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Comment by konschubert | Hacker News Reader

Remove zoning restrictions and community review processes and watch new construction shoot up.

Or, take the non-liberation and crack down on the naked profiteering that is modern real estate. In many areas there appear to be lots of empty living units being kept as investments and second/fourth homes. Anyone owning an empty house or apartment should be taxed whatever amount it necessary to encourage them into at least renting that place out and thereby expanding the pool of available living units in the market.

It doesn’t need to be either/or. We can simultaneously increase housing supply through new construction and disincentivize suboptimal uses of housing you describe.

why does everyone fail to understand that the reason real estate is an "investment" is because prices are skyrocketing because supply is artificially constrained. If we just built properly real estate wouldnt be such a great investment.

My parents happened to buy their house in an area that wasnt super desirable and continued to not be super desirable. If they had just invested their down payment in the S&P it would be worth twice what the house is. But as it is, investors seem convinced real estate is a great investment because governments refuse to let people build so prices continue to skyrocket.

In Japan the value of a building reaches $0 after 30 years because they rebuild everything. A building is an inherently depreciating asset, yet my tenement in Boston build in the 1880's continues to go up in value because they cant build shit.

There is only a finite amount of land. The land value will most likely rise with demand and inflation regardless of the building that is there. Owning a home is an investment because you need a place to live and in the location on where you want to establish yourself. A home going up in value only helps a person on the side and hurts them in the short term because of taxes. Also only accounting for the downpayment is an incomplete investment picture. Most real estate is bought on leverage which multiplies returns.

You cannot force people to think that the value of a building is zero just because you want it to be. We have seen new homes further out command very high prices here in the US because of culture and there are a lot that desire the fit and finish of a new home but for the most part the old homes are still desirable and livable. Eventually old homes are rebuilt or remodeled and if they sell at the lowest point (like after a fire) will be sold for land value.

Last time I checked, the bay are was mostly single-storey homes.

You could probably house 10 times as much people on the same land if you bought 6 storey apartment blocks.

Land is finite, but upzoning it still reduces the cost of a square meter of floor space.

I agree with you that the value of real estate is : building + land.

While the building deprecates, the value of the land is going up. But this can at least be dampened by upzoning and by taxing land value.

all im saying is that investment groups would not be investing in real estate over tech stocks if supply wasnt artificially constrained.

> In many areas there appear to be lots of empty living units

Citation needed.

(There is a problem with Prop 13 in California, where old people stay in houses that are way to big for them, removing supply from the marktet. But that's not the "empty apartments" you're referring to)

It all depends on the definition of empty. I take a practical approach: if there isn't someone sleeping in that unit regularly, it is empty. If I walk my dog through a neighborhood and see countless dark/cold apartments, ones where nobody has seen a light turn on in years and the mail either piles up or has been stopped, those are empty.

Others take different approaches. Some are of the view that a unit is not empty so long as it is listed as someone's "primary residence", irrespective of whether they actually sleep there.

> Anyone owning an empty house or apartment should be taxed whatever amount it necessary to encourage them into at least renting that place out

That approach will surely encourage the hoarders and wreckers to build more housing.

This just isn't true, especially in areas where housing costs are the worst. I don't have a citation right now, but I'm pretty sure a city in Canada attempted this (Vancouver?) and the returns were paltry, because the underlying fact just wasn't true. There is no glut of empty apartments and condos in markets like California, New York, Washington, Florida, Washington D.C., etc. full stop.

Yeah, something along these lines. Also just making apartments that Americans can be comfortable in. We are so attached to this single family home idea that is unsustainable.

Curious. Why are single family homes unsustainable?

The land that is next to the jobs is expensive. The construction costs of single homes are going to make it out of reach for those who are in housing precarity, even if you make them "tiny houses."

Why not phrase it as "having too many kids and accepting too many immigrants is unsustainable" rather than "single family homes are unsustainable"?

Housing type and housing location have a large impact on energy usage. 1000 homes outside of a city requires 1000 cars, and the structure itself will likely not nearly be as energy efficient as a single unit in a larger building.

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2014-03/documents/lo...

Sure, things can be made more efficient one way or another. But why are single family homes unsustainable?

Might not be the best resource for this, but the youtube channel "Not just bikes" has a few very interesting video on suburbs that could be a decent start. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0intLFzLaudFG-xAvUEO-A

To go further, there are plenty of article around the subject on https://www.strongtowns.org/

When I briefly looked into this, it appeared that my town's school budget absolutely dwarfs the budget for things like roads, so if the roads are bankrupting us, we're really screwed if we need to somehow fund education. So I'd be a bit wary of taking their claims at face value.

That is often because the roads, sidewalks, etc. aren't actually maintained properly, they do some minimal patchwork and when it gets too bad, they ask the state to bail them out.

What about garbage collection, waste water, and electricity wiring? All of which are inefficient in a sparsely populated area.

Garbage collection is private, so I assume they're charging a fair price. Water/power cover their expenses through monthly bills. Sewer is mostly covered through monthly bills, with a small amount coming from "other sources" which I don't understand.

Lots of nearby homes are 70+ years old, so it's not like it's just that it's new construction and hasn't encountered maintenance costs yet.

If we have too many people for the good life let’s stop more from coming in and let our below replacement birth rates get us back there. Our population growth is almost exclusively driven by immigration. This seems fixable.

It is. But for some reason you will never find the substring “migra” in these sorts of mainstream articles.

And only one person so far in 150 comments has dared to suggest that the demand side of the equation ought to be dealt with. The political narrative is overwhelmingly powerful and even here crimestop[1] is readily observable.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/725596-crimestop-means-the-...

Including trailers parks. New trailer parks and trailers built to modern standards could fill a lot of housing need.

It's better than homelessness, but in areas where land is expensive, renting an apartment in a high-rise might end up being cheaper than renting a trailer spot.

Definitely. Different tradeoffs in every locality, but more trailer parks would make other housing cheaper.

"Manufactured house". It's mostly a sorely needed rename to avoid the connotations, but most trailers never get moved once placed so it's not a useful feature to retain.

And also "modular home", which is the middle ground between manufactured and conventional.

Thank you. If new manufactured home / modular home neighborhoods were allowed, relocating homes would be a lot more viable. Trailer park landlords might be one of the worst types of landlords, so it would be great if there was more competition: "From floods to slime: Mobile home residents say landlords make millions, neglect them" https://www.npr.org/2022/08/21/1112299858/from-floods-to-sli...

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