The U.S. Needs More Housing Than Almost Anyone Can Imagine | Hacker News Reader

The U.S. Needs More Housing Than Almost Anyone Can Imagine

theatlantic.com

15 pointsjdkee9 comments

Quite the unimaginative take on the problem. Everyone wants to live at the beach but most regular folk would settle for being able to commute wiithin 60-90 minutes of the beach. If your head is stuck in the box you might be thinking more cars and freeways. How about build a lot of 500Mph+ bullet trains? ~700Mi radius from santa monica,DC or Manhattan is wide enough for new cheaper houses and apartments to become economically attractive.

The 300Bi build back better plan focused on electric cars instead. There won't be another chance in the next 10-15 years sadly. I think electric car infra also has its place but solving housing issues and environmental issues at the same time would have been better I think.

Electric cars are the consensus hotness because they sell to an existing paradigm.

The existing automakers can swap a few parts bins and still continue to operate. The real-estate industrial complex can continue to carve off suburbs to the horizon.

I feel like we could do better if we had a more top-down planned economy; we could build new city sectors around an economic engine, and ensure that housing and transit dovetail with it, rather than hoping the market haphazardly allocates stuff right.

I was hoping they could still give EVs a few billion and have left over for the trains.

Too down planning failed a lot in the past but then again they didn't have high speed internet wich solves the communication+agility issues at the core of the failure. Not gonna happen in the US though.

Even if cities we less restrictive on permitting where would they build all these houses? It’s not like SF, SJ or NY have vast areas of undeveloped land available.

San Francisco does, in the upwards direction. They've severely limited building tall, multi use buildings there. John Stossell did a great video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9pgh5EO6lw

I’m not aware of any metro area that’s building affordable high rise housing. The cost of construction goes up exponentially as you increase a building’s height. Even if SF had no restrictions on height I doubt most construction would be over 10 stories due to fire/building codes getting much more restrictive. So you’re left with a developer paying ~$3M to acquire a duplex that they can then build a max of 10 units on. Just the cost of the land is going to require $300K from each unit sold. Add in the construction costs, and a modest profit and you’re back up to 1M+ unit cost. 1M condo is still not affordable for working class residents.

Long Island and Westchester fight tooth and nail to prevent development: we spend billions to improve train service on LIRR, but no large apartment buildings can be built near the stations. It’s just single family homes owned by hedge fund guys.

Brooklyn and Queens have huge neighborhoods full of brownstones within minutes of subway stops. Even Manhattan too, in certain neighborhoods like the West Village and Soho.

It's possible to build on multiple brownstones and replace it with a denser multifamily but:

  You have to own the lots

  You have to get permits and go through a lot of reviews by the city and possibly the state (if it's condos)

  You'll still be faced with aging infrastructure.  The subway is 2/3 capacity at most and still there are delays and crowded train cars.

I'm not questioning the wisdom of higher density, I'm questioning the feasibility of it. How many years and how much did it cost to make a few blocks of 2nd avenue subway?

London and Paris appear to be doing a better job at expanding the city outward, adding infrastructure as they go.

There is something deeply, fundamentally wrong with modern urban growth in the U.S., and I suspect it has to do with the decentralized nature of the political system. How many layers of approvals do you need here and how much coordination do you need with how many agencies across how many levels of government from local to Federal.

https://archive.ph/IysmI

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