Hacker News Reader

Comment by zbrozek | Hacker News Reader

Housing might be neither. There we have artificially constrained supply, driving up prices and price volatility.

How would you drive down cost in housing? Automate building prefabricated homes of a simple common designs. Use smaller lots of land. Build smaller units. Build higher to put more units on the same land. Build multi-family/apartment style to reduce single family home costs (siding/roofing/boiler/yard/etc). Basically all the things government tends to ban and populace tends to frown upon.

Most stats have shown we haven't really made much labor efficiencies on housing construction. No one wants to live in a prefabricated / factory built home, which is what would drive down the labor costs dramatically. That said I'm kind of a weirdo and like to browse the container home websites frequently, lol.

Further, modern homes are bigger (and nicer) than our parents or their parents generation lived in.

Couple that with the land component being basically inflationary due to natural scarcity PLUS government zoning rules restricting lot sizes to be artificially high, banning multi-family construction, etc.

You have a lot (basically all) tipping the needle towards higher cost.

You drive down housing costs by building more housing, full stop. Housing is expensive because the supply is extremely limited, and the supply is limited because it's too hard to actually build housing, because governments and NIMBYs seemingly don't want more housing.

Yes I think we agree here.

There is tons of cheap, prefab housing available, they're called trailer parks. They're everywhere except where you want to be. The anti-NIMBY argument basically boils down to "If I can't have that house, no one should have it. Let's invoke the unfairness of life and have it torn down, or else build a vertical trailer park next to it."

I think the NIMBY argument is - no you can’t build stuff on your land because I don’t like it.

See it works both ways.

YIMBY argument is largely that government and neighbors shouldn’t have such a front ability to restrict development.

The YIMBY crowd basically boils down to "do whatever you want, I don't care, just don't stop me doing what I want". More basically, "government regulation bad, capitalism good". which happens to be one of the Republican party's main platform points (in theory, but only when it suits their own goals). The YIMBY crowd doesn't want to tear down your house, it wants to let YOU tear down your house and build something more profitable in its place.

Activists recently prevailed on my city's government to rewrite the zoning ordinance, making my block of single family homes eligible to be torn down and turned into 4-plexes. I personally don't have a huge problem with it - from a libertarian point of view - because in theory, that means exactly what you said. I can sell my property for more money or develop it and make more from it. The aspect of it that irritates me is that those weren't the conditions under which I bought the house, and the reasoning behind the change was a foolish sop toward social justice, and clearly comes from a place of sheer hatred born of jealousy toward anyone living in a single family dwelling. I wouldn't have bought the house to live in if I'd known that ten years later it would be surrounded by apartment buildings. And so that plus the castigation of people trying to maintain their space as "NIMBY" leaves me mainly with the attitude that they can have it, I'll take the profit and move somewhere they can't afford and have less leverage to screw up.

Again, trailer parks have been a thing for 70 years now. The innovation here has been rewriting zoning rules without actually rezoning, to bring the trailer park to people who can afford to live somewhere better. The funny thing about class warfare, though, is that people take their lack of class with them and end up making slums wherever they go, and other people manage to make a buck and stay ahead of them.

> The aspect of it that irritates me is that those weren't the conditions under which I bought the house

There were no conditions that the surrounding properties wouldn't change over time. You might have thought there were, but it was an illusion. If you want to control your neighborhood, buy it for yourself.

> the reasoning behind the change was a foolish sop toward social justice, and clearly comes from a place of sheer hatred born of jealousy toward anyone living in a single family dwelling.

This is ridiculous. The reason behind the change was likely because residents of your city want cheaper housing, and your government is trying to make that happen. Most Americans grew up in single family homes, but that doesn't necessarily mean they want to keep living there themselves, and any animosity towards single family homes is because these people are forced to live there because nothing else is available in their city, and they would rather spend their money on something else rather than a single family home.

Your suggestion that denser housing options like low-rise (plexes), midrise, or even highrise are "slums" is patently false.

The only constant in life is change. Or as certain fictional character said, "Nothing is a line. Everything everywhere is always moving forever. Get used to it."

Buying a piece of land doesn't entitle us to control what happens on neighboring pieces of land.

My parents house used to be surrounded by farms and woods, now it's surrounded by homes.

100 years ago 5 story brownstones in NYC were surrounded by other brownstones, then by mid-rises, and now by high-rises.

The vacant lot next to me is now going to be developed into a house. If I wanted it vacant, I should have bought it and carried the RE tax indefinitely.

No one is banning single family homes. We are just trying to reconcile that the main cost lever is density, and in a country with growing population, mostly crowding into a few metropolitan areas.. if you want the next generation to be able to afford a place to live, we can't leave the real estate market ossified.

This is an attempt to change some laws set by the previous generation that restricts your right to develop your land, and freezes the housing market as it is, constraining supply.

If the state was literally banning the construction of single family homes, or taking yours away with eminent domain, you'd have more of a leg to stand on.

Generally the government problem is government subsidizes demand for housing without subsidizing supply. More dollars chasing fixed goods.

Given that the same house costs vastly different amounts in different places, it seems reasonable that those places drive the costs to be different. Maybe in rural Nebraska the actual cost of building materials and the technology of construction is relevant.

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area the twin forces of NIMBYism and Big Government have made it difficult and uneconomical to build anything. The NIMBYs have enacted extremely restrictive zoning laws almost everywhere that prevents you from entitling projects on the front end, and well-intentioned over-regulation has driven up the cost actually building anything on the back end.

After you spend years in public hearings placating bored and angry old people, you then need to hire more professional services, pay higher impact fees, pay higher permitting fees, etc than practically anywhere else in the country. It'll cost me more to knock down my house here than it would cost to build the same plans somewhere else.

Yes, the land & zoning compliance costs in HCOL areas crowd out any of the actual building materials (and some of) the labor component.

My parents live on a 1 acre lot in a non-HCOL area, which costs 1/2 of what a parking spot in Manhattan sells for. Their 1 acre lot comes with a 2000 sq ft home.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com