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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

While I agree that landlords are vampires, that here is wrong:

> But there is a stack of research a mile high that shows that the number one thing we need is a lot more housing supply

There are millions of units vacant everywhere, be it the US [1] or Germany [2]. The last thing the world needs is more housing construction, especially with the insane CO2 footprint of anything involving concrete.

The problem is that rural areas ("flyover states") have been left to rot: no reliable electricity grid, no public transport, basic infrastructure from grocery stores over schools to basic healthcare has closed down, no high-speed Internet which is a necessity for modern life - and particularly the latter is a major contributor in rural flight, as employers move towards more urban areas, which sets off a vicious cycle as the people follow the jobs, and the remaining infrastructure becomes too expensive to maintain. That this neglect is a direct cause of people losing trust in democracy is just the icing on the cake (and again, this also contributes to rural flight as LGBT and women flee far-right areas in droves).

We need to invest into rural areas again.

[1] https://www.nar.realtor/magazine/real-estate-news/16-million...

[2] https://www.demografie-portal.de/DE/Service/Blog/191028-Wohn...

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>The last thing the world needs is more housing construction, especially with the insane CO2 footprint of anything involving concrete.

That self imposed limit is exactly what keeps prices high. Every city has some run down areas that serve no purpose but are wasted space and could be turned into housing.

Also, as some others already said it, living in urban areas reduces your footprint versus living far away in the countryside so the CO2 released from dense urban building makes up for it from the scale of people living together compared to low density rural areas which cost more in maintenance, transportation, etc.

>There are millions of units vacant everywhere, be it the US [1] or Germany [2].

It doesn't help anyone if those vacant units are not where the jobs and education is, especially that 100% WFH is not even remotely(ha!) mainstream, but return to office has being normalized again in Germany, at best into hybrid arrangements so everyone still needs to live close to the office anyway. I can't carry that cheap rural house with me into the city where my job is.

>We need to invest into rural areas again.

Germany and other countries could bring life back to rural areas if it mandated employers allow 100% WFH whoever possible as that would get a lot of people moving back to their hometown closer to their family especially if their family could help out with raising kids.

It could also cause a surge in birthrates and formation of new families. Instead we normalized living with roomates in your 30's, to work for some corporation who needs you in an expensive city with scarce real-estate, just to do stuff you can do from your laptop from anywhere.

We had a good thing going for a while in the pandemic(not the virus, deaths, social distancing, and all that) but the lack of car trips, lack of air and noise pollution, people taking their remote jobs back to live with their families, reduced immigration causing rents to plummet, touristic areas finally livable again, etc. But our dear leaders and their business overlords saw that and said "this is affecting our profits and GDP, we can't have that, we must go back to the way it was before!".

I wouldn't return to more rural areas if 100% WFH is possible. Some left it for a reason and not to get better internet.

And, at least in germany, many rural areas are not so unattractive. I know plenty rural villages with great internet. Especially in BW public transport is solid, the next bigger population center is close by and there are many jobs. It's just conservative, culturally boring, inflexible and really set in their old ways.

Nobody said all rural areas are attractive places to live.

And yes, part of the problem nobody wants to go back isn't jus the "vibe" and lack of "hip culture, art scene and hipster cafes", but that basic infrastructure like good schools, teachers, hospitals, doctors offices and specialists, have been left to rot and they also moved out of the city(the younger generation) or just retired and died along with the town, so bringing all that back to life is nearly impossible as now it's a catch-22, nobody wants to move there because there are no good doctors and teachers, and there are no good doctors and teachers because there's nothing there.

>It's just conservative, culturally boring, inflexible and really set in their old ways.

But then we can't complain that the hip and open minded urban areas are too expensive when everyone runs away from the rural areas to the same handful of hip cities.

Maybe it's our duty as well to try and push for the change we want in those places, instead of always packing our bags and leaving for the cities that are livable on paper because they already share our mentality but in the process crowding them to the point where the stress around housing makes them unlivable in practice unless you're super wealthy.

this is not true across the bank. Of course if you're really deep into depopulated rural areas then there is really a lack of basic social services. But it's not that there's only high-density cities and deserted landscapes, there are still rural areas with schools and doctors. Rural areas that are doing comparatively well, somewhat maintain their population. Also, many cities with a lot of population growth also struggle to provide those services as there are not enough doctors or teachers for all, so you might be able find comparatively better schooling in the right rural areas.

In some rural areas there's a really conservative, tight-knit mindset. A deep resentment for somebody different and a very specific world-view really dominating the area. This is not about hipster-cafes, but about some basic progress in society some parts just try to not be part of.

Rural is also more isolated and there's just strictly less to do. Fine if you want to spend most of your time inside your family circle or the same two people you grew up with. But some just can't cope with that.

>In some rural areas there's a really conservative, tight-knit mindset. A deep resentment for somebody different and a very specific world-view really dominating the area. This is not about hipster-cafes, but about some basic progress in society some parts just try to not be part of.

Boomers are like that almost everywhere. They vehemently reject the current status of realty and want only to live in their own version.

I told some Bavarian boomers a while ago that housing is unaffordable and they were insisting that's nonsense that we're all lazy that back then they could buy a house if they worked hard and saved, so I pulled out a ballpen and the beer coaster on the table, pulled out my phone with the property price numbers, the average wage numbers and the bank loan calculators to prove it to them with the napkin math on the beer coaster, and they were like "huh, I didn't know it was that bad, it expected it would be better today".

They just live in their own bubble refusing to do the basic research on how the world currently is, but instead try to strongarm everyone into their warped reality without caring that they might be wrong.

> I wouldn't return to more rural areas if 100% WFH is possible.

.....Then this isn't about you?

Not every solution has to be 100% perfect for every person. What FirmwareBurner suggests is a very good idea, and would unquestionably be helpful and attractive to many.

If you don't want to take advantage of it, then just...don't?

While we could have more housing, construction is a problem, as, and especially in the US lately, it takes the form of faceless suburbs with an extensive sprawl destroying natural and agricultural lands.

It also promotes a car-centric and consumerist lifestyle, where shopping happens in malls, taking even more space. A better use of the current space would be much better than throwing more supply at the problem.

Cities also have vacant office space. It's likely more economical and greener to convert the existing building vs building new construction in the "wasted space".

I like the idea of what you describe for remote work. I'm not sure how effective that would be in the US. It seems many people want very specific amenities or locations. Or like one friend, they wouldn't move back just because of "all the druggies". I think at best, it would just slow the population decline in those areas. It would be better if the old rust belt cities had business and industry return physically. Not everyone can be a knowledge worker on a laptop - there needs to be some physical jobs too.

Office space is not good for apartments, because the floor plans are usually huge. WTC towers were (iirc) 63x63 meters large, if the rooms are 5x5 meters, you can only build usable rooms in the outer strip of the building, while the internal 53x53 square is usable only for storage, toilets and hallways, which don't require windows... and that's a huge waste of space

Well, what else are you going to do with the vacant building? Seems like it's a bigger waste not to. I guess we'll see how it turns out in NYC since they're proposing it right now.

Use it as commercial realestate, even if at cheaper price per square meter? I've seen enough louis rossmann videos to see the prices there, and bringing them down wouldn't be that bad.

This weeks 99% Invisible podcast is on this exact topic. The bottom line is that while it is technically possible, it is really expensive and only makes financial sense if you create luxury apartments that can charge the very highest levels of rent. Also the legal and regulation red tape is a massive problem making many projects impossible to do, even if on paper they might be viable. In most cases the most practical solution, after taking financial and regulatory considerations into account, is simply to leave the building empty and hope for a future upswing in commercial real estate.

The NYC project is focused on low cost housing and is being supported by the mayor. So it sounds like cost and red tape won't be a problem there.

> It doesn't help anyone if those vacant units are not where the jobs and education is

Why not move the jobs and education?

Build a university in a village with 20 inhabitants? Build a factory in a municipality with 360 inhabitants, where only ~30 are of working age (we have one of those in my country).

And even if you built it, all 6 empty houses would get rented out, there wouldn't be any more places for people to stay and housing prices would go up a lot.

It's a catch-22. Companies move where the existing skilled labor pool already is.

I've seen cases where international companies invested in small collage towns here in Europe with big dreams of expansion, but it didn't work their way because they had trouble recruiting enough candidates to move there, as all the skilled candidates wanted to live in big metro areas with multiple competing companies in the same domain, not limit themselves to a single employer in the area.

Then the company tried training a lot of their staff by taking in skilled people willing to do a career change, and guess what, after 1-2 years, those trained employees left to the big city to work for a competing company for more money. So the company just packed its bags and left because if it has to pay big-city money anyway, it might as well just move directly to the big city in the first palce and not bother with the hassle of expanding in small towns.

Our present day capitalist system doesn't reward investments in small towns and small players because the big players and big cities end up skimming the cream off the smaller ones so it's all go big or go home, so all the investments booth from the private sector and the public sector are happening in the capital city which is now causing the masiv housing issue.

> Germany and other countries could bring life back to rural areas if it mandated employers allow 100% WFH whoever possible as that would get a lot of people moving back to their hometown closer to their family especially if their family could help out with raising kids.

tl;dr: Germany needs to heavily improve its rural/suburbs/general internet connectivity to encourage WFH. It can be insanely frustrating getting anything resembling modern internet in some places.

Speaking on the German situation as I recently experienced that (100% WFH moving out of the city center). I was looking for a flat in a radius of 100km around a city and was very flexible with where I ended up. I had two must-haves: dedicated office (as in, a spare room) plus reasonably fast and stable internet. For (my) remote work anything >= 50Mbit VDSL (roughly 50 down/10 up) is workable. 250/40 was my minimum when searching. I narrowed it down to two solid choices I wanted to check out: 1) rural village of about 20-50 houses and 2) suburbs/300m from city border of a smallish (~50k people) city.

It turned out 1) did not connect the fiber connection they could get (quite literally "I don't understand this and never needed it."). This combined with some other less than ideal things led me to discard 1).

When checking out 2) I found out they didn't connect the cable internet marked as available online ("It sits somewhere in the garden, we don't want to drill the house walls." Drilling the walls for the PV they put up before I moved in was fine...). But they had 250/40 VDSL available and I confirmed then and there that you get at least 100Mbit download.

I signed for 2) based on 100MBit+ VDSL plus liking the overall package (location, neighbors, landlord, flat). I could order 250/40, but two weeks later got a call that they could only offer me 16/1 (not a typo) due to "no available lines". I took that offer, because mobile network is either very expensive (Telekom 5G unlimited is 85€) or very unreliable (Telefonica 4G unlimited is 30€, but went down to 2MBit/s in some areas with full reception) and I needed at least some fallback connectivity. As a data point: Google meet can manage about 1 or 2 incoming video streams and spotty outgoing video at 16/1. I setup a multipath setup to combine Telefonica and the 16/1 land line.

It took me a better part of a month to finally convince support to send a technician out to address the problem that I was marked as offline in their system despite being connected. It turned out someone is blocking "my" line since about 3 years after moving out so I somehow can get a slow speed fallback, but nothing more. The technician belled out the line to the DSLAM, overrode the assignment and assigned the line "officially" to me. When we got talking he mentioned that he had to do the same "fix" the last time someone moved in and that he just expanded the DSLAM VDSL capacity. I had to wait about 30min for him to document that in the system and then order a faster connection before someone else snatches up that line. Which surprisingly worked out to a 250/40 landline finally.

In conclusion: it took me, a quite technical person who depends on the connection for work, about 2 months to get a workable landline after doing all possible due diligence before signing my lease. If I had not haunted support or got a less motivated technician, I would still be sitting here with blurry Google Meets. This is not how you motivate people to move back to rural areas. Based on my experience with 1) there are also problems the state can not tackle. If the landlords don't see the value in even letting a fiber provider lay a dark fiber in the basement, there is nothing the billions of digital infrastructure funding can do.

P.S. Beaming internet down from frigging space via Starlink costs less than Telekom 5G unlimited... P.P.S. I know this is just a single data point, but the amount of locations I had to reject because of not even theoretical fast landlines was insane

EDIT to add: I am not even talking about 1GBit everywhere, just a floor of maybe 50/10 or even 100/20 (reliable!) so you can realistically WFH.

>It turned out 1) did not connect the fiber connection they could get (quite literally "I don't understand this and never needed it."

Older German rural people just don't care about anything resembling fast internet so the ISPs exploit that by gouging you. Especially since they do a lot of stuff by cash and snail-mail anyway.

Rural Switzerland or Scandinavia is way better digitized.

I get the sentiment "I don't need it", but I do not understand the lack of consideration when you are landlord. The whole Corona WFH rush has demonstrated that digital infrastructure is an asset. If you have decent internet, you can either WFH yourself or attract people in roles allowing for WFH to your rental property. While tech workers (higher chance of WFH) in Germany are paid nowhere close to US salaries, they tend to be above average earners. Not sure why landlords do not see this simple (to me at least) connection between future rent opportunities and digital infrastructure.

Also, it does not even need to be something the individual landlord needs to figure out. As GP stated, rural areas can benefit of WFH. So a clever local official can figure out they need to build out infrastructure and(!) convince local landlords and developers to take part in this transformation.

>but I do not understand the lack of consideration when you are landlord.

Because the landlord only thinks in RoI. He most likely thinks the cost and hassle of adding faster internet on his property will not reflect in an increased rent price he could charge, so why bother?

>attract people in roles allowing for WFH to your rental property

The pool of workers in Germany with 100% remote work allowance is much smaller than you think. Most companie went back to 100% in office or at best hybrid meaning you still need to live close to work anyway, and those few workers that do have 100% WFH are a rare pool of mostly SW devs that use remote work to travel or visit family, not live in some boring German village.

Until 100% WFH becomes normalized for all office workers, your landlord has nothing to worry about.

Yes, very few roles offer 100% WFH here, but if you only need to show up once a week tops in your office, you can tolerate a longer commute. So it might not make the most rural areas that much more attractive, but it widens the area around a city you can consider commuter area. For reference, this is mostly the model my mom works with, she is employed in the public sector. Of course, she commuted before WFH every day, so the location was fine for that already.

> those few workers that do have 100% WFH are a rare pool of mostly SW devs that use remote work to travel or visit family, not live in some boring German village.

Careful with generalizations, this was more or less my plan until I ran into the problems I posted above :)

>but if you only need to show up once a week tops in your office, you can tolerate a longer commute

Depends on your family situation. Sounds fine for couple with kids but most single and childless people still want to live in the big city close to their friends and support network.

Moving to the countryside could mean you get to live for cheap in a big house all by yourself, but it could also mean a crushing lonely depression if your closest friend is over 1h away and need to schedule meetings ahead of time instead of spontaneously meeting for a coffee in the neighborhood on the way back from work/gym.

actually with kids i want to live near the school. because while i could tolerate the occasional 1-hour commute to work, having kids needing to travel that far every day to get to middle or highschool is even worse. (primary schools and kindergarten are more likely to be local, so that's less of an issue)

>having kids needing to travel that far every day to get to middle or highschool is even worse

In Austria I see highschool kids having >1h commutes every day. I wouldn't like it, but culturally it seems normalized and accepted here.

because austria has a sparsely populated countryside with mountains, so while accepted i think it only affects a small number of people. i am pretty sure that not many more would want to do that.

No mate, I'm not talking about pupils living in remote villages in the mountains but those living outside of big cities. They usually have a 30 minute bus/train ride to the city plus another 30 minutes is the overhead time for the trip from home to the bus/train stop and then from the destination stop to the school means about 1h in total or sometimes more is absolutely normal here for pupils to commute via public transport per journey.

Which I guess explains the country's and employer's skepticism on remote work, everyone is so used to long commuting times their whole lives, they're desensitized to it and accept it for work as being the norm as well.

i understand that, and it would actually support my argument which implies that in less mountainous areas more people could be living away from the city.

however turns out that this is not necessarily the case: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/249029/umfrag...

surprisingly despite its mountains austria appears to be at the lower end of urbanization

The population is still growing, however you want to slice it.

> The problem is that rural areas ("flyover states") have been left to rot: no reliable electricity grid, no public transport, basic infrastructure from grocery stores over schools to basic healthcare has closed down

This narrative also works in the UK, but where the abandoned areas are mostly coastal. Seaside towns with no tourists and no fish. Ex-mining areas. And the same problem of people becoming more rightist as they become more resource-starved, preferring the solution of demonizing people they think shouldn't get resources rather than anything else.

Fairly sure this list correlates with high votes for Brexit: https://www.moveiq.co.uk/blog/buying/10-cheapest-places-buy-... Let's have a look at Middlesborough since it's at the top and I have ancestors from there.

You can get a really cheap house in town, near plenty of infrastructure: https://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/62793200/

Why is it so cheap? Well, unemployment is really high: https://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/new-data-re...

And how did that happen? https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/sep/28/redcar-stee...

Not really sure what central government could do about this, but I'm fairly sure they've not even tried thinking about it.

>Why is it so cheap? Well, unemployment is really high:

The thing is nobody (with a stable job) wants to live in areas with high unemployment because of all the social issues those areas have.

Depends on the area. Lots of countryside areas have high unemployment statistically, but are actually very chill because there are so few people, and most of them are retirees. With adequate internet connectivity they can be perfect for remote workers.

>Lots of countryside areas have high unemployment statistically, but are actually very chill because there are so few people, and most of them are retirees.

Not true. Unemployment numbers don't account for retirees or children of school age or involved in education/trainings programs.

If an area has high unemployment it means only adults of working age not involved in any schooling, trainings or apprenticeship, who are able bodied to work but don't.

Ah so it's the NEET index

> And the same problem of people becoming more rightist as they become more resource-starved, preferring the solution of demonizing people they think shouldn't get resources rather than anything else.

Ironic, the post was about how people are starved for the resource of shelter. I didn't see you call anyone here out for "demonizing" corporations or individual landlords with many real estate investment properties.

I guess this criticism only applies to conservatives in rural areas with barely anything.

> The problem is that rural areas ("flyover states") have been left to rot

The problem is that rural areas don't pay their way. Rural areas only exist at the charity of the cities funding them.

If you want rural areas to thrive, you need to figure out how to make them economically viable. That means you need local production to be more cost effective than global production.

A good start would be having universal healthcare so hospitals in rural areas would stop closing. Another good start would be to start increasing taxes on imports and subsidizing some exports in order to balance the fact that the US has hollowed out labor by sending it overseas.

Alas, the same people who fight against universal healthcare and import excise taxes are also those who live in rural areas.

And here we are. And so it will continue.

> increasing taxes on imports and subsidizing some exports

One of those things that sounds great until other countries apply it symmetrically and tax US exports.

> One of those things that sounds great until other countries apply it symmetrically and tax US exports.

This is fine. Really.

There is nothing wrong with every country being able to support themselves with their local economy.

I'm not saying to jack things up to 500%, but a general 5%-10% to make shipping cheap crap around the world have a bit more friction would be a good thing.

The goal is to make it economically viable to produce things closer to where they are consumed. And to only produce those things non-locally that have a genuine reason for being produced non-locally.

This is a chicken and egg problem. Reduce public services in rural areas, get population outflow, reduce public services even more.

You can stop the vicious circle by increasing the services back to make it attractive and at the same time densify rural cities to make them less costly to cater to.

> at the same time densify rural cities

This does not work. People live in rural areas because they don't want density. That is the whole point. (Alternatively, it might be because they are too poor to move. However, densifying/gentrifying an area does not fix that--it just boots people to a different poor rural area.)

You are trying to make rural areas viable by making them a city. You might as well just improve the situation in an already existing city.

People live in rural areas for a multitude or reasons. Not all rural towns are like in the US, some have streets, some are dense.

In Europe, a lot of the small towns are pretty dense, due to the historical need to preserve agricultural land and have a community to rely on[0]. In ex-soviet countries, you will often see in the countryside condominiums, as it was then seen as much more efficient and better community-wise.

So yes, if you densify rural towns to reduce sprawl, it becomes much easier to provide good services like doctors, groceries and schools.

[0] Here is one that comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordes-sur-Ciel

> rural cities

This is an oxymoron.

Rural towns if you want.

If what you care about is climate change, you should be in favor of cramming people into the smallest possible spaces in urban areas, not putting them in rural areas where they have to drive 20 minutes to get to the grocery store.

The carbon footprint of your average city dweller is far lower.

It's not only about climate change, most of the effects are to be seen on the biodiversity, the beauty of the countryside (yes, it's important), agricultural production and water supply, as concrete reduces a lot water absorbtion.

Lyme disease outbreaks can be attributed in part to the increase in rodents population, which is due to the urban sprawl and the increased difficulty for predators to hunt in suburban areas.

Or provide better public transportation?

Public transport is only more environmentally friendly if people actually use it. Out where my parents live it was not uncommon to see busses driving for miles with 0-2 passengers. The problem was that providing good enough public transport that you didn't need a car at all is basically impossible. And since everybody had a car, the number of people that wanted to spend 60+ minutes taking a buss that went 3-4 times a day into town, instead of driving 30 minutes, was basically zero. They eventually cancelled the bus line since it was just too expensive and inefficient to run. The alternative of trying to provide a truly useful public transport service (say 2 buss lines running every 30 mintues) would have been extremely expensive and would have meant even more empty busses.

> The problem is that rural areas ("flyover states") have been left to rot: no reliable electricity grid,

I live in a flyover state in the US. Quality electricity is not a problem, save for areas that are Amish and simply don't use it. Even there, electricity is at the curb, it's just never been run to a home. On the telecom front, most rural areas have WISPs, mobile carriers (5g home internet isn't bad) or local telecom companies (DSL & Fiber) that have also solved this problem. It did take almost 20 years to solve the internet issue, and there are some rural homes that are located geographically where wireless won't work well, but on the whole things are a lot better than you are saying. The real issue in a lot of small towns is that the homes are old and often expensive to maintain, there's little entertainment and most importantly, jobs are still a problem. Between remote workers moving out of the city and the trend towards more onshoring of manufacturing, small towns in my state are starting to show signs of life, finally.

> that this neglect is a direct cause of people losing trust in democracy is just the icing on the cake

Not sure if you meant to say "icing on the cake" here because it comes across that you are celebrating people losing trust in democracy.

Technically I suppose "housing supply" doesn't have to imply "housing construction".

While i agree in general, the threat of construction would force the prices to tumble instantly , so it is a good thing.

> Vermont, Maine, and Alaska have the highest vacancy rates—between 22% and 20%, according to the study.

So not really highly desirable metropolises. Places where most people actually want to live have low vacancy rates and not enough housing.

> We need to invest into rural areas again.

No argument from me there, even though it is less bang for the buck to invest in rural facilities. But doing that doesn’t preclude simultaneously relaxing zoning laws and whatnot that cause housing crises in cities.

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