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Develop the conserved federal land? No way. Let's redevelop some of the effing parking lots and one-storey strip malls that take up half the land space in most US cities.

Real life example, Assembly Square near Boston: https://twitter.com/ScoutSomerville/status/12117083803913666...

Assembly Square - reminds me the South Park episode - city part of town - https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/The_City_Part_of_Town

Yeah, except the whole gentrification bit in the episode doesn't apply since nobody lived in Assembly until they redeveloped it.

This is not really how a lot of this works.

Zoning is basically irrelevant - the problem is that the cost of converting an outmoded commercial building to residential is usually within the same order of magnitude as knocking it down and putting up something built for purpose. I would bet real money that there aren’t more than a handful of municipal governments that would die on the hill of maintaining existing zoning restrictions if they had viable proposals to convert vacant commercial buildings.

Those millions of acres owned by the government are mostly desert and national parks and in any event there’s no shortage of privately owned undeveloped land closer to existing cities (or hollowed out existing cities that are ripe for a renaissance).

Also, just nitpicks, but when was $5k a down payment for a house? 1955? And BlackRock isn’t a hedge fund. You might be thinking of Blackstone (also not a hedge fund, but they own portfolio companies that are buying up a lot of single-family housing and turning them into rental properties, which is evidently extremely lucrative but I find incredibly distasteful).

Yes, I'm making a reference to the time when these massive residential building projects began as a juxtaposition for today. The costs of just becoming a renter today are similar to what it took to own a home previously. Zoning is not irrelevant it is the absolute cause of these areas essentially becoming Special Economic Zones which are now, in historic fashion, about to flounder and fade unless the powers that be command workers back to the office, back to the commute, back to the grind.

So? LA is a desert and requires the rest of the region to support their needs; which is really just their real estate values through sustained population growth - which would otherwise not happen without sucking H2O from everywhere else. Knock down the buildings and repurpose the materials for other areas then; though people will claim that's not "profitable" either so it will just be melted, crushed and buried instead of repurposed.

Converting buildings creates jobs! Isn't that the point of much of this, job creation so we can keep all these devious little beings busy? Jobs means they can afford the new constructs. Even at increased costs, how many of these buildings are paid off? How many change hands as a means of transferring debt, buying out equity and essentially playing a Fastowian shell game? The idea that, "we can't profit off that" is absurd given how much the governments of this country subsidize profitability for the people who are wrecking so much.

LOL, was that an Andy Fastow reference? Deep cut, I love it, even if I’m still not sure how it applies here.

LA really isn’t a desert. It is definitely near a desert, but the city itself isn’t very desert like. LA’s water use is a lot smaller than the farms around LA, so converting farms to residential use would actually save a lot of water.

>so converting farms to residential use would actually save a lot of water.

Pray tell, where would you source the food required to support said new residents if you're going to convert farm land already dedicated to supporting people who are already there?

Not sure about California's import/export situation with Ag output.

LA at least gets a lot of its food from Mexico. Most of the farms in that region are for specialty crops that get exported anyways. Like almonds. I like almonds, but most people don’t live on them.

But the point isn’t to get rid of the farms, just that LAs water usage as a city is tiny in comparison to California’s agricultural water usage in general.

the problem is that the cost of converting an outmoded commercial building to residential is usually within the same order of magnitude as knocking it down and putting up something built for purpose.

If you look at the urban core of many cities, they are full of old commercial buildings converted to lofts/residentia. The old bank district in LA was empty and in disrepair for decades, then a huge conversion boom in the 2000's. Soho in NYC. Many buildings south of Market in SF.

The question is why can't we accelerate the process so the buildings don't sit unused for decades before it becomes worth conversion. <- though maybe that is the crux, the prices need to decline enough to make it worth it.

Your average modern commercial skyscraper is less amenable to this kind of conversion than those older, shorter, smaller floor plate industrial/commercial buildings, though. And there's still a lot of opportunity cost in renovating a modern class A commercial building that isn't there for renovating a long-abandoned older industrial/commercial space; those have basically no opportunity cost because the existing uses are worthless.

Yeah, I could have been more specific when I said “outmoded commercial buildings.” I meant the typical open floor plan office towers built during the ‘60s-‘80s. Those are challenging, though not impossible, to convert to residential. But absent incentives it’s almost always cheaper to start from scratch.

More recent commercial buildings, particularly anything from the last decade, are generally fine in terms of valuation/viability - there’s been a very noticeable flight to quality in commercial real estate. Lots of tenants are giving up space in the slightly obsolete buildings and moving into new flagship towers.

Many of today's office buildings are not built to last, honestly. There is a good chance that a glass/concrete tower will collapse in 100 years, while the old brick factories are basically indestructible.

Brick structures, famously known for surviving earthquakes with flying colors.

Maybe building extensively in an earthquake zone isn’t the answer? It’s much more expensive and comes with huge insurance risks.

> Also, just nitpicks, but when was $5k a down payment for a house? 1955? And BlackRock isn’t a hedge fund.

The first house my parents bought in 1976 was $26,500. So I wager $5k down payment would have covered it. (And this was in Los Angeles County)

> In the United States, the government holds hundreds of millions of acres of land in trust...

True.

> ... and it needs to be relinquished in part to help grow the actual base of humanity they hold stewardship over

Almost entirely false. See, the land they hold, they hold because nobody ever claimed it under the Homestead Act. Nobody could figure out how to grow enough to feed a family, even with 168 acres of it. This mostly means that there's no water there.

I'm pretty sure that the solution to the housing crisis is not a few square miles of waterless sagebrush in private hands. If you build a city there, where are the people in it going to work? (If they're currently homeless, they're probably not going to get hired for the kinds of jobs where work from home is possible.) How is it going to integrate into the surrounding economy? Where is the food going to come from? Where are the roads for the food going to come from? Where are the power and the water going to come from?

And even if that is the answer... what private hands? Mine? I don't have the money to develop it. Blackrock's? The banks? I don't think you're going to think that approach is the answer, either.

(True, some of that land is forest rather than just sagebrush. But if the federal government sells it, it will be bought by someone wanting to log it flat for the timber. That won't leave it with cities on it, either.)

I live in a state where the federal government owns a lot of that land that nobody could figure out.

The feds still try to sell it. Nobody buys it, because it's _still_ useless. It's a bad investment to buy shriveled land, build a residence on it that's incredibly far from basic necessities like gasoline and food, and then pay money to have water trucked out to your remote ass.

Wikipedia has a map of the ownership of federal lands here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_federal_land.agen..., the yellow lands are the lands never sold and largely represent the stock of available federal land. The green lands are parks and US forest (which is often, but not always, parkland as well in some sense); the red isn't the federal government's, it's Indian; and the other land is owned by agencies for their own purposes (most notably the military, and the resale value of former weapons testing ranges isn't great).

As you say, a lot of that yellow land is basically desert or semidesert and uninhabitable. Although that understands the nature of the problem, since the US did manage to sell off a large swathe of uninhabitable land--the High Plains was sold off in the late 19th century, only for the Dust Bowl to happen and people to realize that in fact, no, this wasn't good farmland.

fixed link [1]

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_federal_land.agen...

> the government holds hundreds of millions of acres of land in trust and it needs to be relinquished

How would relinquishing that help, is access to land a real issue? You can probably already buy a lot for cheap right now, but it will be far from urban centers and won't be habitable without a ton of investment. Would have zero effect on housing.

Conversion of office property to residential also requires a lot of capital which seems forgotten by a lot of the folks championing this kind of conversion. It's not as simple as building some interior walls and calling it a day

Having remodeled commercial buildings I can say adding plumbing to a finished commercial building is a nightmare.

Most major conversions will require gutting out drywall, ceilings, etc back to the main architectural structure, making new electrical and plumbing much easier to accomplish versus a finished space.

Not if it is a slab. You have to saw cut the slab and run new plumbing and pour back.

And if it is a tension slab, you absolutely cannot cut into it.

It is not more costly than having Hoovervilles and desperate people living hand to mouth in a world of rapidly advancing technology which was the promise of this whole societal endeavor to begin with. The governments of this world already subsidize the production costs of corporations to the tune of billions of dollars a year so they can continue to "make profit" from their productive efforts they would otherwise be failing at in spectacular fashion.

- Autos - Airlines - Banks - Farming

They all require massive injections of liquidity for the purpose of subsidizing poor stewardship. "Costs" is not a feasible excuse for continued economic oppression.

You mean like 15 minute cities? We don't need classical infrastructure as we once did when considering the reduction in the costs of solar, wind, and in many places accessible geothermal energy, plus septic tanks, water table access, and satellite based internet, we no longer require massive right of way projects to build these places.

Initial investment in locality based infrastructure creates the market; expansion through time with connected systems, if so desired, would then be an increased capital cost over time, not an upfront requirement. We can generate competition in building whole new cities, like corporations are attempting to do today, which can help stabilize and reduce the growing costs of rent and housing in major metropolitan areas. It absolutely would have an impact - just not when you construct a fallacious form for it to exist in as a failure by design; which is most of commercial and residential real estate given zoning requirements and the massive middle-man industry surrounding it.

The point being made is that there is plenty of very cheap land adjacent to the nationally preserved land.

The reason it's cheap is that no one wants to develop it.

This is usually a libertarian knee jerk response. For some reason they are jealous that land can be community owned and controlled. Trust me it's a bad idea and results in stuff like in Texas with 97% of the land being owned privately and hoarded with "no trespassing signs" and fences up everywhere

There are only a handful of cities in the United States where federal trust land is meaningfully important - and they're all in the American West - Phoenix and Albuquerque are the two that come to mind - both of those are limited by water, before land.

I will note however, I'm somewhat sympathetic to states like Nevada, Arizona and Utah who would like some of the BLM land given over to state stewardship - but its a very regional issue, and fractious enough that its hard to get enough people nationally behind (people outside of these regions hear 'federal land' and think 'Yellowstone' when the reality is closer to a 640 acre square of semi-arid grassland, in a checkerboard pattern).

Federal land holdings are statistically non-existent east of the Mississippi - and even east of the rockies, less relevant.

I don't disagree that private equity gobbling up some sizable percentage of single family homes is a very bad thing - but it'll take some will by congress and the state legislatures to unwind. The one thing that should give people hope here, is while its not yet widely reflected in the political class, there is broad grassroots support for limiting concentration of land holding and other physical assets (think anti-trust). It's just gonna take some time for that consensus to filter up. The current intensity of energy being expended on the so-called 'culture wars' isn't helping speed this process along.

(The 'culture wars' is probably the largest impediment to us working together to solve the fundamental economic issues present in the nation - the consensus of what to do is largely present - but until you can get people in the room to hash out the details, we're basically blocked from making progress.)

> the amount of money rental income sucks out of the economy that would otherwise be used for production and consumption

Renting is a service, a productive economic activity that yields net positive value to the society. The building did not fall from the sky and someone "claimed" it. Someone actually had to put in work and time and take risks for it to exist and be rented. Those enjoying the building benefit from these previous efforts, which in turn are compensated by receiving rent.

This doesn't apply to the land component of the rent.

The land isn't really valuable. You can buy a football field for $10 in rural areas.

But you'll be in the middle of nowhere, with no infrastructure, no services.

The "location" value of a property is tied to what's around it. Having lots of people deciding to develop useful things and services around it.

Nonsense. There are properties that have doubled in price over the last 2-3 years for no significant reason other than the flooding of cheap money into the economy. Landlords did nothing special or productive to earn this huge share of people’s income. They require little labor or outlay relative to other business markets. Furthermore, housing is a necessity like water and food; such resources cannot be allowed to rise in cost disproportionately or a unstable society is guaranteed where the populous will simply seize the properties during a civil war.

Property owners have no control over prices. It's all dictated by supply/demand.

Yes, government printing money inflates overall prices. More recently, this happened because governments needed to pay for covid. During inflationary cycles, money flocks to assets like real estate. Simply because they are good protection against inflation.

Property owners don't become richer because of that, since everything else became expensive as well.

There are economic systems where price-setting is controlled and/or centralized. To my knowledge, all of them failed in producing better outcomes than a free market for anyone in society.

knockdown and rebuild for new purposes, ie better quality cities would be better, because you'd get the opportunity to fix stoads, and generate jobs from the rebuild.