Hacker News Reader

Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

The three guys that are sleeping rough in a two-block radius around my apartment - they give zero shits that living standards in Kenya, or Shenzhen have improved 300% over the past 20 years.

Or that you can store 64 GB of data on a card the size of a bottle cap.

What they care about is that rent in this city has gone up ~50% in the last six years, their incomes haven't, and they went from having a home, to wrapping themselves in dirty blankets, and sleeping by the garbage bins in the back alley.

View on HN

Yes, restrictive building codes that prevent construction of sufficient housing in major cities are a real problem (some days I think literally the biggest problem) in the US. We should really fix that.

Restrictive building codes are not the problem at all that causes low earning people to go homeless. The only significant source of new affordable housing in this country is single family homes (which are just over 2x cheaper to construct than any multifamily home larger than 5 units on a square foot basis) and this doesn't include land costs which are the biggest constraint in the construction of new affordable urban housing.

Zoning reform will at best only make it cheaper for high earning single people and small families to find housing in dense cities 30 years after a reform is implemented. Where, the only real solution is figuring out a way that would allow us to build dense urban multifamily buildings at the same cost per square foot as single family homes.

Look at Japan. They have much less restrictive zoning so.....housing is WAY CHEAPER. I'm not sure why you think that fixing a fairly obvious problem won't help anything.

Japan has a declining population, housing is cheaper in places with declining populations. Additionally, housing in Japan is often much lower quality than it is in the US, where they use electric heaters and various other plug in amenities rather than ones that are built as a part of the unit.

My city is going through an unprecedented amount of construction. 'Restrictive building codes' aren't the problem.

Vacancy rates are higher then they've been since the recession... Yet rents are climbing 5-15% yoy.

What city? Restrictive zoning is definitely a huge problem when it comes to affordable housing in a great many American cities. I guess I can't say it's universal though.

Seattle, and for a city of 730,000 people, it currently has ~13,000 units actively under construction, another 30,000 approved, and another 30,000 applying for permits.

I look out the window, and it's a panorama of construction cranes. There's more active cranes here, then there are in any other American city.

Oh, and my rent went up 17% last year.

Your personal experience does not reflect what is going on for the city as a whole. Seattle rents are dropping significantly and there has been a ton of publicity about it. This article from close to a year ago is representative:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-ar...

Here is a very recent article:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/amid-build...

If rents are dropping, and the economy is booming, why is the homeless population skyrocketing?

I may not be representative, but the average rent dropping doesn't mean anything to someone renting a bottom 10%-cost unit.

Average rent may very well be dropping - but the average renter is not someone who lives right on the margin of having a home, and sleeping on a park bench.

You're right about the rent on the low end. These things take time. Seattle, like many other cities, under built due to poor zoning policies for years and years. This deficit doesn't get fixed overnight (or in a year).

It'll happen though if current building trends continue.

Do you mean code or zoning? Code is about safety, zoning is about... well, historically many things, some good, many bad.

Er ya, zoning. My bad. Thanks for the correction.

Leave Kenya out of this. Contrary to perception of economic boom in Africa, situation is nearly dire. With 80% of population under 40 years, lack of industries and unprecedented unemployment rates;its a situation nobody knows what to make of. Massive population growth is compounding the challenges

But it's GDP/capita quadrupled in this century, and it now has cellphones and smartphones and bitcoins. Surely, things are all flowers and roses, no?

I dunno about flowers and roses, but life expectancy at birth has gone from ~52 to ~67 in the last 50 years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com