Portugal should build more housing, which is a simple, effective solution if the rent is too damn high: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/the-ren....
The nice thing about indoor space is that we can make pretty much as much of it as we'd like.
"I'd do anything for lower housing prices!"
Build more housing.
"...but I won't do that."
Maybe SF doesn't want to build more housing, but this isn't universal.
The other part is that the same things that make it slower to build more housing also make it more expensive, all the various bureaucratic processes.
Furthermore builders will need to be incentivized appropriately otherwise we'd get an abundance of luxury apartments (higher margins).
https://old.reddit.com/r/yimby/comments/wz3tq0/anything_but_...
This is not some metropolis or even medium city. Quite the opposite.
What? Have you ever been in Lisbon? The city is pretty dense as it is. You could mostly just build higher, and that has its limits too, depending on the structure and foundation.
Adding more housing outside the core of the city might not be attractive enough. And increasing the density of people also means you need to increase the density of services (public and private) and utilities, which also comes with its own problem.
Lisbon: 6,452/km2
Barcelona: 16,000/km2
NYC: 25,000+/km2 (depends on the source)
Lower East Side NYC: 33,600/km2 - due to zoning regs, there are very few buildings over 9 stories... but every building is 9 stories!
Lower East Side NYC 1910: 144,000+/km2 - visit https://www.tenement.org/ to learn more.
Kowloon Walled City, 1970s: ~2M/km2 !!! - inspiring 1000s of dystopian Sci Fi stories from Akira to Blade Runner. https://www.google.com/search?q=Kowloon+Walled+City
25,000/km2
It’s pretty quiet too! :)
There are other decent metropolises in Portugal and other fun spots around the country not to get crammed in the capital.
People can work from nearby towns where housing costs are relatively moderate and just hit the head office in Lisbon one or two times a week.
Corporations and people need to adapt to the changing circumstances and to be open to make the necessary adjustments to advance in this world.
This is the exact way that janitors and baristas and everyone servicing those 100k+ a year software engineers is priced out.
Took a train to Sintra, there were endless and endless 6 story-miles long buildings forever. Portugal seems insanely dense.
Lisbon: 100.05 km^2 , 544k people
San Francisco: 121.48 km^2, 873k people
20% more room than Lisbon, 60% more people.
This is just the dark side of globalism cheered by Portuguese politics for decades. Competition is global now. Local middle class is having their lunch eaten by foreign rich people or even middle classes from wealthier countries while the unrestricted influx of emmigrants from poorer countries keep sallaries down.
Suck it up and enjoy.
How do you arrive to that conclusion?
- If you built 100 million new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall?
- If you built 10 million new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall?
- If you built 1 million new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall?
- If you built 100k new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall?
- If you built 10k new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall?
- If you built 1k new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall?
Even if you have a model that says that building more houses raises prices for some number of houses, surely increasing the number will eventually make prices fall, wouldn't you agree?
Where is that number? Shouldn't the discussion about how big is that number, and how to achieve building that many houses?
"Supply increses lead to price increases" is a pretty extraordinary claim, and the only charitable interpretation of it is with the addition of "up to a point". Where is that point? Why not make the charitable interpretation yourself that people recommending more housing are recommending more housing past the price increase point?
To be clear, I don't believe that the supply/price curve is anything but sloping downwards, but even if your one does have a hump, being against housing still sounds like a bad conclusion.
Anyway, the problems is not so much that there is not enough housing, but that it is on the wrong place.
Globalization is inevitable. What I don't buy is the rate of change, it _must_ be smooth or the system may implode. Blind and raw globalization is just a way to feed the nationalisms that most people are afraid of.
But what that amounts to is, "we could do it, but collectively don't feel like it."
six weeks. People were moving in three months after breaking ground.
I guarantee if California said tomorrow, "build what you like on your land, there will be no permits required!" People would flock to build on the land. Whether the dangers of that outweighs the dangers of homelessness and high price families spend on rent that makes healthcare, healthy food, and education less affordable, is an exercise for the reader.
The challenge is nearly always political in nature: a lot of vested interests want to go out of their way to make it harder to build more housing.
https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23014/houston/population
They have also managed this with affordable housing.
That's something to learn from.
Texas has allowed lots of houses to be built. It's perfectly doable. CA did it until the 1980s.
Check out Arbitrary Lines by Nolan Gray for how Zoning stops people building houses.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59613917-arbitrary-lines
People need to probably drastically limit what they think of when they think of affordable housing. Think multi-family homes where each dwelling supports 4 people and is < 800 sq-feet. 1 bathroom, 1 communal area (w/ small range + table) and 2 bedrooms.
Look to the disposable homes of Japan I guess.
I think the tiny home concept makes sense as it’s trailers without the stigma. But yes, we probably need to think of a new type of town built around small properties that are pre-fab and disposable outside the connecting infrastructure.
I don’t think dense towers are the answer though.
Suppose you see a man strangling himself, and he wants to know how to get out of his predicament. Does he need a VC-backed startup to sell him an anti-strangulation machine? No, he just needs to stop strangling himself! To hell with "innovation".
Land prices in the US (or the UK, or any other place with a housing crisis) are not a limiting factor, if anything they're what would fuel the construction if it were allowed to happen. Property values within cities are so inflated precisely because of the zoning which makes it impossible to build the kind of housing needed to serve the immense demand.
So even if you build multi-family dwellings, the crisis isn’t resolved because the cost of construction, maintenance, and property taxes are out of reach. Unless it is subsidized. The UK is evidence of this. Almost all their housing is multi-family and dense and unit size is small even by European standards. But it’s expensive still. And they keep building.
Japan is a good example of a place where there isn’t a housing crisis and it’s because homes are mainly disposable and very small.
>So even if you build multi-family dwellings, the crisis isn’t resolved because the cost of construction, maintenance, and property taxes are out of reach. Unless it is subsidized. The UK is evidence of this. Almost all their housing is multi-family and dense and unit size is small even by European standards. But it’s expensive still. And they keep building.
No, this is totally, completely wrong, the housing crisis here is not because of materials or labour costs. It is a policy failure: a sluggish, capricious planning system, entrenched NIMBYism and politicians that cave to it, massive legal restrictions on supply, and subsidies to demand. We aren't building enough, there is a massive shortfall in housing supply.
See this thread: https://nitter.net/AntBreach/status/1121362679367598080
There are all sorts of obvious political fixes to this (repeal prop 13, end single-family zoning, incentivize building mixed-use, mixed-income residences, whatever), but I can't imagine any passing any time soon. Homeowners have all the power, fight all these changes tooth and nail (often through lawsuits against developers on environmental protection grounds) at the local level.
It might be the _right_ solution, but if it failed to be adopted for so long it can't be that simple, isn't it ?
They are an active party, so you can’t just say “it works, but only if these people don’t exist”. This means the “simple” solution only applies to an imaginary world, and an actual solution requires a lot more thought and adjustment to accommodate for the reality of the problem.
Or if they're crazy enough to want to keep these old buildings they could just build all the skycrapers in the park surrounding peak Monsanto, easy.
/s
Historical buildings are nice, but for apartment blocks at least, yes, the priority has to be actually housing people. You can always require historical-looking facades if looks are a concern.
I assume you have actually seen the inside of old buildings with your own eyes.
In no way is the look & feel of the inside of an old building comparable to a modern one.
Yes, old buildings sure have downsides. But pretending nobody looses anything when you only keep historical (or even just historical looking) facades is eyewash.
I bet there are ways for the Portuguese Gvt to encourage renovation of all the dilapidated old style buildings instead of encouraging speculators to wait for them to collapse so they can build new and cheap and with loosing every bit of charm a building can have.