For some reason California is obsessed with the idea that housing is too expensive, so we need to force new construction to subsidize middle-middle class housing via a lottery system, which keeps housing expensive
This comment made me realize that maybe powerful people actually want to push lower income people out of the state, or metros at least.
Not sure about California, but in most places that would double or triple the value of the land. If you did everyone all at once, it probably wouldn't be so extreme but would still be an increase.
The principal is that someone should be free to build on their land as long as they don't create safety issues or significantly impose on someone else.
Democracy at worst can be mob rule. Principals are important.
Japan does a good with federal zoning regulations. It's not impossible.
I agree.
> existing near someone can have effects that are easy to justify in court
I had the impression this was a "mob rule" problem, that local voters were voting for zoning laws that limit the quality and quantity of new housing. I admit to not understanding the legal or moral justification. It just doesn't seem right to micromanage others to the extent that occurs today.
There are other countries that are much more flexible, like Japan [0]. Instead of single family single use zoning they start with three story multi-use housing. Some places in the U.S. are moving in this direction.
> decreasing or limiting increase on future land values
That can be flipped around. Someone who opposes new housing is taking value from the people who could have made use of that new housing, had it been allowed.
The recent lawsuit against UC Berkeley is a great example. A handful of cranks angry about UC Berkeley admissions abused an environmental review process to impose their will on their town. Not the will of the majority, but rather the tyranny of the most rich and petty.
0 - I prefer the term “tyranny of the majority”.
The fascinating thing about HOAs is that they’re all done under the guise that they “improve property values”, but I’ve never seen any evidence that this works. From my geographic location it seems like non-HOA factors drive prices (supply, demand, neighborhood location and nearby amenities like transit and shopping), not whether or not the neighbors flower bed matches the “neighborhood character”[0]. From what I see it just seems to let petty tyrants control their neighbors; the property value argument seems like a transparent excuse.
0 - You see this phrase a lot in zoning discussions and it makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills. As if neighborhood character is a concrete thing that can be pointed to and protected, rather than a constantly changing and emergent result of the humans living in a place.
Some people like not worrying about stuff and having rules in place.
It’s all about the freedom to choose
For my house I decided not to buy in an HOA - missed out on some amenities for sure.
I'm not sure what to make of the choice part here. Once an area is under an HOA it's almost impossible to dissolve the HOA. Anecdotal evidence from my own HOA which my wife was president of for many years shows that only very few people get involved. The people who do get involved tend to be of the type who want to overreach. When my wife was president she probably spent more time trying to bring the other folks involved in the HOA back to what's reasonable. Fortunately management companies also help with this. I'm afraid that without management companies most HOAs would devolve into attempts to build a miniature fascist state that only would be stopped by prolonged court battles.
Also, depending on your state it can be very hard to avoid a HOA. If you're buying a home in California, Colorado, or Florida you've got a 2/3 chance of buying into a HOA, with the numbers getting worse over time. 2/3 new homes being made now have a HOA, so pretty soon you won't have an effective choice when buying.
Not all HOAs have infrastructure to maintain. I know a few people in neighborhoods with HOAs that don't have private roads or facilities for the HOA to manage, it's just purely there for property value.
Witness the lack of slurs for Nordics, I have no idea which they are. I'm sure they exist. I know more slurs for doctors than Nordics...wait I think I know one, "dumb blonde", and "rusio" is another one, in Chile..."gringo" in Chile..."borsch" I think is one for Germans though, it's really old, there's others, but not Nordic. "Honkey" comes from "Hungarian"...some Hungarians are very fair...I'd need like a slur dictionary to find a slur for Nordics.
These slurs must all be said at some point, it's irrelevant if I say G-R-I-N-G-O or "gringo", because putting it in writing and spelling it out is literally the same thing, you can read either just as well. For these particular slurs nobody can figure out what the hell I'm writing about if I don't write them in full. Similarly, History professors in Chilean universities can't tell their students about the "n-word" without actually saying it out loud, for real, at some point. They otherwise will never know what the professor is talking about.
Back to Nordic immigration. So yeah, if Swedes arrive next door and the women dress differently, and they recycle all kinds of things Americans don't recycle, like I guess if they yodeled that would piss people off...it would take some work. And white Americans surprise surprise are very tolerant of very different views if they like them. The big thing with the "poor" or "poors" (the worst slur in my whole comment) is the poverty is related to entropy. Same thing pretty much. So more entropy in their nervous system, more entropy in their bodies, more entropy in their housing, more entropy in how they communicate and their habits, more entropy in their relationships, more entropy in how they deal with neighbors ultimately. Reducing entropy in one thing means increasing it in another. On the other hand, if the poor who move in haven't always been poor, or have an excellent reason to be poor, or are rapidly moving up in society, or something else of that nature, they are not as entropic and are therefore welcome.
And that's why there was such a huge social movement to make education free and obligatory, because then you reduce the entropy in the minds of the poor, and that order (meaning strictly absence of entropy) radiates from there into everything else.
Well I suppose there's some moral hazard because the government is more tolerant than rent-seekers (I find the term "landlord" gross because of the "lord" part, no nobility in America, and the whole point of the endeavor is collecting rent, they're synonymous. If they don't want to be called rent-seekers all they have to do is stop seeking rent). Plus Section 8 costs IIRC either 30 or 33.33% of your income, so it's not that they pay nothing for housing, it's just limited to a very high but still feasible amount. You're objecting to exactly what I was talking about, entropy. In this case you're using the synonym "noise."
So you built your own house from scratch, no help from builders, mined your own iron, wrought your own steel, the copper and all, because surely "you" wouldn't be talking about "it" online if it weren't up to code. And claimed your own land...loaned yourself the mortgage, did it all on your very own. Society didn't do anything for you, after all.
> You're objecting to exactly what I was talking about, entropy. In this case you're using the synonym "noise."
I live in a neighborhood without section 8 now and, surprise, there is no entropy!
>So you built your own house from scratch, no help from builder
I am sorry, it might be some popular point on reddit but I need more context, what are you talking about? I bought my house and the land. Are you, by chance, saying that you are sincerely confused by my usage of the verb "to provide" and believe that I used it in a general way, only indicating that the society somehow made the housing available, and not given wholly or partially free?
For instance, I am by all means of the definition living in poverty right now; but I also have much more than even some middle class folk might have depending on their life style.
So poor is relative mostly to the compared 'true wealth' of each other person.
You might only make 1200 a month, but you own a house. Or you might only make 2k a month, but you have a vehicle and house and many luxury items with in it.
By our current standards if you made those amounts, you would be considered poor, like me. BUT, you will still be richer than someone who gets that same amount of money from some stipend, but without any where to live and all those basic things that should be an uncontested human right.
So again. It's all relative to the situation at hand.
If I sold everything I have and went back to just a laptop with bag, a duffle bag of clothes, a back pack full of my 'stuff', and a blow up mattress; I would have maybe 10k total in my account to reuse as a nest egg.
And that's if I don't get ripped off by everyone and their mother.
So one last time. Wealth, is relative.
The easiest way to have actual affordable housing is to change the "single-family home" zone limitations (this might have changed recently IIRC but it might not)
No government has ever been successful at repealing that law, but they sure keep trying.
The “fix older stock” strategy really only works in areas where people aren’t all that keen to live. Ex. It’s easy to do in Pittsburgh or Detroit. Not so easy in SF or Austin.
People also used to occupy far fewer square meters/feet of housing per person in the past so even though Berlin (or Pittsburgh) had a higher population in 1940 than today it doesn't necessarily mean there's a surplus of housing.
There's an easy way to do that - raise teachers' salaries, and let them choose whatever housing they want, not what you've arbitrarily designated as "affordable" (via a political process). This raises observable costs, but has plenty of less obviohs benefits.
That's $480k per class per year.
OUSD owns its buildings, so none of that money needs to go to rent.
Why isn't $480k per class per year enough?
Housing should be affordable for all, not just teachers.
There is affordable housing - just not where people want to live
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1128-Outwoods-Cir-Birming...
Also, if it’s cheap because there are no good jobs - then where there are good jobs it will be expensive
Throw in good weather, nice views, goods school- all of a sudden it’s really expensive
Note there is nothing in the twitter thread about jobs or amenities- it’s all about land and density
Thats like saying we should solve shortage of food by raising salaries.
Some people are so lost in wcobomic theory, sometimes they forget thw physical world exists.
I think there’s a good argument to be made that we shouldn’t do that: as it amounts to a government subsidy for that particular family or individual without solving the overall problem.
I think it makes much more sense for the government to build high quality housing, not sell it at all but rent it out, and use the income stream to fund further house building.
How about they outsource that to private industry professionals on an open, competitive basis, in exchange for a profit sharing arrangement? Hmm...
But that so conflicts with hyper-local (perceived, short-term) interests of the type of people who show up to community meetings who are concerned their home values will go down.
Gotta pass some laws to prevent investors from snatching them up to resell at a higher price like what's happening now. Or prevent them from just turning into AirBNBs
The lack of property taxes makes letting investment properties remain empty much more viable than in the states.
If everyone expects their housing to appreciate forever it’s no surprise that their appreciated homes will become unaffordable to most people. Housing ought to be a utility not an investment IMO. A Georgist-style land tax would probably do a lot to tip the balance.
Housing can either be a good investment that outpaces inflation, or affordable in the long run. Having both is not possible.
Setting aside some amount of housing units to remain affordable is not a good long term solution - we have it here, and it's basically ended up as a lottery with a side dish of corruption.
In order to really fix this, a lot of property investors will need to lost a lot of money on their investments. Problem is they tend to also be political donors, so not many politicians seem interested in doing this.
[1] https://www.ocregister.com/2019/10/23/nobodys-moving-califor...
Long-term, the trend in most built-out metro areas is that SFHs are going to become a luxury good for the well-to-do, and most of the general population will live in apartments or condos. This is simply because of land availability: if it's built-out, there's no more land available for new SFHs, so future population growth will depend upon suburban tracts getting converted to denser multi-family dwellings.
As long as these high cost of living areas continue adding jobs, particularly high income jobs, you continue to have a growing pool of knowledge workers who can afford these market rates that are unaffordable to the working class pool. Give this pool of workers a big enough carrot, maybe its a fitness center or a pool or some astroturf for the dog, and they will gladly move out of that 50 year old dingbat and into this new construction with the golf simulator in the basement and a garage parkng space, freeing up that 50 year old apartment (which in its time may have even been a luxury building in its own right) for someone who can't afford the above amenities.
To this end its essential to build housing as fast as possible and to create as many units as possible. When you mandate things like x% of units as 'affordable,' often times that leads to developers going back to the drawing board and chopping off entire stories from the build, and fewer units of housing being added to the local area than there would have been had the developer been allowed to build full bore and actually cover costs on a larger build. This ironically hurts the very class of people who would have benefited from those affordable units in the first place.
This is only partially true though. What you mean is some percentage of people will move into the new construction. But of course, some people will see that the unit they live in is becoming more affordable and decide that they would like to take advantage of relatively lower rent. Over time and on average you are correct - that building nice new homes will relieve pressure on somewhat less nice older ones, but it will take time.
Also, we aren't talking about mandating affordable units, which is a thing in some places, but rather a developer trying to apply for subsidies for building affordable units. I totally agree that we should not put up barriers to building market rate units, but it's also worthwhile to incentivize some artificially low cost units as well to help solve the problem for some people today instead of 10 years from now.
700 square foot condos in a fourplex or 2 story cottages in a cottage cluster or row houses could be built for a fraction of the cost at 4x the density. But in many areas they are prevented by setbacks, minimum lot sizes, coverage rules, parking requirements, and so on.
Internal material and design regulations similarly don't optimize for things that are safe/functional and affordable.
Yeah, I guess the angle with the sun or something for most of the year makes solar a little more difficult up here? Thankfully we've got a lot of hydro-electric.
Otherwise the builder can place the panels where they want. And if for some reason they don't want them anywhere near the site, they can also purchase shares of community solar projects elsewhere. (Which is often a good option for existing homeowners, too.)
You can't build a boring cheap brownstone anymore according to the law.
1. http://qcode.us/codes/westhollywood/view.php?topic=19-19_3-1...
Railing about having to provide common space which should be public space.
Railing about common space requirements being designed around forcing non detached dwellings to be expensive.
The question is what sort of housing you build. You have a piece of dirt ready to be developed or re-developed. You can put there a mansion which will house one family with enough garden to picnic a whole village and still have space to land a helicopter. Or you can build four detached homes with plenty of garden at the same place. Or you can build two 3-story buildings with 6 flats each and have space for a small comunal park between them.
And we can’t say that the market should figure out what kind of houses should be built, because we already have tax laws, and building codes, and etc which heavily influences what kind of building gets built. The question is not “should we put our finger on the scale” but “which direction should said finger push”?
In many larger cities, older housing occupy prime location where the value of the land is twice the value of a new building you could build on it, so all these would never filter down to affordable levels.
But if we are talking city states, why not take the Singaporean approach? Just have the government build apartments and subsidize sale to citizens? Everyone gets a flat eventually.
IMO the HDB flats should not be saleable on the open market and can only be sold back to the government (subject to inflation and depreciation adjustments that no-one's going to agree to) but I'm an expat and not eligible to partake in the upside so I might be a bit biased.
All that being said they have done a better job than most of making government housing both accessible and appealing even if it means that I'm having to find a new place to live in the middle of an inflationary period (even as the country is seeing net emigration for the first time in decades, wth is going on??)
Only if you overthink it. An "open border" LVT+UBI system is self-balancing; a flood of immigrants would drive up demand for land, which drives up its value, which raises LVT revenue, which raises total UBI disbursement, which keeps each individual's UBI stable.
That said, it would work even better at a state level, and better still at a national/federal level.
> why not take the Singaporean approach?
The Singaporean approach (IIUC) includes land leases, which is in practice equivalent to a 100% LVT (assuming the government prices the lease at the land's full value).
Another factor contributing to the same thing is that cities aren't closed systems. Building new units at the top of the market doesn't mean that everyone in the city will move up one rung in quality leaving the cheapest unit now vacant. Many cities will have a latent demand for housing that is being suppressed by high prices. When that exists, someone from outside the city will move to the city to occupy the new construction or the newly vacated units at the top of the market. All that latent demand needs to be satisfied before the benefit of the new construction will trickle down to the bottom of the market.
Which is to say, what you've described is a signal to demolish and build higher intensity, while the filtering happens elsewhere.
For rental apartments, the most expensive ones are both renovated and in a prime location which is often still a centennial building. Brand new buildings are most of the time outside of these locations.
you're forgetting the part where it is the older housing that is currently affordable that is getting demolished so that this new construction can use that land instead.
That's the theory. The practice is that much of the "older housing" is by now 50 or 60 years old, twice the design life, and at some point renovation is just not economical any longer, you are looking at a teardown and rebuild.
That meme tells more about the profession of economics as taught in schools and universities. It doesn't tell you how the world works, but it provides support for the way things are. There's that old cartoon with a royal and a priest, and the royal turns to the priest saying "you keep them stupid, I keep them poor." That's applied economics.
Your point is good, but it turns out that a lot of really expensive parts of Manhattan aren't anywhere near as dense as they should be, such as:
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.744212,-74.0017042,3a,90y,34...
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.744212,-74.0017042,3a,90y,34...
I'm not sure what you're getting at here.
I live in the area (in fact, I grew up there too) covered by the link you posted and don't know what you mean about density.
Yes, many of the older buildings are only 12-15 stories tall, although a bunch are 20, 30 or even 40 stories tall.
And yes, there are many brownstones (usually 4 or 5 stories tall, with 1-2 apartments per floor) on side streets as well. And there are buildings like mine (5 stories tall with 4 apartments per floor with a lot size of ~4,000 sq ft.).
But there are zero single family homes.
Or are you suggesting that we bulldoze Central Park and build 500-600 60 story residential buildings because Central Park is wasted space?
As a Manhattanite, not having Central Park (or Riverside Park, or any of the other greenspace in Manhattan for that matter) would make upper Manhattan completely unlivable.
Please do elucidate on this. What mechanism could significantly increase the density of Manhattan housing?
This ought to be interesting.
I'd expect that the folks who actually live under overpasses would wholeheartedly disagree with you.
Have you ever been homeless? I'm guessing not. Because you have no idea what you're talking about.
It is amazing they were able to build like that three hundred years ago, only a few decades after the area was first settled.
Not sure where this is coming from. 60 years old is 1960s. Across the US, particularly in older cities, plenty of houses are that old and much older (family members living in a 1930's house). As long as owners maintain it over the years, it should easily last longer than 60 years. Even in my relatively younger city, there are plenty of 1960's houses that sell about the same as the 2000's houses.
Absolutely. The building where I live was built in 1920 -- 100 years ago. The apartments have (mostly, all but four out of 20 -- and not those four because the long-term tenants, myself included, haven't moved out) been gut renovated in the past ten years. All of the apartments were also renovated in the late 1980s-early 1990s as well.
I expect that they've been renovated many times previously too, but I've only been here for 25 years.
>there are plenty of 1960's houses that sell about the same as the 2000's houses.
Absolutely. The most recently renovated apartments are all at market rates, and those of us who have stayed have done so because our apartments are rent stabilized[0] (my upstairs neighbor is rent controlled[1], a different set of regulations.
[0] https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/resources/faqs/...
To get the market price for housing down; even a supply glut would not help as long as mortgages are subsidised, and defacto function as economic stimulus and retirement funds.
That sort of ownership of the land rents is exactly the problem, as it incentivizes the local land owners to use their political power to en chance their market power to charge high rents.
So what you’ve stated is effectively a tautology. Either ownership embues the owner with the right to rent their property, or you don’t believe in ownership at all.
You vote where you live, not where you own. The “local land owners using political power” is a trope posted here often, but I’m pretty sure it’s the renters who are electing the local politicians.
And what determines the price level of rents? Scarcity of housing determines how far up the demand-price curve the market clearing price will go.
> You vote where you live, not where you own. The “local land owners using political power” is a trope posted here often, but I’m pretty sure it’s the renters who are electing the local politicians.
This is a very astute observation! And you will find that places where the landlords live in their voting jurisdiction, like San Francisco and Palo Alto, tend to vote for far less housing-positive politicians than places where the landlords tend to live elsewhere, like Oakland or East Palo Alto.
Landlords and homeowners have more money, more free time to influence local politicians. Every time you go to a public comment section, homeowners tout their homeowners status as if it gives them more clout with politicians, and often it does.
There's significant academic work on this power dynamic. One sub-genre of it is the home-voter hypothesis:
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674015951
But there's lots of other research too.