The Housing Shortage Affects Everything | Hacker News Reader

The Housing Shortage Affects Everything

theatlantic.com

46 pointsGalenErso22 comments

>The answer is to build more homes in our most desirable places

The answer to how to make that happen is to tax land value.

Land value tax might help but I don’t think it is necessary. We need to allow housing to be built. I think there is enough demand and plenty of people willing to sell to get patchwork development. People aren’t talking about huge changes, mostly multiplexes in single-family areas and high-density in designated corridors.

Land value tax might be needed for holdouts, but I suspect greed will do it. Also, forcing out rich grandmas is unpopular.

Do you mean a property tax? We already have those. California also has a sales tax on real estate.

Are there really many cities in the western world that dont have a housing shortage? I'm worried that the housing shortage isn't caused by increased population, and that building more houses won't necessarily solve the problem.

I have no housing research to back this up but wonder if it’s similar to increasing the number of lanes on a road Can lead to worse traffic

I suspect that in much of the western world what looks like a shortage of housing is actually an excess of capital.

Not excess of capital, but rather excess of money, due in large part to expansionary monetary policy such as reduced interest rates, allowing companies and investors to scoop up housing, supply of which is not flexible in the short term. In a smaller part it is decades of NIMBY activism and zoning laws making it near impossible to build new homes.

It isn’t increased population, it’s population increase in targeted areas (cities), plus financial instruments that make it easy to afford more expensive homes, plus existing homeowners with no incentive to encourage more supply.

I agree. I think it's imperative that we come up with a way to properly count underutilized properties. By underutilized properties I mean empty, landbanked, holiday and second homes, Airbnb's, etc - basically everything that isn't a primary residence.

I've seen many indications that these have increased as a proportion of the housing stock. I appreciate that people have a right to do what they like with their property, but when so many start buying properties that are then removed from the 'primary residence' portion of the stock, we have to look at what this means for society.

There are plenty which don’t. Look at the smaller US cities.

You can get large, relatively new houses in Youngstown, OH for less than $150/sq foot. Similar prices can be found in Omaha, NE or Iowa City, IA or Oklahoma City, OK. (For reference I looked for houses with at least four bedrooms in all places.)

This isn’t a matter of the cost of construction. It’s a matter of supply not keeping up with demand due to very very very stringent regulations on land use. None of this has to happen. This is a self-inflicted wound.

Except that before the “I’ve Never Seen A Bubble” Federal Reserve and “Everything’s AAA” Credit Agencies got involved those prices were closer to $60/sq foot. The massive amount of QE since 2008 and 2020 has sloshed into the housing market.

The saying used to me that “all real estate is local” meaning that economic trends didn’t dominate local economic trends. Today it’s completely dominated by the Fed.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IASTHPI

I don't know where the bagel belt is, but I'm going to guess it's New York. If that's the case, the bagel shops in San Francisco actually open at the same time. I call this the EST theory of everything.

Clever, but I thihk you have ut backwards. 9 in California would be noon in New York.

You're right. It must be the housing thing then.

https://archive.is/yQnzZ

So the article (which I can't load again due to paywall) ends on the note of "the only solution is to build more housing in the most desired places" which is well enough but not true. like Christopher Alexander explained in A City Is Not A Tree, places and locations are not the same thing. We can extend a place far beyond its location by connecting it efficiently to other locations.

Build homes, yes. But build really good transit as well. Help people move around a big area easily and cheaply and the housing crisis will be no more.

> Help people move around a big area easily and cheaply and the housing crisis will be no more

And yet, cities/regions with great transit systems are the most expensive to live and have the most severe shortages. HK, London, NYC, SF...

Your point is correct, but let’s note that SF doesn’t have a great transit system.

Untrue: https://jamesjgleeson.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/how-tokyo-bui...

Also, SF has a great transit system?

Don't many people in Tokyo regularly spend their nights in tiny capsules or pods?

I certainly wouldn't say "regularly" - rarely might be a better word. Sometimes it makes sense to crash at a capsule hotel if the trains are closed for the night or something, but that's not common for most (or many) people. Nowadays the capsule hotels cater more towards tourists than their original market anyways.

I get your point but none of those are regions with great transit any more. SF's transit is awful, NYC the same. If borderless transit with mainland existed HK's residential pressure would definitely be eased by Guangdong. Consider Tokyo, where both building and transit have progressed at a good pace and housing prices have remained affordable (despite the fame).

Still, maybe I should have put my idea forward a different way: If you are currently facing a housing crisis, the way to fix it is to build great transit to somewhere with plenty of housing availability. This fix needs to be implemented recursively at a scale that matches the city in need. It's much easier than the alternative of trying to densify an existing city, which could be impossible in many scenarios.

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