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Comment by kodah | Hacker News Reader

Speaking as someone who doesn't own a house in California, apartments are not enough and never will be. Housing is an investment, and if I am put in a position to perpetually rent then I am excluded from a very stable and viable long term investment that is not easily replaced. What complicates this more, is if you shove all the affordable houses to the outskirts of the city where most companies are not then you create an entirely new class-based issue.

Edit: I don't care what kind of housing it is, but it needs to be for sale as opposed to for rent.

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I suspect there was a language barrier here. For the whole world "apartments" means what the US refer as "condos".

So, in short, L.A. needs a lot of "apartments"(world)/"condos"(USA). And you are right, "apartments"(USA) don't help.

Even if housing you own is not a significantly appreciating investment, there's a lot to be said for the stability of owning a place that shields you from rent increases/forced moves and which you probably own outright by the time you retire.

The solution, of course, is that houses shouldn’t be investments. They should be things that you pay to live in. But that’s exactly what the parent commenter is saying that the current homeowners will never allow.

I think you can buy apartments?

The vast majority of apartments I've seen are for rent, not for purchase. So, at the least I'm putting emphasis on the idea that they need to be apartments for sale.

They just don't call them apartments, they call them condos. But they're essentially apartments for sale, and I see them all the time.

The post I was replying to used the word "apartment". I wanted to be specific in case there's anyone out there that thinks that more rental properties will fix the issue.

I see them all the time too, outside of California where they can build housing. See Toronto or even Vancouver.

You're thinking of condos. Otherwise, I don't it's possible for a multi-unit apartment building to sell single units.

I thought the difference between an apartment and a condo was specifically who owned it, i.e. is it for sale.

I feel like it's asking why there aren't there any tropical storms with sustained wins of 100mph. There are, we just call them hurricanes.

You can't just offer up an apartment building as a condominium. There's all sorts of regulations, building codes, and inspections required to convert.

>I don't it's possible for a multi-unit apartment building to sell single units.

Ok. I own one unit of a 4-unit building, which was as far as I know built to sell, not rent, roughly 30 years ago. It is definitively not a condo, in terms of the ownership structure and the portion that I own. No HOA either.

So your point is that it's not an apartment? Empirically, it is true that people don't call it an apartment. But it has the same square footage and decor as nearby apartments. The only thing approaching a fundamental difference is that it's on two levels, with bedrooms upstairs.

In the US, "apartment" tends to imply renting vs. condo (or co-ops in some places).

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