Ask HN: Will we ever have affordable and attractive urban housing for all? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Will we ever have affordable and attractive urban housing for all?

59 pointsdrcross74 comments

It seems every area of our lives has been improved through technology except for the cost of housing. Food and produce has reduced in price to the point where the average minimum wage provides a decent standard of living but the prospect of house ownership is a 25 to 30 year loan repayment (if you are able to get a loan). I know world populations are increasing causing scarcity and that we are also improving our transportation technology but human accommodation needs have not changed and we still seem unable to "hack" urban housing at scale. Do you see any changes coming down the line that will improve this situation?

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The reason housing is expensive regardless of technological advances is because it's a people problem, not a technological problem. The people who would benefit the most from cheaper urban housing are not in a position to vote for the policies that would cause that to happen, as the vast majority of them don't live in those cities.

The only way to solve this problem is to wrest control of local policy decisions away from municipal governments and make them instead at the state or national level. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening any time soon, since those already living in cities are much more incentivized to fight to retain the status quo than those who don't live there are incentivized to fight for changes that could hypothetically help them.

Hi there! This is exactly the problem we work on daily at the local SF YIMBY coalition (sfyimby.org). If you're interested in making a difference in local SF politics, especially around improving the housing situation, come to one of our meetings! We move votes :)

Even if we wrested control away from local municipalities, we would still be faced with pushback from homeowners nationwide who don't want to see a reduction in housing prices. I think realistically we'll only see policy improvements on this front when we reach a point were the overwhelming majority of Americans have been priced out of home ownership and no longer view real estate appreciation as personally beneficial.

The state senator for San Francisco (Scott Wiener) is trying to do just that[0].

In a city known for wacky politicians, Scott Wiener was a breath of fresh air. He also signed the city's long term Subway plan[1].

0: https://artplusmarketing.com/housing-is-a-statewide-crisis-a...

1: http://connectsf.org/components/subway-vision/

An avg. of ~$75 billion in govt funds are spent on homeless social services in the U.S. every year with very little results... that's ~$123k/yr for every individual homeless person.

Also, the problem with housing costs is that land is finite and expensive, hence the need for vertical growth and smaller units to add to the supply.

Finally, another problem is the influential, nativist NIMBY homeowners whom styme affordable housing efforts like vertical growth and microhomes to keep their property values high, while millions sleep rough on the street. The disenfranchised will stay screwed until they organize and demand minimal human decency.

Where do you get the $75B figure from? Looking around, it looks closer to $5-7B: https://www.usich.gov/resources/uploads/asset_library/2016_B...

NIMBYism (Not In My Backyard) is a term for some of this underpinning. Most people claim to be all for new housing being constructed as long as it's not in their area.

>"make them instead at the state or national level. "

That is what the case in China, but the house price is still very high.

I agree it is people problem, but I did not see a way to solve it. A lot people want to make the house price affordable, but a lot do not. probably, greedy is human nature.

I don't even think it's necessarily a greed problem as much as a self interest problem, assuming its possible to make that distinction.

When I see people who constantly hold up urban high density housing development, in part to keep certain demographics from enjoying their neighborhoods, all the while enjoying the protection of limited property tax increases due to Prop 13 while still reaping the rewards of housing appreciation, I can make a case for myself that these people are being greedy and unethical.

On the other hand, if someone works hard, saves for years to make a down payment on a mortgage, services the debt of that mortgage for 20-30 years, and relies on their house as their primary investment, I can't really blame them for voting for policies that increase housing prices. I think this highlights why the issue will be so hard to solve. It's going to be very difficult to get people who have been paying into a mortgage under the assumption that housing is a safe investment to suddenly support policies that will result in real estate depreciation.

Also in terms of housing cost, the major players in building new apartment buildings are real estate developers. Their number people tell them exactly how to maximize profit per square footage and that goes into the design from the beginning.

I was having a thought the other day that, were I a developer, and could afford to, what would I do with a five-story building? Ground floor commercial, top floor market rate (or above?) and then floors 1-4 a percentage below market rate with maybe a set increase for each year. I guess it would work as long as I factor in paying back to the bank and making a certain profit (but not the max). I don't know, I'm not a developer, I don't even know how one becomes one without already having money to do so, but in my AEC office design decisions are one thing but at the end of the day it is 1) building as cheaply as possible while 2) maximizing profit per square foot.

The reason housing is so expensive is because it is a financial vehicle, and has little to do with housing density. It's a fantasy that building more will bring prices down.

Housing prices were remarkably consistent with all other prices for the 100 years before around 1998.

What changes in 1998? I'm guessing the appetite to lend (and thus create new) money and ever decreasing interest rates.

This argument doesn't past the smell test as it doesn't explain why home prices are less today in Detroit than 10 years ago and why home prices fell around the country in 2008.

Higher districts like states or federal governments, already have the power to create subdistricts with favourable leadership and goals. They're just uninterested in doing so.

In the past, incorperated townships were created for specific goals: we have a coal mine here, create a township around it. Today, that kind of top-down leadership is no longer used so widely.

California could carve out a new township, and use its state budget to incentivize the development of an urban region with cheap housing, high tech jobs, and interesting culture. They do not do so out of choice, not out of inability.

Technology has improved the cost of housing.

In the USA, the average house size has grown. So has its quality. It has air conditioning standard in warm climates. It has safer electrical systems that handle higher loads. It has more carpeting. More bathrooms. Better appliances, with washers and dryers standard. More, bigger windows. Higher ceilings in basements. Lower-maintenance building envelopes. Better fire safety, with fire sprinklers being required in many jurisdictions. Off-street parking. The list goes on and on.

Technology helps explain why housing has improved so much. Much of the home is fabricated offsite and trucked in. Computers help make more efficient use of materials. Manufactured building products (like oriented strand board) make more efficient use of lumber, and create more durable products. The labor savings are immense: compare the labor to sweat a house of copper pipes versus using pex. Compare plastering a house versus drywall. Not even in the same league cost wise.

Do not make the mistake of looking at a few extraordinarily high cost areas like SF or NYC and believe they represent anything typical. They do not. Housing has improved dramatically in just a few decades.

What's relevant is the cost of housing where people want to live.

Yes, but that's too subjective to measure. A better proxy may be housing cost relative to wages.

I think that is the issues that should be discussed.

Housing price is Land + Building Cost + Profit with Supply and Demand. Land is politics which you cant improve much, Supply and Demand is a market force you cant change. So really the only thing you can do is Building Cost.

But what i think the housing mentioned here being better really are houses, not Flat. i.e High Rise Building. And all of those Appliances has nothing to do with building itself.

What i really want to see, is technology improving High Rise Building in Cites, so when the time for land approval comes, it could be built and sold ( live in ) within 6 months. Preferably even sooner.

They should be durable, easy to assemble, easy to fit in floors, Windows ( Without leaking water ), Pipes, etc.

I have seen Office Building being built in that time frame but not residential. In Hong Kong it is common to see these Office building built in Metal / Steel frame compared to Residential being concrete only. I guess that is a cost issues involved.

At the moment, fitting pipes, Windows, and polishing etc after the block of concrete lay on each floor is still very labour intensive and slow. To me, technology hasn't improved at all in these regards.

With regards to the US, there is affordable and attractive urban housing, just not in cities that people particularly want to live in.

I mean, look at the Midwest. Houses there cost nothing compared to houses in metro areas along the coast. It's not like cities there are terribly middling either. You look at the Cleveland Metro, and it has 3.2 million people, it has a lot of historical architecture, it has good infrastructure, it's alright overall.

But everyone wants to live in LA, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Denver, New York, Miami, or pretty much any other major city along our nation's western or eastern coasts (not so much the southern coast, unless you like living in a greenhouse in the summer).

I mean, I get it, all the cool stuff is happening elsewhere, but Midwesterners are still having a good time, sans beach.

In case you're wondering, I myself live in New Mexico in a place called Albuquerque. Affordable, but not as affordable as some Midwestern cities. Because the city wasn't in the Rust Belt there's also fewer older structures. The boom took place once all the nuclear scientists moved in and gas was cheap, so it's pretty badly sprawled out.

You're omitting a major factor in this. Jobs.

I moved from Chicago to the Bay Area and while I'm not a developer, the opportunities are still night and day in terms of the job options, the pay, benefits, etc.

A cheap mortgage on a nice house in a good neighborhood means squat if there are not a lot of job options, or only ones a long commute away.

Personally I think the best thing to help this is make remote work more viable for non developer professions that don't have as much demand or leverage. This would enable more people to live in affordable areas if getting another remote job were comparable to living in a market flush with jobs.

That is true, I am conveniently omitting the jobs part.

So maybe the right answer to ask is not how to create more affordable and attractive housing, but rather how to spread the jobs out to cities overlooked by employers.

Why isn't there a satellite Google office in Cincinnati, in other words?

Why does Google need physical offices in the first place?

Why does it have to be urban? As a rural resident I do not understand the attraction. I can walk or bike everywhere that I want to go. Thousands of miles of trails branch out in every direction depending on my heart's content. Farms within easy distance produce a bounty to enjoy, including world class beer. I am not sure why the growing trend toward global mega-cities is in our best interest.

Well, in the UK, rural voters largely vote to prevent urban people moving to the countryside, by maintaining restrictive planning laws.

The UK also has a long history of poorly distributed land "ownership" [1]. Considerably more than half the land in the UK is controlled by approximately 6000 families. The wealthiest were given real law-making / killing power through the House of Lords until 1999, when most (but not all) hereditary peerages were removed.

Much of this land comes with subsidies and titles. Immense amounts of money can be made from grouse shooting. There's not really an incentive to sell land. There also tends to be a stigma in selling off inherited land -- like the end of a dynasty. Much of the land that is bought by developers is land that was sold by developers.

When land is sold from these families, it is sold for very high amounts because demand is high and supply is low. Land can make up ~50% of a new house price. I do not know if there is any collusion amongst those who do own the land, but any such collusion would bring enormous advantages and would almost certainly not be condemned in any way.

Affordable housing in the UK is a needlessly scarce resource. Instead of focusing on supply, which would lead to a long-term solution, much of the media has jumped through hoops to focus on the short-term demand caused by immigration whilst ignoring the slightly peculiar policy to sell off state-owned affordable housing to banks.

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[1] Land ownership in England and Wales is interesting -- the Crown owns all the land, and landowners buy a title to the land. Scotland is different again and a greater proportion of land is in the hands of a smaller proportion of the population.

Your rural experience isn't universal, the majority, common, or even frequent.

Living in a city does tend to produce fewer greenhouse gases. But the reason most people live in cities? Jobs.

Also fun.

Let me give you someone else's perspective (mine.)

I'm 25, I'm a dev, I'm single, I like spending time with people. I like to plan far ahead.

In cities, I can command a far higher pay more easily--- getting over $100k is the norm. This is important to me, because I like having excess money to buy stocks for years to come. If I wanted to live in the Montana outback, it may be difficult for me to find a company willing to pay at that level. The options would be far more limited. It would be "take what you can get," and take what they offer. But the truth is, there's not many companies hiring devs in the Montana outback.

I don't like working remotely because I'm not personally comfortable with it-- I often need to ask more tenured devs a lot of questions about legacy code and I like to be there in person to do it. So that isn't an option I'm interested in.

I like to have things to do after work-- rock gyms, parks, classes, shows, movies, events, martial arts, or just wandering around various city districts. In the outback, this isn't an option. In small towns you have the outdoors, but you'll often have to drive 40 minutes to get groceries (Source: I'm currently on a farm in a town you've never heard of in the middle of Virginia.)

There is not a plentitude of people in their 20s available to spend time with or meet in rural settings. There are no meetups, there are no clubs, there are no rock gyms. The social groups are often more targeted towards 40+ groups, because that's who lives out there. I personally don't think it's likely I would make many new friends or find many people to date in a rural setting.

In the city, I can get paid what I want, I can meet new people and try new things every day, I have hundreds or thousands of restaurants to choose from (I like eating out!), I have many stores nearby for buying all variety of goods, I can go to a beautiful park like Central Park and enjoy it and maybe meet people there. I can sign up for classes in almost anything.

From where I'm sitting, it's hard to see why someone in my position wouldn't want to live in a city. Sure, once you're settled and no longer feel a need for these things, I understand it perfectly. But when you're in your early 20s? Seems the clear choice.

I can understand everything you mentioned. I am a little over 50, but I have a salary commensurate with what most developers are getting. I can imagine that rock gyms and parks are nice, but my personal preference is actual rocks and trails.

You make a good some good points about clubs and proximity to groups of 20 somethings though, those are certainly in short supply where I am.

Different locations are attractive at different stages in life, so I'm glad your are enjoying your 20s. I spent my 20s working around the world in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and I have never regretted a single minute of that time. At this point in my life I'm very happy to have a general store, a brew pub, a French restaurant, and my office within an easy ski or walk of where I live.

Energy efficiency. Rural living cannot be made energy-efficient and as such is, ironically enough, catastrophically environmentally unfriendly.

Plus depending on where you are it may be subsidized.

Everyone's different. I certainly like nature but I can't imagine living in the countryside. Just to give you my perspective why I think city life is fantastic:

First thing that comes to mind: I like (mostly non-mainstream) music and I like to go to live music events. There's no way I can do that frequently in a rural area. Well, apart from driving to the next larger city, that is.

Which brings me to the next point: While public transport in larger cities often is far from perfect it's ok to pretty decent most of the time. Living in a rural area requires owning a car, something which I've given up on years ago and never intend to do again.

Then there's the economic aspect of cities: Where there's a greater density of people and companies there also is more potential income available. Cities allow you to make new connections on a regular basis. Meeting new people allows you to explore new opportunities - economic or otherwise - if only by serendipity.

Apart from that, large cities counterintuitively also make sense ecologically because they require less resources than if the some number of human beings lived spread out through the country.

All good points.

I personally consider every time I get in the car to be a failure on my part that I regret. It takes some planning, but I get around mostly by walking, biking, and taking advantage of our regional bus system (which admittedly does not come very often). Other friends of mine commute by cross country skiing or by rowing when the weather makes it conducive.

There is a lot of great music in rural areas, especially live music. It helps if you develop an appreciation for fiddle music and sad songs about logging camps, the love that you lost, and really good dogs. Admittedly these may be acquired tastes.

Having close contacts in urban areas certainly helps on the income front, and I will admit is that a minimum of a three hour drive to the nearest major airport makes jetting off to speak or consult challenging.

I am definitely going to look into the ecological balance, because I that is something I cannot speak to. A lot of my neighbors have solar panels and are off the grid, but you could be right about that.

Understand a few things first:

A) The 'cost of housing' is usually not the building itself. It's the land. So, we can't compare to other products.

B) It's greatly affected by financing, interest rates, accepted norms. Ex: when interest rates drop, housing prices balloon. Also - as people accept longer and longer mortgages, housing prices ballon.

C) It's a relative thing, not a 'cost' thing. There are x number of people and say, roughly x spots for housing. The riches people will live where they want. The others go elsewhere. If rich people want to live in an urban area, there is nary a solution for 'low cost' housing in that area.

Some things like 'rent control' - if applied responsibly can maybe help, but they can also create other weird problems.

Social housing might help, but also, some other odd problems.

The only want to allow poor people to live in expensive areas is to seriously mess with market forces, and that can be problematic.

The 'problem' we are trying to address here is age old: 'the fair and equitable distribution of resources'. It's not going to be solved with some new technology or process :), it will probably be some smart economic thinking.

It's a supply and demand issue at the core. There is simply more demand for housing units than available and so prices continue to rise until demand tapers off.

Using New York City as an example there are about 3.4 million residential housing units available and a population that is set to reach 9 million in the next few years (500k increase).

It's true that there is not much raw land left for new development, but the city can change zoning in areas. Imagine if 100,000 1 family houses are rezoned to allow for even just 8 unit multi-family walkup. 800,000 new housing units would help counter the demand that causes the price to keep rising.

The home construction industry also has issues which end raising the finished cost of housing. An interesting read is "Sweat Equity" by Larry Angell, A self-published book where the author describes why it made financial sense for him to leave his job for a year to build his own house rather than buy a house and continue working.

Yep. The math works, you take 1m house and turn it into 8 new condos.

Zoning is also a big issue in LA and hasn't been updated since the 70s I believe.

If you look at a satellite view of the city, there are nodes of density with massive amounts of individual house spaces. But it's expensive all over. I don't think there's any real solution to that outside of another real estate collapse here (which only set things back for a few years and stopped some gentrification creep).

Technologists giveth, rentiers taketh away.

"Will we ever have affordable and attractive urban housing for all?". No, not as thing stand. Those with a monopoly on credit will continue to use competition for accommodation as a means to leach every spare drop of wealth from the productive members of society.

Its a really fascinating problem and if I ever won the powerball I'd take a crack at it. It touches everything, from the fundamental differences between capitalism and communism to the raw math of just how much steel and concrete (or w/e) it would take to give everyone ~30+m^2. Which, when the nominator is all sorted out, inevitably leads to the question of what to do with the denominator.

Realistically we either need a massive borderline miraculous leap forward in materials science and construction technology (like carbon nanofiber weaving spider drones) or a completely different system from capitalism for allocating for basic needs, or a looooot less people. Its not really a space problem at all so much as a energy cost and societal values one.

Maybe check out the venus project https://www.thevenusproject.com/the-venus-project/

It has zero to do with steel, concrete or anything material.

The cost of making the building is not the issues.

It's the property price that is the issue, always.

In places that are already dense and have no room for further sprawl, the cost of building in ways that add capacity can be quite high.

It's not just about the raw materials. It's also about labor, safety, regulations (many of which are there for good reasons like preventing people from dying in fires due to cheap construction or lack of escape routes).

Even the cost of trucking in the materials and paying for parking tickets/getting permits to inconvenience the neighbors for months on end can be a major expense.

    It's the property price that is the issue

And a Land Value Tax instead of traditional property tax would go a long way to solving this problem. (Basically, tax the value of the raw land, not the man-made property on top.)

It would prevent speculative ownership of land and encourage development of underused land in high-value areas. It would also capture a lot of the value of urban development, so that the urban area gets the money rather than private owners who simply got lucky enough to buy the property.

Housing is partly a status symbol and those that can afford it often put measures in place to make sure that those they don't want to have living next to them can't afford to. Housing that is affordable for all, will by definition not be attractive for all. You imply the existence of a goal that doesn't actually exist and for which there is no consensus.

Even if that were a goal, you couldn't reach it because there is only so much space. This would be a problem even, if we were to use what space is available, which is usually not the case for political reasons.

Improved technology won't help you and even changing politics wouldn't get you to this.

No we won't ever have affordable and attractive urban housing for all, because standards of attractiveness will naturally adjust to be somewhat beyond whatever is affordable and accessible to all.

I am very aware of the benefits to urban living, but i do wonder if humans are inherently happier living in high density environments. I feel like the benefits of urban living are less crucial if the human population was prevented from growing or even reduced with time.

I've spent a considerable amount of time living in Tokyo and New York City. In NY, most weekends I would take the bus to my tiny hometown in Pennsylvania where I was surrounded by nature. I find that the things I get mentally from the city is extreme amounts of social interaction, and from the countryside I get the deep connection with nature. I think it is near impossible to find the social interaction I'm looking for in small towns, as I want a high concentration of smart, open minded people.

Woah woah.. it's not very open minded of you to say that small town folks are dumb and closed minded!

It's a bit of a different point - no matter how nice small folks are, for any given type of person there isn't a high concentration of them.

Niche activities cannot flourish or even exist if there isn't a sufficient "critical mass" of people interested in that niche, so a small town simply can not have as much diversity in such niches as a large city.

It's true, dumb is the opposite of smart, but nothing there implies that small town folk are dumb.

Small town folk are of average intelligence, with a lower concentration of significantly smarter people simply due to the fact that high paying jobs are concentrated in urban areas.

If you were to concentrate high paying jobs in small towns, you'd see the reverse happening.

As for being closed minded---I'd find that people from urban areas are more close minded if they happen to live in their enclave without much interaction outside of it. Many people in cities are highly mobile, but many people in cities just treat their neighborhood as a walled garden, and are highly defensive against other types of people.

That still makes the assumption that the smartest people must necessarily be taking on the highest paying jobs. That may or may not be true.

No, it assumes smarter people take higher paying jobs on average, which is most likely true.

https://pumpkinperson.com/2016/02/11/the-incredible-correlat...

I've lived in city and rural environments. In my experience, people in the city are far more judgmental of rural people than the opposite. Rural people are too busy with manual labor jobs to worry about what's happening in the city.

Is it technology holding housing back, or politics? I thought it was mostly the latter?

I too believe it's mostly political. If some hypothetical SV startup invented a shoebox sized device that cost $100 and when sprinkled with water would unfold into a multi unit residence, we would still be faced with a ton of other issues relating to zoning, particularly density and parking requirements, that would continue to make housing prohibitive.

Also, Americans have been sold on the idea of real estate as an investment and I'm not sure how we will ever get policies that lead to lower housing prices when that essentially means that a large part of the population will have to agree to enact policies that will result in depreciation of their primary asset.

Otoh a device to shrink humans to fit in a shoebox would be disruptive.

The problem is lots of people want to live in the same areas.

The answer is to rework city zoning laws to allow for more vertical building and less car parking requirements, but $$$, nimbyism and "I was here first" thinking gets in the way. Way more people want to live in cities than can afford it and it's a shame that cities aren't thinking about this enough.

It's a people problem, not a technology one - the elevator was already invented.

"The Rent Is Too Damn High" is a good, short book on this.

Capsule hotels could work nicely for single people if an entrepreneur brought the concept to the US:

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

By the way, someone really ought to define what they mean when they discuss affordable things. It seems everyone has a different idea of what that means.

Yes. The internet allows you to avoid high cost areas.

I pay about 25% of the cost of a 1 bedroom apartment in SFO for a 4 bedroom house with a great yards, with a 15 year mortgage.

Any gap in salary for not living in SFO/NYC/BOS is more than accounted for. In my case, over my lifetime I'll come out $4M ahead.

What's the catch?

You either need to find a job locally, which is a bit of a hustle, or travel.

You won't be working for a hit new startup.

He lives in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

I believe that we eventually will have a reliable and cheap way of making durable houses, maybe 3D printing. There are machines capable of doing so now, its just a matter of refining and provide them with enough availability

The main issues I see are:

Construction is a low skill labor intensive source of jobs, so unions and government don't want to cut it. And a more efficient way of building will probably mean less people working.

Most people loves being showing off, a huge house is the best way of showing how much money and power you have. Why print this wall when you could buy some expensive material?

Clustering low income residents creates the "street prison" phenomenon. Such housing complexes often have bars on windows for residents' protection. They may have increased frequency police patrols. In effect, people voluntarily incarcerate themselves.

We need to solve that problem first. Sadly, I don't have a solution.

The prevailing winds in the regulatory climate do not seem to point towards a skyscraper construction boom anytime soon.

Over in technology, we're rapidly marching towards cheap household-scale solar panels and batteries, commodity autonomous driving technology, and cheap electric cars. Elon Musk's satellite constellation will deliver decent internet service regardless of the population density/economics needed to support fibre buildout. Telepresence is already good and keeps getting better.

The society coming down the line is one made of energy-independent prefab houses with no particular constraints on location (so they'll go to where land is cheapest), drastically improved freeway throughput (autonomous cars can pack much more densely), and car interiors not much different from small apartments (you'll be able to eat, sleep, and work while the computer drives).

So, as it gets easier to live farther from work, the economic incentives for everyone to cluster into a few square miles will diminish greatly.

When (not if!) ride-sharing in electric cars becomes much bigger, it will free up a huge amount of real estate from car-related use to other uses. (Fun fact: In the U.S., there are four parking spots for every one of the 255 million cars.) Add to that, all of the gas stations, oil change outfits, car washes, auto parts stores, auto dealerships, etc., etc. Every home that elects to go car-less will now have whatever garage, carport, driveway space available for an extra bedroom, garden, etc.

The other urban trend of smaller housing unit zoning will allow increased density which will also bring the cost of housing down. The demand is there a NY Times article reported that when new micro apartments (260 to 360 square feet) were available, 60,000 people applied for one of the the 55 units. Article: http://tinyurl.com/ntdjvt9

I would imagine, in 15 - 20 years time, when self driving Car is a thing, the need for Urban Housing will drop. You car can be summoned whenever you need and not worried about where to park it as it will find and park itself.

No. I hope not. Not everyone wants it anyway.

Why would you not want some people to get what they want? If they were happy would their happiness make you unhappy?

As long as demand outstrips supply, I can't foresee that happening.

Demand will always outstrip supply in trendy areas.

I think that "affordable", "attractive", and "urban" form kind of an Iron Triangle in the sense that you can have any two out of three.

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