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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

We need to build more homes. When we do that, buying and holding homes ceases to become an interesting investment, and private equity gets out of it, just like private equity does not buy and hold used Toyota Corollas.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/housing-cr...

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I wonder what would be a really effective incentive to the construction industry to build more homes.

Something like -- no tax on any homes construction for the next 5 years. Wouldn't that create a construction boom?

The first step is to legalize a much broader array of housing types. Apartments, condos, small lots, townhomes, cottage clusters... all of it.

I'm involved in housing advocacy locally, and a huge impediment to building more is zoning and NIMBYism.

Zoning should be used to keep factories out of neighborhoods, nothing more. Also, building code is making houses boring. Should be a third-party standard, like UL.

It kind of is. Most places just adopt the IBC and make a few amendments.

You can't build if you don't have the labor. There are half a million open construction jobs [0].

People forget that most construction companies went bankrupt in the aftermath of 2008.

[0] - https://www.abc.org/News-Media/News-Releases/construction-wo...

The limits are: Getting people willing to work in the industry (a lot of it is hard labor for okay but not great pay). Zoning which doesn't allow you to build at all in high demand places. Building codes that sometimes require things that don't make sense. Places where builders can get permits "by right" tend to have a lot more building and thus much lower housing prices.

If that created a construction boom, then it would be a boom of constructing very expensive housing, not affordable housing. At least, that's what would happen if recent history is anything to go by.

Except that houses last much longer and there won‘t be an newer more attractive version 5 years later. And in many places the value is the land not the house.

I would agree that treating the taxation of land differently than that of housing would be a sensible idea.

Newer housing is quite often much nicer than older housing, truth be told. More energy efficient, for instance.

> Newer housing is quite often much nicer than older housing

I would disagree very strongly. Stronger building codes and rising material costs have made everything look very samey. I really wish people would/could build more houses that were interesting.

You're discussing aesthetics, not the actual quality of the housing:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/stop-fetis...

Anecdotally, housing quality has gone way down, but that's probably due to quality of labor.

> Newer housing is quite often much nicer than older housing, truth be told.

I haven't seen this in the real world. Newer housing tends to be of much lower quality than older housing, even when we're talking about high-end housing.

Perhaps we agree in terms of aesthetics, but that's in the eye of the beholder. In terms of the quality of the actual build, see the article below. Newer is generally much better in terms of energy efficiency and other metrics.

Anyone who says house a hundred years ago were better built is free to buy one and discover all the fun money pits they come with.

I've owned two houses now that were older than 100 years, and both of them were the best houses I've had. No money pits that were any worse than the money pits new houses are.

I'm specifically ignoring aesthetics here.

Newer housing is indeed better in certain ways, but is worse in others. I suppose whether or not it's better overall depends on how much you value those different things.

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