[1] - https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/plumbing/install-rep...
[2] - https://www.electriciantalk.com/threads/estimate-for-new-hou...
[3] - https://www.houzeo.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-a...
I can think of a few things that might be issues with some houses that old, but they are all things that your inspector would find.
A home that old is unlikely to have any original appliances, and has a good chance to have been upgraded to 200 amp electrical service. The roof has probably been replaced a couple times. So for all that it isn't really much different than buying a house that is maybe 10 years old.
Some things might be grandfathered in from earlier codes, which can be a little annoying but in most cases probably won't cause problems.
Insulation might not be up to current standards, which could be a problem depending on the climate.
Some examples of issues with older homes:
* Older, just general wear and tear
* Asbestos
* Insufficient heating/cooling
* Badly designed insulation
* Low number of outlets per room
* Smaller rooms
* Annoying layout (basement washer/dryer, etc)
The real sweet spot is probably to hire a builder to build exactly what you want, but you need to wait for a downturn when they're available (they make much more money smashing out nearly identical developments).
Also, given the way shrinkflation and related phenomena work, do you actually believe that if a municipality went from banning PEX to allowing it, the prices of new homes in its boundaries would go down?
For HVAC, requiring a fused disconnect within 6ft of the unit is overkill when the panel with an appropriate shutoff is already located in an accessible area.
The code requirements make things safer in probably 90% of the situations. But they also increase the cost substantially. With the affordability crisis in housing, I think we should look for places where a small reduction in safety can yield big savings on cost.
Your examples are fair, but as you note, they bring a LOT of safety with them even so.
I'd be shocked if the cumulative building codes since then to today could be shown to save even a single year of, say, 2022 of automobile fatalities (about 43,000 people).
You need a better example. An AFCI breaker saved my house from burning down and quite possibly the four lives (mine included) within it.
The owner in the 80s needed a permit from the historic preservation board to add the dormer. It's the same historic preservation board I need permission from to remove the dormer. Ironically, the history board doesn't have any of its own records before the early oughts, so they don't believe they issued a permit. (I talked with the old owner back in ~1992 about the odd dormer and heard a lot about permits back then.)
I would love to have that particular board of busybodies disbanded.
I tried to find a house in our nearby bigger city. The prices were 100k higher than I was planning on spending, and also had upwards of a 1 year wait to close because they were being used as a rental property.
Instead, I was able to find a house in the nearby smaller town's outskirts. However that means that I live in the county, as I did before. It also means I have no say in the town's elections, nor do I have any say in the city's elections. And I'm 2000 feet away from the town, yet cant vote there.
And I even worked in person in the bigger city, and lived in a trailer park 3 miles away from the city square, yet 1/3 of a mile away from the city. I spent 40 hours a week there, and no voting rights. I deserve a quarter of a vote given my taxes went there, and I was there quarter of my living hours.
The ones who can afford to live there are the ones enforcing terrible laws, and are gatekeeping the rest of us out.
The City of London does this. It doesn’t work in America: you can easily defuse it by claiming they’re votes for corporations or point to a random wealthy person in the suburbs.
While I don’t disagree with you, you’re saying this like it is the easy part. It’s probably political career suicide for anyone who proposed getting rid of zoning and there isn’t really any way to stop homes from being a financial asset (because what would then be the point of home ownership)? Big building projects can take a decade or more so you wouldn’t likely see enough new housing stock to make a real difference in home prices for a generation or two. Mortgage rate increases have done nothing more than stall and slightly decrease home prices but now you have a higher mortgage payment. Currently, people who have a “starter home” or townhouse etc have no incentive to move up in house size which because of higher rates. This was previously very important for younger or less well off people to be able to afford something to own. I think a new mechanism needs to be developed that could incentivize people to sell their homes.
This is a problem of permitting. Let developers build and you’ll see housing within two years.
having a place to live? Trading off potentially greater financial returns elsewhere for whatever one perceives as the benefits of actual ownership?
It's not as if actual home ownership has made the USA so much better than the countries around the world where more people choose to rent.
People in other parts of the world where real estate doesn't always/ever appreciate in value the way it has in the Anglosphere over the last 40 years also have to spend a lot of money and time/effort ... and they do it anyway.
Having a place to live in which you can do anything you may want to it? And not pay rent?
Where I live, local developers run local politics. The developers would rejoice! If it happened to be political suicide for anyone along the way, I'm sure they could find new politicians to run.
"financializing" in this case is a scare word describing the functioning of markets. not sure how you finance the apartments you're constructing without "financializing."
The "financialzing" is just that we decided owning a home was the best way for the middle class to build wealth.
The downside of this is now every homeowner wants their residence to go up in value. So they support policies that encourage that. We've done that for so long, few people can afford to buy a home anymore.
The alternative would be to 1) not have the gov involved in incentivizing homeownership 2) change zoning and permitting policies to encourage much much more supply
Yes, there would be financial instruments involved in all of this. But it might look more like car ownership, where the asset depreciates over time. (Like is often the case in Japan with housing).
But housing would not be something people look at as a way to build wealth.
However, you could still make money building housing, apartments, etc. Or even owning apartment buildings and charging people to live in them.
This is becoming less true over time. Japanese houses depreciated because they had terrible quality / no insulation / they kept updating the earthquake codes, but they've grown larger and are fairly decent now.
But more importantly, in either place it's not the house that appreciates but the land under it. So the best policy to prevent this is a land value tax, but this very much annoys people who would like to make unproductive use of land they own, ie residential landlords or retirees.
I don't want all land in its most productive use, and neither, I suspect, does the rest of the world.
If we want a thing, we should subsidize it directly rather than as a side-effect of a mostly bad policy.
It's true that this problem doesn't arise under Georgist tax policies (AFAIU) for public land, so there's that. But I still feel a little uneasy about making land preservation by individuals prohibitively expensive.
Only if that land preservation is in the middle of the city ("land preservation" that typically looks like gated-in parking lots). Nature access can and is subsidized in the city.
Someone can maintain a piece of land unproductively if they want to. They just have to pay for that right, same as anyone else that would want to own that piece of land.
There is a broad range of situations here. No one should want a blighted property just sitting there in places like NYC or LA where homelessness is rampant. However, no one is arguing to just teardown places like Central Park to put in more housing.
I do think cities can work on accelerating permits and zoning, but cities are strapped for funding to assign people to help with this. Again, shortage of workers.
Down the street from us, is a nice land that has been parceled, they cleared and leveled the land, laid sewer, underground electricity, all set to build houses. Only one problem, the demand for housing has crashed, due to the market. 6 houses all set to be built, completely stalled.
>> stop financializing homes as a financial asset
I don't understand. Isn't this dictated by the market?
Permits are one of the few municipal services where this argument doesn't make sense. Permits aren't free, after all. Permit revenue scales with the number of permit applications. A city overwhelmed with permit applications by definition has more money to hire staff to work the permitting process.
Let's say you are paid "appropriately", and that your income comes from the fee payments associated with the tasks you complete. You're fully occupied, and the income from fees matches the expenses (including your salary). Things are in balance, so to speak.
Now we increase the number of fee payments by 80%. You can no longer complete all the associated tasks in any reasonably time frame, but the fee payments will not pay for an additional full time member of staff.
Fortunately, there is no requirement that municipalities only employ people full-time.
Denser housing provides more functional housing for a given amount of material, labor, and land. For example, if you're building a townhouse, you just need a 10 inch wall instead of two 8 inch walls. That's less material and labor.
> the demand for housing has crashed, due to the market
The demand for housing that can be supplied within the context of the given regulations has crashed. If you allow people to build more efficient housing, then it could be financially viable again.
These townhomes, are still available and not selling quickly.
Then price will have to drop until they sell
In most high-cost housing markets, this isn’t true [1]. Land value appreciation dominates construction cost factors. In my case, structure is 10% of the value of my home—I could rebuild the structure for 10% of the house’s value.
> don't understand. Isn't this dictated by the market?
Americans treat their houses as an asset. So we vote for policies that increase housing prices in real terms. Contrast that with Japan, where housing is a depreciated asset.
[1] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-much-do-construct...
Are you kidding? They're is good if demand for houses. Maybe not at the price they originally thought they could get for it, but that doesn't mean the demand is gone.
A larger portion of monthly payments now go to interest instead of principal since rates have climbed, but houses are still way more expensive in terms of monthly payments than they were 2 years ago.
The demand is still there, people just can't afford it.
Build build build and the issue is solved.
As an example, the most famous restaurant in California is called "French Laundry" because "French laundries" were a way of signaling they were owned by white people, so white customers could go to them without accidentally supporting a Chinese immigrant business. But there's no environmental risk in allowing a corner store or a Chinese laundry in a residential neighborhood.
As I said, you can just go read the meeting minutes when they were introduced in the early 20th century and it's why they said they were doing it.
But there's a book called The Color of Law about it.
> And do you mean that all zoning laws still exist for this purpose, or that that was their original intent?
They still exist because they haven't been removed yet and the SCOTUS precedent (Euclid v Ambler) that authorizes them hasn't been overruled. Racial covenants on individual properties were removed, but not that.
> precedent for zoning laws that came from, e.g., England
To be clear, England doesn't have zoning, it has /much worse ideas/ where you can't do anything without planning permission and the US is a big improvement over it. (Urban growth boundaries are okay though, but the US has national parks so we're cooler.)
> Would we be living in a zoning-free society if not for racism?
We would still have things that you probably think of as zoning but are not actually zoning. For instance, it's legal to have a corner store in a housing district in any given old quaint European country, and Japan has some light forms of zoning strictly controlled at the national level so individual cities don't get big ideas about becoming exclusive.
Action/omission bias - it is very important to life safety to be housed, yet zoning reduces the number of people housed.
i.e. in low rise residential zones you can only build low rise housing and small shops, in high rise residential you can still build low rise residential, in commercial you can build large commercial spaces but you can still build residential, and in "light industrial" zones you can build non-hazardous industrial structures but you can still build everything else. However for full blown industrial you can only build industrial due to the hazards.
In practice that looks a lot like just getting rid of zoning entirely with the exception that traffic management works out a little better and actually dangerous industrial sites are still kept away from everything else.
The hyper-growth 1940s and 1950s that tore up a century of development across a lot of cities left us empowered activists of the 1960s and 1970s that overcorrected policies and laws and gave way too much power to neighborhoods to dictate all kinds of things they really shouldn't have had the power to dictate.
https://www.bestplaces.net/compare-cities/houston_tx/dallas_...
It appears (without me knowing anything else about the area conditions), that prices in Dallas rise faster.
On the other hand, I don't want my quiet neighborhood to explode with dense high rise apartments. I appreciate the peace and quiet.
Don't want to be too capitalist about it, but cheap plentiful housing would make it easy for you to pick a cheap peaceful neighborhood somewhere else.
The national traffic engineers' guides for parking are based on some of the most made up statistics you've ever seen and feature things like parking requirements for bars, as if they were trying to encourage drunk driving.
I wonder if anybody's ever actually used that to say the State and Feds support inebriated driving, since they require parking for bar patrons. This place is for drinking alcohol, and the last thing that should be included is parking for the drinking customers.
But drunk driving is illegal <wink wink>.
And since the law is not "8 hours bottle to throttle" like it probably should be, it continues.
https://www1.wsrb.com/blog/turkey-building-codes-and-the-imp...
I think most of the Zoning laws are about what purposes the building can serve. Like do you really want a meat packing plant built in your neighborhood or a fireworks factory? Now there maybe overly restrictive Zoning but having no Zoning is likely not a good idea.
- convert it to a duplex, triplex, or quadplex without changing the footprint of the building
- build an ADU for another resident on your property, even if it will fit and otherwise be up to code
- tear your house down and build a 5-story residential building
These codes aren't about preventing meatpacking plants from being built in residential neighborhoods as much as they are about creating an artificial ceiling on the number of residents of a residential neighborhood.
> Tax the absolute hell out of vacant homes at rates so high it's financially disastrous to hold them as assets
Higher taxes on homes - regardless of the action being taxed, will not get you to where we need to be on housing unless they are paired with subsidies. We already are not building enough of them, we should not be imposing higher costs unless we are prepared to offset it elsewhere. Vacancy taxes might be part of the solution, but they also encourage sparser living to occupy more homes simultaneously.
I have a feeling it's much more the second than the first there. I know some people are picky but I have a hard time imagining a person who would willingly choose homelessness because they're just that committed to a given area.
> Higher taxes on homes - regardless of the action being taxed, will not get you to where we need to be on housing unless they are paired with subsidies.
I'm proposing higher taxes on houses, not homes. The difference being the former is held as stock to be sold later, and the latter is lived within by it's owner (or someone who has a business relationship with the owner.)
> We already are not building enough of them, we should not be imposing higher costs unless we are prepared to offset it elsewhere.
In what way in your mind is someone under my suggestion spending more money to build a home?
> Vacancy taxes might be part of the solution
That's literally what I've suggested. Taxing homes that are vacant.
People need and want to live in a place where it is affordable for them to live. That includes the costs of provisioning services and the jobs available to them.
People will obviously pick homelessness in the city (where they can access services) over literally not being able to have food in the places lots of these houses are (because you need a car to access services and services are sparse/nonexistent).
> The difference being the former is held as stock to be sold later, and the latter is lived within by it's owner (or someone who has a business relationship with the owner.)
When a house is constructed or sold it is definitionally being held to be sold later, so your suggestion would just impose costs on new construction.
> That's literally what I've suggested. Taxing homes that are vacant.
Right, and this was the part where I was agreeing with you.
But vacancy taxes have been shown to be insufficient at increasing the number of people housed.
Then you have not met many homeless. In my experience the vast majority of homeless in big cities would say no if offered a place to live in kansas.
Homeless congregate to cities because they can get the widest exposure to panhandle on. This isn't complicated. If you have no income apart from what's given to you, you need to be in places where a lot of people are a lot of the time to maximize your income. I'm sure plenty of them would happily move to a different area, if they're given the tools and resources to build a life there. But we don't do that. We just sick the cops on them and burn whatever they've managed to cobble together and tell them to go somewhere else. They might, MIGHT, get a bus ticket. But that's it and that solves none of their problems, it just makes them a problem for a different metro.
Sure, but not different areas that actually have housing available. That would mean moving to Kansas which they're not willing to do.
> If you have no income apart from what's given to you
What's stopping them from getting a job?
P.S: There is one case where Korean government relaxed zoning restrictions and construction regulations of Seoul to reduce the housing prices by providing more homes, but it failed as well (https://www.globalpropertyguide.com/asia/south-korea/price-h...). Moreover, now the city looks really really awful with all the high rise apartments (https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_business/1...)
This is urban sprawl. It’s what we’ve been doing for decades. It’s a social, environmental and economic disaster.
Low density works for the very rich (can put through the inefficiency) and destitute (who accept the lower standard of living). For the educated or middle income, who won’t accept a lower standard of living at higher cost, it’s a road to increased emissions, shorter lives and less choice on everything.
According to a principle that is fundamentally fucked? Lack of density causes that economic inefficiency, service dilution and environmental damage. There are cities that don’t have the problems America’s do, because they don’t implement these zoning policies. Which cause those problems.
Why would you hold onto a broken concept? You don’t even have to be considerate: you can keep low density for yourself, causing prices around you to spike, while supporting liberalisation in cities, where economic activity happens.
You can’t have low population density everywhere, amidst population growth, without causing those problems. They’re inherent to supply and demand, logistics and transportation cost, and the geographic limits of civil services like police and fire.
You can have low density for the rich (same services, higher cost) or destitute (same cost, fewer services). But not everyone. Being selfish is okay—you can move to a place with a shrinking population or somewhere low density with high costs or lower your standard of living voluntarily. But forcing that everywhere, while ignoring the destitution and destruction it necessarily causes, is morally wrong. (It’s also ineffective.)
For what it’s worth, I moved from New York City to Jackson Hole. The latter is low density. But it’s expensive. And we have to subsidise housing for many people, paid for through property taxes, to keep even the small community sustainable and morally balanced. (Which makes it more expensive.) That means we need to accept that the cities should be unshackled, because our community couldn’t afford to sustain itself without the economic productivity of America’s urban cores.
> 9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
Is that more or less ugly than having people living in tents and shitting onto streets?