[HN Gopher] The U.S. Needs More Housing Than Almost Anyone Can I...
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The U.S. Needs More Housing Than Almost Anyone Can Imagine
Author : paulpauper
Score : 44 points
Date : 2022-11-24 16:54 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| The full picture gets worse the more you look into it.
|
| The largest home builders in the nation aren't building homes at
| budgets that most can afford.
|
| So you'd say to yourself, well clearly they're targeting the
| affluent then. Except there are only so many high income
| Americans you can sell to, and not all of them want expensive
| homes.
|
| So what do these builders do? They build-to-rent! Yep. Those
| single-family homes you see in many large developments you can
| just think of as so-called "luxury" apartments by a different
| name.
|
| I suspect most developed nations experiencing this issue are
| effectively stuck and growth capped markets.
|
| Truly only dedicated policy targeting this problem will make a
| change, because the capital required to obtain land, rezone it
| for traditional residential building, then sell it requires
| either institutional capital, or small builders doing one-offs
| for select clients.
| jimrandomh wrote:
| This is a misunderstanding of how pricing works. The homes that
| are beig built aren't expensive because they're fancy, they're
| expensive because they're scarce and people need them, so they
| bid against each other. Every building markets itself as
| "luxury", but this is in fact just marketing. In principle you
| could make units cheaper by dividing them up into units with
| less floor space, but that people are already renting the
| larger units in groups.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Agree. The luxury finishings are in fact quite cheap.
| pydry wrote:
| >So you'd say to yourself, well clearly they're targeting the
| affluent then. Except there are only so many high income
| Americans you can sell to
|
| They're targeting high net worth individuals looking for a
| store of value (or, in some cases, a foothold/bolthole from
| their repressive government).
|
| High income Americans are to these flats what
| jewellery/smartphones are to gold - the underlying use value
| that, combined with natural scarcity, drives the hoarding
| instinct.
|
| It's quite possible to pull the rug out from under the feet of
| the ultrawealthy by instituting a steep land value tax. This
| would kill the hoarding instinct, kill the NIMBY instinct and
| drive more efficient use of land.
| zbrozek wrote:
| It's a stifling regulatory environment that's landed us here.
| Zoning is restrictive, planning commissions are slow and
| restrictive, councils are slow and restrictive. All of the
| agencies involved want to capture value from construction
| projects.
|
| The net result is that very few projects pencil out, and the
| ones that do are expensive. We need to fix the root cause,
| which is lack of property rights.
| froggychairs wrote:
| Zoning for who? America has no issue with single family
| zoning.
|
| I'm assuming you're speaking about middle and high density
| zoning. Since the issues you're describing are extremely
| common for those zoning projects.
| zbrozek wrote:
| If you're the property owner it should be easy for you to
| build whatever level of residential density you want and
| think the market will make profitable. Why is it illegal
| for me to build townhouses on my land?
|
| I'm in an area where it takes, on average, 1.8 acres per
| single family home. The next town over would put 18 single
| family homes in that same space. Zoning is restrictive even
| for single-family homes.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| I don't think that's a particularly representative
| example. Zoning is determined locally in the U.S., and
| taking the most extreme locality doesn't really shed
| light on what's going on in the country as a whole, and
| isn't a useful avenue to approach this problem. Try
| instead to work with averages and representative
| localities. The U.S., like any area, has urban, suburban,
| and rural areas, with a continuous gradient in between.
| No point in discussing rural or near-rural areas when
| complaining about zoning, since the real issue is that
| people in urban areas need access to jobs. People living
| on the horse farms or rural ranches are not the problem
| here, and liberalizing zoning in Asheville isn't going to
| make housing more affordable in Austin or San Francisco,
| which is where the pain of restrictive zoning is felt.
| BuckyBeaver wrote:
| For several reasons. First of all, you may destroy the
| value of neighboring properties, for people who opted NOT
| to live in a high-density area. The vilification of
| zoning laws is bullshit. People should be able to select
| the type of area they want to live in. If you want high
| density, then live in a downtown area or similar. If you
| want a single-family house with a bit of yard, go to that
| kind of neighborhood. Why should people be able to
| arbitrarily ruin others' standard of living? The country
| is not "full."
|
| There are also environmental and infrastructure reasons.
| Oft-cited California exists in a crushing permanent
| drought. Now you want to pack MORE people in, and allow
| even more ground to be covered up with concrete and
| prevent water absorption? You want MORE trees to be cut
| down, increasing heat? Not to mention the lack of public
| transportation in most areas, so now you're creating more
| traffic.
|
| Meanwhile, dying malls and their anchor stores sit
| vacant. Boarded-up Macy's and AMC theaters are surrounded
| by vast, weed-infested parking lots... but developers
| have been handed free rein to replace one house and yard
| with 10 UNITS. That's right, 10. Meanwhile the commercial
| hulks sit empty, after the area has already suffered the
| density consequences of their construction (tree loss,
| concrete plains, traffic potential).
|
| The whole premise of the caterwauling about this "housing
| crisis" is fundamentally bankrupt: "How many homes must
| the United States' expensive coastal cities build to
| become affordable for middle-class and working-poor
| families again?"
|
| Why even ask? From where does the mandate come from to
| make scarce, sought-after real estate cheap? Who decreed
| that everyone has a right to live in resort communities?
| It's ridiculous. Why not ask what's it's going to take to
| make Manhattan affordable to working-class families?
|
| This "housing crisis" refrain is beyond tired at this
| point, and it's distracting everyone from the real
| problem: massive corporate buy-ups of entire
| neighborhoods, making home ownership IMPOSSIBLE across
| growing swaths of the USA. If that is not stopped NOW,
| the "American dream" of home ownership is gone forever.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Denser cities use less water.. Biggest consumer of water
| is agriculture. There are natural places to increase
| density as traffic increases. So think of a main road,
| along that main road and some of the nearer side streets
| can be densified. You see a lot of this along El Camino
| for example in the Bay area.
|
| Take a bunch of these 1950s and earlier small 2bdrm
| houses and build multifamily housing.
| manfre wrote:
| Zoning density is based partially on supporting
| infrastructure. If low density suddenly becomes higher
| density, will the roads be able to handle the additional
| vehicles/trips? Probably not, so who will cover costs to
| improve the roads so individuals can build multiple
| townhomes in their property?
| davidf18 wrote:
| neilwilson wrote:
| Not just the USA
|
| The housing situation in the UK is beyond critical.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| The UK's problems are about distribution not supply. We
| subsidise OAPs to sit alone in 4 bed houses in areas that need
| workers, then there is no space or money left for working
| families...
| davidf18 wrote:
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I think it's still possible to actually get housing in the UK,
| it's just more expensive than you'd like. (There's lots on the
| market near me.) Look at somewhere like Ireland where it's
| getting to the point where there almost literally just isn't
| _any_ housing available at all. Lines of hundreds of people
| applying to get any property that comes onto the market.
| freddymilkovich wrote:
| https://archive.ph/2pfx8
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