Hacker News Reader

> I find it odd that you almost never hear about the car's role in the housing crisis.

This trope is repeated on HN almost every time any article resembling city planning comes up. It’s discussed here ad nauseam. Anyway, let’s do it again.

First, if you think cars are the problem, why is the housing crisis still persistent in NYC and Chicago?

Second, this is not a US-specific issue. Rent is just as bad in Europe and people just get by on much less space there that would be unacceptable to most people in the US who aren’t accustomed to paying $2k for an old 1-2br apartment in a transit friendly location in a city.

Finally, the reason car usage exploded was because it enabled people to have cheap housing and work in the city. All of the cheapest housing in the US is in small towns and exurbs where you can have a 3 bedroom house to yourself for $1300/mo. Houses with access to good public transit (not an hourly bus) cost significantly more.

On a square footage basis, the US has some of the cheapest housing for a developed nation.

That’s an interesting metric, price per sqft. Where’d you come across that in light of this context? I always heard of price per sqft on the context of building and as one of the metrics on Trulia and the like but as a high level metric to compare countries with and what that number rolls up to I find it fascinating and am curious how it would render as a heat map overlaid over counties and cities etc across the globe. Do you know of any such visualization/analysis? Even a table would be a good start.

Price per square foot is the metric to compare and classify like property in region.

It’s usually the best quick way to determine home valuation or reasonableness of price. Typically the scale will vary by metro area.

To visualize it, you’d need to control for different income tiers and local taxes. In my small city, a good condition average quality existing house is about $150/ft. The same house in a nearby suburb with fancy school district, etc is about $200/ft. That home in Queens, NY would be about $400-500/ft.

In most places, you need to build higher density as 3 decades of subsidized mortgage rates built out all of the usable space. Usually condos cost around 25% less per unit to build than a single/duplex home.

It is very much untrue that the rent is just as bad in Europe. In reality, it’s much, much worse in Europe than in US. In terms of income-to-housing costs ratio, most expensive US cities like NYC or Bay Area are below average of biggest 100 European metros, and more typical places like Boise or Las Vegas are an outright steal, compared to what Europeans pay.

According to what numbers? E.g. https://www.statista.com/statistics/237529/price-to-income-r... shows the US as rather decent, but many European countries seem to beat it on affordability,

It's also hard to define "income" without going into all the direct and indirect subsidies and income, e.g. is it adjusted for US health car spending coming out of "income", which you'd get for "free" in universal health care countries. Ditto living in Paris and not needed a car. v.s. that being the case in the US.

Yes, as you can observe, most of Europe less affordable to locals than US is, some places quite a bit more so. But I specifically said metros, where the situation is much worse. Rural housing, and housing in third or fourth tier cities in Europe can be indeed quite cheap. However, housing in second and first tier European cities is insanely expensive.

Here's an example: one of the countries that looks more affordable to US is Italy. Let's take a look at the the top metro in Italy, Milan.

Milan is now at around 4800 EUR/square meter. Average individual income is around 32k EUR/year, so average household income will be probably under 60k EUR/year, i.e. 5k EUR/mo. That means that a 100 square meter (~1100 square feet) dwelling will cost you just under half a million euros, your monthly mortgage will be something like 2k EUR, so your mortgage will be 40% of your before-tax household income. If you're unmarried, and making average wage, your chances of affording anything bigger than a one-bedroom are extremely slim, and even that will stretch your finances a lot.

The above is by no means extraordinary. Try doing the same for Rome or Florence, they are just as unaffordable as Milan. Bologna is slightly more affordable than that, but still less than NYC. And Italy is relatively affordable as far as Europe goes! Do the same for Netherlands, or UK metros, or France, or Germany. Truly, urban housing in US is very affordable all across the board.

Italy has been in headlines about this for years, young people living with parents into their 30s due to low incomes and high unemployment. At the same time income stats vs other WEU countries are problematic as the shadow economy is much larger.

It is true that Italy is not affordable at all for young, unmarried people, despite being overall more affordable than Europe average. It only makes it clear how bad the situation is in Europe, and how Americans have no idea how good and affordable housing in US is.

At the same time, prolonged living with parents, and multi generational households have, for many past centuries, been rather common in southern Europe, much more so than in the western, or, especially, northern Europe. Very high rates of living with parents is not necessarily indicative of economic situation, one also needs to consider cultural patterns.

When cities are designed around cars, you must have a car to participate in society. As a result, it's a significant tax on the poor. The recent oil price spike has caused many people to worry about being able to afford to work.

It's a tax on the poor, and also a tax on people who for whatever reason (there are many) aren't fit/able to drive.

That's a whole separate topic: Americans are like "just drive" and a large chunk of them just hate the poor for not having enough money to have and maintain a car.

But what about the people who actually can't drive? Epilepsy, vision, etc. There are a ton of reasons. But like what do these people do? There are so few places you can live without a car in the US compared to any other country on Earth.

> and a large chunk of them just hate the poor for not having enough money to have and maintain a car.

If you’re too poor to own a car with a $300/mo payment you certainly aren’t going to pay $1800 for a studio in the city.

The only people who “hate the poor” more than those who suggest people drive are the ones who suggest people move into dense cities.

NYC's situation is a bit unique. a study of the zoning changes during the pro-development Bloomberg administration found that more lots were actually downzoned than upzoned. https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/city-hall/story/201...

While it legalized residential towers in DUMBO and other areas that have since gentrified, that also meant that the amount of redevelopable lots shrank. This increased the value of the remaining developable lots and made it harder for small developers to compete to get the remaining lots.

I can't find these links because they're from years ago and Google isn't great about looking up older links, but because of these policies the small-scale (<10 unit) developments did not recover their previous figures after the Great Recession, when traditionally that is how a good chunk of new housing gets built. (They also tend to be more affordable, because building a small building has a lower capital cost than building a large one and so more people can compete.)

---

As far as the square footage concern goes, I think that's valid, but I think the distinction is that the housing that people would find "unacceptable" in the US is also illegal. This raises the bar on what the minimum you need to rent any space is, and increasingly we are seeing ever larger segments of the population struggling to meet that bar. At some point we're going to have to ask if we dislike SROs so much we would rather have people on the streets.

> First, if you think cars are the problem, why is the housing crisis still persistent in NYC and Chicago?

Addendum: here's a direct citation for Harlem rent hikes precipitated by subway construction in 1904 making the neighborhood more accessible to low-income would-be-renters: https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/the-end-of-the-african-ame...

"A few years after the 1900 riot [in which whites attacked blacks in midtown following the stabbing of an undercover police officer by a black man], as Harlem land values increased with the first subway line nearing completion in 1904, the black residents, once sought as renters in Harlem, became the targets of an organized removal effort by some white Harlem property owners."

"The [New York Herald] article also suggested that a rent increase “which the parlor car porters could pay, but their colored inferiors could not,” had previously been used as a strategy to remove the undesirable tenants."

> First, if you think cars are the problem, why is the housing crisis still persistent in NYC and Chicago?

This is a deep topic.

Homelessness is just one metric for an affordable housing crisis. I see estimates that there are ~80,000 homeless in NYC, being roughly 1% of the population. That's a lot and unacceptable but there's also a far bigger segment of the working poor and low-income.

I would argue that these people are less worse off in NYC than Chicago and certainly LA or SF simply because there is that transit system. Put another way: the homelessness situation would (IMHO) be significantly worse without that system.

For cities you need to consider a number of factors that play into this:

1. Minorities typically didn't have the option of moving to the suburbs post-WWII because they were excluded from purchasing or borrowing for homes;

2. Affordable neighbourhoods were demolished at a disproportionate rate to make way for freeways and interstates;

3. This all snowballed into the Great White Flight that lowered average incomes in cities, which diminished the tax base of those cities (among other things); and

4. When it suddenly became fashionable to live in cities again, those who had previously been abandoned there effectively were priced out or otherwise pushed out of their homes.

> Second, this is not a US-specific issue. Rent is just as bad in Europe and people just get by on much less space there

European countries have more of a social safety net. Some quick googling claims there are 10-11,000 homeless in London out of almost 9 million people, a rate roughly 1/8th that of NYC or LA.

But "Americans just want more space" is propaganda. We don't know that because it's extremely rare for Americans to have that choice due to almost all population centers only allowing single-family homes to be built. Low-density apartments, high-density apartments, row houses and multi-family dwellings are incredibly rare in the US because it's illegal to build them almost everywhere with exceptions confined to very narrow areas.

> Finally, the reason car usage exploded was because it enabled people to have cheap housing and work in the city

It enabled some people to do that, which is kind of the point.

>why is the housing crisis still persistent in NYC and Chicago Using Google data, New York has a land area of 783.8 km^2, where as SF has 121.4 km^2. New York has around 10 times the population of SF, with around 5.5 times the area. Yes New York has a housing supply issue, but it's able to host twice the density. Housing would always be a problem in a place that's desirable to live, but NY is much better at meeting that demand than SF.

Not to mention that cities subsidize suburbs in many ways:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/comments/qrn9i7/in_wh...

You’re basically tilting at windmills talking to Americans about even slightly reducing their car use.

Many people simply can’t imagine a life without a car.

Many people gush about how they would love to drive less but suggest they walk anywhere or ride a bicycle and you’ll get a million excuses about why it won’t work for them.

Very few people are willing to put their money where their mouth is and choose to live a low or no-car life. Personally, I have. I grew up in the country, never learned to drive, managed with my feet and a bicycle, then rode the bus during college, and finally I moved to a city as an adult. Yes, I gave up a lot to do it, but it’s worth it to me.

Great. Cars are a significant contributor to the housing crisis. Would have been much better if that hadn’t happened.

Unfortunately, we need to build affordable housing in the cities we have, not in the cities in some magical world where the car didn’t take over.

Unless, of course, you want to wait a couple of decades for good public transportation to show up before housing the underserved.

Talking about how society should have done something different and casting blame moves the ball forward exactly zero steps, and talking about it in this article is an utter waste of time.

The public transpiration problem needs to be solved, but won’t be solved in the even the medium term and is a distraction from solving other problems we have today.

There's plenty of easy and cheap options that can be taken to shift cities away from car dependence without tearing them down and rebuilding them.

step one would be to abolish mandatory parking minimums. if a developer wants to use their entire lot size for housing and not provide any parking, they should be able to. if the market demands parking, the market can build market-rate parking. it's ridiculous that we have legal requirements for how much housing there is for cars, but not how much housing there is for people.

This, really, after growing up in NYC, then suburban Florida and then living abroad in Cities such as Tokyo, Manila and Jakarta, owning a car in those places, motorcycle and just walking around is really night and day in terms of disconnect and comfort.

Cars are a comfortable bubble and 100% in many high dense cities, useless or worthless, but necessary to get out of the cities sometimes (Tokyo is a large exception of course, but a car is def a nice option to experience while in Japan)

The thing is, outside of USA, zoning and such do not exist to the same extent so you do have much more owner consideration w/ whatever they want with their land which is good and bad, cheap housing across asia, but parking or getting around even outside your place to the main road is def tricky, open sewers, poorly closed sewers, no car parking (which is acceptable) no/minor motorcycle parking, no bike parking, the right of way of the road and the property ingress can be really close, and it's pretty amazing.

I agree 100% with your post, I just think many Americans do not know how things used to be, and never had the experience of going to places abroad which do not have many american problems. .

6. Today, automobiles are housing a lot more people than any "homeless" numbers give.

7. While there is enough room on every street to build a row of houses.

>Fourth, driving everywhere is like living in an insulated bubble. You don't have to deal with your fellow man. Things like Skid Row (LA) or the Tenderloin (SF) don't touch you because you can just drive around them in an airconditioned bubble. I honestly think this contributed to making people care less about the plight of their fellow man.

I'm not sure the car is to blame for this one.

When I'm driving a long drive with the same cars around me for an extended period of time, I think how in the past travelers would be able to chit chat and get to know each other. Cars prevent that. So why do I say it isn't the car's fault?

Because even in public transport, people isolate themselves from each other. Even when packed together so you are physically touching, you don't interact with others. People walk down sidewalks don't chat with each other unless they already know one another.

If cars were the problem, we wouldn't expect to see this behavior where there aren't cars, including in countries that don't have anything like the car culture the US does. But we do. Something else is at play. I'm not sure what it is, but it doesn't seem fair to blame cars without some stronger evidence.

I've also noticed that attitudes towards the homeless are completely different between those who walk and those who drive. I'm personally willing to pay whatever it takes in extra taxes to get them shelter and deal with the current crisis in my city, but I've noticed that people who drive are often far less willing to support action here.

You are. I’m not ok with more wasteful spending. California spends most on the homeless and still has a massive homeless problem.

Actually many suburbs do predate the car:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

There are people that talk about the effect the car has. This is probably the best explanation of what we've become because of it: Not just bikes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

Cars have been at the center of western urban planning for many decades. This crisis is a recent development. And it happened in partbecause we’ve STOPPED building freeways, suburbs, and in general neighborhoods people want. Instead we build giant fortress style apartments and crowded “condos” that no one wants to live on if they can avoid it, driving the existing single family home prices through the roof. It’s not car culture that’s killing is, it’s mythical thinking about what actual influence climate doomerism and squealing about NIMBYs has on the electorate.

>First, it allowed the building of suburbs, which just wasn't feasible before. This in turn led people to push zoning laws such that building anything other than a SFH became illegal.

Possibly, because blaming the car by taking a detour through a motivated political movement doesn't make sense to people? Suburbs would be impossible without cars, true, and airstrikes would be impossible without airplanes, but that seems like a poor case for blaming government policy on an inanimate object.

>Third, all these cars new housing developments needed roads

All economic activity needs roads. Those roads get wider because of cars, but their existence is felt most strongly in the wider economy because of trucks. Being able to transport goods anywhere with low latency makes a huge difference to the operation of thousands if not millions of businesses.

>Fourth, driving everywhere is like living in an insulated bubble. You don't have to deal with your fellow man.

Just earlier tonight I was driving and nearly got hit by some other driver who ran a red light.

>Things like Skid Row (LA) or the Tenderloin (SF) don't touch you

Liberals really need to work on not sounding like they want people to get robbed.

>I honestly think this contributed to making people care less about the plight of their fellow man.

Someone in Utah honestly believes that the reason Californians won't deal with the homeless problem is because they don't go to church. But neither of you gave me any evidence.