Hacker News Reader

Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

Well, they could also build more homes. But Seattle has somehow decided they don't want that.

Citation on this? Seattle has added tens of thousands of units and upzoned many neighborhoods. At one point I could look out my window and see 21 cranes building high rises, both mixed use and office buildings. The population influx has been massive.

These are typically luxury units, which are not affordable to most people outside the tech sector. Meanwhile, despite high salaries many people in the tech sector (rightly) don't want to pay luxury prices, and so they are also competing for lower priced housing.

Oh, 100%. We need to incentivize affordable housing. It should be in the developers interest to house as many as possible rather than as lushly as possible (until we're all comfortably housed.)

How? Why would a developer want to lose money housing as many people as possible? At the end of the day your looking to sell or rent for the highest $ per SQ FT possible in your market, with the least amount of risk. If your rent to 50 @ $500, your gross monthly rent income is 25,000. If you rent to 10 @ 2,500 you have the same totals. You are much less profitable with 50 units @ $500 because of maintenance/repairs, tenant issues & labor. It takes a whole lot more to keep 50 units operating than 10.

Glad you asked. The problem is partly because housing is a commodity. Everyone from the developers to the banks have the incentive to build the most luxury unit they can sell -- developer gets more rents/sales, bank considers units less risky, etc.

There is a pressing and urgent need for more housing, but there is also a huge eviction crisis in those same cities.

So what can we do?

Public housing/Public funding for housing -- fund both capital and operations publicly, paying developers more to incentivize building non-luxury units.

Tax empty units -- Taxing units that are empty reduces speculation in homes. It should not be financially possible to buy housing and leave it empty as a way to store value.

Rent Control -- Limiting rent increases tenant control over a neighborhood, limiting the amount of speculation and acting like a bit of a brake on market rate.

Build More -- Upzoning, especially with regulations that require more units per lot and require moving tenants to equivalent units while construction is ongoing. It's no good to tear down a bunch of townhouses and put in an apartment building with the same number of units.

Eliminate minimum parking -- Parking takes a massive amount of space. Especially in an urban core. Use that space for housing people not cars.

Decommodify Housing -- Make it less profitable to be a landlord. Give tenants right of first refusal in the sale of their buildings, form housing coops, guarantee tenants representation in legal battles, create stricter laws around evictions. If it's less appealing to treat housing like a commodity, it's easier to push for housing as a right. All of these things are about making small chips away from the power of landlords to extract rents.

Affordable Foreclosure Insurance -- Insurance helps ensure people can stay in their homes, upkeep their homes, and continue to contribute to the neighborhood. Reduces the amount of home flipping pushing prices upwards.

Community Land Trusts -- There are groups that buy land/houses and sell/rent them at below market rates (with the rider that the property must be sold later at below market rates.) In Seattle, for example: http://www.homesteadclt.org/ By putting downward pressure on market rates, you further decommodify housing and make it easier to push for reforms that make the ROI better for housing more people rather than more luxuriously.

Stiffer Penalties for failing to upkeep apartments -- When apartments fall into disrepair, whole buildings need to be taken offline or people refuse to live there. Requiring high standards in maintaining apartments ensures that the housing we do have doesn't get taken out of circulation too early.

Edit: I'm assuming you asked in good faith. I don't think we need to do all of the above. I don't think we can do all of the above right away. But combinations of the above I think are achievable and could lead to better communities. Happy to discuss any of them more, provide more resources, etc.

People moving into luxury units don't pop out of thin air. They vacate other units to move in.

(Though if we could generate them out of thin air, that would be great, too. Simple way to shore up the tax base.)

I think you're going to see this everywhere. Many of these homeowners saw the value of their home go from $100k to $500k. Do we honestly expect them to support a plan which will drop the value back to $150k? You're asking the homeowners to give up literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in equity to help people they don't know. I agree that it needs to happen, but it shouldn't surprise anyone that there is a significant push back against it. This is especially true for those who bought their house at the upper end of the market, and now aren't just losing equity but actual money that they put into the property.

I see tons of townhomes and apartments going up everywhere here. Most of them replacing single-family homes in the same plot.

Exactly. That's how you add density in an existing city.

when building homes, you also need to build roads, sewers, power plants, hospitals, schools... it's not just about a few houses.

You always needed those. So why is it that you could build the first homes and roads and sewers and power plants and hospitals and schools, but not more of the same?

Do you imagine that the size of sewers, hospitals, schools, and power plants to serve 100K people are the same size as those to serve 500K people?

If you've got existing, working infrastructure built out for population X, you have a lot more building to do to support 5X. Often that requires tearing down existing, functional infrastructure and replacing with larger.

Yes, but it's usually less than 5x more.

I don't really see your argument. The per capita expenditure should be the same or less.

If really necessary, just charge real estate developers for it.

When the sewer and water service is under existing streets and needs to be dug up to support higher density housing, that project is enormously more expensive and disruptive to the locals.

It's funny that city living is described as economical, ecological, and scalable compared to suburban & rural living because of infrastructure & transport costs. And here you're arguing the exact opposite.

So how is it? Dig up the street and build taller flats (oh no, digging up streets is expensive!), or commit to suburban sprawl (oh no, spreading infrastructure wide is expensive!). Pick your poison; either way people are going to have the infrastructure they need in one place or another, unless you kill them off.

Nevermind the the third and obvious alternative of expanding the city with high density buildings and new infrastructure to support it. You don't have to interconnect every sewer pipe in town just because.

In addition to what clarry said: do it piecemeal, and upgrade the sewers when you would be doing maintenance on them anyway.

Also: if necessary, do charge the developers, and use that to finance the upgrading work and perhaps some modest handouts to existing residents to compensate them for the trouble. (Perhaps have different parts of the city compete in an auction on who would accept the smallest handout to be upgraded first. Allow negative bids as well, in case some parts of the city positively want the upgrade.)

Sure. Oh, and you want to be building higher.

That allows you to save a bit on the roads and sewers on a per capita basis.

Power plants are usually handled by the market already.

This would be offset by the extra tax revenue of all the new people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com