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Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

> It would mean, more or less, an urban Marshall Plan for housing.

I would like to see this, at the national level: federally strip all downzoning from urban cities, then increasingly tax single-occupancy houses, focusing on subsidizing and activating high-density housing for all income strata. There's no reason Seattle, San Francisco, LA, etc can't all be turned into high-density high-efficiency Manhattan-esque locations. With the increased density comes a more effective tax base and a better scale for urban services.

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Simply make it legal to build higher-density housing with smaller setbacks, less required parking, smaller room and unit sizes, etc. The affordability problem will take care of itself, no subsidies required.

For existing owners, they will get a huge payout because their land becomes MUCH more valuable. The downside is that certain neighborhoods where supply is most suppressed will change very much, very fast, and the people that don't sell and leave will probably not like that.

Preferences aside, this cannot be done without hugely disrupting municipal finance, primarily the provision of public schools. Residential property and services are subsidized by commercial/industrial tax revenues, and there is no linkage between assessed value of property and number of school-age children (e.g. two empty-nesters in a mansion pay multiples of the property tax of a family of 5 renting an apartment). And that's just operations! Building lots of new school capacity, when land has just become very expensive, is not something existing cities/school districts are equipped to do.

However, Americans are tough and smart and can figure stuff out. These are just the current obstacles that exist.

>For existing owners, they will get a huge payout because their land becomes MUCH more valuable.

But these very same owners are the ones blocking such construction, even despite being the same people that will receive a financial windfall; they prefer to keep the neighborhoods as is even at this tremendous opportunity cost.

So, it still requires some eminent domain or overriding local government.

Sure, owners prefer to sacrifice total windfall in favor of stability and control. That is proven across all cities everywhere that land use controls exist. I'm just saying it's not all bitter medicine for existing owners if land use controls are loosened.

> eminent domain or overriding local government

Really? You'd prefer that over working remotely, or staffing remote offices?

> build higher-density housing with smaller setbacks, less required parking, smaller room and unit sizes, etc

That's what we've been doing here in Australia to deal with a housing crisis; now there's a looming oversupply of apartments [1], and a lot of them are barely habitable "dog boxes" [2][3] built as investment assets (rather than, you know, for living in) while house prices are still sky high.

[1] http://www.domain.com.au/news/australia-to-have-too-many-hom...

[2] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-14/melbourne-dog-box-apar...

[3] http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2016/03/melbournes-dog-boxes...

Again, I'm not saying to REQUIRE any of those things, simply make them not illegal. If developers build an oversupply housing that people do not deem acceptable at any price, then people will not buy/rent them and they will be removed. If people are renting them, then people find it an acceptable tradeoff. Sweatshop jobs have been more attractive than rural poverty since the Industrial Revolution began, and small, "substandard" apartments are a choice that many people would choose over longer more expensive commutes, health care, better nutrition, working one job instead of two, or any thing else that can be purchased with money.

Oh totally, I'm not disagreeing. I just think those regulations are there for a reason, and in our case the regulations have been wound back too far and now we have to adjust in the opposite direction.

I'm against the parking aspect for this...

UNLESS: The municipality becomes the 'building'. If you have parking silos at the edges (or in dedicated locations within), and excellent human scale transit (like people mover belts through commercial areas) between there and housing then I'm more for /centralized/ parking.

America is simply built on cars, and no matter how much you get rid of the need for a car in the city (and PLEASE reduce that as much as possible!) the car is /the/ interface for accessing the rest of the world, where families, lower density industrial, and other aspects live.

If you want to go out and access parks and other features that involve more trees, more natural animals, and less people that is also a requirement.

Not saying parking can't be built, just do not require parking minimums. Parking spots cost ~$10K and take ~180 sq ft of space + about half that again for access, or about the size of a small studio apartment. Parking garage spaces cost ~$20-$40K. If you have a parking lot, that limits the amount of land you can use for a building, and the number of spots limits the number of units (or sq ft for commercial/office). If you build a garage, you run into height limits, either from zoning or limitations of your construction method and materials.

Imagine if every room (not just bedrooms) was required to have a walk-in closet, because the American way is for people to have a lot of stuff and there's simply no way to provide for space if it's not mandated to be included in the cost and construction of every dwelling. It's be very convenient to have the space, but not everyone needs it, it would encourage people to buy and keep more stuff than they would choose if they had to pay, and it would reduce the amount of space available for anything besides closets.

But this is silly - people buy less, rent storage units, change habits, etc. Parking and transportation is the same. If your condo is $35K cheaper because there's no parking, and you forego a $35K car, then you save ~$1K/mo which pays for a lot of Ubers, delivery fees, and vacation cars. And if you want to have your own car, then you can always buy/rent a space!

> However, Americans are tough and smart and can figure stuff out. These are just the current obstacles that exist.

The key problem is that these zoning decisions are occurring at the local level, where petty biases and NIMBYism plays out - shoving externalities at the neighboring cities is par for the course.

Yeah, I meant figure out the municipal finance thing. Local rule of land use has directly led to underbuilding, limiting rental housing, and high prices. If that changed and the market for housing was allowed to correct, it would create the municipal funding problem, and that's what I said that Americans are smart enough to figure out a solution to.

Such a plan needs a good, clever name.

We could call it, "The great leap forward." Or maybe, a "Five-year plan".

Certainly the locals shouldn't have a say in what the feds do to their own cities.

If I want to live in a place and I can't afford to live there because "reasons" and that means I can't vote there, but due to work, etc I'm "stuck" commuting there, how do I affect change there? Property rights trump all and I can eff off? I mean that's clearly not the case; zoning exists so property rights aren't the end-all, be-all thing.

In fact, zoning is what is keeping people from building the kinds of buildings that people who can't currently afford living in city $X from living in city $X. Does one particular unit of government deserve more respect than all others?

Well, zoning is still determined largely by the local voters, albeit on the aggregate level rather than the individual property owner level. (For the most part, subject to legal challenges, etc.)

So, no, as a non-resident you don't have much of a say. Although, if you're working in a city, your company that is making you "stuck" working there presumably has some sway as a taxpayer.

I understand that "owns property here" is a reasonable approximation for "should have a voice in what goes on here" but there are lots of cases where it breaks down. Places that you "have" to travel through, places that you work but don't live, etc. Should a person who owns two houses and splits their time 51/49 REALLY only be allowed to vote about things at one of those houses? I'm strictly speculating; I don't own any properties so it passes me by completely. But it would certainly seem not entirely in line with democracy to do that to people.

how about "The New New Deal" or "the NeXT New Deal"?

The feds have already stuffed their hand deep up in housing policy. It's only a mild shift, and one that will stop the petty Balkanizations of regions like the SFBA, Seattle, Denver, St Louis, etc.

There are many reasons that not all cities are as dense as lower Manhattan, starting with the fact that those of us in these cities don't want it and that outranks those outside who do.

>I would like to see this, at the national level: federally strip all downzoning from urban cities, then increasingly tax single-occupancy houses, focusing on subsidizing and activating high-density housing for all income strata.

Washington already exerts too much influence on far-flung localities. This is the last thing I want to see - people who live in a place should be the ones who set the rules for that place.

> This is the last thing I want to see - people who live in a place should be the ones who set the rules for that place.

I lost all sympathy for that argument when it was part of the key rationales for redlining and keeping the blacks out of town in the 1940s & 1950s.

The federal government can exclude those kinds of practices without taking over, though. It's not an either-or situation.

Sounds like a great way to fuck the middle class, whose only remaining wealth is real estate.

Thank god for democracy.

Think about this for a second-- is holding onto desirable real estate as a wealth asset really a sustainable method of building wealth for the middle class?

In the Bay Area, you see what happens when the supply runs out: the middle class becomes renters for life.

...Real estate has been a boon for some in the middle class, but it's important to consider the wider implications of speculation in land values as a source of wealth-- it's ultimately unsustainable and highly regressive.

It's been the most consistently effective method for at least 2500 years, probably longer than that. The oldest formula in the book is land=wealth.

But for whom?

For instance, consider John Arrillaga[0]. Land in the Silicon Valley made him billions. But does that make this a sensible system?

Silicon Valley would exist whether or not people speculated in land, and yet we consider fishing for gains to be a noble pursuit. I think it actively holds back actual improvements in communities.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Arrillaga

Frankly, the bizarre phenomena that is Silicon Valley is the problem, not real estate.

It's a bubble that will burst.

Compare SF to other cities in the country, and you'll see that it's not some outlier:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/08/daily-c...

Those charts make my point. Look at the prices in real terms. SFO is more than 2x NYC and 4x the national average!

A $400k home in NYC is within reasonable reach of a dual income professional couple.

Prices are high generally because capital is cheap and monetary policy has made other traditional "safe" investments useless.

The income ratio based numbers reflect how the "middle class" is getting the proverbial shaft.

When wages are stagnant for 30 years and property appreciates, you need to accept the fact that you're not capable of supporting a circa 1986 middle class standard of living. My grandfather owned a home in NYC, kept new cars, and had a summer camp in the mountains on a blue-collar city government income and second job as a boilerman in the 1960s. That's no longer achievable. I personally barely have that level of buying power as a IT executive.

But how can you support the statement that the phenomenon of Silicon Valley created the unaffordability of houses when we see the same increases across the country? If it really was the tech scene, we'd expect the increases to be much higher in the Bay Area.

Click on the "prices in real terms" chart, which factors out inflation.

The average US price in real terms is up like 10% since 1980. The average SFO price is 400% above that. The average NYC price is 200% more. That's a real estate bubble.

Lots of factors influence what's happening. Between Tech workers who make too much, Chinese capital flight liking for a home and stupid bank underwriting practices, demand is wacky in a few cities.

Compare to Los Angeles, a city with similarly broken land-use policies to SF, but without the tech scene. It only lags by a small amount. I simply don't think you can attribute the tech scene as a unique cause of this.

This is going to sound insane on a site like this but you don't have to live in SF. You can certainly choose too, but if you look at the pros/cons of job offers, housing just makes SF untenable. There are plenty of other cities with plenty of other jobs.

I can't tell if this comment is genuine or sarcastic.

If it's genuine, how the heck would you get support for something like this? It'd be the ultimate NIMBY.

The federal government could at least stop subsidizing mortgages (which is more NMMYA than NIMBY).

NMMYA?

Not my mortgage you asshole.

(which just to be clear, I'm not saying that to anyone here, I'm putting it in the mouths of mortgage holders who like their tax deduction)

Not sarcastic. Seattle resident frustrated at NIMBYs who want to replicate the most asinine of the SFBA and NYC practices.

YIMBY, actually: NIMBYs are the folks who don't want to have development nearby.

League of Urban Voters: we would work together to draw up a workable plan for the next 12 election cycles (or so) - the LUV would accept members and donations from all who support the goal of increasing density and urbanization. Key congress people supporting the goals would be identified, along with professional city planners and professionals at universities. Supporting cast members would be industry groups and other coalitions that we find common cause with. We would collaborate with them to develop talking points and in-depth policy wonk analyses, policies, and plans.

After we had hammered out the key policy points and major reasons to shut down the pro-single-occupancy house policies & pro-suburb policies, we'd go onto the campaign path, understanding that it'd be a 48-60 year battle. There'd be a blog, a forum, probably eventually a think tank and a journal. Given a careful orchestration over the timespan of two generations, a reasonable success would be had.

There's no God-given right to live in your own home on an acre of land in the US. Or in a 120-story skyscraper. These capabilities are hammered out through politics, engineering, and money. If the sociopolitical scene is tuned to have cheap houses, it'll have cheap houses. If it's tuned for condos in skyscrapers, it'll be condos in skyscrapers. This genuinely is malleable stuff here.

N.b., this is not unique to housing policy. You can define the same general game plan for any particular issue you like.

Does the high density housing in SF allow for families? In Vancouver at least the majority of condos in the core are single bedroom so if you want a family you need to move to the suburbs.

San Francisco requires that a certain percentage of the apartments in new construction be two or more bedrooms.

San Francisco's school system pushes people to other cities/suburbs.

Although, realistically, that's what tends to happen anyway and has been for a long time. I know lots of people who liked the urban lifestyle even before it became as popular. Walk to a bar or restaurant or head to a play after work.

At least many of them started valuing a yard, easy access to a car, and better public schools after they had children.

The federal government doesn't have that authority, unless maybe if someone concocted a Commerce Clause argument for it.

Don't think it would be hard to argue that housing prices in major cities affect interstate commerce.

Anyways, you can tie HUD/DOT/etc grants to the conditions. Don't play ball = no funding.

Withholding DOT funding has been done before: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/07/four-tim...

"The federal government now only has tax deductions for condos and renting in areas where the occupancy is > 10 adults/acre. Increasing deductions are possible through increasing the adult/acre density".

"The federal government will no longer provide security for single occupancy house mortgages"

"The federal government finds that policies preferring in any sense single-occupancy homes gives clear rise to racism. The Equal Housing authority will be auditing all sales and rentals of single housing homes; landlord violators will be fined severely; mortgage lenders who violate will be fined severely".

Also, with the demographic shifts in the US and how they affect urban areas, it's absolutely relevant to the nation's commerce.

Oh, okay, yeah, we'll just MAKE people live however we want. We know best, so no one would ever resist.

Of course, the zoning, parking regulations, mortgage subsidies &c. which led to the present situation are all also instances of making folks live the way planners want.

Weren't those mostly in place before most people who currently live in those places moved there, and don't people often chose where to live based on the rules and regulations of that place?

I wouldn't call moving into a place being forced to live under the rules and regulations of that place.

Changing the rules and regulations on people who already live there, though, I'd say is forcing because it can be a major effort to move somewhere else, especially if they are an owner rather than a renter.

They changed the rules and regulations that made housing prices go roughly 3x before I was old enough to buy a house. Why is locking me out of the housing market by preserving other people's paper wealth a moral imperative? Are they more deserving of the money because they're older? Because they already have it?

I know the real answer is because they can vote for things that preserve it, and I can't vote for things that erode it.

People complain that millenials aren't buying into the american way of life while simultaneously making it so unaffordable as to be roughly financial suicide to participate.

Costs are specifically because people want to live there. Housing costs are dominated by infrastructure costs not by what specific homeowners spend. Thus, 'protecting' an investment is silly when it's not homeowners that made the real investment.

Housing policy is already being forced upon you in the US. Today, we call it zoning, along with various governmental services and political boundaries for them. On the less obvious level, it's also taxes, exemptions, and infrastructure such as bridges and roads. As Kim-Mai Cutler has been recording over the past 2-3 years, housing policy today is, in part, the result of explicit choices for low-density suburbs.

So while you have a point from a purely anarchist point of view (and that's not a slur on you, ok? anarchists have a great critique of existing systems), that ship has sailed so long ago in the first world that I don't think there's any meaningful point in trying to recall it.

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