[HN Gopher] Has LA cracked the code for building affordable hous...
___________________________________________________________________
Has LA cracked the code for building affordable housing?
Author : vwoolf
Score : 66 points
Date : 2024-02-10 22:14 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (benjaminschneider.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (benjaminschneider.substack.com)
| sigsegv420 wrote:
| Cracking the code is about as easy as reversing a rot-13 cipher.
| Apparently "build more housing where people want to be" faces
| more... political difficulties than purely technical ones.
| crooked-v wrote:
| There's no big secret here. Dump restrictive zoning requirements,
| remove subjective approval processes, and make the permitting
| process a "shall approve" instead of "may approve", and you'll
| see a lot of new housing get built very quickly. All the
| slowdowns and immense extra expenses are self-inflicted by city
| residents who either don't care, don't want cheaper housing, or
| have been infected by the terminally brainless anti-housing
| pseudo-left.
| o11c wrote:
| The problem with "shall approve" is that sometimes the best
| answer really is "no".
|
| A lot of ecological disasters are averted by processes that
| seem long and drawn out, but which actually are just companies
| not understanding that "no, we don't want you to burn down the
| planet around us". Residential is obviously _somewhat_
| different, but not entirely.
| crooked-v wrote:
| "Ecological disasters" is covered by putting in objective
| instead of subjective rules. The point is to make objections
| like "doesn't fit neighborhood character" / "blocks the view"
| / "would replace this extremely historic run-down laundromat"
| hold no weight in the process.
| epistasis wrote:
| The environmental cost of saying "no" to denser housing on
| land that is already developed is extremely high, and leads
| to development on green fields where there is nobody to
| oppose the development.
|
| There should be an automatic "yes" to any mixed use housing
| and small retail development that is infill, from an
| environmental perspective.
|
| There should be an automatic "no" to any greenfield
| development, additional parking, or freeways. And to get over
| that "no" there should be strong environmental studies that
| show benefit, not just neutrality.
|
| Our existing built environment is unsustainable and needs to
| change drastically. Keeping it in the current state is
| untenable. We should be radically reshaping it as fast as
| possible with the fewest brakes if we care about the
| environment.
| thisgoesnowhere wrote:
| The restrictive zoning practices, long approval processes
| ridiculous permitting costs etc are in place because most
| people's entire net worth is held up in housing and they vote
| for laws that keep the price high for that reason.
|
| It's completely backwards to think that the reason why housing
| is expensive is because of those symptoms when the root cause
| is more than half the population wants mega high housing costs.
| losteric wrote:
| If height limits were raised with zoning for multi family
| housing, those investments would sky rocket faster than under
| NIMBY
| thisgoesnowhere wrote:
| And yet here we are
| nradov wrote:
| Despite the uniformed nonsense you might read here, the
| most active NIMBYs aren't primarily motivated by property
| values. If you actually talk to them you'll find that they
| have no wish to ever sell and are worried (sometimes
| irrationally) about quality of life issues: noise, parking,
| traffic, crime, privacy, etc.
| thisgoesnowhere wrote:
| Tell me more about how they don't care about their
| property value they are simply trying to uphold the
| character of the neighborhood.
|
| Really the property owners and landlords are the victims
| here.
| beaeglebeached wrote:
| Imagine you spend half your working class life saving for
| an absolute shit hole for half a million, knowing it's an
| NFT that no one can build more of. Then permitting laws
| are liberalized and suddenly your NFT is worth no more
| than the labor and material cost to physically build the
| house, minus depreciation.
|
| It's difficult because losing that NFT means they are
| fucked in retirement. Oh well for them, stupid them for
| wanting a house while nimby zoning was in effect.
|
| The losers unfortunately won't be the boomers that made
| the dumbass laws but the people they squeezed afterwards.
| It's a totally fucked situation.
| thisgoesnowhere wrote:
| I hope it's clear that I'm not blaming the average person
| caught up in the housing market for the broader climate
| in which they live. It is fucked and I don't see a way
| out. If we build enough housing the price of their
| retirement asset drops and they are fucked and if we
| don't then we continue seeing mass homelessness and
| dropping birth rates.
|
| I don't have a solution, I'm commenting that the typical
| things that are blamed for the housing shortage are
| symptoms not causes.
| beaeglebeached wrote:
| I pretty much agree. FWIW I did what both sides hate, I
| bypassed all that shit by building my own place without
| any code inspections and not even sending building
| designs to the state. The liberalize building people seem
| to hate it because their brain explodes that someone
| would want to build a house with zero safety checks, the
| conservative nimbys hate it because their precious
| property values fall.
|
| Fuck em all, family comes first.
| nradov wrote:
| You misunderstand. Most of them aren't specifically
| concerned with neighborhood character. They are mostly
| long-term resident homeowners (not landlords) who don't
| want the hassle and annoyance that comes with higher
| density. If you want to counteract their efforts then at
| least understand their motivations instead of treating
| them like caracitures.
| m0llusk wrote:
| That is overly dismissive. Back in the post war era there was a
| huge problem with slum lords and corrupt builders constructing
| terrible residential units that were unlivable and began to
| fall apart as soon as tenants moved in. In response layers of
| requirements were added and regulators who had benign
| intentions went way too far. That all these rules would crash
| residential construction in the 1970s such that it would never
| recover was not foreseen at all.
| beaeglebeached wrote:
| If the problem is such slumlords and builder profiteers they
| wouldn't have made it damn near impossible to be an
| unregulated owner builder for your families own homestead,
| but instead imposed those regulations only on the profiteers
| who wouldn't be living there.
|
| No, this is intentional. It was damn near impossible to find
| a place where a man can still build his own home near
| civilization without oversight.
| pas wrote:
| > approving more units through this program in the last 13 months
| than all affordable housing approved in previous three years
| combined -- without dedicating any additional subsidy.
|
| oh, so it was NIMBYs all along!? _pikatchu face_
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| That's not what I read from the article. Instead it seemed to
| be fairly arbitrary government regulations such as required
| shrubbery and facade articulation that make the cost of
| building prohibitively expensive.
|
| Now, you may be saying it's NIMBY for the LA government to
| require unnecessary (or mildly necessary) stuff to keep the
| neighborhoods beautiful, but it's I'd guess it's probably more
| "just because I can means I do" typical petite bureaucratic
| power flexing.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| > required shrubbery and facade articulation
|
| Isn't that appeasing to the NIMBYs who don't want their
| property values to drop?
| echelon wrote:
| This is decades of regulation set by people who may no
| longer be alive.
|
| These archaic rules were crafted for a different era and
| are products of that time and thinking. Their desires and
| pressures were different than the ones we face today.
|
| We need to garbage collect the rules and streamline for
| today's needs. Some regulations, such as fire safety,
| remain important. Many others are simply an unnecessary
| impediment that hold us back from meeting demand.
| kiba wrote:
| Their desire and pressures probably impedes the time
| they're in. It's just not immediately obvious, and even
| today it's not completely obvious.
|
| Typically, the response to ever increasing traffic
| congestion is to invest in wider highway, but the
| consequence remain the same, yet people continues to push
| for highway expansion.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| So it's the legacy of NIMBYs.
| epistasis wrote:
| And it's also appealing to NIMBYs that want to stop all new
| development after they have their own home.
|
| Every extra hoop to jump through gives extra negotiation
| points or veto points. Anything that can provide a point of
| argumentation that allows further delay is a chance to stop
| a project. Every month of delay is a chance for
| construction costs to rise, for financing preapprovals to
| run out, for the builder to get tired of the process and
| pursue greener pastures.
| pas wrote:
| I think the main point is the fast-tracking. Developers don't
| care if they need to add some landscaping to the whole thing,
| it just makes things more expensive in the end. What they
| care about is they don't want to start working on projects
| that then sit in drawers for years.
|
| Of course "LA cracked" nothing, because the construction
| industry is in absolute shambles. It basically regressed into
| this cutesy artisanal nonsense, delivering a lot of single
| family homes (from the ugliest flimsiest Florida-grade paper-
| thin boxes to the enormous McMansions), and a few fancy high-
| rises.
|
| Because there's nothing industrial in much of construction.
| It's one-off bespoke custom things with their separate
| paperwork. About as productive as wrapping rice by the grain.
| crooked-v wrote:
| > delivering a lot of single family homes [...] and a few
| fancy high-rises
|
| Yes, because it turns out that local zoning and permitting
| in most major US cities makes everything else
| nonprofitable. Construction companies will build what is
| effective to build.
|
| Change those local rules, as in the article, and suddenly
| lots of companies rush in to build that middle-density
| housing as soon as they can actually make any money doing
| so.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > What they care about is they don't want to start working
| on projects that then sit in drawers for years.
|
| This reminds me of another HN discussion about prediction
| markets, and how they can be misleading since profit is not
| the same as _the time value of money_.
|
| For example, I _could_ put down some money for a guaranteed
| profit against the people betting on "Trump will replace
| Biden in October 2024 after the aliens invade", but that's
| so far-out (in both senses) that it's not actually a good
| rate of return--I could be doing a lot more in-between now
| and then with the money.
|
| In this case, perhaps developers _could_ invest in a
| profitable project... but if the time-span is too long, the
| profit-per-time is bad so they 'll look elsewhere.
| gottorf wrote:
| > ugliest flimsiest Florida-grade paper-thin boxes
|
| Is Florida-grade a thing? As far as I know, Florida is the
| only state where a majority (or plurality?) of single-
| family homes are built with CMU blocks, vs. the typical
| stick-framed construction.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| What is "affordable housing"? All housing becomes affordable once
| you build enough of it. Is it just the politically correct way of
| saying "low-quality housing"?
| losteric wrote:
| Subsidized housing, through vouchers or rent control. At least
| in my city.
| ec109685 wrote:
| This housing is deed restricted to certain income levels.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| there are documented cases of small groups of investors
| immediately buying new housing stock just to flip it for a
| profit on some small time scale. rinse and repeat
| striking wrote:
| > There are dozens of building code (not just zoning code)
| requirements that add cost and complexity to housing projects
| in cities like LA. Street trees, front setbacks, off-street
| parking, roof decks, facade articulation -- these are nice to
| haves, yet LA requires these features in many cases.
|
| > Without these goodies, some ED1 buildings will be ugly. Some
| will be poorly designed. Just about all of them, by definition,
| will be "out of scale" with their surroundings. (LA housing
| activist Joe Cohen has a great thread of renderings of ED1
| projects.) I personally think all of that is ok. A housing
| emergency is no time for aesthetic perfection. LA, like San
| Francisco, is finally acting like it.
|
| If "low quality" just means "ugly" then... Yes? But if "low
| quality" means "unlivable" then no.
| ldoughty wrote:
| I think it depends what permits they are waiving as part of
| this plan... Will we see a bunch of leaning buildings like
| Santos Brazil after their big tower boom?
|
| I imagine they are keeping most of the safety ones.. but it
| wasn't well highlighted in the article
| m0llusk wrote:
| Because of the earthquakes LA has tight regulations on
| foundations which make leaning towers extremely unlikely.
| The leaning tower in SF is a fluke that was brought about
| by a corrupt builder choosing a bad foundation option,
| getting that approved, and then building a much heaver
| construction than originally proposed.
| apsurd wrote:
| Your statement is so hard for me to understand because quality,
| or lack thereof, is a function of modern construction and cost
| saving practices, and laws around what constitutes a livable
| dwelling. McMansions!
|
| These practices either save or cost the builder, not the buyer,
| because the value is all locked up in land. And the extra
| layers of scarcity we impose around building on said land.
|
| In other words, what are you talking about?
| cyberax wrote:
| > What is "affordable housing"?
|
| It's one of two things:
|
| 1. A polite way to say "housing project" or "subsidized
| housing" to not scare people.
|
| 2. A buzzword to force more housing density and/or promote
| social engineering agendas. When used in this sense, it isn't
| actually linked to affordability.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| You are referring to building apartments in the second most
| populous city in the United States as promoting a social
| engineering agenda?
| LoganDark wrote:
| No, just the term "affordable housing" in general.
| cyberax wrote:
| Yes. That as well.
| fragmede wrote:
| Or, seeing as how it's kind of important, we could subsidize
| building more housing.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Or seeing as how it's kinda important, we could stop regulatory
| capture for housing.
|
| (There is an article here on hackers news not too long ago that
| said that while most industries had had huge productivity gains
| in the last 30 years, construction had been flat or decreasing
| - mostly because of increased regulation)
| SheepSlapper wrote:
| Coming from a construction family, this is THE problem with
| building right now. Material costs going up by an order of
| magnitude during COVID times (and not really recovering) was
| rough, but it doesn't hold a candle to the dumpster fire that
| is regulation.
|
| Permits for everything (some permits are good, some are SO
| bad), mandates for things that increase cost for marginal/no
| gains in the finished product, and a ton of red tape/money
| going to people not involved in the actual work or the
| quality of the end product. If I, as a builder, have to go
| through all that bullshit for each house I build, the sane
| response is that I'm only building expensive houses that take
| more time but end up being similar $/hr for me, because I end
| up saving money and time dealing with the regulators.
| Veedrac wrote:
| You don't solve the problem of having more demand than supply
| by subsidizing demand. You solve it by making it legal to build
| housing. There is already plenty of monetary reward in building
| houses in places where housing is expensive; that's what it
| means for housing to be expensive.
| Aloisius wrote:
| Or we could stop making it so painfully expensive and risky to
| try and build housing.
|
| NIMBY policies have broken the traditional boom and bust cycles
| of housing in California that used to ensure there was enough
| housing for everyone.
|
| It used to be that when demand was outrageously high, it'd
| start a housing boom where builders would start reinvesting
| profits from building higher-end places into building more and
| more until they'd overbuilt. Wealthier people would move to
| newer places freeing up stock for everyone else. During the
| bust, you'd have even more people upgrading as prices reset.
|
| LA seems to be experimenting with suspending some of the anti-
| building policies which is certainly good, but they're still
| stuck on this idea that it should only be for below market-rate
| housing - as if the laws of supply and demand don't exist.
| ijhuygft776 wrote:
| Affordable is easy in Cali... you just have to charge 200% of
| what is reasonable.
| twelvechairs wrote:
| Good to see this happening.
|
| That said I strongly dislike when there's a conflation of
| "affordable housing" (lower-case, the general concept of
| providing for people on lower incomes) with specific schemes you
| have to qualify for (often "Afffordable Housing" upper-case) - in
| this case it seems to be deed restrictions on income that are
| required in exchange for floorspace bonuses and building code
| relaxations?
|
| There's a big problem for me in the latter building inefficient
| bureaucratic systems and being able to be gamed (e.g. If I'm rich
| maybe I can still buy a lower income unit for my children or
| perhaps my wife or mother and then rent it out. I could lower my
| income for one year just to qualify etc.)
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Ya, I don't see any of these schemes being sustainable until
| they are somehow universal (eg an option even for the rich, but
| not one they can somehow monopolize). Like Singapore's public
| housing, which isn't gated by income, but rationed in other
| ways (marriage, have a family, must be a resident).
| solumunus wrote:
| I think the only answer is that housing as an investment
| needs to be banned, it's just too damaging. Not only is it
| making people poorer by the decade, eventually leading to a
| dead economy, it's completely unproductive. Imagine if all
| that money were to be invested in business instead.
| oliwarner wrote:
| One major restriction has to be a covenant that you can only
| _ever_ buy one of these if you meet the means-test they were
| initially sold under. That limits the market and the mortgages
| available therefore caps the price.
|
| That or generational (eg 35y) leaseholds. In the UK apartments
| are almost always leasehold anyway, but a long-but-not-too-long
| lease would mean it always returns to the state without being
| resold or sublet indefinitely.
|
| I agree, defining "means" in a means-tested transaction can be
| tricky but also, it's just data. If you can't or won't show
| enough history (even homelessness leaves a trail), it's not
| hard to find someone else who meets the criteria with a better
| history.
| cyberax wrote:
| I'll save you a click: no.
|
| Here's the thing: housing in dense cities will NEVER be
| affordable. Never.
|
| What happened recently (and is happening in other cities like
| Seattle) is companies pivoting from building "luxury" crappy
| condos to sweet state-subsdizied housing. These kinds of projects
| are great for them, they don't need to care about the market
| demand.
| skeptrune wrote:
| That's not really what the article says was going on. Those
| "luxuries" were being mandated by the bureaucratic agencies.
| Builders seem to have never really wanted them in the first
| place. The developers are apparently happy to ditch all the
| niceities and offer affordable housing if allowed it seems.
|
| Not like I've done my own research, but the article was
| actually interesting.
| BadCookie wrote:
| Tokyo manages to remain affordable somehow.
|
| "Two full-time workers earning Tokyo's minimum wage can
| comfortably afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment
| in six of the city's 23 wards."
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/editorials/tokyo-...
| stavros wrote:
| Not to detract from your point, but 2-bedroom apartments in
| Tokyo are 60 sqm or something.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| That's 646 square feet. That's 25'5"x25'5". For an urban
| area, that's plenty of space. That doesn't mean literally
| every apartment is that small, just that small and cheap
| apartments are available for those who want them, and
| American-sized apartments with American prices are also
| available for those who want to pay for them.
|
| That's one of the main reasons why housing is so expensive
| in the United States. We paternalistically decide that 760
| square feet is the absolute minimum amount of livable space
| for a one-bedroom apartment, and instead force people who
| can't afford that much space to split a 1200 square foot
| apartment with three people.
|
| Adults are more than capable of deciding for themselves how
| big of an apartment they would like to live in. Banning 60
| square meter apartments doesn't help people who can't
| afford the legal mandated minimum.
| cyberax wrote:
| > That's 646 square feet. That's 25'5"x25'5". For an
| urban area, that's plenty of space.
|
| It's not. And this is the total space, including the
| bathroom and the kitchen.
|
| > That doesn't mean literally every apartment is that
| small
|
| You are right, some are even smaller:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/business/tiny-
| apartments-...
|
| And all while just a hundred miles away, beautiful
| historical houses can be bought for literally nothing.
| And that's with a rapidly declining population.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| Why do you feel the need to impose your values on others,
| even at great cost?
| tekla wrote:
| What is this opulence? 646 SqFt is plenty.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Tokyo manages to remain affordable somehow.
|
| Bullshit. Tokyo's average unit costs $1m now. They managed to
| create a bona-fide property bubble in the middle of declining
| population: https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/surging-
| tokyo-property-...
|
| The NYT article is (of course) a one-sided social engineering
| story, full of half-truths and outright lies.
| epistasis wrote:
| You do realize that people can read the articles you link
| to, right? For example:
|
| > The flood of investment drove the average price for a new
| condominium in central Tokyo up 60% to a record 129.6
| million yen ($865,000) in the first half of this year,
| according to the Real Estate Economic Institute.
|
| Prices surged. Before the surge, professionals had this
| dream of owning. So your own article refutes your
| nonsensical statement that Dems housing can "never" be
| affordable.
|
| Can you conceive of a cyclical nature to markets that
| affects pricing? Or is it that now that they went from
| affordable to less affordable, it means that purchasing
| will forever be changed now?
|
| Or you assertion of "declining population"? Maybe on the
| national level, but it's not true of Tokyo!
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/608585/japan-tokyo-
| popul...
|
| And what is the difference in cost between renting and
| owning? Perhaps renting is affordable, but ownership is
| extremely expensive becuase of irrational speculation or
| temporary macro factors?
|
| TL;DR your own article refutes your central hypothesis that
| housing can not be affordable in dense cities.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Prices surged. Before the surge, professionals had this
| dream of owning.
|
| You're literally repeating the joke.
|
| A doctor asks a nurse:
|
| - Was the patient sweating prior to death?
|
| - Yes.
|
| - Good, that's a good sign.
|
| > Or you assertion of "declining population"? Maybe on
| the national level, but it's not true of Tokyo!
|
| Indeed. And that's my point. Tokyo, like a leech, is
| sucking the life from its surroundings.
|
| > And what is the difference in cost between renting and
| owning? Perhaps renting is affordable, but ownership is
| extremely expensive becuase of irrational speculation or
| temporary macro factors?
|
| No. They are not temporary. The prices will not fall,
| they have been steadily growing for the last 2 decades.
| gotaran wrote:
| I loved the "luxury" techbro condos of Seattle. I'd take a
| cookie cutter glassbox any day over my disgusting Manhattan
| prewar.
| odysseus wrote:
| Almost always, when headlines end in a question mark, the
| answer is no.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| Vienna's plenty affordable. It takes an investment in public
| transit and reasonable housing policies, but it's perfectly
| achievable.
| jeffbee wrote:
| This is literally the opposite of everything the article is
| saying. These are not state-subsidized. They are just vanilla
| buildings. The city got rid of impact fees, "prevailing wage"
| union giveaways, and approved projects in 60 days or less, and
| because this reduced the costs of building by a large amount,
| it becomes profitable for builders to just do their thing
| without subsidies.
| closeparen wrote:
| You can, right this moment, purchase a 2-3 bedroom condo in a
| glass-and-steel high rise in a central business district from a
| profit-seeking entity, for less than $400,000. It's called
| Chicago. Something SF, LA, Seattle, etc. would be immensely
| improved by imitating.
| xnx wrote:
| Chicago is great, and $400K can be a good deal compared to
| the coasts, but watch out for those assessments.
| epistasis wrote:
| Where do these nonsense beliefs come from? There's no data to
| support them. No examples. Nothing?
|
| It's so odd to see such undying certainty without any evidence,
| and without any clear path to political indoctrination. Or
| perhaps this sort of political indoctrination was present
| before mt times? Its just mystifying to see comments like this
| stated as if people would agree of believe these views by sheer
| force of will.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Where do these nonsense beliefs come from? There's no data
| to support them. No examples. Nothing?
|
| Have you actually tried to look at the data? Hint: no city in
| the US managed to lower prices by building new housing within
| the last 25 years. Not a single one.
|
| Even pro-density pushers are admitting it:
| https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-
| might...
|
| Here's a nice overview of the literature:
| https://furmancenter.org/files/Supply_Skepticism_-_Final.pdf
| skeptrune wrote:
| My main takeaway from this is that the free market may have
| already lowered housing costs if bureaucracy would just get out
| of the way.
|
| I mean it seems like there is something to the bit of regulation
| that forces them to keep rent low, but broadly this suggests to
| me that the bulk of spend should be on somehow making the
| bureaucratic part of the system run more smoothly or be easier to
| navigate so more projects get approved and built.
|
| The last bit about learning from Houston especially made me
| chuckle. Houston is cheap and big at the same time and likely
| because there are so little bureaucraticisms for zoning/roofdeck
| requirements. The cost is that the city is ugly and not "tier 1"
| but seems like a fine tradeoff.
| ipnon wrote:
| How much of your rent is going to salaries at city hall? How
| much better would the city be to substitute these salaries for
| cheaper rent?
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| Canada is seeing housing prices skyrocket like mad because they
| refuse to understand this. They recently passed a federal
| spending bill to help fund city planners, because a huge
| bottleneck in housing construction is the cities requiring a
| city planner to check boxes on a ton of things that were never
| important to begin with.
|
| City planning is one of the most destructive professions in the
| United States. In terms of death, lost years of life to
| commuting, health issues, and social ills, it has no peer. We
| live shorter lives, with more health issues, and are lonelier
| than our rich peers in other countries because of our
| centrally-planned built environment. We built cities the same
| way for thousands of years: for humans on foot; and are only
| now coming to realize that our great auto-centric suburban
| experiment was an enormous and historic blunder.
| cyberax wrote:
| There's NOTHING good in building dense housing. It always
| (ALWAYS) leads to more misery down the road: higher housing
| costs, smaller units, more congestion, etc.
|
| Want truly affordable housing? Bring jobs to smaller cities. You
| don't have ANY other option.
|
| No, "transit-enabled" housing won't help you. No, banning cars
| and forcing people to bike won't help you. No, screaming at the
| "end stage capitalism" won't help you.
| apsurd wrote:
| I'm the person that wants more dense and walkable cities, so
| I'm really curious to learn more about why that will ALWAYS
| lead to more misery down the road. Honest question, do you have
| any stuff I can read or terms I can search on?
| vuln wrote:
| There is plenty of history showing the long term effects and
| outcome of dense housing run by the Government. Dense housing
| ran by private companies will always be a race to capture the
| most amount of profit. While Government ran dense housing
| will be affected by an ever decreasing budget and ever
| increasing cost. OP is right. We need to invest in "fly over"
| states. There is an abundance of land and opportunity to
| achieve the American dream. Humans living in a tiny cube and
| commuting in a tiny cylinder (bus, subway) to a tiny office
| cube ad nauseam is the worst.
| apsurd wrote:
| Thanks, so it's specifically govt run affordable housing. I
| read OP as the more general "dense cities = BAD" but seems
| like it's more specifically "govt run plans for dense
| housing". I can understand that.
|
| Also, yes also agree about more jobs and opportunities more
| distributed across the land. That sounds good.
|
| I think about my position as favoring walkable dense metros
| in the more organic manner - people like people - we WANT
| to be close to one another. And the infrastructure to make
| that possible, comfortable, affordable, and sustainable..
| is great!
|
| The exchange of ideas and tolerance leading to innovation,
| is a function of dense metros. Is that not just
| fundamentally...true?
| kiba wrote:
| Government planned housing being bad is just a feature of
| your specific local context, not an inevitability to all
| government subsidized/built housing.
|
| Governments are human organizations, and it's not a
| surprise that some organizations are better ran than
| other.
| always2slow wrote:
| This is anecdotal I guess but I know I'm not alone.. as
| someone who has been forced to live in more dense housing
| with each move the older I get.. (grew up in a
| house,shared walls, more shared walls, and now an
| apartment with shared walls and people above me). Misery
| vastly increases with density, at least for me. People
| are loud, inconsiderate and fucking gross. There's trash
| and broken shit everywhere, people idle their cars and
| cause noise pollution from the exhaust reverberating on
| the buildings or their stereos, no one owns the communal
| areas so they get trashed because nobody gives a shit.
| Common areas smell horrible, or are overpoweringly
| scented with air freshener. Living in dense housing as
| driven me absolutely mad, and I have more buying power
| than I've ever enjoyed in my life it's ridiculous so it's
| not like I'm forced to live in dense housing and poverty.
| So when I read shit like 'people like people - we WANT to
| be close to one another' I get triggered as fuck, I'm not
| sure I know any adult that would prefer to live in a
| house over an apartment. Also... There's almost zero
| cultural tolerance, people silo into their cultural
| bubbles and refuse to integrate.
| apsurd wrote:
| I agree with every one of your points. I mean to say
| "people want to be close to one another" as a philosophy
| along a spectrum. People crave belonging, connection,
| intimacy, stimulus, novelty. In a grand sense we really
| do choose to congregate.
|
| That said, yes for sure there's much suck about the
| filth, obliviousness, and inconsideration of "other
| people". I like people, but I do not live on top of
| people. I want the ability to walk or bike to my
| stimulus. And then retreat back to solitude.
|
| Completely get you! In simple terms, I just think it has
| to occur silly to people, that 8 billion humans are gonna
| have their 2 acres of land and that that is somehow
| _actually_ ideal beyond "I want what I want the way I
| want it". Quite literally the concept of Civilization is
| honoring a WE more than an I.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| Neither the article nor the comment you are referring to
| were talking about government housing.
|
| And you're entitled to not want to live in a dense urban
| environment, but you might need to open your mind to the
| idea that not everyone feels the way you do.
| cyberax wrote:
| > And you're entitled to not want to live in a dense
| urban environment, but you might need to open your mind
| to the idea that not everyone feels the way you do.
|
| You're entitled to move away from a toxic river that
| catches fire. But you might need to open your mind to the
| idea that not everyone feels the way you do. Perhaps some
| people like to work at the factory that produces the
| toxic slime.
|
| Urban density is pollution. Its effects are not limited
| to cities.
|
| By making it easier for companies to open offices in
| dense urban cores, it ensures that smaller cities are
| starved of jobs and die. So people are forced to move to
| ever-densifying areas, driving up the price. This in turn
| makes it even easier for companies to hire people living
| near dense urban cores.
|
| Rinse, wash, repeat.
| Sabinus wrote:
| Do you think there are economic efficiencies in gathering
| a large workforce in one location?
|
| Do you think suburbia is an efficient and effective use
| of land?
| xnx wrote:
| Small cities are a relic from 100 years ago when 40% of
| the US population worked on farms. Their diminished
| present day stature is a indication that they are not a
| productive use of resources (e.g. roads and other
| infrastructure). We don't need government intervention to
| save them.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| > Urban density is pollution. Its effects are not limited
| to cities.
|
| This is simply not the case. People living in dense
| walkable urban areas produce far less pollution than
| those living in the suburbs who need to drive much more
| and require far more infrastructure per household.
|
| https://www.brookings.edu/articles/its-not-just-cities-
| subur...
| michaelmrose wrote:
| There are three problems you have to deal with.
|
| Remote Work You need pervasive remote jobs to move any
| meaningful number of people away from the companies that
| presently fund their lifestyle.
|
| Government and Desirability
|
| Flyover states are run by gross people whose theories on
| how our country ought to be run that are misaligned with
| the people you wish would move there. This is going to
| cause in not many years a crisis situation with doctors
| choosing to move to more desirable locations and small
| cities lack a lot of the amenities and interest of living
| in the big city. People are already choosing not to live
| there despite decrease costs. Small cities are BORING.
| Retric wrote:
| Many examples of dense government built/run housing work
| fine. The common problems are not a function of housing but
| the people living in that housing. In cities where the
| government owns over half of all housing stock tenants end
| up representing the general population well and the system
| works fine with generally low prices and overhead.
|
| The temptation is to only build government housing for the
| poor, but that's a well known recipe for failure. The US
| has instead shifted to government spreading out poor
| population via subsidies but that's doesn't fix any of the
| core issues.
| popularonion wrote:
| Fertility rates in cities are far below replacement and
| falling every year. In every country, religious or secular,
| liberal or conservative, socialized healthcare/education or
| no. So they are proving simply not capable of sustaining
| human life.
|
| This only works as long as rural people keep having lots of
| kids to feed into the city, but that isn't really happening
| anymore either.
| SR2Z wrote:
| This is insane - rural birthrates are higher, but
| birthrates are falling across the developed world in both
| urban and rural contexts.
|
| It's not because of density - it's because people with
| options other than raising children tend to pick them since
| kids require a lot of effort.
|
| SF and LA could easily be several times more dense than
| they currently are; that kind of increase would see the
| capacity of the entire state grow by double-digit
| percentages.
|
| So now I've gotta ask you: if cities suck for population
| growth, then where would those double-digit population
| gains come from? It's not rural America, that's for sure.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| For us it wasn't about not being able to raise kids, it
| was seeing how garbage parents are with their massive
| consumption and a whole generation of iPad pacifier kids.
| This planet is fucked in a hundred years and I'm not
| bringing kids into that world.
| crooked-v wrote:
| This isn't the 1800s. A clear majority of the population of
| the modern US lives in "the city".
| fbdab103 wrote:
| In fact, if I am reading this 2020 Census report
| correctly[0], 40% of the US population lives in the 806
| cities with a population >= 50,000.
|
| [0] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-
| series/demo/popest/2...
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Modern Societies as a whole are below replacement for our
| own consider
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6745a9.htm
| https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2017/08/rural-
| america...
|
| Based on actual data urban individuals (80% of the pop)
| aren't dependent upon rurals (20% of the pop) having babies
| because by the numbers most of the native born sons and
| daughters are born in urban and suburban areas. In fact
| both are dependent upon immigration to maintain the same
| level of population.
| cyberax wrote:
| "Supply skepticism" is a good overview:
| https://furmancenter.org/research/publication/supply-
| skeptic...
|
| And it's written from the viewpoint of pro-density. Read the
| linked papers there, the best results of density increases
| are either extremely indirect ("migration chains") or
| insignificant (no sale price decreases, and single-digit
| percentage one-time decreases in rent).
|
| I'm writing an analysis of all densifications in the US and
| Canada. So far, I have not found a _single_ example of
| density increases leading to even slowing down of sale
| prices. Never mind their reduction.
|
| On the other hand, they ALWAYS lead to worsening commutes and
| shrinking square footage per capita.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Density increases actually make cities more popular, so the
| supply constraints remain or even worsen. They also
| generate wealth, meaning people earn more, and can bid up
| housing prices. I think people just like dense cities with
| good transit, so we should definitely do it, but let's not
| pretend that SF would be affordable if only it had HK's
| density (it would be as affordable as HK, which means not
| very).
| Aloisius wrote:
| Greenaway-McGrevy (2023) showed an increased supply of
| housing in Auckland reduced rents in 3-bedroom homes by
| 26-33% below a control.
|
| Mense (2023) showed a 1% yearly increase in housing supply
| in Germany results in an average local municipality rent to
| fall by 0.2%.
|
| Asquith et al. (2023) found in NYC, the average new
| building lowers nearby rents within 250 meters of the new
| building by 5% to 7% relative to the trend rent growth
| otherwise would have followed.
|
| Li (2022), looked at new market rate buildings of 7+
| stories and found that for every 10% increase to the
| housing stock that new high rises add within a 500-ft ring,
| residential rents for the buildings within that ring
| decrease by 1 percent.
|
| Pennington (2021) found rents within 500 meters of a new
| project fell by 1.2 to 2.3% in San Francisco.
| crooked-v wrote:
| > higher housing costs
|
| The basic reason for skyrocketing housing costs in major
| California cities is that there aren't enough housing units for
| the number of people living there. The solution to that is...
| ... ... denser housing.
| cyberax wrote:
| > The solution to that is... ... ... denser housing.
|
| No large city in the US managed to decrease prices by
| building more housing (dense or not) within the last 25
| years.
|
| There are several fundamental reasons why density increases
| won't work.
| Aloisius wrote:
| What large US city has actually built enough housing to
| even match natural population growth in the last 25 years?
|
| More housing can only lower prices, in absolute terms, if
| it actually exceeds demand, but it still lowers prices
| compared to what they would have been had nothing been
| built, all else being equal.
|
| There is broad consensus among economists that it is
| stringent regulatory controls constraining supply that lead
| to higher housing prices - not building more housing.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Given that natural population growth has basically
| flatlined, I'm not sure what to take from that challenge.
|
| https://www.brookings.edu/articles/u-s-population-growth-
| has...
|
| If we look at the growth from 2000-2020, it basically
| went from 1% to .12%, so I guess we could use a step
| method to integrate (or just take population delta from
| 2024 to 1999 and subtract immigrants?). I don't think
| we've grown that much, and growth is incredibly uneven.
|
| > There is broad consensus among economists that it is
| stringent regulatory controls constraining supply that
| lead to higher housing prices - not building more
| housing.
|
| People say things like this without backing it up. We
| get:
|
| > https://truthout.org/articles/big-real-estate-says-
| regulatio...
|
| "Big Real Estate Says Regulations Caused Housing Crisis,
| But They Wrote the Rules"
|
| But if you try to key in on specifically economists, they
| don't say that. The fact that we have a global housing
| crisis, not just in America, seems to hint that something
| else is going on. Of course, we can build baby build
| Chinese style and wind up with 1.5 houses for every
| household, but that is probably a worse problem.
| Aloisius wrote:
| Population growth since 2000 doesn't really affect the
| housing market today. Most of those people aren't old
| enough to be in the housing market.
|
| We're facing shortages caused by 40 years of building
| below the level of population growth.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| So you mean growth in population from 1975 to 2000 as the
| 25 year window we should be looking at?
|
| We went through a property bust in the late 80s/early 90s
| due to Japan's larger property bust and the S/L crisis,
| among having wicked recessions at the time.
| cyberax wrote:
| Wrong. We have more housing units per capita than in
| 80-s. It's just that the demand is forced into several
| large population centers.
| deepthunder wrote:
| What's to stop Hedge Funds or other "investors" from buying
| these houses up?
|
| Houses have to be owner occupied, not investment vehicles. I
| know, I know "what about rentals", etc? When it comes to
| rentals may be the Vienna mode?
| Aloisius wrote:
| As long as they're occupied, who cares who is living there
| and who owns it? Demand for housing gets reduced.
|
| Owners occupying certainly doesn't make them any less of an
| investment vehicle.
| oliwarner wrote:
| One solution.
|
| Another is breaking apart the reasons want to live somewhere.
| Every conurbation wants _all the jobs_ but it 's so self-
| destructive.
|
| Federally limit where multinationals can set up shop (so they
| can't use state-level tax incentives to play states off one
| another).
|
| Connect cities and states together better. High speed rail
| services so that it's actually viable to live away from work.
| I know people who try to justify 4h daily commutes. It's not
| fair to shovel 4M people into a space to work where only 1.6M
| people can live.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| If your dense housing leads to _higher_ housing costs that 's
| actually great news; it means that your city is enabling
| higher-productivity arrangements that boost local incomes, and
| all the concern about "lowering property values" was 100% bunk.
| That's the pattern you see in places like Manhattan. Wouldn't
| it be nice if most people in the U.S. had a bunch of Manhattan-
| level cities in their state that they could easily move to if
| they wished?
|
| > Want truly affordable housing? Bring jobs to smaller cities.
| You don't have ANY other option.
|
| Want big houses and cars? Bring good jobs to smaller cities,
| that still have little need for density. That's a pretty
| natural pattern of development. But the really high incomes
| will most likely still come from the very densest places, where
| people willingly put up with tradeoffs like living in a smaller
| place and doing without a car, because they're actually a lot
| better than the alternative.
| cyberax wrote:
| > If your dense housing leads to higher housing costs that's
| actually great news;
|
| No, it's not. Density leads to quantifiably worse life:
| longer commutes, smaller living spaces.
|
| > Want big houses and cars? Bring good jobs to smaller
| cities, that still have little need for density.
|
| Except that this is impossible unless density is regulated.
|
| > But the really high incomes will most likely still come
| from the very densest places
|
| Right now, the highest incomes come from people living in
| suburbs (according to the IRS stats).
| flopriore wrote:
| _If your dense housing leads to higher housing costs that 's
| actually great news; it means that your city is enabling
| higher-productivity arrangements that boost local incomes_
|
| Take Milan as a counterexample. A single room in a shared
| flat costs around EUR700/month, a single-room studio
| EUR1200/month. Yet, people on average earn EUR30,000 a year,
| which means EUR24000 after taxes, or around EUR1800 per
| month. That's not what I would say increased salaries and
| productivity.
|
| In Italy, there are serious problems with stagnating
| productivity and national, collective bargaining.
| Nevertheless, that doesn't mean rents do not skyrocket in big
| cities
| simonw wrote:
| How does building dense housing lead to higher housing costs?
| That seems unintuitive to me.
| crooked-v wrote:
| This kind of anti-logic usually goes along with arguments
| like "well, they keep building lots of units and prices
| haven't gone down, so obviously it's useless to do anything
| but enact rent control for current residents and give the
| middle finger to anyone else who ever wants to live in that
| place", while ignoring that prices can't go down until we
| catch up on the literally decades of underbuilding in most US
| metro areas.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Prices do go down though. A new building in Oakland just
| got written down by the joint venture REIT that built it,
| in their filing they blame "historically high levels of new
| housing on the market". Rents in Oakland are down about 25%
| in real dollars from their peak in 2019.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Yes, but it's also Oakland - not really the most
| desirable place in the neighborhood. That's actually the
| kind of place where prices would be most likely to drop
| if you just increase density across the board. (Which is
| not a bad thing if you're overly worried about the
| detrimental effects of gentrification!)
| jeffbee wrote:
| People who say that are speaking from ignorance. These
| new buildings are ludicrously valuable. The newest,
| tallest in Oakland is worth > $500 million and the rents
| are $2k to $4k, and it's > 90% occupied. There are tons
| of jobs and demand for these homes.
| epistasis wrote:
| Plenty of places with far worse reputations than Oakland
| are not dropping in prices, because they didn't build.
|
| Any place will drop in prices if you keep on building in
| advance of demand.
|
| Gentrification is more likely to come from lack of
| building than building. That's the story all throughout
| California and every other wealthy area in the US:
| extreme gentrification through lack of new housing. Its
| not the new housing that drives up prices, it's the lack
| of it.
| cyberax wrote:
| It's like induced demand doesn't exist. As we all know,
| adding a new lane to a freeway can't lead to more
| congestion. It's simply against all logic that adding new
| road space could result in it!
| yterdy wrote:
| Devil's advocate: induced demand. Density increases
| interactions which are the economic point of cities, and why
| cities are wealthier than suburbs/rural areas (when
| suburbs/rural areas aren't juiced by subsidies and loans).
| Wealthier cities attract migration, migration increases
| demand for units.
|
| That said, my personal belief is that prices are completely
| decoupled from demand and are more reflective of a
| desperation to keep them high for... other reasons.
| epistasis wrote:
| (Keeping in mind that you are playing devils advocate, and
| that none of this is directed at you personally)
|
| Induced demand for highways: sure. Well proven. Happens
| every single time.
|
| Induced demand for housing? Gonna need to see some hard
| evidence on the time scales, etc.
|
| Housing is very different from highways. People can go from
| using zero freeway miles to 50 freeway miles a day, if
| there's slightly cheaper housing further out. It's this
| drop in pricing that drives demand.
|
| For housing, the increase in demand comes from having,
| presumable, more amenities, making the dense living more
| desirable. The change in time for amenities to develop is
| on the order of years, however. It takes a long time for
| businesses to develop, build customer bases, etc. And in
| that time, it's possible to build more housing. Housing
| scales far far far better than freeways. It's easy to
| double, triple, quintuple, and even 10x or more the density
| from single detached units. Freeways don't scale like that.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Induced demand for housing? Gonna need to see some hard
| evidence on the time scales, etc.
|
| Seattle: grew the number of units by 25% within the last
| 12 years. SF: only 5% within that timeframe.
|
| Their price growth curve is nearly identical.
|
| > Housing scales far far far better than freeways. It's
| easy to double, triple, quintuple, and even 10x or more
| the density from single detached units.
|
| LOL, no. You have no idea how much city infrastructure
| costs.
|
| > Freeways don't scale like that.
|
| One mile of subway in Manhattan now costs more than 1000
| miles of a 6-lane freeway.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| If living in a denser place turns out to be more desirable
| due to better jobs and/or amenities, the demand effect can be
| so strong that it more than offsets the increased supply. But
| that's actually a very good thing; it means that dense
| housing is unlocking even more value than you might have
| expected it to.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| Dense housing creates highly walk-able cities with extremely
| good public transportation. Furthermore, high density foot
| traffic creates improved economies of scale for businesses.
| Economies of scale might shift society to one where you don't
| need to cook at home because good inexpensive food is
| everywhere. Businesses themselves benefit from high
| concentrations of skilled workers in more condensed areas.
| The total cost of commuting for society diminishes. Public
| works also benefit because more people can benefit from every
| dollar spent. Dense living lets people take advantage of the
| economies of scale of the businesses and infrastructure
| around them.
|
| The end result of dense housing is a highly desirable place
| to live, in other words, increased demand for housing,
| _locally_.
|
| This can be seen in housing prices in NYC, Taipei, Seoul,
| Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc.
|
| So it is not dense housing that makes housing costs drop, it
| is dense housing built _in excess of demand_... But incumbent
| property owners will resist that tooth and nail because if
| production of housing can satisfy demand, their capital
| investments (and very often sole vehicle of retirement
| income) will decrease in value. When a person 's wealth
| decreases, they desire political change. So housing policy
| that results in lower housing costs is extremely unpopular
| among those with power (education, money, time, etc.).
| cyberax wrote:
| > How does building dense housing lead to higher housing
| costs? That seems unintuitive to me.
|
| By creating a denser unit, you're forcing (via economic
| forces) more people to move closer to denser areas. This in
| turn makes these areas more attractive for employers, making
| it easier to do business. This in turn makes dense areas more
| attractive for employees, so they are willing to pay more to
| live closer to dense areas.
|
| Result: density increases, and prices rise along with it.
|
| And an additional toxic component: the population is
| basically not growing anymore. It's nearly a zero-sum game
| now, so each new dense unit means one more dilapidated house
| in Kansas as its occupants had to move to find a job.
| cyberax wrote:
| Here's a great post from a person living in Tokyo:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39331618
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| _gestures broadly at large European cities that have cheaper
| rents than US cities_
| vinay427 wrote:
| There's more to it than housing density (see below). For
| instance, there are also differences in public transport to
| spread the area of viable housing. Anecdotally, high rent
| cities such as New York or London tend to not do a great job
| at providing reasonably priced _and_ efficient transport to
| nearby commuter towns or suburban areas compared to many in
| central Europe, for instance.
|
| On densities, cities like New York, San Francisco, and
| Seattle (high rents) are comparable or higher in density than
| larger European cities with the exception of Paris (and I may
| have missed another). London, Berlin, or Madrid are
| noticeably lower than New York or possibly the other two US
| cities as well.
|
| (Naturally, the city boundaries of somewhere like London
| include many less-urban areas so this doesn't quite capture
| exactly what either of us presumably mean, but it's loosely
| demonstrative.)
| axpy wrote:
| I think you are mixing units here (km2 vs square mile).
| According to wikipedia NY density is 11313/km2 which would
| ranked 18th city in Europe. SF would be 29th with 7194/km2.
| I would argue that NY public transit is absolutely doing a
| fine job (cleanliness appart) and it's moving 7.5 million
| peoples on a weekday (was higher pre-pandemic)
|
| Density is needed for proper public transit and locally
| accessible services to flourish.
| cyberax wrote:
| I don't have datasets for European rents. Can you provide an
| example of a sufficiently large European city where new
| density led to a _decrease_ in rents _and_ sale prices?
| jbm wrote:
| I agree in part with you, particularly the weird utopian
| beliefs people have about transit-enabled housing.
|
| I lived in Tokyo which is full of high density and the world's
| best public transit without the drug abuse issues in the West.
| Safe, omnipresent public transit like this is absolutely
| necessary for high density -- and it's not ideal at all.
|
| Getting from point A to B for work is miserable. You walk to
| the station, wait for your train, then switch as necessary.
| Switching trains can be awful -- Yotsuya to the Marunouchi line
| was particularly horrible. Maybe you are a winner with a job at
| Tokyo station; but I thought the point was empowering all
| people, not just the top tier of society?
|
| Of course, you can choose to align yourself with the train
| system. Leaving aside your subsequent disadvantage when
| changing jobs, you are then competing with everyone for a
| decent place to live. Suddenly you need to fight for denser and
| denser (aka smaller and smaller) housing again and people
| eventually get priced out to a new town two hours out of Tokyo.
|
| And that's in the city; Try visiting your family in Saitama if
| you live in the wrong part of Tokyo. Your selfish human desire
| to connect with family turns a 25-30 minute car ride into a 1.5
| hour painful hassle, and one that is not cheap either. Try
| getting your friends together for a board game -- transit is
| one reason why such home parties are so rare.
|
| For the Bike utopians, I used to bike from Koenji to Ikebukuro
| at Sunshine 60 and would routinely beat the train. I had to
| stop because, even with the ideal small back roads, it was
| dangerous -- and someone stole my bike. This is an inevitable
| part of density, you aren't going to have bigger roads and you
| get more rolls of the dice to encounter dishonest people.
|
| Finally, the more density, the less you can do. Humans have
| their own social gravity and it shows. You will be poorer
| overall as going to the spice grocery is going to take up all
| your activity time (since so much will vanish in transit).
| Maybe it's ok if you wish to conform to everyone else's choice
| of food and activity but that's literally the opposite of
| diversity.
|
| This is with the very best public transit system in the safest
| city in the world (for men, let's not talk sexual harassment of
| women) -- any attempt in North America will be much, much worse
| for reasons that are obvious.
|
| I still believe cities should enable higher density as
| homelessness is worse than everything I outlined above; but it
| won't be pleasant and many people will be forced into a cramped
| housing situation that they will never be able to get out of.
|
| In that context, finding ways to bring jobs to smaller cities
| makes a lot of sense. I am sorry you got downvoted op, but a
| lot of people seem to be attracted to high density without
| appreciating realistic drawbacks.
|
| (And to be honest, I still like the Tokyo train system, I'm
| just not going to mindlessly worship it)
| hayst4ck wrote:
| > the world's best public transit.
|
| FWIW, Tokyo is _maybe_ a contender for 3rd. Taipei and Seoul
| are both an order of magnitude better than Tokyo for public
| transportation, in my opinion.
|
| I recall NYC being better than Tokyo, too (when it worked).
| yowzadave wrote:
| Making these kinds of sweeping, counter-intuitive, absolute
| statements in all caps without any justification gives the
| impression of an analysis that may be colored by ideology
| rather than a clear look at the facts in question. If cities
| are too expensive because everybody wants to live
| there...perhaps they have some qualities other than "misery"
| that you haven't considered?
| dang wrote:
| Ok, but please don't post in the flamewar style and please do
| make your substantive points without fulminating. This is in
| the site guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39331110.
| robomartin wrote:
| Making things affordable in LA will be easy. Almost everyone I
| know is either in the process of leaving CA or planning on
| leaving. This includes everything from middle-class individuals
| to high-net-worth families, soon-to-retire and retired. Everyone
| is sick of the financially abusive environment in CA, at every
| level. And, of course, other issues.
|
| My wife and I are so sick of it that it has become an almost
| weekly conversation. She is actively investigating where to go.
| There are a range of options, from other places in the US to
| Europe. Today she was showing me her research on opportunities in
| Valencia, Spain.
|
| When we go, we will take three businesses and as many of the
| people working for us as possible out of CA. Logistically, it is
| far more likely that the move will happen within the US, of
| course.
|
| So yeah, keep going on this path and housing affordability will
| not be a problem at all. That's my take on it. Right or wrong.
| apsurd wrote:
| I hear you. There's definitely a stur up going on these days.
|
| > When we go, we will take three businesses and as many of the
| people working for us as possible out of CA. Logistically, it
| is far more likely that the move will happen within the US, of
| course.
|
| I'm replying because this is just the tiny vocal minority.
| California is fucking BEAUTIFUL. People will want to live here
| until CA breaks off and sinks into the ocean from a major
| earthquake. Plenty of people. It's a non-issue.
|
| disclaimer: born and raised CA kid. I hate that the West is so
| car centric. There's much to love about other places. But there
| is no place like CA.
| robomartin wrote:
| > there is no place like CA.
|
| The US is a beautiful place. I would not be so bolt as to
| make such a categorical statement.
|
| Economically, in terms of business climate, affordability and
| more, CA is a dumpster fire. To the point that people at the
| new $15 to $20 per hour minimum wage that was supposed to
| solve so many problems actually have lower spending power
| than when they were earning at a lower rate. That should not
| be surprising when we pay 3x to 5x for auto licenses, 3x to
| 10x for auto insurance, 3x to 10x for homeowners insurance,
| 2x or more for gasoline, more in taxes across the board, from
| sales to income taxes and a bunch of little taxes on
| everything that just kills your money. Etc.
|
| The only way CA improves is if there's a major ideological
| shift that permeates the state. I cannot see that happening
| for decades. I think it has to sink to a very painful bottom
| before people actually understand. CA needs to get the
| "Argentina experience" before voters will understand just how
| dumb it is to continue to support the charlatans and crooks
| who have been running this state.
|
| The CA high speed rail was supposed to cost us $10 billion.
| We are well --way-- past $100 billion and nowhere completion.
| It will probably take this project another 25 years (if we
| are lucky), it might cost $500 billion and, if it ever really
| comes online, the cost per rider will be such that we could
| have sent everyone to the moon for less. Stupid voters.
| Ideologically broken crooks for politicians. Not a good
| combination. Time will tell.
|
| As for affordable housing. Good luck. The very idea in CA
| violates the laws of physics. Unless there's a serious regime
| change this particular issue will not improve at all. Not at
| scale.
| dxbydt wrote:
| I have long followed your work, on and off hn, for a couple
| years now. Huge respect. Before you consider Spain etc., please
| give the midwest a chance. Idealogically and workwise, you will
| find that Indiana, Ohio, Michigan strongly align with your
| values. You can pick any flagship university here and draw a
| circle with 20 mile radius. You will find plenty of
| manufacturing capital, cheap land, and a rooted workforce
| looking for stable jobs in the industrial sector(rather than
| 150k swes). State funding & support for R&D, tons of expertise
| in aerospace/robotics/cad/mech/... purdue for example is a
| top-10 in several of these, with several hundred oncampus
| professors and over 50k students, most of who are midwest
| natives who prefer to stay put rather than catch the first
| flight to llm valley. After a very long stint in CA, I made the
| move to the midwest and couldn't be happier. Life is short. A
| certain amount of friction is fine, but if you are swimming
| against the tide every single damned day of your life, it
| quickly drains you. I find the midwest much more supportive of
| my values and politics.
| gottorf wrote:
| > There are a range of options, from other places in the US
|
| > far more likely that the move will happen within the US
|
| I don't know what you value in a place to live in, but many
| Southern and Midwestern states have much better fiscal and
| regulatory climates[0] and are full of midsized cities with
| surprisingly charming and walkable downtown areas. About the
| only thing you will not find is the delicious Mediterranean
| climate found in much of California.
|
| [0]: https://www.freedominthe50states.org/
| jmyeet wrote:
| Credit has to be given to the governor Gavin Newsom here. He's
| made some questionable policy choices, particularly with
| seemingly random vetoes (which the legislature could override but
| they haven't done in decades because that would take up time in
| the next legislative session).
|
| Prop 13 was about the absolute worst thing to ever happen to
| California housing. Rising property prices make people feel like
| they're richer but really they're not. You typically still own
| one housing unit of wealth in almost all cases. It's just the
| nominal value is higher. For this benefit, eye-wateringly massive
| subsidies have been given to Disney, institutional property
| holders and the very wealthy for absolutely no gain.
|
| But this goes to show how powerful NIMBYs are and the level of
| delusional self-interest people possess.
|
| For those unfamiliar, Prop 13 capped the annual property tax
| increases to 1-2%. Property tax rates are reset when the property
| is sold. Property held in LLCs is _never_ reset because the LLC
| not the property is sold. This is why Disney 's property tax rate
| was basically set in the 1960s and never been adjusted for
| current values. The net effect is that incumbent property owners
| from the 70s and 80s pay a tiny fraction of the assessable
| property tax on their properties and this has been a massive
| drain on state budgets. This was sold as not kicking seniors out
| of their houses. Texas handles this a lot better: property taxes
| can be deferred until death or the sale of the property.
|
| But it gets worse: this beneficial tax rate can be _inherited_.
| It 's just locking in generational wealth. It's also not allowing
| people to move because they can't keep this beneficial tax rate.
|
| Recently, there was a very minor partial rollback on this known
| as Prop 19. What is it? It limits this beneficial property tax
| rate inheritance to only one property. That's right. If you owned
| 10 properties then your family could inherit all your tax rates
| prior to this. So this only affects people who bought multiple
| properties in the 20th century and sat on them. That's probably
| less than 1% of CAlifornians.
|
| Prop 13 passed with _only 51% of the vote_. 49% of voters
| rejected this very minor reform. That 's how powerful the NIMBY
| brain rot is.
|
| Now against this force, which tends to overtake all local cities,
| towns, councils and planning boards, there have been a whole
| bunch of reforms: stopping the abuse of CEQA to block any
| development, increasing density without years-long planning
| approvals in certain cases (eg on major roads), all CA
| municpalities having to plan for how they're going to build more
| housing (aka the housing element) with real consequences for not
| complying (eg the builder's remedy) and so on.
|
| Passing any of these given the power of NIMBYism with voters is a
| major accomplishment and I think these are starting to have an
| effect.
| jeffbee wrote:
| You did not ever seem to get around to the part where we have
| to give credit to Newsom. He hasn't shown leadership on this
| issue. State housing reform has come from Weiner and Skinner,
| enforcement from AG Rob Bonta, and these local Los Angeles
| improvements are executive orders of their mayor.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Capitulating to the depp pockets of NIMBYs and real estate
| developers would mean Newsom could easily kill all this with
| a few vetoes. He's not a passive actor here.
| lulznews wrote:
| So let's see if I have this right ... build a bunch of shitty
| project housing ... pols and devs get sweet kickbacks ...
| slumlords create another junkie dealer hellhole. Everybody high
| fives and declares mission accomplished!
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| > A single person making $70,000 would qualify for a one-bedroom
| for about $2,000 per month. A family of four making $100,000
| would qualify for a three-bed for about $2,500.
|
| So not what most people would consider "affordable". It's
| "affordable" because it's currently affordable to people making
| below the area's median income and is deed restricted. It's
| nearly-market rate housing.
|
| And that's a good thing! We need more housing of all kinds for
| all people.
|
| >ED1 is not going to end homelessness in LA. (Though some non-
| profit developers -- including the AIDS Healthcare Foundation,
| which spends millions of dollars advocating against housing
| policies like ED1 -- are using the law to build affordable
| housing for the formerly homeless.)
|
| The AIDS Healthcare Foundation is mentioned in a throwaway line,
| but it's truly one of the most bizarre parts of the housing
| discourse in California. It's a non-profit organization
| controlled by Michael Weinstein, who uses the organization as his
| personal slush fund to sue housing development that would block
| views from his office and his personal home, and sued to block
| any development in the city of Los Angeles.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_Healthcare_Foundation
| LoganDark wrote:
| > So not what most people would consider "affordable".
|
| Yeah, this is basically "slightly less unaffordable housing".
| The one-bedrooms are apparently even more expensive than the
| two-bedrooms here, which are already extortionary, about double
| the price they were less than a decade ago. I would know, as
| for our current place (two-bedroom) we started at under $1,000
| per month and ended up here paying almost $2,000 per month
| instead.
|
| Our family of three makes $35,000 a year. It's a wonder we're
| not homeless.
| from-nibly wrote:
| I think they need to revisit their definition of done. All I saw
| was a 3d render and some people who said "could I build this" and
| they've somehow cracked something.
|
| Eli goldrat would say you've solved nothing until people are
| living in those homes and producing in your society. (Customers'
| customers have received value)
| imgabe wrote:
| There is no code to crack. Just build more housing and it will
| become affordable. If it's not affordable, you haven't built
| enough yet.
|
| It's crazy how these cities will try literally anything except
| building more housing.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> you won't do stuff during the day. So overall it will be
| less participating in economy._
|
| Building more housing ruins the picturesque views and hip vibe
| of the area. /s
| rcbdev wrote:
| In Vienna they have this interesting thing where any
| apartment built before the 50s is rent-capped, so investors
| usually won't go for the very picturesque old-town
| properties.
|
| This combined with 1/4th of apartments in the city being
| social housing really created a very affordable market for
| renters.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> really created a very affordable market for renters._
|
| I wouldn't say it's _very_ affordable in the post pandemic,
| post Ukraine world. It 's affordable only if you get public
| social housing, or if you compare the private market rents
| to what's happening in the likes of London, Amsterdam,
| Berlin or Munich, but those are high paying
| banking/corporate/tech hubs, while Vienna is not, and so
| the lower rents also reflect the lower spending power of
| Viennese workers.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| Not necessarily. The housing market is very complex, and there
| is such a thing as induced demand - for example building lots
| more apartments in SF would make it even more attractive for
| e.g. tech companies to locate, and so they would quickly be
| filled, without moving the price.
| snapplebobapple wrote:
| Given california's long record of utter failure on this issue, I
| am skeptical.I see proposed, how many are actually approved and
| in construction? Its a decent start if they are actually managing
| to gwt building started
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-02-11 23:02 UTC)