Unleash the trailers: End regulatory discrimination against manufactured housing
slowboring.com
slowboring.com
[1] https://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/working-papers/solvi... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31623842 (120 points, 2 days ago, 185 comments)
We saw how devastating this was during the paradise fires and Napa tubbs fires earlier. Some areas are not meant to be habitable because it’s simply not feasible.
There is a reason the tropics are over populated vs the rest of the world. Heating and cooling costs are ridiculously high and not sustainable. We need timber, fossil fuel powdered grids and snaking supply chains..all of them rely on fossil fuels.
The restrictions help us live well. Perhaps it time to build smart and not because we need to get what we demand … and we usually demand what we don’t have..and can’t have.
In other words, ‘desirable areas’ are desirable because there is a high operating cost to it. Putting cheap homes where gas is 6 bucks a gallon and pretty much everything else is expensive is setting people up for penury because they simply can’t afford to live there even if they move there. Harsh truth.
A lot of the costs of city infrastructure is borne by developers and passed on to the home owner in the price.
The city relies on high home cost to fund the city expenses via property taxes.
Low income and affordable homes are also subsidized by high developer built market rate homes.
Mortgages require homes to last at least 30-50 years. You can’t get that with manufactured homes whose main advantage is the low cost.
The solution to housing everyone is not building homes first. It’s building infrastructure first and then build around the carrying capacity of that infrastructure. This is how high density cities around the world are designed.
You can’t guesstimate what it takes to run a city after you fill it up. It’s working backwards. First determine all of the infrastructure load, pressures and costs..and then populate the city. This is exactly the reason zoning and building restrictions exist. As they should.
Unliveable, unloveable and unaffordable cities are a direct result of forgetting the above rules. I don’t know when it happened, but clearly someone thought that cities can be raised out of nothing. Reality? It’s more nuanced and multi layered.
> Mortgages require homes to last at least 30-50 years. You can’t get that with manufactured homes whose main advantage is the low cost.
Manufactured homes of all sorts absolutely can last a long time & be affordable. Especially if we stop discriminating against them & allow them to be built at significant scale.
> The city relies on high home cost to fund the city expenses via property taxes. Low income and affordable homes are also subsidized by high developer built market rate homes.
The idea that only rich people matter & the poor are only bad is false & prejudiced & harmful. If your latter statement is true, perhaps that's better cause to explore options where lower income/affordable houses can be made more effectively?
> In other words, ‘desirable areas’ are desirable because there is a high operating cost to it
I've always heard denser areas are often much more efficient since municipal services can be better scaled & more effectively ran, without having to cover so much physical area. I certainly think there's a lot of spawl that could be converted to much denser forms, and manufactured housing absolutely could work well.
> The solution to housing everyone is not building homes first. It’s building infrastructure first and then build around the carrying capacity of that infrastructure.
There is definitely some truth to the need for capacity planning! But we need to be building housing. And we are. And we have the opportunity to be doing a better job, to be getting better outcomes, cheaper, & the opportunity to be investing in doing even better. Gatekeeping getting good at housing, saying we shouldn't work on it, because we need to do other things first, is wrong. We're building housing now, and we're not doing it as well as we could or should.
> The restrictions help us live well.
Citation needed. And, capitally, for what definitions of "us"?
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Marginal Revolution had a decent roundup off recent manufactured housing material, recommendable[1]. Did you know:
> Manufactured homes briefly dominated the U.S. housing market during the 1960s. By 1972, these homes — not just mobile homes but small-scale modular houses — accounted for some 60% of all new single-family homes produced nationwide, according to census data. That number has diminished so much that the role of factories in building affordable housing has gone all but forgotten.
Plenty plenty plenty of those Sears Roebuck & many other houses are still doing fine. There's also other facts to manufactured housing, like manufactured housing being 45% more carbon-efficient to make[2], and many designs are more efficient to live in, owing to much better tolerances & better planning.
Please folks, keep a somewhat open mind.
[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/06/fa...
[2] https://www.businessgreen.com/news/4050792/study-modular-hom...
There is no benefit to homeowners who have sunk capital. In which universe do you think people who have built value will give it up?
There is a place for manufactured homes and there is a place for mansions. There is a place for apartments and high rises. They cannot exist together and people will fight tooth and nail for it. It is definitely a class issue and will always be that way as land is a restricted asset that cannot be manufactured.
High density will have to be cheap because it costs a lot to run and maintain a city. Putting a lot of poor people to run a city expensively is not earth math.
What was the population of the USA when manufactured homes from sears reigned supreme? It is difficult to take these arguments seriously. I literally do not know one city in the whole world that is high density and affordable. Villages are cheaper to live in than towns ..that are cheaper than densely populated cities. Why cheap? Because they are designed with less amenities and infrastructure. Cheap homes are always at the edges. And this is universal.
I have lived in multiple cities and countries. Nowhere but in America have I see such willful stubborn spoon fed ignorance about very basic economics ..macro and micro.
Anyways..I do not want to sink into an argument. It is my opinion and I had expressed it in my previous reply. I do not wish to engage in debate. I don’t believe it would be fruitful or interesting. Have a good day.