far the worst offenders at anti-housing regulations. part of it must be that people are funadamentally extremely conservative when it comes to housing.
Actually yes they do more than just prevent building, they were also implemented to keep "undesirables" out of more affluent areas by making it too expensive for them. This is covered extensively in the book The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, and is a great read.
Specifically:
- Huge min lot sizes
- Offsets
- Covenants*
We can start by removing/revising those.
(*Certain covenants are no longer enforceable today)
The obvious one is residential only zoning. How are you supposed to be able to walk to local businesses if there are no local businesses as zoning prohibits them?
zoning laws are usually locally voted on and approved - if the locals in any given area want to allow business, they can - but lots of people don't want to live close to businesses - so they vote accordingly.
People that want to live near businesses and don't, should move to places that have it - there are lots of places in the country like that.
People that want to live in an entirely residential area, but don't, should move to those places that are.
Why do we need a single solution for everyone, in all areas?
Housing discrimination, Jim Crow, anti-asian immigration, and red-lining laws were locally voted on and approved.
That doesn't make them just or a good idea.
>Why do we need a single solution for everyone, in all areas?
Because we have a severe housing shortage. Because why should a crank three blocks over get any input at all into me wanting to put a multiplex on my private property. This isn't advocating for a single solution, it is advocating for a revisiting of a set of rules that are increasingly being found to be the cause of very serious social problems that benefit very few people.
If you want to live in a place that is only SFH with no businesses, that necessarily places a restriction on a historically allowable use of someone else's private property. Zoning is a VERY recent invention.
> zoning laws are usually locally voted on and approved - if the locals in any given area want to allow business, they can - but lots of people don't want to live close to businesses - so they vote accordingly.
By this logic, it would seem impossible to critique really anything that any democratically elected government does.
Local elections have notoriously low voter turnout and candidates are often supported by developers and real estate brokers. Often local city council members are outright bribed by people who have an interest in only approving their own projects. In addition, sometimes city counselors will prevent zoning changes to increase the value of their own property. City officials are often the biggest bang for your buck when it comes to corruption.
A really prominent case in Moreno Valley, CA exposes how this often works:
> Local elections have notoriously low voter turnout
The flaw in democracy, manifest.
You simply can't say "We literally do not need anyone. Things are fine. If there's an emergency we can convene something, but outside of that, I don't actually want a body convened with the responsibility of changing things randomly. I'm busy and I don't have the time to keep an eye on these goofs."
It should be that if voter turnout is less than 25%, the election is canceled and either held again, or the seat just left vacant until the next election. Or you are elected, but without power until an emergency is declared, then you have the standard powers but only for that temporary period.
Then you get Brazil. Literal clowns and jokes for candidates.
> i dont understand why people seem to refuse to participate in democracy
Participating in democracy means actually going to meetings, trying to get on the agenda, watching and reporting on the business of the government. Voting is literally the smallest form of participation available.
Further, even if it wasn't, I'm a free person. I didn't ask to be born in your democracy, I don't feel required to participate in it, and even your system of participation explicitly denies me the right to say "no."
> and it's mandatory here
My view is all this does is give politicians a false mandate. They're forcing you to pick from a slate they've likely manipulated and introduce the majority mode of "least worst of."
Is that what my forced participation is to boil down to? Giving full authority to the least worst person that got sent up that year? What about this makes you feel that you have participated in anything?
if the alternative is the worst worst, then yes i actually participated in something. as summed up by someone else, and i am paraphrasing here, if you have the option to vote for 80% hitler and actual hitler, and you choose neither, if actual hitler gets into power you are complicit through your inaction. sometimes democracy is about selecting the least bad person, because if you dont things can just get much MUCH worse
The notion that compulsory voting results in an engaged electorate is not plausible to me. Human nature does not work that way.
It does not seem wise to solicit (much less demand) opinions from those who would choose to withhold them. These would be the least-informed opinions available.
We have enough trouble with the people who insist on sharing when their opinion is unwelcome. (These are often a close second on the least-informed scale!) :)
Where I live in Australia, small developers would be the biggest opponents of things that limit their opportunities to subdivide and build more densely - parking minimums, setbacks, frontage minimums, shadowing, sight-lines and so on. (I don't know what "offset" is in US real estate lingo.)
The limitations are largely NIMBYism. There's a block of six units in my short one-block street of otherwise detached single-family dwellings, and the elderly neighbours here talk about how they wished they'd objected to its building decades ago because it changed the character of the street.
It's all tension between "what is best for me and the street as it was when I bought into it" and "what is best for us all collectively". Building here is slightly outpacing population, but it is too financially attractive to buy second and third properties as investments, and it is politically risky to tackle that.
Try to build a multi unit housing development in just about every SFH neighborhood in North America and you will quickly discover the layers of laws that actively prevent it.
Plus, if the choice is going to be between great family homes for some + terrible quality ultra-expensive appartements for most, or decent reasonably priced appartements for everyone but few family homes.. then yeah, screw family homes.
So the suburbs are net recipients of infrastructure taxes, which is a bad thing. Got it. Shall we also apply this to other government services? It would be kind of shameless to complain about suburbanites being the net-beneficiaries of one service, while expecting them to be net-contributors to literally every other government service in existence, right?
It would be amusing if the end result of harassing net-productive taxpayers (suburbanites) is that they exit even further into wholly private areas where the government provides almost no services and nearly all the "local tax" is spent on upkeep of only the private community.
I’ll admit that I merely skimmed the study, but as I read it states that local/municipal property taxes in many cases don’t cover the road infrastructure required to support those homes. To make the argument that they are subsidized you’d also have to factor in municipal and state income taxes.
Subsidies are about relative costs. Tax collection is an interesting thing to look at in addition, but ultimately if we are to determine whether the suburbs are subsidized, it would require analyzing cost to deliver city services per capita.
They don't cover them to the tune of many tens of percentage points where I live. It's to the degree that the state basically has to redistribute wealth from the cities to the counties where the roads are built.
If the communities served by a road had to pay the full price of the road you'd see a lot of little 8-10 house hamlets with 10 million dollar bridges pack up and leave.
long ago in the netherlands the road in front of your house was your responsibility. You could agree with your neighbors to a crappy road but with loss of status and probably the value of the home. (The last remnant was the requirement to remove weeds. That was how I found out.)
I keep reading that claim. Then I look at old streetcar suburbs which have successfully a repaired thier roads over decades (including removing the old tracks). They have also added water, sewer, electric, phone, catv since being built.
which is to say it doesn't pass the smell test. I don't know where the studies go wrong but something isn'c adding up.
Old streetcar suburbs are much denser than typical American suburb today due to increased setbacks, lot coverage rates and other factors. But yes, even streetcar suburbs get subsidized back then. The subsidy is just more productive in it opening economic mobility with cheap, carbon neutral transport, depending on your views on rail transport.
assuming his numbers are correct, that shows that in one town in one state, the local taxes don't seem to cover the cost of infrastructure. But what about state taxes? Do they reimburse the locality? Federal funds?
It’s a fairly intuitive thing to understand, the suburbs require significantly more infrastructure per capita. More roads, power lines, sewer/water lines, etc.
Just look at something as simple as trash pickup. In the burbs you have to travel a significantly greater distance per household.
I'd imagine practically no one actually takes that because the standard deduction is more lucrative. Unless you live in a far above average priced home with a jumbo loan.
Is it? Those same people work and pay taxes. If they couldn’t live in a city due to cost that city would have less revenue as a result of fewer employed people buying goods and services.
You’re misreading me. I replied to the idea that suburbs are subsidized. The view was that people should be taxed to off set their supposed subsidies. I don’t think the suburbs are really subsidized.
I'm not an expert on municipal expenses, but I'd wager that it takes a pretty unusual cost situation to render it cheaper to pave/trench/replace more miles of road/pipe/wire and maintain more service entries to serve fewer people.
This is compex. Rural gravel roads are likely cheaper per capite than paved roads, but they don't scale to the triffic of a suburb. A city street needs to be more expensive yet.
Although it's not really that much of a factor these days, it effectively is equivalent to a subsidy. So is government backing of mortgages for that matter.
It’s also possible it’s like that because the city and apartments they are familiar with suck. I used to live in a small, admittedly rich, city, and had all amenities within 7 minutes walk, park within 3 minute walk. The city policy is that there is a primary school within kids walking distance. We had 4 apartments in the city with these characteristics, and didn’t hear the neighbors (much) except for the above neighbors heels in one of them.
I would like for all of the things I buy to be cheaper, including housing. No one finds that hard to believe. But reducing housing costs will require making tough decisions and some special interest groups will end up as net losers, so it's just hard to build political consensus for any major changes.
I would argue more than that the housing crisis is an “urban crisis” and a “fraying of the social fabric” crisis.
By the first I mean the continued destruction of smaller towns and semi-rural areas. Even if single family homes are more expensive to build than multi family apartments, the fact is we have ridiculous amounts of space in this country. But most people for various reasons don’t want to live where the space and “affordable” housing is or can be built. The more our population drifts to major metro areas for economic reasons and the more jobs go to where the people are, the worse housing affordability will be, even if we build huge sky rises and cram everyone into Tokyo size apartments.
By the second I mean that people want their own bars, theaters and restaurants at home because in a lot of cases going out to the shared versions of these sucks, sometimes a lot. There’s an overall lack of respect for being in public that just seems to permeates the American culture right now.
In my own experience just this past week someone was completely oblivious to the fact that I was leaving a parking space and their doors were open and they were flitting about making leaving unsafe. It only broke through to them when a gust of wind caught their door and slammed it into my car, to which they hurriedly apologized and swore it would “buff out” and then ran away.
Or the taxi driver who parked in the middle of the lot lane waiting for their fare blocking the whole exit.
There was the restaurant patron loudly having an argument on their cell phone. The cashier who was so stoned or distracted they needed 3 tries to get the order right. Or the waiter who got into a literal shouting match with their co-worker to which management did nothing but watch.
The theater floor is stickier than a fly trap and the seats aren’t much better. The food is awful, and over priced. The cost of just a few games of pool at the bar is crazy, even before factoring in your drink will cost you 4-6x what you could get it for at home and be lukewarm.
Why would people want to go to these shared places or live where they can’t have the space for their own version when this is more and more the norm.
A huge reason these shared spaces are so miserable is because the communities around them cannot support them. Parking minimums and low density means that not only are these commercial properties insanely expensive, but also that not enough people can access them.
A huge upside to increasing density is that the theatre goes from having 100 people within 4 miles of it to 10,000. In addition, instead of having a 400 car parking lot surrounding it like a moat, people just walk right in off the sidewalk. This means the theatre makes more money and pays less in rent. This means they can hire more people to keep it clean and safe.
>A huge reason these shared spaces are so miserable is because the communities around them cannot support them. Parking minimums and low density means that not only are these commercial properties insanely expensive, but also that not enough people can access them.
That might be a small part of it, but some of the places I'm talking about have been there for 30+ years. And they were better before, when the population was even less dense than it is now. Culture plays a HUGE part in this stuff, and I think much bigger than any parking minimums or housing densities. Compare NYC at the various decades over the year to see an obvious example. There are decades where NYC would be a nice place to live if you're a urbanite, and others where it would have been absolutely miserable no matter how much you like high rise tenements.
And my personal feeling is right now the US as a whole is going through a down turn with respect to public behavior and pride, and as a result people want their own versions of these things. I think one place where density does have a factor is in being able to support multiple versions of something. You don't want your local theater servicing 10,000 people. You want the scales to be tilted more towards 100 theaters servicing 100 people each. Both for variety but also because each can serve the specific desires of a specific clientele. Part of the problem with shared spaces is you can only be so much to so many people before either you're not what they want when they want it, or you're so diluted that you're not what anyone wants.
Cost is a factor but you can have all this and car parking. Plenty of developments in my city are mixed use. 3 or 4 levels of underground parking, then retail, supermarkets on ground floor then bars, gyms, pools, restaurants on the next few and and 20 or 30 levels of apartments on top. And people can walk straight off the street into the building.
It sounds like you live in a very affluent area. There are ways to build cities like you live in that are affordable to everyone. But minimum parking standards make it almost impossible.
Small towns and semi-rural areas squander their land with the exact same ass-ugly car-centric public realms you'll find in the suburbs of major metro areas. They just get less attention for it since the land in question is abundant.
There are examples of small towns with good urbanism - a lot of college towns fit this bill - but they are so rare that they just replicate big-city level prices, without the high-productivity jobs to pay them.
I just went to Panda Express for lunch--yeah yeah, it's not fancy at all, but it's a step above McDonald's--and someone begged me for food.
Cue a bunch of online warriors on their high horses implying I'm a bad person for not prioritizing their need over my negative experience.
I'm still going to second-guess going out to eat a little bit, though. I want to create my own beautiful bubble, and that might be home.
Everyone on Earth should curate their own bubble--should live the life they want. This is not at all contradictory with efficient aid to help the unfortunate.
If you want to live in a mansion and can afford it I say "All the power to you!" But all the rest of us will be happy to live in an affordable place where we can get a slice of pizza and a cold beer without driving 20 minutes. Also, I know I want to see that homeless person begging for food living in an affordable community that has plenty of extra economic power to provide all the Panda Express he can eat!
You are not a bad person for wanting to live in a mansion or even just a bungalow far away from the city center. That's honestly pretty great! In fact, it's my hope that building walkable, affordable communities will make it even easier for you to afford and live in such a place.
eating out at panda express or other fast food restaurants is quite the luxury and not achievable every day for most of society. I'm always perplexed that a poorer person would ask for something so costly. At costco I can get whole wheat for about 70c per pound. Which means I can make an entire days worth of bread for just 80c. Beans, 2$/day, greens are mostly free if you know what to look for and where, or grow it. These are all about x10 to x20 cheaper than panda express or other fast food.
I may have not been clear that someone begged me inside the Panda Express. Likewise, someone recently begged me inside a favorite cafe. These were both first-time incidents.
I assume--no, hope--people misread me, and thought I meant 'on the way to/back'. If not, I'm horrified: it is not normal, and should not be normalized.
What is your reasoning here? Cities are 'bad' from something as minor as that? We all deal with things we dislike, such as stoplights, rain, or bad news on TV. Let's not even start on traffic! Where will you find this idyllic place to call home?
FWIW, it might be alien at first but there's nothing to be afraid of from people who want some food, any more than from anyone else. That is based on long experience with zero problems in many places. Those are the vulnerable people; it's the powerful ones you need to watch out for.
> Cue a bunch of online warriors on their high horses
You violated HN guidelines before anyone even replied!
> there's nothing to be afraid of from people who want some food
not OP but FWIW my roommate was followed into an ATM vestibule while depositing his (5 figure) casino winnings, begged at aggressively, and then the destitute person kicked his suitcase, I'd say that's definitely something to be afraid of. now I don't use ATMs with people sleeping in the vestibule.
> now I don't use ATMs with people sleeping in the vestibule.
Yeah, I don't do that either. It's possible I don't have problems because I don't do stupid sh-t, but that goes for most things in life. When I cross the street, I watch the cars to see if they're stopping and don't just assume they will obey the lights (and that I read the lights correctly). When Covid struck, I kept my distance from people whether or not someone required me to.
I don't know what happened with your roommmate - that would be pretty alarming. There's no way someone is following me into an isolated ATM vestibule; I just keep walking if there's a question. And I'm not pulling out that kind of money anywhere but a bank teller window.
OK. So what? Are we more interested in solutions to a “housing affordability crisis” or are we more interested in making sure some old codgers who are stuck in their ways and oppose the march of progress get their just desserts? And if you’re interested in both, what better way than to encourage a mass of young blood and modern companies to move in and gentrify the area?
>> Everyone has their own bar, restaurant, theatre, and community center.
As opposed to all the "urban lifestyle" people who readily offload their basic needs onto others. Some people are happy cooking their own basic foods. Others want them to be prepared, and their dished cleaned, by a team. Some people are happy with a beer fridge. Others want to go to a bar and pay a young person to smile and flirt while concocting a fancy drink in a silly glass. To each their own. But having a basic kitchen in an apartment is not a luxury any more than having a cupboard for cleaning supplies, a service that can also be outsourced by those too lazy to clean up after themselves. A desire for a modicum of self-sufficiency is not a vice.
I'm not saying we should ban 4000 sq.ft. detached homes on large sprawling lots. They just shouldn't be the ONLY type of home being built. Give people options so they can choose.
In fact, if you want to have that beautiful home surrounded by nature and not suburban cookie cutter houses, then it's also in your interest to see that cities stay in the cities. Too many orchards and farms have been demolished to build miserable tracts of poorly constructed wood frame houses.
Exactly this. People act like it's a "big government takeover" trying to make multi-family housing against peoples wishes. The real fact is it's the exact opposite. "Big government" policies were created forcing people to only build single family homes on massive lots. Current proposals are to remove those regulations, and ironically people see it as the government coming for them.
When a large chunk of the middle-class is counting on their home value to facilitate retirement, they're rightfully concerned about urbanization of their neighborhood.
I personally believe they're mostly wrong - urbanization probably won't harm home values. And done well, might improve the values even more.
I agree. Nice cities are just attractive places to be. Even for people who live in the single family homes near them. An expensive city is expensive everywhere, regardless the type of housing,
> they're rightfully concerned
Yeah for sure. A lot of the pushback against development is a gut feel concern, the fear of losing something, it's not rational. The "rightfully" part I guess is because institutions groom people in borrowing for single family homes, and specifically that e.g. Try financing a multi-family on the same favorable terms. Few people enjoy pensions at an old age, so you're kind of thrown for the wolves if you don't own a home. The system really is maladjusted.
When our son moved out and we decided to right-size our home, we went looking for condos, but there was very little available in our area, at least nothing that was 3 bedroom + priced in our range + located near the subway. We found one condo that had size and location, and while the purchase price was less than a TH across the street, the monthly condo fees were somewhere near $1000/month. That ended up making the monthly expense >30% higher than the TH across the street (which is where we ended up).
Where do you live that 4k sqft homes are the only new construction? I live in a major metro area and sure in the outskirts and suburbs there’s plenty of McMansion developments, but there’s also a whole host of new townhomes and apartments. And the entire downtown is practically being rebuilt into massive multi story apartments. And this is hardly the center of YIMBY land.
I'm seeing this in my area too. But I wasn't seeing it ten or fifteen years ago when these debates first came onto my radar. What it looks like to me is a success story of identifying a problem and working toward improvement, but simultaneously far more slowly than the proponents of the solutions want and far more quickly than opponents want.
A decade ago, YIMBY-leaning people and groups were mad but mostly obscure and NIMBY-leaning people and groups were powerful. Now both sides are mad, the YIMBY side because it is still taking a long time to build enough to see affordability improve (especially with the interest rate shock), and the NIMBY side because they can see all those new townhomes and apartments going up in suburbs and smaller towns and densification projects in the city center, and dislike that.
I remember I used to complain that housing was so expensive and you never saw anything getting built despite there being plenty of great places to build things. And then one day I realized that a lot of construction was happening in a lot of those places I was thinking of, and I should stop complaining, since what I wanted to see happen was actually happening!
It's hard to feel like it's "better" for both sides to be mad while affordability is still bad, but I do think it's better than what seemed more like an insurmountable problem to me a decade ago.
I feel like this is what you'd expect to happen though right? Just from a base intuition on major societal shifts, you'd expect housing prices and availability to outstrip the local ability to afford them. You'd then expect mounting pressure to see more housing built to reduce the rate of price increase and raise the amount of supply. You'd then expect to see developers start making plans and getting the necessary approvals and permits. Finally after all of that happens you'd expect to see stuff start going up. And you'd expect this whole process to probably take something close to a decade to play out wouldn't you? My company just built a brand new HQ, in the middle of a big field. It was a 3+ year process from the moment it was announced, and I have to figure it was another year before that in the planning. I wouldn't really expect that building huge tracts of housing, whether in the middle of downtown, or out in the suburbs would be a much shorter timeline. You have all the permitting and planning to go through, land acquisition, infrastructure improvements / agreements to improve as part of the construction depending on your local setup, public hearings if any zoning changes are required, and then the inevitable delays that come with massive projects like that. And you'd expect all of this to happen in a slow ramp, starting with one project by one developer and expanding as demand continues to climb.
Yep! None of what I said was meant as a disagreement with any of this :)
I mean, I might wish that going from "wait a minute, nobody can afford to live here because lots of people have moved here and we haven't been building any housing" to seeing the first improvements in affordability would require less than like 20 years, but in reality, yeah, things take time.
Reston, VA - for new construction, we see a mix of large SFHs (3000-6000sqft), large THs (2500-4000sqft), and mid-rise and high-rise apartments (vast majority of which are 1-2 bed).
What's missing is smaller apartment blocks (4-8 units), small THs or SFHs (<3000sqft), or duplex/triplex/etc.
That is beginning to change, largely as a result of rezoning around the Metro corridor. More mixed use, more low-rise condos. But, this is limited to areas that are suitable for complete redevelopment (mostly old low-rise offices within 1/2 mile of a Metro station).
Nuking the SFH zoning to allow market forces to drive development outside the immediate Metro-adjacent plots would help. Allows ADUs and "granny flats". Allow a SFH to be split into a duplex or rebuilt as 3-4 THs. Etc.
It's getting better now, but the OP could live in Seattle: [0]. Anywhere white on that map it was illegal through 2019 to build anything but a single-family home. Just an appalling waste of land.
Interested to see how it shakes out in Portland, we put in infill laws a few years ago and I've seen a handful of multi-family additions on previously single-family land, and even a handful of trailer or tiny homes setup on driveways (this was approved in the infill laws). And it does seem like nobody is super happy because the neighborhoods are losing a lot of their classic aesthetic. But IMO we need to let go of that eventually, otherwise everyone just has to move out to suburbs and fill that space instead (which is also happening).
I feel like this is part of the problem every time these housing affordability conversations come up. The problems are hyper-local, but the proposed solutions are advanced as if they need to be state or even country wide. A lot of "we" statements that don't actually apply to the audience. And to people in areas like where I am, or in semi-rural areas that are dying and the housing prices are falling, it just seems ridiculous and hyperbolic. And that isn't to say we don't have problems here. I have plenty of younger co-workers who are facing down where and how to afford living in this area as housing costs have grown immensely over the years. But "stop only building 4k sqft homes" isn't even remotely the right solution here, because that isn't the problem here.
Imagine if we suddenly got a bunch of articles on HN about the "website affordability crisis" and it was a bunch of FAANG engineers and ex FAANG employees and want-to-be FAANG employees talking about how you can't build a reliable website for less than a few million in cloud services and monitoring and logging from Datadog and the like. Sure from their perspective of trying to build a FAANG scale service that might be true, but it would also seem insane to the rest of us who are wondering what's wrong with throwing up a few boxes in a colo center or even a few basic EC2 instances and a cloudflare proxy if you just want some affordable website hosting.
Not every IT problem or company needs Google scale solutions, and not every community (or even community suffering from a housing affordability problem) needs Seattle scale solutions either.
People turn to things like viewing world only in extremes, if it subconsiously validates their viewpoints or life choices. We all fall into this trap to certain extent.
Another case point - lived my whole life in apartments (thats how much of Europe runs), and preferred to buy another one instead of almost similarly-sized house. And I like cooking a lot and currently getting a maybe bit too much into various cuisines via youtube.
Once you grok few basic concepts and rules its amazing how much one can achieve with little and some skills. Plus its creativity to the max, which everybody appreciates too. Also improves your health (better ingredients, you can make stuff with less sugar/fat).
Bad thing is, your average restaurant wont feel that fancy anymore.
While I agree with your general point I am really not sure it's as binary as you present it. I live in a apartment building and I cook all of my food and clean my dishes... in my kitchen. I also fix/do diy in my apartment. I can repair my bike in the basement area.
If I were hunting/growing my own food, sure I'd want to live in a house with terrain around but that's a level of self-sufficiency that's quite rare in suburbia last time I checked.
I live in a 600sq ft 2-bedroom apartment with my wife, and we cook nearly every meal at home, we rarely go out to bars, or spend much money in the city.
But we have 6-7 cute cafes within a 5 minute walk, so we stop in for a coffee now and then. We have a big park that we can picnic in, three blocks away. There are a ton of fun things to do for cheap or free nearby.
We don’t need a ton of space at home because our city provides us a lot of happiness.
If you can walk to handle all of your basic needs, then you don’t need to have so much at home, is the point that the GP was making.
For example, we keep much less food at home in Europe than we used to in the US, because I can just drop by the veggie stand or mini-grocery on my walk/bike home from work and get a fresh version of whatever I want to cook that night.
We don’t need a beer fridge because there is a beer store selling cold beer cans within a block of us, and with way more selection.
It's impossible to explain this qualitative difference in life to somebody who hasn't experienced it.
When the outside environment is attractive, apartment living is glorious. When the outside is gnarly (e.g. no amenities, bad neighbors, ...), apartment living is hell.
There's a weird tipping point, where all the negatives of living in an apartment evaporate. But it's hard to put it into numbers. You just "know", experience it.
Similar for houses, there's a weird tipping point where all the negatives of a home just congeal, and it's a drag and anchor, and the house starts to own you more than the other way around.
It's also hard to explain this difference in life to somebody who doesn't want to live that life.
When I tell people I hate driving so much that I'd rather sit on public transit (or even walk!) for 1 hour if the alternative was a 20 minute drive they are flabbergasted.
I go to the grocery store 3-5 times a week and that amazes people because the default assumption is a grocery trip involves getting in your car and buying a cart full of groceries for a week. People find it so hard to believe that I actually enjoy my 30 minute outings to the grocery store and carrying my groceries home. I got a granny cart for Christmas one year because my family thought "oh hey we can save him time if he can bring a bigger load of groceries home" but it doesn't occur to them that I don't even want that.
I have also had great experiences in a detached home (living with my wife’s family for a short while). They’re kind of out in the beyond-suburbs, but we were able to do lots of trail running and hiking nearby, and they had a bigger house so we could all spread out and do different activities without disrupting each other.
(Though, honestly, the extra maintenance and upkeep that they had would’ve been exhausting, if it were actually my home and I had to do it long-term)
Neither is better, exactly, but there are a ton of hidden benefits to living in an apartment in a great part of a city (Amsterdam in my case)..
Yes. Generally kept in a garage or other place away from the kitchen. Beer is bought in bulk and kept cold for parties. It is just a cheap fridge without any bells and whistles. It is a real thing in much of the US.
Yes, very common in the US. Often an older fridge that was moved to the garage or basement when the kitchen was remodeled. Sometimes a dedicated smaller fridge somewhere in the kitchen or living space - often also has wine, cheese, etc alongside the beer, depending on owner's preferences.
It was facinating to see a pub ran by a landlord at the bottom floor of an 11 floor student dwelling with 16 rooms, 4 toilets, 4 shower a shared area with giant kitchen per floor. Each had something like 3 bar shifts usually taken up by someone else, the thing was "open" all night and beer on the tap was much cheaper than the store. It paid no rent, needed no licenses and didn't have any tax obligations. As no one knew what to do with the pinball profit it was frequently not allowed to pay for beer.
This idea that the problem with western society is that we allow people to live in detached houses with yards instead of inner-city apartment buildings is bollocks. People need privacy, something to work on, freedom to move about, and agency over their environment to thrive psychologically. That's why prison is the opposite of this. "Something to work on" is partially being met by video games, and it's not going well for us. The rest are much harder to fake out. It's possible to have those things in the city, but only if you are extremely wealthy. For everybody else, it's a life of being tolerated by the people who own and control your world, so long as you keep paying out most of what you earn, don't make any noise or waves, and aren't interested in doing anything that doesn't already have the required space or vendor already within your designated, walkable, or public transport-safe area.
This would be a compelling complaint if the rest of the world didn't exist.
Every complaint about apartments stems from American inner city dilapidation. My first culture shock when arriving in the US was the sorry state of American apartments.
We know how to build apartments that are insulated to sound. Common building courtyards give kids safe play-areas within walking distance while supervised. Balconies can be built large and large common areas give people all the space they need.
Back in India, urban army cantonments used to be one of the best places to live. Funnily enough, they were simply gated colonies with large apartment complexes, and the recovered space was used for community activities and sports. That's all we're talking about.
Take the same surface area. You can choose to build in 2d (SFH) or in 3d (buildings). No where does this imply stuffing people like sardines. All they're saying is that if you optimize for your priorities in 3d it is unlikely that the 2d edge case will be most effective outcome.
I agree with this. The vast majority of the world is not "choosing" to live in small apartments, outside of a small minority of young urban professionals under the age of 35. There is simply not enough wealth, land, or resources to support detached housing in most of the world. No one wants to live in a tenement with their 12 closest relatives. It's not romantic, or some kind of culturally enlightened way of living. It sucks, and 99% of the world doesn't get the option to live in a house.
There was a study investigating people's preferences for living type ... I don't remember whether it was 40/60 or 60/40, but the preference for SFH or for apartments is not universal.
Honestly it's weird that people decide they know how other people want to live, both ways. Obv it stems from folks assuming that their values and wants are universal therefore anything derived from those is obvious, but some folks have some pretty extreme confidence in knowing other people's preferences.
> This idea that the problem with western society is that we allow people to live in detached houses with yards instead of inner-city apartment buildings is bollocks.
The problem isn't that people are allowed to live in detached houses with yards, it's that they're not allowed to live anywhere else. Plenty of people evidently want to live in apartment buildings - it wouldn't be necessary to make them illegal otherwise.
Do people need privacy (of the sort you mean) and something to work on (meaning a house and not a body, a language, a family, friendships)? Is that why everyone in New York and São Paulo and Tokyo is so sad?
I didn't mean you need the house to work on it, FWIW, but there are a lot of hobbies that will scratch that itch, and are impossible or make you a real dick if you live in an apartment complex. Sorry for not making that clear.
I want people to have the freedom to build what they want on their own land. I want people to have the freedom to live where they want and how they want.
Denser housing sounds good in theory; I support it myself and vote accordingly. The problem is that it comes with other people. The more immediate neighbors you have, the greater the risk that one of them will be an antisocial asshole who makes life hell for everyone else. You're going to occasionally get drug dealers (or other habitual criminals), aggressive dog owners, serious mental illness cases, couples that have screaming arguments every night, motorcyclists who rev their engines at 5:00 AM, etc. And the police/code enforcement/apartment manager usually won't do anything to fix the problem. It only takes one bad neighbor experience to send a family fleeing to a single-family house in the exurbs regardless of costs or environmental impacts. So far I haven't seen the YIMBYs propose serious solutions to the antisocial behavior problem, or even acknowledge that it's an obstacle to their goals.
I don't understand your comment. Changing how cities are built won't prevent antisocial people from moving in next door. That's more of a social policy and law enforcement issue than an urban planning issue.
> You're going to occasionally get drug dealers (or other habitual criminals), aggressive dog owners, serious mental illness cases, couples that have screaming arguments every night, motorcyclists who rev their engines at 5:00 AM, etc.
I'm not downplaying how much those suck. but half of those problems go away if you don't have to hear them. The couple that argues at all hours of the day? How do you know they're arguing if you can't hear them? If there's a dog that barks all day long but you can't hear it, how is that a problem? Not all of the problems go away, yes, but some of them go away if apartments are built better.
Not everyone likes to share a wall. I'm glad there are options, since I'm one of them. I can walk from my single family home to nearby community centers, restaurants, kitchens, theaters, and bars in 15 minutes. Not everyone likes to be that close to that stuff, and that's okay. I'm glad we have options, since I'm not one of them. There's plenty of space to build new homes of all types. It's an entitlement crisis.
> There's plenty of space to build new homes of all types.
Unfortunately this is not the case in North America. Very little land is zoned to allow such communities. Those areas that are have become so insanely expensive only the extremely wealthy can afford to live in them.
Very little land...in all... of North America. That's a big place for such a tight summary lol.
The communities,, space, and zoning are out there, but often many facing the housing issues just aren't willing to move. There's more to it than this obviously, but for every person slamming their lifestyle and expenses against the wall in a trendy area, there are others picking up and moving to Philly, St. Louis, Lexington, etc.
> Very little land...in all... of North America. That's a big place for such a tight summary lol.
The problem is it's de facto illegal to actually build anything in city centres in North America, because of postwar zoning laws (it only takes 1 NIMBY to block any development, so it's not literally illegal but it might as well be). So even if you start your own new city in the middle of the empty desert, as soon as a hundred people move there you can't build anything anymore. That's why the only cities in NA are the ones that were built pre-1940, and as demand grows while supply stays fixed, they just get more and more expensive.
Every time I see a giant timber framed apartment building being constructed I'm exceptionally glad that I don't have to consider living inside of it. It's fine for your early 30s, but if you hope to be part of the "professional class" then that form of living takes it's toll exceptionally quickly.
American multi-family dwellings are constructed so poorly compared to other countries. You should not be able to hear your neighbors in a modern apartment building or hotel. Unfortunately since building permits and zoning restrictions are so tight, many MFD owning/renting Americans are living in buildings that are over 50 years old.
The only apartment that I lived in and would consider moving back to was a 1940s constructed "solid" concrete apartment building in northern Minnesota. That thing was built to a standard that is rarely used anymore. The only thing you heard was people walking past your door.
In major cities filled with the professional class - the wealthiest communities in the US, such NY, LA, and the Bay Area, lots of them live in apartments.
Perhaps this dates me.. but for me and my industry, there was a standing expectation that you would stay late and work as hard as necessary to get the job done. Thankfully, labor laws in California have changed since then, but during that time, it was an exceptionally draining experience trying to "climb the ladder," and not being able to come home and experience any sort of solace was soul crushing to me. It literally became my only motivation for a year and half was to get out of that environment to somewhere I could have space and peace and quiet with zero expectations of intrusions or interruptions.
I don't think they have ever lived in such a structure. They are probably talking about living in a two story light timber frame apartment from the 70s/80s. The walls are paper thin and you can wake up your neighbor walking in slippers to get a drink of water.
I don’t think sfh have been foisted on us by stupid or conniving urban planners.
It’s more interesting to ask why people don’t want to live in multi family dwellings. For example, if hearing your neighbors is a big part of the problem, would building code requiring sound baffling in every multi family start tipping the scales? Or if crazy neighbors was the issue, what about legal structures that let residents approve of new owners? (Yes, risky territory, but humor me for a second)
Multi family is generally seen as less appealing. So if you want people to live in multi family, how do we make it appealing?
You can see small attempts at dealing with the problems in e.g. the elimination of shared metering, which invited freeloader problems that simply don’t exist with individual metering.
If I could get a really well sound-insulated 3 or 4 bedroom apartment, awesome, but it's either just too hard to find, or too hard to verify that it'll actually be quiet without some certification/guarantee.
With a SFH you can control your own destiny to some extent.
Some multi-family housing operates as co-ops where existing owners vote on who is allowed to buy a unit. That can help to an extent. But some boards abuse their authority to discriminate against protected classes. And a board can't necessarily prevent an existing owner from allowing a crazy relative to move in.
> I don’t think sfh have been foisted on us by stupid or conniving urban planners.
No, it's been foisted on us by corrupt local city officials and massive suburban developers. They have systemically destroyed our city centers turning them into freeways while banning any other construction.
Those amenities are rarely used in North America. The problem is zoning, fire, and building codes make it impractical to build a bunch of 2.2k square foot units instead of the current mix of 500, 700 and 900 square foot units. Double stairway requirements are a big onerous regulation, especially when we already mandate sprinklers. What we need for families are more developments like the interwar upper west side in NYC, 4 bedrooms, natural light, bigger than 1.5k square feet, single stairway.
Double stairways and building code requirements don't seem terribly onerous to me. However, the parking minimums and traffic flow requirements do. In Dallas, each 500 square feet of a unit is required to have a parking space... A parking space takes up 300 square feet on average. This means your apartments are at LEAST 3/5 parking.
This means you get complexes like this one where it's more parking lot than housing and that land is VERY expensive.
The double stair means there is no practical way to make a four bedroom. try doing a layout and you discover you have a lot of space that isn't useful. (bedrooms require a window)
Also, the absurd level of car ownership is dragging us down a lot. The fact that old people who should absolutely not be driving HAVE to drive is absurd. If we could make it so only 50% of people NEED a car it would be a huge step in the right direction. Right now there are 0.9 cars per person in the United States. Those cars take up tons of valuable space and resources.
Not saying without kitchens so much as smaller kitchens. When you look at new home construction in the past 10 years, they have MASSIVE kitchens. A lot of them are bigger than my first apartment.
This is honestly the wrong angle to take. I’m a raging environmentalist and your decrementalist comment is making my blood boil. Advocating for a reduction in standard of living is not the way to go about environmentalism. Using science and technology to make Manhattan project tier changes to energy generation and transportation are. There is a way to reduce your impact almost completely while still maintaining the existing standard of living.
The existing standard of living requires exponential growth and unbounded resource consumption. It isn't possible to maintain that while reducing energy consumption "almost completely." This isn't Star Trek where you can just outsmart the laws of thermodynamics and run everything on free energy and vibes.
A "raging environmentalist" should understand that, particularly given that climate change and the collapse of the ecosystem is already underway. The window for "Manhattan project" scale solutions passed decades ago, the only solutions available now are damage mitigation. The future is going to be about maintaining our survival and civilization, not a reasonable standard of comfort.
Hard disagree. China and India are adding massive amounts of renewable energy in the form of solar, wind and nuclear energy every year. Electric cars are basically selling like crazy in Europe and Asia and to a reasonable extent in the US. Our challenge in the US is simple. Destroy the oil lobby. This should be followed by large scale renewable energy installations and nuclear power plants. Use natural gas as a transitional energy source or in peaker plants to back up the renewables. You having one less room contributes almost nothing to the solution. A cruise ship is going to offset a 100 of your “hardship” gains in about 10 minutes of emissions.
Accessory dwelling units ("ADUs") are becoming somewhat common because it lets people throw down a tiny (sometimes pre-fab) cheap housing unit that they can rent out. Many of these don't have real kitchens (no stove, etc.).
Partially, yes, but you have to mix in the whole idea of treating your house or houses as your retirement plan, which is a screwy, self-perpetuating economic system. It takes a lot of capital to construct an apartment building, and greed seems the only way capital is directed towards housing in the US.
I used to believe this. And I still prefer density and think that urban sprawl is bad for mental health, finances and the environment.
However I no longer believe it's the cause of the housing crisis. Perhaps it contributes in Europe but here in North America there is space to build and building materials only make up a small portion of the cost of housing. So I don't believe we can point to single family homes as a cause for the housing crisis or price inflation.
However that said, although it is not behind housing inflation, it does still have negative impacts on quality of life and the environment and I do hope we move towards samer urban planning models incorporating density, public transportation and walkability.
> We are building massive 3-4k sq. ft. homes for families of four [...] Everyone has their own bar, restaurant, theatre, and community center. [...] the required square footage per person drops by huge amounts when people can walk to nearby community centers, restaurants, kitchens, theaters, and bars.
Most families don't live in 3-4k sq homes. The average newly built house today is a little over 2k sqft, and most houses are not newly built. Unless you are seriously stretching their definitions, most do not have their own "bar", "restaurant", "theater", and "community center".
A house or apartment should follow a kind of "fractal" pattern that mirrors private and public spaces that encircle it or that it contains. A town should have a town center. This is the public square. For towns large enough, you'll have neighborhoods with squares or parks that are the public meeting place for the neighborhood, but more "private" in relation to the town. Each neighborhood is divided into housing units. An apartment building should have a public space for the apartment buildings, like a courtyard, that is proper to the building, but private in relation to the neighborhood. Within each apartment building, there should be a living room + dining area that function as the public space of the apartment, but which is private in relation to the apartment building (the same principle holds if we replace "apartment building + apartment unit" with "individual house"). The ultimate private space is the bedroom.
Of course, this is idealized, but this is a principle we see in traditional architecture and one that makes sense and respects human nature and supports human flourishing instead of trying to impose some weird, inhuman, Procrustean invention on people to check off some boxes. The things you mention, like bars, restaurants, theaters, and community centers, would appear chiefly in town and neighborhood centers. But they don't replace the living room, the kitchen, and the dining room.
EDIT: Ah, and I would define "neighborhood" in terms of walkability. I should be able to get to the town square by walking in a reasonable about of time.
Stop trying to imply we should be in these 600 sqft shoeboxes where the only escape is to go outside in a dirty urban city and walk around.
I want a large home I can decorate, with lots of light to keep me happy, and space to invite friends and host a variety of activities, a garden I can tend to and see animals, or just be at peace enjoying the quiet tranquility of not being attached to a neighbor.
If I had no choice but to live stuck in a tiny apartment all my life – I’d just kill myself.
I'm not saying we should bulldoze all the single family homes and make everyone live in filing cabinets. What I'm saying is people should be free to choose. We want the people who enjoy living in cities to have a place to live IN the city. This makes it so they don't have to spread out across the country side ruining farms, natural areas, and stuff that is better out in the country.
In fact, this would make it easier for you to afford a single family home and make your experience much more pleasant. You wouldn't have 10 neighbors complaining about the sounds and smells of your animals or report you to code enforcement for your plants growing too tall. You also wouldn't have thousands of cars going by with broken exhausts as people commute to work.
In addition, you could live much closer to cities to go see sporting events and concerts because the availability of single family housing would be much better. Also, your race tracks, animal rescues, nature parks, hunting areas, and other rural features wouldn't be regulated to death by massive suburban developments taking over.
I live in a multi housing building and its a NIGHTMARE. A drug dealer moved in next door and he smokes all kinds of synthetic drugs 24/7 the shared walls and gaps are so thin the drugs leak in to my home. The person above me has some sort of mental condition, he wakes up at 12:45 am and starts drumming the floor with his hands, runs around and moves the furniture all night everyday. There isnt a damn thing i can do about this other than pack and move. the hoa is an exercise in futility. I am now literally nauseously averse to “muti-unit” housing.
I have had problems with bad neighbors in my old apartment as well as out on county land. It's just a universal problem honestly. You are definitely right about American apartments sucking. But they have to get the money for parking from somewhere and it's usually building quality that suffers.
I agree, I've lived in such apartments and hated them. However, you will notice that such buildings are usually 50+ years old and barely maintained. The reason for this is the cost to create new ones is absurdly high due to planning restrictions at the city level. Any attempts to make modern and more livable structures are thwarted by local opposition.
Also, the lack of competition in the MFD housing market means that landlords can barely maintain them and people will not have other options. This is why it often costs $2k+/month to live in apartments that look like they may collapse at any moment.
However, if you can afford to live in a single family house I would say "Wonderful! Please do!"
I don't even know where to begin here. Of course we have the land to spread people out, but it's insanely expensive on everyone (especially those who are spread out) over time to sustain it. [1]
You have a lot of straw man arguments that but the one that I'll focus on the most is "Our leaders just FORCE us to flock to cities cpz it's cheaper on infrastructure" - prove it.
Infrastructure work is supervised and licensed by the goverment. You cant start building a city in the middle of nowhere even if its your own land. You have to follow standards and regulations enforced on you.
Last time I checked it looks similar in every 1st world country. Ppl are slowly losing means of production and being moved to subscription plan to even live.
Anyone who has lived in a rural area that hasn't been subsidized can tell you why spreading out kinda sucks. The power company charges you $100k to run a line to your house. The phone company charges you $20k to run a copper line to give you 100kb DSL. Water has to be pumped from a well which costs $30-50k to drill.
We don't really need to cram people in elbow to elbow like New York City though. We just need walkable downtowns where you can pop on down the street from your apartments to the market to get ingredients for dinner. Even just building our houses closer together and putting in dedicated pedestrian paths is enough honestly.
No one wants to live in a condo. Shitty coops where your neighbors are a wall away, no land/backyard, no hobbies, no place for your kids to run around etc. No ones cares about a community center/shitty shared space. If you’re outside a medium sized city in the US, you’re less than 10 mins from restaurants and bars from your multiple acre sized property.
A LOT of people want to live in such places. However, most of the problems you mention are a result of car dependency and not dense housing itself. Kids have nowhere to play because cars make it unsafe for them to roam. You have no hobbies because you have no places to go to do them. You have no backyard because the roads prevent you from going to the park.
Instead we have to build our houses into huge compounds to do things that we would normally do at community centers, pubs and other public buildings.
That's great! But we need places for people to live too. Not everyone wants to own acreage. Some people just want a place to lay their head that's close to where they work and a nice school for their kids. It also doesn't have to be Manhattan density either. It can even just be as simple as building houses closer together and allowing for corner markets in residential areas.
> We are building massive 3-4k sq. ft. homes for families of four because all of their food, entertainment, and social needs are not met by their community.
You assume it's a necessity thing instead of a desire+wealth thing. Yet the history of the wealthy and powerful "escaping" to large estates goes back centuries (millenia!).
Additionally, the housing affordability crisis is also happening in European cities with 4+ story buildings everywhere and shops and restaurants on every corner.
If you misunderstand what exactly the problem is and what exactly is being desired and what is being purchased then any sort of "build it and they come" attempts to provide alternatives will be limited by the misconceptions, and any sort of enforce-through-policy change will by stymied by lack of popular support.
If I can walk less than a mile to a theatre and pay $10 to watch a movie on a giant screen, I won't want to pay $10k to create a home theatre. If I can get food from around the world by walking 10 minutes to 20+ restaurants, I won't want to pay $20k to have an 800 sq.ft. kitchen. If I can entertain my guests at a community center or beer garden, I won't need to have a $15k patio and outdoor bar area.
People pay absurd amounts for these things because they can't get them in their own community.
> If I can walk less than a mile to a theatre and pay $10 to watch a movie on a giant screen, I won't want to pay $10k to create a home theatre.
What theater are you used to that lets you pick what's shown for $10, vs just a dozen or two movies at once?
> If I can get food from around the world by walking 10 minutes to 20+ restaurants, I won't want to pay $20k to have an 800 sq.ft. kitchen.
What restaurants are you going to where it's cost-effective to eat every meal out instead of doing some of your cooking at home?
> If I can entertain my guests at a community center or beer garden, I won't need to have a $15k patio and outdoor bar area.
What community center are you going to where there's never scheduling conflicts or events? Where you can choose your own landscaping and plants to grow, and do whatever hobbies you want? Where your pet can bask in the sun all day?
Get a bigger imagination about why people want personal space!
(You might also be suprised by how many people in the US can already drive <=10minutes to all the things on your list - and wouldn't see that as a big hindrance compared to walking - and STILL get versions of them in their own home too, to point at some existing evidence to the contrary.)
I'm not saying that no one will want their own mansion far away from the city. I'm just saying that a lot of people don't want to pay for their own movie theatre and restaurant size kitchen. Some people just want a tiny kitchen in a house near a theatre and some amazing restaurants that costs 1/10th of what a mansion costs.
I think these preferences just aren't universal is the problem, as shown by the disagreement in this thread. For me, many of these things I'd rather enjoy in my own home because the additional comfort and privacy is something that I highly value. That is, I'm willing to pay more not because my community doesn't offer it, but because I value being able to define my own experience.
That said though, I do agree that community options are missing in many American towns/cities today, and I wish people at least had the choice.
Density spoils many of these examples, being in close proximity to a random collection of people has downsides.
Why would I go to a theatre with people who cough and talk, when I can spend a couple of months wage to have a better experience?
Why would I go to a crowded expensive bar when I could have the space to host at home?
People pay for the better experience, there are very few places where the apartment experience is desirable, only some where it's a bit less shit.
I'm not saying that no one would build their own home theatre or restaurant sized kitchen. But a lot of people honestly wouldn't bother if they had other options in their community. It moves the cost/benefit curve over by a standard deviation or two.
I think you are advocating for trying to make the experience of apartment living less shit, based on some idea that density is inherently good.
However there is no example where this is the case, as less density always allows individuals more control over their immediate environment.
I don't believe people choose community options deliberately, people who use them simply have no alternative. There is no positive evaluation being done, or cost/benifit it's simply the only affordable option.
It's actually not. I'm as yimby as they get but you need to understand that the value of people's property has almost nothing to do with nimbyism. They want things to stay the same, they want their "neighborhood character". Listen to them when they say this, it's not a sleight of hand. If more dense housing was built in their area the value of their house would go up even further than without it, but the point is they don't want to live near more people!
I do not know how you arrived at these odd conclusions, but I would recommend reading a few books on urbanism to understand exactly what I'm proposing.
that's the thing though, the suburban/rural individual house lifestyle is a a bit of a cosplay self-reliance - it's completely dependent on someone else providing you with staggering quantities of fossil fuels
No one is more reliant on other people than someone living on a farm or out in the middle of nowhere. This is why rural neighbors are often so friendly. When something goes wrong you only have each other.
Suburbia relies almost entirely on urban centers or something like a military base or university to survive. I remember when Bill Clinton closed March Air Force Base in California and the city surrounding it died like a plant that was watered using bleach.
I think this article is a great example of how technical people have become so intoxicated by the relatively few instances in which an advance in technology has genuinely solved an entrenched social or power problem by making a new thing possible or reducing costs that they basically only argue in those terms
The fact is, the housing crisis is and always was a policy failure and a "distributional outcomes" issue, and and no amount of improving housing construction's speed, costs, or legality will fix it if we don't both change policy and reduce inequality
There are tons of building that are or could be residential housing that are owned by massive investment firms as a speculative asset. The FTC's recently published brief mentioned that keeping units empty rather than lowering prices is common practice among landlords. Even among individuals, an incredible amount of older, wealthy people own multiple homes and view most of them as a source of passive income. When I talk to people in that category, if they are doing well, they are often thinking about buying more homes to generate more income directly from renters or as a speculative investment (IE to hold and sell later)
As it stands, people are not homeless because there is nowhere they could live. Not even close. Increasing housing supply without making any significant dent in the financial and regulatory situation surrounding housing will more likely just put more real estate in the hands of the entrenched winners, who have already demonstrated the willingness and ability to hoard housing
Vacancy rates are misleading and includes things like being unoccupied briefly between owners or houses that are unlivable in areas with no buyers. The number of homes where people want them is quite low, there is simply a shortage.
Houses as an asset is a major contributor for sure. It's long been a rival to stocks or exceeded it as an investment and makes a powerful political base. But it also includes a lot of people who view their primary residence as one and aren't landlording other properties.
It's hard to find solutions to this that are politically and socially viable. To create more homes requires capital and doing so will lower the value of existing assets. I think people reach for easy solutions because they don't want to face some deep contradictions in our way of life.
And increasing housing is the surest way to "fight back" against these supposed "house hoarders" - because once these assets stop performing so incredibly well, they'll get dumped.
I'll buy that, but still doubt that materials costs is anything close to a driving factor in shortages compared to, say, zoning/new construction policy
I hope we can be better about addressing issues like this. Taxing empty houses, like most negative incentives, fails to address the existing incentives that cause the problem in the first place which will lead to different market imbalances.
The biggest challenge we face is that the best way to protect wealth is to own assets and properties are assets we can live in. If wealth didn't naturally sublimate this would be less of an issue. Likewise if it were easier to protect wealth by doing something productive, it would happen.
Where to even start with this? Homes occupied by renters are not being "hoarded." At most this is a concern about homeownership rate, which is not nothing, but a distant second to whether people have places to live or not. Because rents are tethered to incomes, the rental market is a relief valve for speculative excesses in the ownership market. That's why it costs less than half as much to rent as to buy the same property in San Francisco right now. Landlords are not getting a return from collecting rent, they're getting a return from appreciation due to scarcity. And the more concerned voters get about capitalism and inequality, the surer a bet that scarcity becomes.
