Developers don't build cheaper housing because we make it illegal (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Developers don't build cheaper housing because we make it illegal (2014)

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112 pointsjseliger129 comments

This is one of the reasons why I have zero interest in wasting my hard earned money propping up the insane housing bubble in western cities.

Building a simple house is a 5000 year old technology.

I know that since we brought a small piece of land outside the city - brought the raw material and paid some local laborer to help us put our family home together.

It cost us a grand total of 10,000 dollars. The only difference was - we did it in india where there are no nonsense housing regulation.

Getting internet was supposed to be hard, but we were allowed to just use the telephone pole to get copper internet ( instead of fibre ).

From a business perspective - no wonder it temping to offshore - when putting a roof over your head eats so much into your income.

It should converge on eating about the same percentage of your income - people in lower cost of living areas are typically paid less. Markets remove arbitrage opportunities eventually.

Super pedantic but some niceties (good insulation! Double paned windows) are less than 5000 years old ;)

Really, you went with insulation rather than indoor plumbing and electricity? :)

I'm a Canadian and my first thought was insulation, too. Also heat. Natural gas piping isn't something you'd want to DIY.

Natural gas piping is done at such low pressures in residential environments that it's basically a joke. I think it's about 0.5psi (or 14" of water column) which in the grand scheme of pressures is very low. People can generate greater pressures with their lungs.

http://hvac-talk.com/vbb/showthread.php?1587361-What-is-typi...

http://www.personal.psu.edu/ref7/apparatus/2003%20competitio...

EDIT: I'm not saying that one should do their own natural gas piping as in many places it's technically illegal unless you're a licensed plumber. But it's certainly not rocket science. The only reason it's "harder" than plumbing compressed air is that if compressed air leaks a tad, it's no big deal. You have to get rather tight on gas piping because of the consequences of a leak, not because it's so difficult to get it tight.

I think that was the GP's objection to DIY. Not the actual installation process, but long term leakage issues if you do it incorrectly.

In Most of Canada and a lot of northern states, if you have no insulation then you soon won't have indoor plumbing, but you'll have a nice ice skating rink in your house.

In all fairness - People have been building houses in similar climates for 5000 years, and while they didn't have indoor plumbing, they surely built their houses to some standard of insulation.

I was reaffirming the reasoning behind rtpg and Pxtl's prioritizing insulation over indoor plumbing and further explaining why it is a necessary pre-condition to indoor plumbing.

I spent my summers in rural Russia, occasionally in the winter. I'll take the insulation over the indoor plumbing and the electricity, and trust me, so would you if that was the binary choice.

Earthquake/fire/electrical regulations might not seem valuable until your entire house/city is in ruins.

When it costs 10,000 to replace, maybe you don't care that much.

You definitely don't care when you're dead. In that split second before the disaster, maybe the point of silly regulations like not collapsing at the first hint of an earthquake or not going up in flames in seconds will become clear.

Choose your level of risk. I am sure if you want all those features, you can make the determination yourself. If you want to live dangerously, then live dangerously. I personally support this outlook. Better have cheap housing with risk than rent.

You're choosing your neighbour's level of risk too, though. Even a house built to regs has a hard time staying not on fire when the one right beside it is going up like a pile of tinder.

If you build for low long-term cost, you're not using wood anyway because of fungus and termites. You're using cementboard, concrete blocks, stucco, and similar. That won't burn. The roof can be corrugated metal.

If you are arguing from the perspective of low income people, most of whom rent, they aren't looking in detail at how the building was built, just the price.

In other words, in this future poor neighbourhoods would collapse like 3rd world countries while rich neighbourhoods would get hairline cracks in the drywall.

They had this problem in cases of activists going after slumlords that weren't maintaining their buildings. The problem was, in order to get tenants to rent a building in that state, the slumlords had to discount the rent by pretty much exactly the cost of the repairs not made. Paying for the repairs would have required (and allowed) rents to be increased to more than the existing tenants were able to pay.

So every time the activists forced a slumlord to bring their building to code, fixing it allowed them to increase the rent and the people the activists were trying to help were forced to move out because they could no longer afford it.

But at least they made it less likely that the whole city would catch on fire.

That's interesting. You have a link for that?

So you'll be perfectly understanding when, having adopted your preferred level of risk, people don't send in crews to help you. That we'll just bring in bulldozers and start over.

Maybe that lot on the slope of the volcano wasn't such a great idea after all?

> Maybe that lot on the slope of the volcano wasn't such a great idea after all?

Yeah, tell that to about half the population of New Zealand. Volcano or fault line, take your pick.

(writing this from vacation in Hawaii): I have the sense that the rest of the world will help out if you Kiwi's get into trouble. Ditto if the Pacific Northwest takes a hit.

It wasn't a great point. We live where we live, for the most part. There are few places free of potential natural disasters. (The scope of the PNW quakes were only realized in the last 20 years or so...).

But it's colossally stupid to build substandard housing in such an area, to the point where it's a net win for society to enforce some minimum quality.

Fires, for instance, are not the Huge Fucking Deal they were a hundred years ago. We have better fire-fighting equipment, but that's kind of the booby prize. Better to make things fire-resistant, and to not cause fires to begin with.

Please keep your beliefs in your world, where your decisions apparently don't have consequences for others. Around here, I like to think that society benefits every time a building that's up to code fails to fall on a passersby, or fails to set a neighboring building on fire because it burns slowly and coolly enough to be put out first.

After 1906 or so, people in San Francisco discovered that they cared very much.

I used to be a structural engineer, and I can tell you _exactly_ what you're giving up if you're interested. The cost difference isn't $10k vs $700k because of building materials. The cost difference is $5k (land) + $5k (construction) vs $600k (land) vs $100k (construction).

What I've seen is that most people in the West end up thinking that that $95k difference is worth it.

Let me start with a true story of what happened to me the first time I represented myself in court back around 2005. Someone had moved my motorbike to make a bit more room to park their stupid oversized Hummer. My bike was now just past the legal line so I got a $45 ticket. Outraged I vowed to bring this to court. In the pre-meeting with the prosecutor the cop didn't even remember the location of the motorcycle, let alone what was around, whereas I had drawings and the license plate number of the Hummer owner.

The prosecutor said that if I plead guilty with an explanation that they would drop the charges. So that is what we did. Right afterwards I got a $40 "courtroom fee" because I'd plead guilty. That's when I learned the adage "A man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client".

5000 years ago children died because they crawled between the banister railings. Our building code stops that oversight. 5000 years ago houses collapsed during hurricanes. Our building codes severely reduced that. I could go on and on.

The main issue isn't the building code. The issue is that it is difficult in modern cities to get the local population to agree to expanding the housing stock with taller buildings. It ruins views, it's noisy, excess supply collapses housing prices. It changes the city's charm and culture. So they elect people that slow it down.

The issue is that taking away that choice is damaging to many people. I think that the statement "most people in the West agree" glosses over an important detail - perhaps most people who have the money agree, and the others are forced to go along with it.

I would far rather have a home that has 'risky banister railings' if that meant I could actually afford it.

Mental health is as important as physical health, if not moreso - what's worse, risk of eviction, or having to pay attention near the stairwell? I get that this is an isolated example, but I'd take worse insulation, no solar, worse security, everything, if it meant I could get a home and slowly improve it myself with time.

If that means I have to live rurally - so be it - but as far as I can tell that means living outside of the country I was born in (UK), which is quite sad.

I have broadly libertarian leanings too. But this isn't just about _you_. This is about your guests, your children, the person that buys your house next, the person that lives next door (in the event of a fire). I agree that the housing situation sucks right now, but the solution is to embrace smaller residences and lots of tallish buildings. I'm currently vacationing in Vietnam. It's a terrible annoyance dealing with exposed wires and crappy houses. Someone didn't have money for a drain, so they threw their (still very hot) excess soup from their pot out the window and it got all over me.

I don't have children. I can't afford them.

I think the solution is to move away from cities. I'm planning to do so. I'm just going to be sad if it means leaving my country because you don't want me anywhere near you, even if it means I'm on the horizon from your window.

I think you should be able to build it the way you want, and if you wish to rent it, or sell it, then it has to brought up to standards. I bought a house with deck railings that were far apart even though I had a 3 month old baby. We kept the door to the deck locked, and I installed railings the following Spring. I grew up in Brooklyn, but I now live in rural East Java, Indonesia. Yep, life is very different, but I like it. You adapt. Some people choose not to, and that is their perogative. I think rent control is a big issue in the sense that it allows people who can truly afford a higher rent, a nice lifestyle. A friend lived in TriBeca NYC, paying $600 per month for a > 2000 sq. ft. loft in an area of million dollar lofts. She could afford it, or to move to Brooklyn at the time, but did not want to leave the luxury afforded to her by rent control. It's not old people eating cat food out of cans in unheated apartments as much as people protray it. I lived in Chelsea, NYC in the late 1990s. I paid a fair rent, a lot of older people paid rent control, or their grandkids who lived there while they lived elsewhere in the suburbs. I spoke to the owner of the building, who showed me the boiler that was constantly in need of repair. He said he wanted to buy a new one, but 90% of the tenants were paying around $400 per month rent. The boiler installed was over $100K. I like to see both sides. My belief is we should do away with rent control, let the market stabilize, build affordable housing up to code, and ride the wave until it becomes a better situation. Subsidies, and delaying the solution is only creating more disparity.

>This is about your guests,

who consented to the conditions of your house when entering. If he is not sure he ought to hire a civil engineer to inspect and verify the safety status of the house or ask the host to do it.

>your children,

who is your ward and is subjected to the decisions of its parent with regards to all of life choices

>the person that buys your house next,

ditto the guest situation except for buying

>the person that lives next door

this is the only legitimate case for regulation, to protect the public and/or third party.

>so they threw their (still very hot) excess soup from their pot out the window and it got all over me.

This is not a problem of housing but of manners. You can get rid of hot soup without infringing of other people's ability to walk around the public area and not be wet.

Isn't the problem the cost of the land? 100k for a house that's up to code financed over 30 years should be reasonably affordable?

What makes you think you can't live rurally in the UK?

It really is mostly about the land value, with a bit of local planning opposition. Allowing people to build un-code houses would save a surprisingly small amount of money in the short term at the cost of all sorts of long-term problems.

In the UK if you want a house but are completely agnostic about where, there's Stoke-on-Trent; the council were selling houses for £1 on the condition that the new owner renovated them to code. Otherwise, rural living in Scotland is also quite cheap.

I agree about all the things about safety.

However, for a isolated suburban house - it made little sense to put all that measures you are talking about. If we were living in a major city - it would make more sense to add some of those things.

4 walls and a roof should not make someone bankrupt.

Most of the cost of housing is not construction, but land costs. Construction costs could be $0, and it wouldn't affect affordability all that much in currently expensive areas.

>excess supply collapses housing prices

If this motivation was held by anyone other than random individuals and families, it would be regarded with scorn.

Yes. Because it is effectively a cartel.

"Home is where the Cartel is"

http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6287.html

Hear, hear! It wouldn't be America if we didn't vote to make the government prop up our poor investment decisions.

The Japanese have been dealing with earthquakes for eons and the housing fashion from the previous era could still crush you like a bug if the pillars give out (those tile roofs are -heavy-).

I think there's a quite different lesson in these codes. What's the difference between software developers that don't have a Code and electricians or plumbers who do? Not all that much. Except that we get to spend a lot of time trying to talk people out of doing stuff using reason and logic. People who got the job they did instead of your job because they weren't quite so good at reason and logic.

Pull the sort of things we deal with every day on an electrician? Fuck you, I'm not doing that, it's not to code. Now cough up the time and materials to do it right, or we're done here. Don't like it? The next guy you call is going to tell you the exact same thing. Have a nice day.

Careful with things like survivorship bias. Even as recently as the mid 1800s there was an earthquake that took out ton of buildings, temples, and dams in Nagano, Japan (Google Zenkōji earthquake).

But I do understand and partially agree with your primary point.

I'm not sure I understand what the parent's point was, however I thought it would be interesting to point out that there are almost no old buildings in Japan. Especially for houses, you would be really hard pressed to find more than a handful of inhabited houses that are more than 30 years old in any given city. The Japanese fashion is to knock down the old house and build a new one in it's place. There is virtually no market for old houses (and, in fact, you will often get less money trying to sell land with a house on it than if you demolish the house yourself).

Of course there are lots of old temples and shrines but even those have often had every single piece replaced. I was really surprised a couple of years ago when one of the local shrines tore down their building completely and rebuilt it exactly the same!

Whether this has to do with earthquakes or not, I'm not entirely sure. My wife and I have been thinking of buying a house and I keep having to remind myself that I will lose money if I ultimately sell. Our current plan is to wait until we're a bit older and then buy a not-too-old used house at a discount ;-)

What part of Japan do you live in? At least in Nagoya there is at least one "Showa" house per block. They are knocked down when their inhabitants (generally older people) stop living in them, but it's not hard to find them.

It was known that older houses were dangerous in earthquakes (I believe the safer building code dates from the 80s), but no one was really worried about it until the Kobe earthquake where most damage was borne by older buildings.

I'm in Shizuoka. Possibly they are more sensitive due to overdue Tokai earthquake. I was actually living in one of the oldest buildings in my town and it was probably 50 years old. It was demolished 2 years ago.

Damn near the whole country was burned flat in 44/45, so there's that...

From what I understand, the central pillar supporting many of those temples is reaching end of life, after 5-900 years depending on conditions. So you have to disassemble it to rebuild due to the heavy but rational reliance on the strength of the old growth timbers.

I only meant that even among people who know how to build crazy well, accidents still happen. But that doesn't negate the need for standards of construction.

The heavy tile roofs were for protection from typhoons, which are much more common than "oh fuck"-level earthquakes.

Oh! That makes sense now. Thanks.

Yeah I'd love to have a Code I could point to.

"you might think all those tests are a waste of everyone's time and your money, but that's the Code so we gotta do them"

There'd be less programs written, and those programs would be more expensive. But we might finally start making a dent in the "80% of software projects fail" statistic that hasn't changed since the 60's.

Charming? Drive through any single family detached neighborhood in America during the summer and count how many people are actually enjoying their yards.

Where you see charm some of us see waste. Grass is ugly and so are single detached family homes. Row houses look nice, so do skyscrapers. Inventing a simulacrum for the country estate and calling it a "dream" is a bad joke I'd like everyone to start laughing at.

This is it. This is the mother of all bad policies in the USA! From keeping African Americans out of our neighborhoods via red lining, to increased police presence, to one generation's artificial chokehold on the housing stock. Americans should feel nothing but disgust for most of our housing policy, and single family homes should be derided as one of single worst allocation of resources the American public makes. People defend these things as lifestyle choices, and almost never live into the carrying capacity of the asset they buy. It is one lifestyle choice I feel comfortable judging.

Just so no one thinks I don't have any skin in the game I do have a child.

I live in one of those areas. I mock their attachment to yards. I do love that we have plenty of space that's ours under our rules. That's front for public stuff, back for semi-private, an insulated house for noise reduction (love that), and so on. As often is with suburbs, it's close enough to big city to get its benefits without its problems. It's all that for under a grand a month.

Is all that normal for the big cities with dense, multi-story housing?

My father built our 20x30ft family room add on. He built it to be sound proof enough that he could practice his drumming and not annoy the neighbors. I don't think he'd be able to do that in most apartments

You're a delusion fool if you think row houses are nice, especially as the aesthetic of the house is the least important part of living in it.

I live in the UK where they are common, they're a nightmare to live in, you can hear people arguing or babies screaming 4 houses down.

A lot of houses are detached but very close to each other or semi-detached (linked to one other house). Both are far more pleasant to live in than row houses or sky scrapers.

>Americans should feel nothing but disgust for most of our housing policy, and single family homes should be derided as one of single worst allocation of resources the American public makes.

In your opinion.

Some people think driving cars are bad. Some people think eating meat is bad. Some people think space heating is a waste of electricity.

Everybody seems to think their particular way of living is perfect and everybody else is either too wasteful or doesn't know how to live.

Your argument really is just "this is my subjective opinion of how to live and people who disagree are wrong".

Quite so Even such a small thing as the rake on stairs can make a difference to accidents an deaths from falls.

"...5000 years ago children died because they crawled between the banister railings. Our building code stops that oversight. 5000 years ago houses collapsed during hurricanes. Our building codes severely reduced that. I could go on and on..."

Interestingly, the same thing happens in large software development shops. Somebody breaks production by doing X. So now there's a process in place never to do X (Even when it might make sense). Somebody forgets Y. So now everybody has to do Y. And so on.

Overall, over time it's much easier to take out the hammer and create one-size-fits-all answers to every catastrophe that occurs. Repeat and rinse this process over several years, and you've got a software shop that's running ten times slower than everybody else.

...and not killing anyone.

"People have to channel their creativity into changing the process," says Keller, "not changing the software."

"Most people choose to spend their money at the wrong end of the process," says Munson. "In the modern software environment, 80% of the cost of the software is spent after the software is written the first time — they don't get it right the first time, so they spend time flogging it. In shuttle, they do it right the first time."

"The most important things the shuttle group does — carefully planning the software in advance, writing no code until the design is complete, making no changes without supporting blueprints, keeping a completely accurate record of the code — are not expensive. The process isn't even rocket science. Its standard practice in almost every engineering discipline except software engineering."

http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

> 5000 years ago children died because they crawled between the banister railings.

Actually, it's very difficult to get babies to crawl into empty space, or even onto a glass surface that looks like empty space.

The Western practice of using a house as an investment vehicle and a bank account is partly to blame. Once a person buys a home they instantly become a NIMBY as they are now leveraged into a scarce asset and have a vested interest in keeping it scarce.

But your not comparing like for like and building codes are there for a reason.

Also in the west you don't have to worry about having your home expropriated by "gangsters" - which happened to one of my coworkers family back home.

Like this [1][2] you mean?

[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2029648/Holiday-squa... [2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1322246/Man-leaves-h...

So, if the problem is that real estate in cities is too expensive to build affordable housing... isn't the solution to build more cities?

There keep being more people and those people keep wanting to live in the same places.

But, the people already in those places don't want them - charitably, because it gets too crowded. Turns LA or SF into Manhattan, where you pay a lot for a mediocre shoebox.

Better transportation gets us a ways - when you ask someone in LA how far away something is, they tell it to you in time, because that's what matters - not the physical distance, but the temporal one. Better transportation means more physical space is accessible within the same "city".

But, it strikes me that this is nearly the same problem as corporatism and monopolies - as power concentrates, power concentrates faster. I guess that extends past money and politics to society and populations.

So if the government needs to redistribute power - wealth (universal basic income), politics (democracy vs autocracy), access (mass transit, education)... does it need to build more cities? Not build existing cities larger, mind you - but cause more cities?

The west coast grew later than the east coast. We have, what, three major cities / metropolitan areas? San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle? Five if you move the bar to include Portland and San Diego? East coast has more than a dozen MAJOR metropolitan areas, and how many more when you move the bar?

Maybe the answer isn't higher density housing in the cities we have where everyone wants to live. Maybe the answer is getting more cities where everyone wants to live.

Sure, it's not exactly like New York has a monopoly on metropolitan-ness, and we need to go all anti-trust on it... But you get the idea, yeah?

Make me think of Dublin. What was Dublin two decades ago? What is it now?

Makes me think of - what was it called, where you make a city with different laws, one part test bed, one part diversity? Happened in the Renaissance, and it's what Hong Kong is.

More cities?

This sounds like a solution China would come up with.

That's a very good point, although I don't think I'm taking it the way you're intending it. I'm taking it as "here are case studies".

I've been to a couple of planned cities (Astana and Pavlodar in Kazakhstan - that was a trip!), and I've been to suburban developments, and there IS a distinct difference, but neither has that... /something/ that established cities have. Ironically, Pavlodar, I felt, had it more, and what I think it it is, is...

...Space for the people to own what they bring. Planned cities don't let you own it, and HOAs don't necessarily give the you the metaphorical space to bring it.

If you don't own it - and not in the simple legal property sense, but the sense of "if I invest myself in this thing, it's not going to be taken away one day" - you won't work on it. If there's no "space", only one vision (and likely one that isn't even present) can exist. Need both.

I think you CAN make a city. )*( does it every year, after all, and while much of that event can't persist year-round, some of the ideas about how to make a city definitely could (I would expect).

Or the UK: Welwyn Garden City, Milton Keynes, etc.

per capita, NYC has the smallest carbon footprint in the country.

increasing the population density of existing cities is the most responsible thing we could do, and beyond that, yes, more cities.

This is the opposite of what china would come up with. China tries to consolidate everything in a few very large mega cities: like Shanghai - population 23 million! This gives them more control, which is important to China's government.

Good point. For example, I find it really strange that lots of money is spent on improving infrastructure in London rather than building new subways etc. in other cities in the UK:

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/aug/07/london-...

I wonder, is it the same in the US (and other countries)? Lots of money being spent in cities that are already large, rather than building new roads, tramways and subways in smaller cities?

The England situation is a bit odd because London is such a distortion. We've entered into a weird feedback loop - London generates so much money that companies and government locates there, so a bunch of infrastructure is built and maintained there, which makes it more attractive for businesses to locate there.

Upgrading London transport has "trickle down"[1] benefits outside London. Some of the older London trains are sold off cheap to be used outside London, where they're newer that current stock.

I'd love to see better transport links between Bristol, Swindon, Birmingham, Manchester, and London. And some tax incentives to make it easier for companies to locate outside London. And for more government departments to locate away from London. And I'd freaking love it if Houses of Parliament relocated and turned current Westminster into a museum. But I don't think any of that is going to happen.

[1] I'm aware the term is tainted.

The term might be tainted, but the taint may be reasonably spread - consider why trickle-down economics doesn't work (while trickle-up economics does) and consider whether those reasons would apply to this situation. I think they would, actually, so it's good you pointed out the similarity.

Good Point. And it's not like we don't have the space. Only 5% of CA land is being used currently! That's even less than the average state in the US. Mostly what's lacking is political will. Incumbent residents would rather see their investments go up in value and a slight improvement in traffic, etc rather than solve the Housing problem.

I have predicted this for a long time (not just me, but a lot of people).

The demand for human labor is going down on average, so wages are going down - and have been on a decline since the 70s. Capitalism relies on employers to value their employees for the money to trickle down and the system to work. Our grandfathers used to work for the same employer for decades and got a pension. Today, that loyalty is unheard of from either side. We have the rise of temps and the contractor economy and unemployed living with parents.

Yes, the cost of mass produced consumer goods is going down. So the wage repression is mitigated. With the explosion of consumer credit in the 80s and 90s, the unsustainability of consumer spending was also masked. Now it has come to the fore, in exactly the areas where costs are not going down: rent and real estate. In every major city including NYC and SF, the costs of rent are sky high relative to wages. Wonder why? Look at the rest of the country and it's true too -- the rents are slightly lower but the wages are lower too.

So the predictions are borne out... automation has reduced demand for human labor, reduced wages for the average worker (or they got laid off / became temps), reduced the prices of mass produced goods, but the cost of real estate keeps rising.

I guess there could be more than one single thing causing this problem. So, overly restrictive zoning might contribute to the problem, but so might reduced demand for human labor and the government/banks printing too much money.

Must be a weird California problem. I simply don't see this problem in Texas. I have known several people who have fled California to Texas for exactly that reason.

EDIT:

Look through the data and ask yourself why you would want to pay more for what appears (according to the data) to be a less diverse, more expensive, and more dense area. What the data doesn't reflect is home size. I paid $125k for a 3000sqft foreclosure a few years ago that is now worth $200k. I couldn't get half a garage for this in the bay area.

http://www.bestplaces.net/compare-cities/san_francisco_ca/fo...

It's more of an everywhere-but-Texas problem. Texas has a great tradition of respecting property rights. Most states are not like this.

But this comes at an expense to nature and or natural preserves for wildlife. California has some of the greatest protected forests and areas like Yosemite.

So, yes we pay more and have more restrictions, but a better question is is it worth it?

Following the articles car analogy, this is like requiring cars to have airbags for the safety of the people in them, but that comes at a higher cost on the purchase price of the car.

And SF has some of the highest rent in the country because they won't zone for larger apartment buildings.

This is a false dichotomy.

We have minimum lot size restrictions, and restrict lots to one housing unit (R1 zoning). These regulations push up the prices of homes (since it increases the minimum amount of land for a housing unit), and do nothing to save forests and national parks.

In fact, if we keep building low density neighborhoods, more open space will be used up than if our zoning allowed for denser development.

I think you miss the point:

Two words: Eminent Domain. Silicon Valley (and other areas in CA) need to use eminent domain to build high-rises.

The housing crisis can be solved without impacting nature preserves.

Didn't some place in New Jersey get roundly hosed around here when they pulled eminent domain on some properties and then turned them over to developers?

Something about property rights?

Or tech companies could just move to the many areas of the country, such as many areas of the Midwest, where housing isn't so constrained. There's plenty of space in the US. Just not in the Bay area.

Sure, and then they'd be stuck with Billy Joe and Jim Bob, who once used a computer back in the 90's, as a workforce.

Or they could offer the same California salaries to programmers, who would live like kings in a small town but wouldn't have the same conveniences, and still spend the same amount of money.

Moving to the countryside doesn't always make business sense. Sure, costs to have a business in an urban area, but it's easier to find workforce at all needed levels and the trappings of urban civilization keep your workforce occupied and happier in their off hours.

Case-in-point: I work for a cash-strapped startup (for reasons) and sometimes have to live off my savings, but I live in an urban area. I could move to my hometown, where my costs would be about 25% of my current expenses, but then I'd be living in a special kind of hell where there are few good restaurants and the nearest bookstore is 60 miles away.

Oh my god, the horror of not having five-star restaurants!

If Google or Apple moved from the Bay to anywhere else, their workers would follow. Don't doubt that for a second.

Or we could just embrace technology and stop insisting that all your workers have to breathe the same oxygen, and allow remote work. There are huge swathes of the United States that are becoming depopulated because industry died and all of the young people have had to leave to find work. I just got back from a trip home to western Maine, and it's disturbing the number of houses that are just abandoned up there.

> Oh my god, the horror of not having five-star restaurants!

It's not just the lack of 5-star restaurants, it's the lack of 2+ star restaurants and everything else that goes with it. If your job relocated to western Maine, how much of a wrench in your life would that be?

> If Google or Apple moved from the Bay to anywhere else, their workers would follow. Don't doubt that for a second.

Only if the pay incentive was great enough, I'm sure. Otherwise, it might be easier to just get a new job in the same area. Google and Apple might be exceptions, considering that they're pretty much both loaded, but any smaller company would have to think long and hard about the expenditures required to get the bulk of their employees moved. People get rooted in their communities, especially if the standard of living is higher than where they're expected to move.

> Or we could just embrace technology and stop insisting that all your workers have to breathe the same oxygen, and allow remote work.

And someday pigs might fly, but not this century.

> If your job relocated to western Maine, how much of a wrench in your life would that be?

I'd be fucking stoked. Cheap land, low population density, mountains. But I'm originally a redneck from that area to begin with, so my expectations of amenities and services are very low.

"The Midwest" doesn't mean small 50-person towns. There are many big cities and medium cities in the midwest, chock full of computer savvy people who need jobs. Where exactly do you think this workforce overflowing the Bay Area is coming from? They've flooded California because CA has told them that's where all the jobs are, but there are plenty more where they came from.

Denver. Double digit rent and housing increases for 2-3 years now.

In California, the state constitution forbids (in general) state and local government from using eminent domain to acquire an owner-occupied residence for the purposes of conveying it to a private entity. This restriction was added to the state constitution in 2008 via referendum.

On a broader note, while I understand the frustration with NIMBYism, a lot of these discussions about housing here on HN cross the line from anti-NIMBYism to anti-democracy. The United States is not China. The solution to the housing crisis in the US is not and never will be for governments (at any level) to impose solutions contrary to the general will of the American voting public. Any government that tries to do so will find itself replaced. Quickly. And quite rightly so.

Texas has a lot of very low value real estate. US real estate is cheap if you're willing to live in Outer Nowhere.

Yes, there's a lot of wide open spaces in Texas, but there's tons of sub $200K houses in decent subdivisions sub $200k, and within 15 minutes of downtowns $200k-300k. I live in an older area midway between downtown Houston and the upscale Woodlands area in North Houston; my house is value at $105k. (3 bedrooms, 2 baths, corner lot, 1600 sq ft, big fenced yard)

Sure, but you have to live in Houston. Austin house prices in good school districts are expensive. I just sold a house for 10k in a small town in a part of Texas with almost no jobs, so you can find houses, but houses close to the biggest job markets in desirable neighborhoods just aren't that cheap. You can, however easily retire in BFE with a cheap house if that's the desire.

Definitely, though Dallas prices are on par with Houston. However, even in Houston, there are expensive homes (such as in the medical district, River Oaks, The Woodlands, etc)

My mom lives in a little $20k house about 90 minutes north of Dallas. (and it's not necessarily BFE, but in an older part of a 40k city)

Nah, it's more some parts of the U.S. are just ridiculously expensive. In many areas of South and East, you can get quite affordable homes within 20-30 minutes drive of the areas (eg "downtown") that have the big businesses and expensive homes. Local example is nearby properties at $80k-200k half-hour away from condos costing nearly a million right next to businesses. Locals working there spend most of their day, lunch breaks, and some free time on weekends around all those people. No need to live over there even for networking.

And then there's Texas doing it's own thing with its own cost-benefit analysis. As usual. ;)

Nice try, Rick Perry.

Pull up Zillow for Houston or Dallas, pick a home a random - sub $200k is pretty easy to find.

You are not paying for Earthquake proofing your house and space is more limited because of mountains and hills. Plus, houses in the middle of BFE California are cheap too.

I am not talking about the middle of nowhere. I am talking about actually within the boundaries of a city of similar population size. Houses in Texas are far cheaper than that in the middle of nowhere as well.

Seems like a bit of a clickbaity title when this is the only part of the post that mentions laws:

> In reality, housing construction is very limited; it’s being restricted by zoning and permitting laws.

Yep. In LA Large empty lots are hard to come by. A 6k square ft lot might be 100k for an undesirable location in an undesirable nbhd, but 400k is probably typical. Not sure how much cost "zoning and permitting" really adds on top of that.

Zoning can affect how many residences you can build on that block. If the zoning laws say you can only build one on that lot, then the land cost is $400k per residence. But if you're allowed to build a 5 floor building with two apartments per floor, then the land cost is $40k per residence.

Ding ding ding! Single family zoning is the problem.

Why can't we just build a little farther? I am not local to the area (as you can probably tell from my name) so I'm not trying to criticize anyone. I am genuinely curious if that is a possibility. Also I've never bought, sold, built a house. Are these single family zoning everywhere?

The Silicon Valley area is surrounded by either hills or ocean, so "a little farther" is a difficult commute with varying delays of hours on a couple roads.

Nobody wants to raise a family in Oakland.

Also, my understanding is that the Central Valley is a flood plain.

No it isn't. The land cost goes up, because now it's possible to use it for a much more lucrative purpose. This is called the zoning windfall problem.

At some point, in theory, the greater supply begins to bring down land costs in aggregate, but since real estate pricing is a localized phenomenon, this effect isn't universal.

The original owner gets some money from that windfall. The developers make money by selling 10 units on a lot that used to have a single residence. The new tenants get to live closer to jobs and nightlife and possibly pay less in rent. The city makes more money from property taxes.

That seems like a win-win-win-win for everyone directly involved in this growing city.

The land value goes up but not by the full amount. If the land was worth $400K before, with less restrictive zoning it's worth maybe $800K, but then you can build ten units there and the per-unit cost of land is $80K instead of $400K.

>In reality, housing construction is very limited; it’s being restricted by zoning and permitting laws. Because developers can only build a few new units, they’re building luxury, since that’s the most profitable.

Having more space thanks to laxer regulations would just mean that they build even more and even bigger luxury housing because it would still be the most profitable.

Besides, one of those permitting laws they absolutely loathe are laws that say that they must build a certain percentage of affordable housing (not mentioned in this article because that would be inconvenient).

These articles are so disingenuous. They're telling you that the solution to your housing woes, caused by and large by the ultra-wealthy, is to give into the ultra-wealthy's demand that they shouldn't face laxer regulation. We know how that story always ends.

The solution to housing shortage in high cost of living cities is and always has been to build high quality government housing. Singapore provides a stellar example of what that would look like. Literally the day a program like that is announced prices and rents would tumble.

>The global elite argument really falls apart here.

No it really doesn't. The global elite will happily swallow up all available prime real estate in their portfolios and A) tell you to fuck off to cities with no jobs if you complain about the house prices and B) tell you that the lack of jobs in nowheresville is your problem since you chose to move there.

THEY'RE the problem.

If you want affordable, build dense, urban cities; not NY style rows after rows of 2 story building, separated by roads, but USSR style large 4-6-9 story blocks, build from concrete (longevity, privacy) with no eventually moldy drywalls, closed for through traffic, with parking garages, public places, playgrounds etc. American university campuses can be good models for residential neighborhoods.

Buildings which are just residential (and, for that matter, ones which are just commercial) still tend to produce dead zones, with little to no street life; and it's street life (and walkability) that makes a city, at least if you ask me.

I'd say that the best kind of city -- or district/neighborhood, more accurately, since cities tend to be a patchwork -- is an area of multi-storey buildings with businesses on the ground floor and apartments above them. My understanding is that this is the usual pattern in the Old World; in the US, the North End and Allston-Brighton in Boston, Seattle's Chinatown, and of course Vancouver are among the examples. This isn't a common pattern in the US; I know that parts of NYC fit it (although I don't know that city particularly well), but I've heard that even Manhattan Island is all office buildings, and becomes a wasteland after dark.

I certainly agree, though, that 4-9 storeys is a pretty good height. Smaller than that and you don't get enough density to support interesting streetscapes; larger, and you get wind tunnels and the need for more parking. Of course, sometimes geography (San Francisco, Tehran, most of Japan) or politics (Singapore) force a denser population, and require a more built-up area...

USSR has always had ground floor shopping on the street facing residential buildings, also major bus stops have convenience stores attached.

It sounds like I should visit Russia, then! Whatever else can be said about them, it sounds like the Soviets really knew how to build a city.

And this is why almost all US cities are incredibly hostile to anyone walking. Also, while this is subjective, they're unattractive as well.

This is a helpful illustration of how parking minimums raise rents by several hundred dollars a month and make the streetscape less appealing.

http://www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/article/420062

Software developers these days can move to many other major cities and find a job instantly. They are in very high demand. They don't have to live in the Silicon Valley area and pay 3x the price for rent.

If I was a property investor, I wouldn't want to build properties there either. The risk would be extremely high that property values are going to come crashing back down to reality at some point. There is a serious property value bubble out there.

Property investors aren't the ones building properties. It's the property developers. I read this in an article explaining Miami's development boom, in spite of the possibility that rising sea levels could inundate much of the new construction in the next century. The property developer's only concern is selling the property. Once it's out of their hands, they are no longer exposed to risk on that property. As long as they can continue convincing property investors that the boom will continue, developers will continue building right up till the moment that property values come crashing down.

I lease a home in North Houston owned by an attorney in LA - all of his real estate investments are here and Brownsville, Tx. (And I pay $1150 for 1600 sq ft with a giant yard, stand-alone home, not an apartment)

> "In reality, housing construction is very limited; it’s being restricted by zoning and permitting laws."

So what about all the small cities where there are no enforced zoning/permitting laws and developers get literally anything they ask for?

If zoning/permitting is the issue, why do all these areas without zoning/permitting have the same problem?

Are you talking about cities/towns in the middle of nowhere? Meaning cities, and towns that business left years ago?

I've found small towns overly red tag heppy, and these small towns realized they could make a lot of income by enforcing building codes--to the Teee.

In my small town, we have building inspectors who are literally looking for errors in the permitting process. Why--the extra fees it brings in. Oh, they will always claim it was Safety, and just following procedure, but these fees are outragious. The average person has no idea how the permitting process works, or just how difficult/expensive it has become to do any building.

Let's talk about small town zoning. In my little town, it's tight. Fine--we have a way fight the rigid system. You fine a Variance! You pay $1000 fee. That's if you can fill out the paperwork. In my small town, since the invention of the internet, I don't believe they have ever passed a variance. They look at it, and deny it, but keep the fee. A fee for what? Five minutes of their time?

People don't realize how little towns keep bringing in money. A lot of it is fees/fines--and is going up yearly? No inflation, but constantly going up?

Don't get me started on our little town Revenue Squad--also know as public safety, or the people in blue. They are literally just collecting revenue now. Crime has never been a big problem here, and they will always claim they are the reason. The real reason is it's too expensive to live here, but you can't argue. Just pay the ticket! It's not about the ticket, it's the financial punishment you take.

(I got off topic on that last paragraph--sorry, this is an important topic. I just see it getting worse. Every new law/regulation adds to the problem. I've lost hope actually.)

I'm talking about small cities, like Toledo, Milwaukee, Rochester MN, South Bend, Lansing, Kalamazoo, etc. They are in the middle of nowhere, but they still have people and jobs.

I live in Grand Rapids. There's lots of zoning and permitting rules. None of it is ever enforced. All a developer has to do is ask, and they get literally every non-safety rule waived.

- Don't want to build kitchen or bathrooms in your studio apartments? Just say your "micro-unit focused" and the already-tiny minimum unit size no longer applies to you. People are so desperate for housing, they'll pay luxury price premiums, even to live in door rooms. Extra money, for free!

- Annoyed about having to pay for your tenants parking? No worries! Just say you are a "transit-oriented design" and all parking requirements are waived -- you can dump infinite cars on the street for free! (Despite the fact that, like most mid-west cities, we only barely have transit at all)

- Want to skip out on your make ready costs? Just claim your lot needs "brownfield redevelopment" and the city will reimburse the developer for all of the make-ready expenses in cash.

I get that in California, the zoning and local governments are the major roadblock. But I have a hard time believing "zoning/permitting" is the root cause for this issue.

Because there are places where developers have no rules and get literally anything they ask for, anytime they ask. And yet even these places still only get luxury apartments.

It's not illegal. It's not even expensive. Take a look at this catalog of manufactured homes.[1]

[1] http://www.claytonhomes.com/find-homes.cfm?categoryID=1

Then, take a look at the zoning restrictions on where you can(t) place those.

You mean trailers.

This article is a little all over the place:

> at the expense of people living in Lagos or rural Appalachia or San Salvador

Which is at the end, but seems to have little to do with the points earlier about restricted building laws in cities. I get the argument, it's been made in many economics books, but I don't think it comes at the expense of the people in Appalachia. It comes at the expense of people living in the expensive areas. The people in Appalachia have other issues dealing with jobs and investment in the local area.

Is the alternative that we allow people to build however and wherever they want until there is not quiet nature within driving distance of anyone?

The problem isn't just building affordable houses but building affordable houses in locations people want to live. But how essential would location be if an autonomous vehicle could take your child to a quality charter school beyond your district? How essential is location if long commutes can be turned into productive time because you don't have to focus on driving? All those construction regulations holding back affordable housing; they don't apply if it's on top of a set of wheels. I have my doubts that the status quo is sustainable for too much longer.

> One of these vehicles offers the possibility of huge profits off rich d-bags. The other one, not so much.

I stopped reading when I reached this caption. Companies exist to make profit, not act in the public interest.

Demonizing normal business behavior is counterproductive. There's a huge gap between Goldman Sacks/Enron/etc and most companies.

Aren't there cities close to silicon valley, with nicer zoning laws enabling sane housing prices ? And if so, why don't they become the 2nd silicon valley ?

Because major employers of the valley don't open offices in Modesto, Stockton, Tracy, Fairfield, Gilroy, etc.

The founders of the companies that employ the most employees already have housing in the prime silicon valley, so it's not their problem. And as long as they can still find plenty of software developers in the prime silicon valley, they have no reason to move to other areas.

Another solution would be improvements to transportation. If we had something like Hyperloop, ET3, skyTran, etc., we could increase the radius we could live from work. It's traffic jams that drive up the value of land in the inner city. If you can get to work in 20 minutes, you don't care how far you have to live from the city.

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