Why developers seem to only build luxury housing (2018)
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Anywhere that demand across the spectrum dramatically outstrips production capacity (e.g., anywhere in the Bay Area, where NIMBYism has made it nigh-impossible to build anything) what little production manages to happen will target the high end of the market.
You have to build enough to make satisfying demand at the bottom worth doing. Our regulations (onerous constraints to construction and land use) preclude that outcome.
The only thing that should happen, if the goal is to lower prices, is increase supply and/or lower demand. The supply can be increased by simply changing zoning to allow for much denser residences.
The only way to do this is to zone things certain ways. For instance, pass a law that says any building in a certain area needs to be a certain height and contain n% affordable units.
Regardless of how you feel about this, it can and does happen all the time. New residential highrises in Manhattan don't get approved unless they have a percentage of low-income units.
Are new residential high-rises getting built in Manhattan at a rate which is commensurate with demand and keeping prices stable? According to Redfin[0], housing prices there are up 12.9% YoY, exceeding general inflation and showing that the rate of construction is too low.
In CA, we've added additional burdens onto affordable housing which makes them more expensive than market rate housing. A report from UC Berkeley[1] says that regulatory constraints make 'affordable' units 7% more expensive to build than market-rate units. And of course CA has also made market-rate units more expensive to construct, further exacerbating the crisis[2].
This is unsustainable. On our current trajectory we will either needlessly sprawl our way into occupying all unincorporated land (because there's no Planning Department) in the entire country or we'll have tens of millions of people living in tents and camper vans.
[0] - https://www.redfin.com/city/35948/NY/Manhattan/housing-marke...
[1] - https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/research-and-policy/the-co...
[2] - https://www.builderonline.com/land/local-markets/californias...
https://www.mercatus.org/publications/urban-economics/inclus....
Then if you banned them from making luxury cars you'd still find that the rich bought all the new cars.
The fundamental fix is let car companies build more cars.
Or we could simply make it legal and cheaper to build denser housing.
But with or without specific affordable housing areas do gentrify and long-term residents don't necessarily like it even if it results in a "better"/safer/etc. neighborhood.
I think I see your point though. at a high level, the neighborhood composition could be optimized for everyone to walk to work (wide range of incomes), or for everyone to walk to everything outside work (narrow range of incomes), but not both. or there's the US suburb approach where no one can walk to anything.
imo, assuming you're reasonably connected to work by transit, quality of life maximized by the latter arrangement (homogeneous incomes at the lowest level of organization). even if it's a little inconvenient, I will figure out how to get to work everyday. outside of work, a little inconvenience is the difference between doing or not doing all kinds of spontaneous activities.
Or we could invest in better high density housing and more mass transit and get rid of the lottery nonsense.
Every year in the United States, the Toyota motor company sells about 2 million regular Toyota cars and 300,000 expensive luxury Lexus cars. Suppose that we introduced a law that each motor company can only sell 300,000 cars a year. Which cars would Toyota continue to make?
[0] https://islandpress.org/books/affordable-city [1] https://pressroom.toyota.com/toyota-motor-north-america-repo...
You actually want it more complicated than that, maybe something like for every dollar of affordability you sell (under $X), you earn the right to sell $0.10 worth of luxury.
If you prohibit most profit you prohibit most progress.
A few will, but most won’t. The amount of risk to develop and the type of skills required are non trivial.
The reality is that if all those things were provided population would grow unchecked until resources ran out. It’s not sustainable.
On the other extreme, we can do a lot better than artificial scarcity.
In the context of cars, arguably nothing.
In the original context of real estate, all kinds of things, because having somewhere to live is essential to quality of life and reserving more of the finite real estate available for development for a few luxury homes means a lot more regular homes that could house a lot more families can't be built there instead.
In a world (kind of like the one we live in right now...) where Toyota only had components to build 500k cars a year then they'll make 300k luxury cars and 200k regular cars and buying cheap low end cars becomes almost impossible.
If the market equilibrium in an unrestricted market is 2mil:300k, or roughly 6:1, regular to luxury cars then an argument could be made that regulations should be but in place to retain that market equilibrium even during a restricted market, assuming we believe it is important that everyone can own a car.
More deeply, I don't understand how it's analogous. Why are companies prohibited from selling more than 300K cars? Is it because of too-high pollution (CO2 emissions, tire micro particles, etc.)? Is it because of a mass desire to switch to public transit systems? To stop having so many traffic deaths?
If so, then the laws will likely result in a ban on the total number of new cars, or at least higher import fees and higher tax rate. And these all shift the economics of what Toyota would produce.
As an unlikely case, if the laws were passed due to a mass movement against displays of wealth, such that private car ownership is frowned upon and luxury cars frequently get vandalized, then Toyota isn't going to make many Lexus sales at all.
In which case the rebuttal to your argument is as simple as adding another arbitrary layer of assumptions that do not generalise, in order to restrict your use of arbitrary assumptions that do not generalise, e.g "the government will not allow that split, back to discussing the original scenario."
In the UK, developers aren't allowed to build a new development (of >5 [some areas] or >10 dwellings [everywhere]) without providing sufficient affordable housing. This is usually a mixture of shared ownership properties and affordable rent properties (which must be no more than 80% of market rent, incl charges) which must be built alongside the other dwellings.
Is this a thing in the United States? If not, why not?
> there is no epidemic of fire deaths in older buildings that are not equipped with state-of-the-art sprinkler systems
For someone from the UK, where we experienced the Grenfell tower tragedy just a few years ago - and where experts have testified that sprinklers would've absolutely helped to prevent fire deaths (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-41230521), this argument comes across as so short-sighted and stupid it's not even funny. Skimping on fire safety measures is not the answer.
So local entities govern building in the USA. I know that where I live, Boulder, has a requirement for affordable housing to be built in any new development, but also allows for the developer to pay cash in lieu of building the affordable housing. The cash is then used by other entities (non-profits, the city) to build affordable housing.
More here: https://bouldercolorado.gov/unit-cash-lieu-calculator
I don't know what other cities/local governments require, though.
It's great that one city in Colorado has done something (and I'm sure it's not the only locality), but I can't help think that this sort of governance must lead to a ton of fragmentation in regulations.
Trying to do this at large levels ignores a bit of the differences in housing density and cost of housing in the area.
Would it be possible to build luxury housing in San Francisco and then some affordable housing in a different city or state?
While there is going to be fragmentation of regulations, a developer working in Boulder is working in Boulder. Building luxury housing there and then building housing in... Federal Heights or Alamosa doesn't help the affordable housing issue in Boulder.
Handling this at the city level (rather than state or federal) is likely the right spot.
The problems within the UK construction industry go far, far beyond the implementation of obvious saftey measures.
The Grenfell disater would never have happened if works had been carried out in accordance with regulations at the time, sprinklers or no sprinklers.
Having lived in neither, going off reports I'll take the UK, even with Grenfell, than the US(where the Florida collapse compensates for Grenfell).
London MSA is 1/7 of the population, so it's pretty relevant.
Because it has the regulatory requirements I detailed in my post for housing developers.
> The UK is well known for unaffordable, poor-quality housing
And houses in the states aren't poor quality? Do builders over there even know what bricks are?
Freeholds in some areas have a reputation for being unaffordable, sure. I'm not so sure that the shared ownership and affordable rent properties I refer to have this reputation, but it is clear that there's not nearly enough housing stock for demand.
Quality is definitely variable across all housing stock, but I'm not sure I'd say all new builds are of a poor quality.
And they don't work to make housing affordable, so not achieving the end goal.
> And houses in the states aren't poor quality? Do builders over there even know what bricks are?
More than a third of Britons cannot afford to heat their home to a comfortable level: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/0...
My wood home is insulated, dry, and affordable to heat.
Builders over here in earthquake country are constrained by earthquake and fire mitigation materials. Plus masonry isn't energy-efficient.
BTW, I highly recommend the PBS series "Home Diagnosis" for modern home building strategies and testing of insulation and airflow.
And for what it's worth, I ride. So helmet and gear but no belt on that.
Turns out, requiring little houses for cars be added on to every house for people gets expensive.
Population density in the US is 34.05 people per square kilometer.
Granted, a huge amount of the US should probably be discounted for a more realistic comparison (e.g. unlivable regions, BLM / park / national forest, and massive amount of farmland), which would bump the number up.
But we're still probably going to need some adjustments going from a country you can drive across in about 4 hours, to one where it would take 40+ hours.
If your “quality of life” is so compelling, why do you need to outlaw everything else, comrade?
“Tear down this wall, Mr Gorbachev”
Your city council is the People’s Central Planning Committee that runs the construction economy in your city. They decide what is produced and they decide who does it. Construction in your city is a planned economy - every bit as much as the Soviet Union or pre-Deng China.
And like every planned economy, it sucks and fails in just about every way.
It's not like a city exists in some impermeable bubble from the surrounding area. A great deal is shipped into a city through the suburbs and other surrounding area. Many workers commute in from suburbs which are often cheaper than the city even though they may have better school systems (even though the per student costs are often lower). Food comes in from generally more rural areas.
Cities and especially their denser and more walkable areas are dependent on the surrounding area in many ways. More dependent than the suburbs are on the city except perhaps for employment.
There's a reasonable argument to be made that while San Francisco was the original primary catalyst for development in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley (which is effectively suburban sprawl) would be just fine without the city at all. The same would have been true of the Boston area to a large degree especially 20 years or so ago, except perhaps for the universities.
If you want to consider the entire thing one unit (suburbs + downtown = unit), you still have to figure out how to pay for all the services. The more spread out everything is the more those services cost.
So it still comes down to the same thing. If you want, blame it on the government zoning downtown for no residents and only zoning for single family housing and therefore leading to the only affordable thing being the suburbs. But, to maintain those suburbs they're going to have to raise taxes 4x to 8x on everyone in that unit.
When in reality, the productivity of an acre (and therefore its tax revenue) depends on that acre + all its inputs (people, services, etc).
Downtowns (aka central business districts) look wildly productive, but they're fueled by people who live... not there.
From this perspective, it's really more of a call for mixed use development [0], which is able to supply more of its own requirements AND benefit from locality.
Unsurprisingly, whether it’s public housing or public transportation, there really is no way around investing in public infrastructure if you want to have a healthy society.
I.e. having a light or heavy rail stop within 2 miles gives an X credit, having a grocery or mixed use commercial (food and services) within 2 miles gives a Y credit, having bike storage and lanes gives a Z credit
Essentially, attempt to quantify the holistic experience of residents, when talking about parking requirements.
If we make the kind of housing / communities we'd like to see cheaper, developers will start building it naturally.
Edit: From the linked Reddit post: "In January 2013, LA enacted its first major parking reduction, essentially giving developers the option of replacing up to 15% of their required residential parking with bike parking if they are within 1500ft of a major light rail or metro station. However, these bike spaces must be “long term” spaces, which require locked cages, a dedicated bike servicing area." (But also notes some requirements around the bike spaces that increase the cost of making that trade-off)
Most developers would have no problem building two apartment buildings right next to each other, on every foot of available space, with no parking, selling everything, and then never giving their futures a second thought.
Zoning exists precisely because all building parties involved in are absolutely mercenary, and yet the city has to deal with the mess in the subsequent decades.
The entire parking requirement was created because previously developers had overburden street spaces without care.
So what's going on with the developer's counterparty in this transaction? I'd be happy to buy a property without parking because I don't drive a car and I find that all the extra asphalt in a neighborhood dedicated to cars actively makes it worse.
I'll grant that removing any parking requirement creates short-term chaos in places where developers under-judge the amount of parking necessary, but I also think that people systematically over-estimate how much parking a place actually needs, and that over-building parking necessarily induces demand for cars because it forces the built environment to become spread out and less walkable. I also think that if the right incentive structures are in place that it's a problem that sorts itself out in fairly short order. In this case if you build a dense housing development with very little parking and no nearby shops then a grocery store on the corner is pretty much risk-free profit since you have a large customer base in close proximity with no competition selling essential goods. If you strip out parking requirements and zoning then you also clear out a lot of the red tape that makes such store difficult or outright illegal to build.
> Zoning exists precisely because all building parties involved in are absolutely mercenary, and yet the city has to deal with the mess in the subsequent decades.
> The entire parking requirement was created because previously developers had overburden street spaces without care.
Zoning is precisely what created communities that have such hopelessly ingrained car dependence and therefore demand huge amounts of dedicated asphalt just for basic transportation.
The "streetcar suburbs" in North America, which were built before modern zoning and before car ownership became an explicit assumption of developmental policy, are still in high demand even with the streetcars ripped out because the lower setback requirements, reduced/nonexistent driveway space, narrower streets, and corner shops make it a more livable and friendly environment.
Where, once you've removed all the parking footprint that existed before? Do you have any idea how expensive it is to retrofit underground parking under an existing structure?
Are people in those neighborhoods willing to forgo the hundreds of vehicle trips a month that they will create via their Uber/Lyft/cab trips and Instacart, Amazon, Chewy, Doordash, and Uber Eats orders? Simply outsourcing those car trips to someone else, and leaving them nowhere to stop in the process, is a hypocritical pipe dream.
Walkable neighborhoods existed for millennia before these apps were invented. People just walked to a shop a block away for the things they needed. Not sure why you think that you have to "outsource those car trips to someone else" when many neighborhoods already don't need car trips at all.
I live car-free in the DC metro area. I ride a bicycle with a rack on the rear for attaching bags, I have a collapsible shopping cart that I can take on the bus, and I have a dolly for moving heavy objects short distances. I've gotten a lot done with them.
Those days are gone because no small "shop a block away" can compete with the behemoths of Amazon, Instacart or major supermarket chains that deliver, or cloud kitchens with DoorDash or UberEats, not unlike how American fast food chains and Starbucks crowded out a lot of former native mom-and-pop cafes and restaurants.
What "existed for millennia" only had to compete with nearest such other small business in each direction. Now, they're competing with the world's supply chain.
Just look at a traffic cam in any "walkable city" where vehicles still run and count the brand names crowding the streets doing trips that just didn't happen even 20 years ago.
There's a whole host of problems strongly linked to American car-dependent development for which the solutions already exist and have been in use for some time elsewhere. Air quality, street congestion, traffic fatalities, obesity, high cost-of-living, poor accessibility for the disabled, children growing up with little independence or hobbies outside the home, housing shortage, and the general unhappiness of people who have no choice but to drive everywhere to do anything in a congested suburban town.
The obstacles are not technological and have not been for some time. It's fully a social and political problem.
You can have a healthy society with private transportation and private housing, it just needs to be a rich society.
For an extra level of irony, where do wealthy Angelenos go for vacation? Paris, for its great, walkable neighborhoods that allow exactly what their city rabidly bans.
It's really worth highlighting that in most of the US it is illegal to build anything other than single-family homes ("SFHs"). The sort of medium density neighbourhoods a lot of people like are an historical anachronism in zoning terms.
It's true there are local issues too. For example, New York's scaffolding laws just make all construction expensive [1]. Basically any gravity-induced incident is 100% the employer's fault and this hugely drives up insurance costs.
Tax laws play a part too. Ultra-luxury apartments in NYC not only don't pay their fair share of property tax (in terms of market value), which is an issue New York State has to fix and has refused to for decades because upstate SFH owners don't want to pay more tax (SFHs in NY pay way less property tax than an equivalent value apartment). Ultra-luxury getting property tax abatements for new construction is a crime.
But here's a key general issue that has been proven true around tdhe world: anywhere with the free flow of capital such that you can park money in real estate in the world's urban centers with little to no oversight have experienced huge increases in property value. This incentivizes ultra-luxury pdroperty development. We need to stop this.
We need:
1. More multi-family building in SFH zoned areas. Areas that prohibit this should be penalized for it with higher property taxes (if it's not outlawed entirely);
2. More medium-density development along transport corridors where we can and do create walkable neighbourhoods; and
3. More high-density affordable housing in urban centers.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/18/nyregion/campaign-underwa...
This is a flat lie.
http://www.bostonplans.org/projects/development-projects?sor...
The cities of the world that don't feel like they're enveloped in a housing crisis have opposite zoning restrictions to those that do - namely they restrict single-family homes and high rises, and permit that middle-sized building and also for existing single family homes to be converted into multiplexes.
https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...
This should be pasted liberally across the internet
Research shows that if you build a new expensive apartment, it starts a avalanche of people moving and just 2-4 steps later someone with low income gets into a new apartment.
Background assumptions: no empty apartments (this can be fixed with tax) , no NIMBY limits for housing quantity or quality.
Critics focusing on poor aesthetics of high/wide buildings, lack of greens and parking spaces, overload of civil infrastructure such as child care/schools. But it's quite obvious you can't have all of that taken care of and keep the existing price tag. Speaking of which, a basic studio apartment on the outskirts of SPb could cost you as few as 20k$ a few years back, especially if bought early in development cycle (which does carry some risks).
According to Wikipedia:
* ~4 million mi^2 of land * ~130 million housholds
This is about 19 acres per family. Of course this is an overestimate because a lot of land is waterways, mountains, etc. Even if we assume that we're off by 100x that's .2 acres/family which equates to a house something like this: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/40-Canvasback-Ln-Elizabet...
Maybe instead of trying to put as many people as possible into as small of a square foot area we could:
1. Build public transit that can cover larger distances. (Street cars, busses, subways)
2. Artificially stimulate new communities (0 property & sales tax for any restaurants, bars, theaters, etc for 30 years)
3. Build out high quality infrastructure. This could be built underground with maintenance tunnels that allow these utilities to be repaired and could be subsidized by the construction of subways. (sewers, power, fiber)
While there are obvious gaps and issues with physical construction and zoning, the real issue is that housing, and many other assets, have gone up way above inflation for the last 14 years. And the corrections do not wipe out enough of those gains.
If we never solve the asset inflation problem with real estate values, all others issues are ultimately moot.
Money has been cheaper during that time - as investors chase after yields assets go up in value:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US
If people could extract yield from savings accounts people would leave their money in the bank.
In 2000 you could get 5% annual return from your savings account - but during the last 20 years you would have been better off buying stocks or real estate.
When rates went to zero, capital chased after yield: housing, stocks, NFTs
In a sane market when a good (housing) is extremely scarce and valuable, people make more of it and naturally compete away the profits to bring the price comes down.
But the point is that todays new luxury homes become tomorrow’s working class bargains. The analogies to the car market are instructive. Wealthy people, by insisting on paying top dollar for the latest style and technology, indirectly subsidize the poor. Their constant rotation to the latest and greatest creates a huge surplus of used cars/homes that are almost just as good (even if not as high status) as their new counterparts.
Or at least this is how it worked until the NIMBYs took over and blocked the demand for new luxury housing.
We don't need hand-down/trickle-down, we need 1200 sqft entry-level housing built in line with demand. In large tracts of the nation this is not happening.
That's what we have in the Bay Area - $3,000,000 houses in Mountain View that working class people used to live a few decades ago. And now working class people are priced out of even those simple houses. Nobody wins.
Now after all of these fix costs would I rather build luxury units that net me tons of money or affordable units that net me little money? And also the neighborhood itself is opposed to a lot of low-income housing for all sorts of class reasons. It’s just not in any stakeholder interest.
I'm coming from an attitude of "a house is a home, a machine to make the lives of my family easier and more comfortable", not "houses are an investment with incidental utility as shelter." Is it that many don't care about their house as a home?
So, it's somewhat of a luxury to be able to form an emotional attachment to your home, without worrying about its effect on your finances.
Isn’t that the rule ? Wasn’t there a huge shift to the US west in search of opportunities?
People move all the time to find a better life for themselves
You can sit around and wait for your cities laws to revert the market and offer walkable cities, mass public transit, solve homelessness… or move
Many people move because they're priced out of their former dwellings. Many people who want to move to a different area can't because of financial/family reasons.
In Europe at least legality of the process. I do a shitload of DIY in the home and so does my brother in his home. Fancy hotel-looking closet with lighting and whatnots? (this sure give a "luxury" feel): we got it. But I'm not allowed to build a house from scracth. I'd love to: my grandfather build a chalet all by himself in the fifties and that chalet still exists.
For the architect plans you kinda can do it yourself and then find an architect that'll adapt and sign the plans.
But the concrete, the electricity: you need stamps/approval from professional and the state does send people verifying that everything is kosher.
You can have the wall and electricity lay out and then do a lot yourself, but you now have the issue that the price you'll pay for "stuff" aren't the discounted prices the professionals do get.
Most people do not even understand something as simple as marginal income taxes and income tax withholding procedures. They would be well out of their league managing real estate development. Not to mention they would need to quit their day job to manage all the contractors.
And even with a general contractor (GC), you need to know enough and spend enough time to make sure you and/or the GC is not getting scammed. You will not find out about big problems until years after, and good luck pursuing those at fault.
Also, most people have nowhere near the necessary liquidity or cash flow to handle purchasing land, obtaining a construction loan, and managing payments for materials and labor.
I'd also say zoning generally prohibits this in most desirable areas. Developers have the ability to do a lot of legal work to get approvals and permits. Since they are getting approval for a large number of buildings or units, they can distribute that cost and so they can sometimes build in those desirable areas where it would be too costly for me to build as an individual.
1) The animating principle of his simple construction designs was that they were based on off-the-shelf materials and the industry conventions on how they are sold, and could be built incrementally. Those designs turned out to be hard to insulate. Alternatives that were far better to insulate would require new designs, the materials were harder to find, and building codes are tuned to enforcing the exact kind of construction that we always do (and that the old designs were a variation of.) He also created this sort of drag and drop style of architecture based on standard material sizes enabling people to design their houses themselves, and all of that has to be thrown away with alternative materials. That gets rid of most of Walter Segal's material contribution, leaving only the spirit of self-building.
2) Houses in Segal developments ended up shooting up in value, so it ultimately didn't solve any problems. It's land value that's important anyway. The way to solve this would be to only self-build in undesirable areas or on your own land?
* in my humble opinion from research.
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http://www.ianwhite.info/THE_SEGAL_METHOD.pdf
http://www.waltersegal.org.uk/
https://thequietus.com/articles/19906-aa-self-build-revoluti...
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/peek-inside-the-ho... [posted just for the main photograph and its caption. Segal houses were eventually just baubles for rich people.]
"appliances" too. moreso if you count frankenstein abominations that only I can run safely. there's some things I could sell to others and expect them to use without dying, so that counts.
"Laptops" meh. but I've had mobile computing things that featured structural duct tape and were indeed mobile, so I think that counts too.
"Car" ... I've assisted with the construction of go karts, dune buggies, and the repurposing of mass market cars into nasty perversions of their original functions. So I'll say "done that" too.
So yes, I think on reflection I can answer "I do."
Sure there are edge cases like nice antiques and the building where they filmed Downton Abbey but for the most part older stuff is just less nice.
According to this interpretation therefore, if you build a new house, and it is broadly similar to houses in the neighborhood in which you build it… it’s going to be expensive relative to its neighbors. It will perhaps be perceived as “luxury” despite just being new.
The article suggests changing zoning so triplex/fourplexes can be built. Even if they have marble countertops, they'd still be more affordable than a house.
Currently, I can't build the housing version of a Camry.
I’ve bought five properties over the years. The two I bought to live in I had built and never had the maintenance costs people complain about (2002-2012 and 2016 - present).
He did just rebuild a house after a fire and put all the latest gadgetry and controls in. The heat pump seems nice but mostly I find there's a lot of complexity and not a lot that offers significant advantages relative to my house.
Better materials? I'm not convinced. Drafty doors and windows, little insulation, lead paint, outdated plumbing parts, and old wires are a few things that were used. Any serious look at windows used during building booms during the 50's dispels the materials, honestly - at least in the US.
More space? Again, only if you get the right house. Plenty of old houses are small. You also have a bit of survivor bias here: Old, large houses that were expensive were more likely to be maintained and preserved later. I'll also point out that a good deal of old houses are now apartments, and also point out that the space you get in an old house costs more to heat. On top of that, this was a space designed for a different time period. That means that space can be a much less efficient space than you get in a new house that is wired for modern times.
Maybe using more mature trees really isn't something we should be doing right now? At least some of those mature trees contributed to deforestation and it seems better to get trees not from old growth, but from new growth from a well-managed forest area, where swaths of trees are replanted.
Old houses are just full of downfalls, even if you happen to be getting more space and possibly a better looking house.
The trees are more mature because they were planted longer ago. Planting trees in suburbia is the opposite of deforestation.
I'm saying that houses in areas built in the 1920s have beautiful hundred-year old trees along the roads. Houses built in the 2020s have tiny saplings. I'm saying the former is nicer than the latter.
Not talking about building materials. Talking about the environment around the houses.
The flipside is that sometimes the mature tree isn't healthy, and remediation of a large and dying tree can be tricky and expensive.
Also lead and asbestos are no fun. Or thatched roofs, but I admit that's my own very particular concern having bought a 200+ year old house.
But they aren't of equivalent quality. That's the point.
And houses generally have gotten far larger over time.
I can't really see us ever going back to solid-stone construction and the kind of intricate architecture we used to have in our culture.
> And houses generally have gotten far larger over time.
Rooms used to be 3m tall - they've shrunk over time to 2.4m tall. New-builds have zero storage.
Well yeah if you build it bespoke you can have ceilings as high as you want. But we're talking about houses that normal people buy from developers.
But many other aspects of the house are annoying and silly.
That said, I'm not sure I have much sympathy for these buyers. There is a new esatate near me where everyone is driving a newish car in the 30-50K price range?
Of course we refinanced when the housing market got crazy and reduced the interest rate to 1.5% and got rid of PMI (FHA MPI)
I guess either it's a dangerous amount of finance or I'm just very underpaid. Not that's I'd buy a new car anyway, I'll let someone eat that five-digits depreciation thank you.