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Comment by notch656a | Hacker News Reader

Here here.

My plan to cheap housing

1) Unfuck Zoning. Be like Texas.

2) Unfuck building codes. Person signs their own death warrant? Let them live in a yurt or a the kind of shack people keep their garden tools in. There's a county east of Tucson like this, guess what, people no ded.

3) End all subsidies and government involvement in mortgages. Best way for skyrocketing price is for government to guarantee loans in a way a relatively free market would not.

4) Permit fees dropped for building housing. Cost of evaluating permits should drop without zoning or building codes. Only examine development to make sure it doesn't cause imminent harm to those outside the property line.

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Zoning fixes are absolutely required, but Texas (particularly Huston) is not a good model. While many places in Texas don't have so-called 'zoning' they manage to implement pretty much all the restrictions zoning reform advocates want fixed through things like land use restrictions on deeds (which are even tougher to reform than zoning)

Japan is the model I'd like to see: inclusionary zoning. A small number of zones that allow for maximum use.

This might have the opposite effect. Permits and building codes are there for the lender. They want assurances that the property is going to last for at least the duration of their loan. If lenders decide these deathtraps aren't worth the risk, and they have no way of offloading that risk to someone like the government, they aren't going to bite.

The entire housing industry is designed around lending. If policies are make that screw with the status quo, the industry is going to collapse then reform around the new one, and that could take decades.

We have regulations for a reason. When you blindly get rid of all of them, history repeats itself. We find ourselves looking to solve the same problems. It wasn't that long ago in the USA when entire cities would burn to the ground because a cow kicked over a lantern because lack of building codes meant buildings weren't built with safety in mind.

Everything you just wrote sounds like a good thing to me. The fact that housing is structured around lending in the US is part of the problem. It should not require a loan to get a roof over your head, and combined with zoning making basic housing illegal, there's a lot of perfectly sound shelter that cannot be legally constructed in the US.

> Permits and building codes are there for the lender.

Aight, so if I'm the lender for myself let me nix them. If they're for some third party lender, let the lender and lendee solve that through private market rather than government. Surely someone can be trained to inspect a house.

> [ mention of Great Chicago Fire ]

The classic "make hundreds millions of people work for decades to afford a house, costing tens of millions of lifespans of work so we can save 300 people once a century from the great Chicago Fire". The calculus there is way way way off.

I'll take my chances.

>It wasn't that long ago

It wasn't that long ago housing was far more affordable.

> because a cow kicked over a lantern because lack of building codes

You've fallen victim to a big tale, like santa clause. No one knows the cause of that fire. We do know that many of the conditions were completely unsubject government, such as a windy dry spell.

>We have regulations for a reason

They're there for good reasons, unfortunately the worst tyrannies and misdeeds happen at the gunpoint of those who purport to be acting for the common good. Building codes in practice are as much about taking your life away as they are as preserving it.

Building codes aren't nearly so bad as zoning and the NIMBYism that is strangling the country. There's certainly room to liberalize building codes, but I don't think the impact would be as large as one might hope. Liberalize land use please.

I believe that one of the things that make Texas more affordable is high property taxes. It keeps people from borrowing more money and competing as aggressively on price. So they pay in Taxes what they would be paying in interest. Taxes at least are spent in the community. Schools, roads, parks, etc.

Housing prices have little to do with property taxes, just in how the amount levied is paid by homeowners, not in the amount levied. The reason property taxes are high in Texas is for the same reason they are high in Washington state: no state income tax. That doesn’t really keep our housing prices low, however.

Texas sucks just like almost everywhere else. Oregon's reforms we're pretty aggressive though. The entire Portland metro area is zoned to at least quadplexes in residential areas, and duplexes statewide. No SFH zoning allowed. California I think only made the minimum two units.

This is a good list.

2) Unfuck building codes.

I think it could be greatly simplified by holding the building owner/manager criminally liable for defects that lead to major injury or death, and civilly liable for smaller defects.

There's no reason for the government to have an opinion about what type of concrete you're using or how many feet of wire you're using. They should be policing outcomes, not hiring and sending inspectors all over. If a building collapses, the people who own it and the people who built it should go to jail.

And insurance companies can come after the owners for the smaller problems.

This makes absolutely no sense.

How is "let the building collapse then send the owner to jail" an improvement over "don't let the building collapse"?

Why would we get rid of building codes, but then still jail people who don't follow the old building codes that we just got rid of. All this would accomplish is sending well-meaning people to jail, just because they didn't know their house had a serious problem, because we got rid of the building codes.

I am so confused by your rational.

The argument is probably something along the lines of "most building codes are costly but not necessary for safety" aka "it can be somehow done significantly cheaper but just as safely, a way that doesn't follow the building codes".

Not sure such a way exists...

Are you in favor of bulldozing favelas in places like Brazil if the inhabitants can't afford to fix their shanty to meet up to code?

I guess it comes down to comparing the risk of poor quality housing vs the risks of homelessness. Kind of like that saying "the real minimum wage is zero"

For many of those people, it's not a risk of homelessness but rather that they would have to rent someplace outside the favela at a much higher price, one they may be able to barely afford. Sort of like in the US, where zoning/building don't generally make people homeless but instead put a person into the situation of the favela dweller who has the option to rent while paying a large portion of their income, except without the option to build their own sub-code housing.

No one wants liability. Builders wants to build and be gone ASAP. They'll build a $350k home using the cheapest parts and labor they can find and do their best to run away with the profit. 5 years time, after any sort of warranty, their workmanship (or rather, their lack of it) starts showing.

I think your idea would be great, but there would be turmoil while the liability hot potato is thrown around until the industry figures out where that lands (probably some form of "malpractice insurance" on builders would become a thing, with higher premiums on those who suck more, eventually forcing them to be better or quit entirely).

Isn’t there some small town that can be bought to test these hypotheses?

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