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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

It's handy to say "nowhere is building" but it's not really supported by the data. Look at Dallas and Houston compared to San Francisco. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=B6Tc

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BTW, for people looking for other examples of how to grow, who might not like the idea of Houston's sprawl, I've always liked this article:

https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...

That is a lovely article! Thanks for sharing.

I feel like the US would be better off looking at cities around the world that are pleasent, and pattern-matching off of that.

Vienna is beautiful. We should do more of what Vienna does.

Clearly tweaking the US's "process" is just moving deck chairs on the titanic.

Yeah, Vienna is very nice! It doesn't feel like a "Big City" at all. I'm partial to the Montreal example in the article - it feels the most 'human scale' to me - but everyone has different tastes.

I've never been to Vienna so I can't speak to it but my experience in traveling around the world is that many cities have incredible central cities but also have sprawling medium to high density suburbs that everyone turns a blind eye to. The low density automobile focused suburbs of North America might not exist around those cities but the denser suburbs still have poor livability, especially compared to the central cities they surround.

I lived in a suburb of Padova, Italy, for many years. Still quite walkable and nice, even if it didn't have the old, historic buildings.

Yes, housing isn’t a problem in a city whose population is the same today as it was in 1935, in a country that’s projected to slowly shrink over the next century.

The whole population of the US is not growing, there are just a few places where there is growth.

The whole US population is growing, as are most states. (Although California and New York shrank this past year.)

however as the pandemic has shown us, we may as a whole starting to realize how much your location doesn't matter in technology jobs which will go a good way to freeing up more space for affordable housing in metropolitan areas.

the real reckoning to come is all these tax authorities looking to make up the losses from the exodus and use of facilities in town. a lot was built up not to just serve the population but to reward political friends by making sure they had the properties and contracts to build and even run businesses in town. that gravy train for the tax coffers and political campaigns won't go down without a fight.

one faster way of building out new housing is not rezoning existing areas of housing but going after areas that are not currently zoned for any housing. especially true are larger commercial districts that have collapsed or seen sufficient change to where most businesses up and left. plus removing the requirements that only union labor can be used will help as well in addition to allow hiring people who need work but are not attractive to union employers (most of these rules were originally put in place in the North stop cheaper labor cost black worker construction companies from getting a foothold - go look it up)

Texas is also a good example of that density only matters if there is a land scarcity problem.

There are areas in Canada where building massive towers has been premature and also led to increase in costs.

Density also matters if you're trying to avoid sprawl. A city like Houston basically requires you to own a car and drive everywhere, because public transit will never be able to keep up with the construction nor will the density be high enough to make it economically viable.

I sincerely doubt that building towers lead to an increase in costs in the existing housing stock, unless something very strange is afoot.

Cost of building a tower is much more than something like rowhouses, multiplexes. Cities like Toronto and Vancouver bypass the "missing middle". So it's mostly single family homes with various "tower node districts".

Yes, towers are expensive, but building them doesn't make the existing SFHs more expensive. Maybe tower building and rising home prices both coincide with certain economic trends, post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Not really. Dallas is an example of a metro area that has extended sprawl as far as it can go. A ton of new highways have been built out but growth in car usage and population have eaten back all the gains. There will never be enough land to make the sprawl work. As a result home prices there are jumping just like everywhere else. No one wants a 2 hour commute.

Not as far as it can go. It can still go many dozens of miles in every direction, and has, and will continue. Companies are following employees to the burbs and employees are moving even more with the uptick of remote work. Home prices are jumping due to population, but sprawl continues unabated.

Density doesn’t matter right up until you hit the limits of what the highways will handle. Then you’ll suddenly wish you’d built dense enough for light rail to alleviate the load on common routes.

Is there a similar source that would let you compare MSAs for building of housing units? I'd be interested to see how Boise's MSA lines up with the Bay Area. Most Californian transplants I'd met growing up in the area were from Sacremento/SoCal though.

Does this get you started? Population-adjusted new housing starts for both Boise and San Francisco MSAs since 2000.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=B6Uf

It does indeed. Thanks!

Those cities are much larger, both in size and population. DFW is 8x the population of SF. According to Google, at least.

Meanwhile those new building numbers are NOT 8x.

It's comparing DFW metro area vs. Houston/Sugarlands metro area vs. SF/Oakland/Berkeley metro area.

As of 1990 (the point where the graphs diverged), DFW had 3.8M people, Greater Houston had 3.3M, and SF/Oakland had 3.7M. They were pretty comparable then; subsequent growth has been simply because the Texas metro areas have added more housing.

Your quote chopped off an important qualifier present in the original comment.

Explain? The fact that the population of greater Houston has more than doubled in 30 years tends to support the idea that they are building enough for growth. They've got a city the size of Berkeley that didn't even exist 50 years ago.

> The fact that the population of greater Houston has more than doubled in 30 years tends to support the idea that they are building enough for growth.

This isn't enough to support the idea unless prices have also not climbed.

The Bay Area population has dramatically increased and prices have too because building to support this growth has been fought by NIMBYs via bad policy.[0] As a result houses on the peninsula have reached insane prices and there is little available for new people, see: https://www.redfin.com/CA/Palo-Alto/3785-Park-Blvd-94306/hom...

Myself and many of my friends (~30yrs old) rent with multiple roommates.

The only people that can buy experienced some sort of exit event or have a lot of FAANG equity with two FAANG incomes. Even then they have to pay property tax on that insane value that the NIMBYs don't pay.

Maybe Houston has done a better job, but population increase itself isn't much evidence.

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

Bad incentives for existing owners to restrict growth exist everywhere, but they're particularly bad in California because of Prop 13.

The most frustrating bit to me, is that the NIMBYs that won the housing lottery and leverage their political power to screw everyone else also play victim. I hope one day we can pass something that corrects a lot of these bad incentives. The new RHNA housing policy and things like Sacramento's elimination of single family zoning are the way. SB50 and related policy would help too.

I mean, population _is_ pretty good evidence of growth. 20 years ago Houston MSA was 15% larger than SF MSA and today it's 50% larger. What other evidence of "building for growth" can you demand?

A ratio of new housing vs. new population.

You can expand sprawl via single family homes and still not build nearly enough housing to meet population growth requirements.

You can have a lot more population and still build little. It just forces people to live in shared housing with roommates at very expensive rents.

I'm not arguing that you're wrong about Houston - maybe they did build enough. I'm just saying that population growth itself doesn't tell you too much.

Here you go: new housing units per 1000s of new population for Houston MSA, 2000-present.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=B6Yd

I exist to serve.

That's a cool site, I made a graph that I think illustrates my point more clearly: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=B6ZP

It's the change in population vs. the change in new housing with a separate line for each.

It's not super easy to understand because the population change is in thousands of people and housing is just in individual units, but I think it's clear from the graph (if I'm reading it correctly) that Houston is not building enough to meet demand. When you mouse over you can see the amount of new people and compare it to the amount of new housing. There's a lot more new people than new housing.

[Edit]: I found an even cooler dataset which I added to the above graph, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=B72x - it doesn't go back as far, but it shows available housing inventory which is a more relevant metric (and it's going down). I tried adding median price too, but it made the graph hard to read.

Basically, in a city not meeting demand I'd expect to see the following:

- Prices increasing faster than inflation

- Population increasing faster than new housing

- Availability of housing going down (supply constraints which cause prices to go up)

How bad the situation is depends on the above variables, but generally if you don't build enough to meet demand things get worse. That is true in a worst-in-the-world way in the bay area, but also appears to be true most places due to bad incentives - people who already bought in benefit (or at least think they benefit) from restricting supply.

Wouldn't you have to have some sort of adjustment for singles vs families over time? and for average number of people in a household? Number of people in a household has a cultural factor and age factor also (young single people often share households, more young people => higher density).

I have no idea impactful those numbers would be, just pointing out that there are lots of confounding factors to consider.

Yeah totally, I think those are all things to consider.

I'd also guess a factor of young single people sharing households is due to limited supply and high cost. If it was affordable to have your own apartment, more people would do so. The roommate situation is partly (though not entirely) a symptom of failure to build.

You can see this when you compare regions, where I grew up (western new york) housing is super cheap even though there's a lot less economic opportunity. Nobody I know from high school that stayed there lives with roommates. Many have bought their own (nice, new) house for ~150k. That house in the bay area would be 3 million easily.

So while I agree there are confounding factors at play, the housing supply issue is so extreme I think the others are largely rounding errors.

2M for an ugly house from 1940...

It’s $2M for the land, not the house.

Are you actually able to demolish the house?

The only reason one wouldn't be able to demolish the house in the US is if it was designated a historical landmark, that I know of.

Otherwise, if it's still zoned for a single family home, then the owner of the land has the right to deconstruct and construct a single family home, per the updated building codes and whatnot.

It doesn't sound like you've ever been to California at all.

I would like to be educated if there's something I'm missing. Is there a legal maneuver in CA that can prevent people from using their real estate for whatever it's zoned for, excluding frivolous lawsuits?

Yes, many jurisdictions in California require city permits for demolition and the process for getting those permits is by no means guaranteed. In my city after you apply for a permit you have to post public notice for 90 days so your nosy neighbors have a chance to go to the "landmarks preservation commission" to argue that your dilapidated shack in which nobody has lived for 50 years is, in fact, a priceless treasure and an irreplaceable piece of the city's identity, an event for which you'll need to hire an expensive land use attorney, a historian, and a forensic architect. Assuming you miraculously get through that part of the process, it certainly is by no means assured that you'd get a permit to build another home because the development standards are written in such a way that "by right" permits don't exist. You need a use permit from the city for everything, and for that you'll need to go through more public hearings at the zoning adjustments board and the design review committee. Meanwhile, you and your lawyers and architects will probably have to appear again before the full city council multiple times because each of the LPC, ZAB, and DRC decisions can be appealed to the full council by anyone, even if they don't live in the city.

That's sad. The whole use permit thing is confusing:

https://www.sccgov.org/sites/dpd/Iwantto/Permits/Pages/UsePe...

On initial reading, I don't see why land zoned for a house would even need a use permit. But then the linked "more" website (which goes to blob.core.windows.net?) says:

>What is a Use Permit?

>A Use Permit is a discretionary land use approval which, under certain circumstances, may authorize a use that is not allowed as a matter of right in a particular zoning district.

>Is a Use Permit Required?

>Each zoning designation has certain uses which are allowed subject to the securing of a Use Permit. These discretionary uses are listed in the Use Table ofArticle 2 of the zoning ordinance.

The first answer says use permits are for authorizing something that's not zoned, and the second answer says all uses require securing a use permit, even for the zoned designations? Looks like a lot of local corruption.

I don't know things about that county, I can only tell you the tactics they use in my city. One of them is at some point the minimum lot size for anything was increased to 5000 sq ft, even though most lots are 4000 or less. This means if you want a new structure on a 4000 sq ft lot, you need a special permit from the city.

Another one is setbacks. If most parcels are 40x100 feet, and the city says you need a 15-foot side yard on both sides, then you either need to figure out how to build a house that's only ten feet wide, or you need a special permit.

Lisa: "But if we did use fire..."

People get around many of these by simply leaving one room (the garage typically) standing.

Not a demolition now. Just renovating (90% of the house).

https://www.sfweekly.com/news/why-a-laundromat-might-be-cons...

It's unfortunate that such blatant corruption on the local level is allowed to fester. One would hope a court somewhere up the chain in the state would come down the right side.

That's not the case, unless you consider tenement conditions acceptable. The working class in these cities aren't suddenly affording $2000 in rent, they are simply cramming more people and more incomes into smaller apartments (1). In Houston over the last 10 years alone, some neighborhoods rate of overcrowding has gone up well over 100% (2). No, Houston is not building enough either, and paying for the population increase by sacrificing the quality of life of the overcrowded working poor, and pushing the middle class out of the city and elsewhere.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/23/us/los-angeles-crowded-co...

2. https://kinder.rice.edu/sites/default/files/documents/KI%20R...

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