In what way is building more housing simple? If it were that straightforward, California (which has much more space and money) would have done it, and Californians wouldn't be moving to Portugal.
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.