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Comment by betaby | Hacker News Reader

Increase supply by building more and building up.

Based on my local market, this doesn’t work. Builders (more likely their financiers) hold on to houses until they sell at their target price.

They don’t rent them, they don’t lower the target price.

They’ll wait for months or years for the sale to come in order to maximize their returns, and they have enough liquidity to be able to wait.

Accurate. I used to have about 20 neighbors on the adjoining two lots, until the previous owner pushed them all out and then sold to some investors who wanted to convert the properties into condos. They gathered dust for 2 years then there's been 18 months of half-assed construction. Why rush? They're accruing value by the day.They didn't even get proper permits, but the fine is nominal.

That can be fixed with idle real estate taxes. They would have to at least rent them.

Won’t cure all. Building costs are soaring. Try building something new for less than $200/sf and you’ll see that the price of dirt is only part of the cost.

Throw out property taxes and implement land taxes. Stop assessing a tax penalty on building up.

that in the US i believe is mostly regulatory capture (guilds & licensing, unions, in some cases inappropriate regulations)

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/ne...

The dirt is pretty expensive. In many areas just a block of dirt will sell for $1-2M. While a nice apartment in the same area sells for $600,000 AUD.

This alone would solve almost all the wage "problems" in the Bay Area.

This doesn't help in the short term, because building takes time. Moving people is faster than constructing buildings.

You're right it does not help in the short term, but we've been speaking about the Bay Area problems (for example) for two decades and vigorously discussing it in the past decade -- building five years ago could have solved today's problem.

Similarly, we could speak about it for another decade, or we could build now and solve part of the problem in five years.

This also doesn't exclude other fixes that can happen orthogonally.

> building takes time

It does not have to take nine months (the national average) to build a house or a hundred houses. Housing can be and in times of necessity has been built rapidly and well. My favorite example is Hilton Village in Newport News, VA, built to house workers at Newport News Shipyard at the tail end of and after World War I. Five hundred units were constructed within two years, and they were built cheaply yet with a randomization to the sequence of models and detailing that kept the houses from feeling like a cookie-cutter development, avoiding pitfalls into which many suburbs today fall. A hundred years later the homes remain occupied and in fact prized today for their charm.

The barriers to affordable, desirable, swiftly built housing are artificial.

Manufactured housing is probably the best bet for "built cheaply yet with a randomization", but most high-cost-of-living areas lack the available land. So then you need to build up, and that opens the Pandora's box of building code compliance, labor costs and material cost.

The city of Los Angeles presumably has access to average material costs and average labor costs, but the simple apartment complex they developed to house the homeless still ended up at $746,000 a unit https://www.nbclosangeles.com/investigations/las-homeless-ho...

"Moving people" OTOH sounds violent.

It doesn't have to. For example, if people are moving from Bay Area to Texas, we should think about how to accelerate that.

Isn't Jimmy Carter and Habit For Humanity building new homes, each in under 30 days, around the southern east coast? https://allthatsinteresting.com/jimmy-carter-houses

You're unlikely to find an instant solution to a problem decades in the making, period.

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