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.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

That's not a bad thing at all.

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.

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.

The problem is zoning and all the red tape and NIMBYism that prevents the construction from taking place.

[1] https://www.woodtechsystems.com/legal-mumbo-jumbo/

So... basically "buy more wood?" I think I'll pass.

Thanks to home office there should be many otherwise useless offices.

If you just want to rent an apartment there's an oversupply from overbuilding during the pandemic.

"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.

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.

The housing crisis is an urban planning crisis.

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

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.

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".

That kind of housing goes back at least as far as the Roman insulae, which you can still see in places like Ostia Antica.

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.

Cheapest is double stud construction + blown in.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fg...

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.

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.

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?

Where are grocery clerks, baristas, school teachers, janitors, restaurant workers, etc supposed to live?

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.

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).

I think people mainly think of it as "their home and their community" rather than "economic extraction"

// calculated 50% GDP losses in the US because of large metro areas being too expensive to move into

Doesn't that strike you as obvious bullshit?

At some point you have to give up; if the electorate doesn't even bother caring enough to vote, what can you do?

Most people don’t dream of living in Sunnyvale. They are there because of the job. Any small city would be a fine substitution for many people.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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`.

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?

These colonies you refer to are built on literal and figurative sand with shoddy regulations.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/bengaluru...

> Bengaluru water crisis: Plush society asks residents to use disposable cutlery and wet wipes

https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/floodwaters-cau...

Traditional Indian houses are SFH like US homes.

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.

"You wont own anything and be happy"

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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?

There are no easy answers to these questions.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

So if we had 100x more of the land that matches that criteria:

- ppl could pay a lot less to build houses there

- ppl would pay more ?

Ps. Its just an infrastructure issue our moron leaders failed to account for. Any 3rd grade RTS player understands that.

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.

Which laws are those?

Is Ferrari "not allow specific groups of people" (I am in that group) to buy their cars by not pricing them the same as a Honda?

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.

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.)

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.

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.

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20230529/Study-shows-link-...

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 triply confounded by the huge group of people who simply don't understand the math behind renting (and this includes many landlords, sadly).

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.

Vacancy is not the issue.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal-Aid_Highway_Act_of_195...

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.

https://catalyst.independent.org/2019/12/18/how-houston-is-b...

I'm also really happy with how they have handled their homeless.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...

https://abc13.com/floodplain-housing-building-houston-flood/...

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.

And when people think New York City they think Manhattan, but New York City includes quite a bit more.

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.

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.

Why it doesn't take a toll on members of other classes?

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.

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?

Main city in the metro area, let's say 2 million people: 2 representatives.

Every other settlement in the metro area, let's say 3 million people: 20 representatives.

Guess why they kept building highways which cut through city neighborhoods?

Edit: found it:

https://www.fairforhouston.com/

Gerrymandering, starting to be undone 60+ decades later.

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.

I just showed you elsewhere that this is wrong.

They're not, as evidenced by the literally millions of apartments in existence.

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.

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.

Gonna need some sources on this one.

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.

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.

See here https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-...

https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2021/06/17/...

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.

Specifically:

- Huge min lot sizes

- Offsets

- Covenants*

We can start by removing/revising those.

(*Certain covenants are no longer enforceable today)

In Washington, certain cities put restrictions on SRO units. The state is passing legislation to make that easier. [1][2]

These are just cities I've lived in. I would imagine other cities are facing similar zoning questions.

Some of us think that more housing is a good thing, and laws preventing units like ADUs or SROs are prima facie misguided.

[0] https://www.oregonlive.com/hg/2021/09/put-a-spare-home-or-tw...

[1] https://www.seattle.gov/sdci/vault/micro-housing

[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/once-curbe...

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.

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.

That's 30,000 unhoused individuals per month being added, and unless the expelled offsets it, they still need housing.

That's a common argument that no one has been able to sufficiently prove.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If it’s not any of these it’s owned and thus controlled by someone.

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.

Everyone complains about the city’s endless verticalização (verticalizication) because they like the idea of old houses, but I say keep it coming.

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.

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.

> 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 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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City...

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.

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.