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Comment by nacho2sweet | Hacker News Reader

I mean good luck but the YIMBY movement is a very pro investor movement.

Decrepit old SFH selling for $1.6 million turned into a 4 plex here in Vancouver would see each unit in the 4 plex selling for $1.4+ million (maybe $1.1 for the basement suite). Friend bought in a converted old place 780 sqft attic suite $940k. It doesn't really make stuff affordable.

It was sold here as "the missing middle" and they basically dragged a mouse over huge washes of neighbourhoods like SimCity and said you could do 5 unit conversions. Fixer-upper SFH become gut out conversion SFH and are priced based on the investment of the 5plex conversion and what those can be sold for.

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Just because someplace is so deep in the housing debt hole doesn't mean the approach isn't a good one.

Making more of something when you have a shortage is the way to fix it.

4 nice, brand new 1.4 million dollar homes is 1) more housing and 2) cheaper than a decrepit 1.6 million dollar home. It sounds like progress even if it hasn't fixed all the problems.

Sounds like they need to just keep going down that path of legalizing housing. Where I lived in Italy, it was pretty normal to have 6/8/10 home buildings, and that was in a town of maybe 200K without any serious geographic constraints.

BTW, nothing saying you can't also do some things to directly help people who can't afford a million dollar home. Subsidized housing is good too - just that it's tough to create enough of it, so we need to fix the broken market too.

When you're ten feet deep in a hole you don't see out of it by climbing up one foot.

Last time I checked 1.4 is less than 1.6 champ.

The balance between those "evil investors" and affordable housing needs is not zero sum, no matter what people on twitter tell you.

New homes are going to be built at market prices. The market prices are high, but the new homes will push them down.

A few years ago, $800k homes were consistently opposed on the basis that they aren't affordable to anyone, so not many were built. Now because so few were built, houses cost $1.6M.

Will we repeat the same mistake, and oppose $1.4M homes on the basis that they aren't affordable?

In 10 years we might be having the same discussion about $3M homes.

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