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Comment by cycrutchfield | Hacker News Reader

Build more houses then

Anyone with enough money to do that is investing it into making the shortage profitable for them.

Where? Sure there is plenty of empty land in the USA but that’s just it: there’s nothing there so nobody wants to live there.

In these conversations, there is a lot of slipping back and forth between the idea of people being unable to have a home, and the idea of people being unable to have a home where they would like to. They are different problems, and, while I am not trying to minimize the latter, the former is both worse and more solvable, yet we spend most of the conversation getting into emotional arguments about the latter.

You realize there exists a third dimension, right? You can simply build higher.

Sure, but who can afford them? We're building a house right now... My god it is expensive.

Indeed. We also acquired a lot and are getting bids to build a modest 3 bedroom house for us and two kids. People saying “build more” seem to be under the impression that construction labor and materials are cheap and we’re just refusing to do it.

Single family housing is not the way that you’d build your way out of this. You need all sorts of housing, like the missing middle of affordable townhouse style units with one or two bedrooms and no onsite parking.

It’s going to take decades to get out of the system we’ve built for ourselves with sprawl and the automobile. Until it’s possible to build in volume and cheaply you won’t see prices go down because there so much pent up demand.

The market is not how you build your way out of this. You need state-backed construction on a postwar scale, bans on corporate investment in real estate, abolition of zoning, and myriad other interventions that are blocked at every step by people looking to profit off their neighbors being forced into the streets.

> state-backed construction on a postwar scale

One more innocent question: Should our state build enough houses just for existing population or for all South America population too?

You forgot one crucial step in that book: nationalize all the housing and pack more families into the existing units.

Pretty sure you can increase supply without having to resort to building shitty Khrushchevkas for everybody.

Shhh! I would pay to watch America moves this way.

I’ve lived in a country without sprawl and without the automobile. I’ll watch with great interest if this country moves in that direction.

The country as a whole is one thing, but San Francisco has been putting in a lot of time and money into creating bike-friendly infrastructure, and in some cases, succeeding. We'll have to see how the local culture adopts it, but, especially with ebikes, theres a future where the automobile's dominance wanes.

Don’t worry, after a couple of decades of spikes in homelessness, property crime, and every hospital worker, educator, and bus driver being driven out of cities, the housing will trickle down to those who can afford it. We just need to let the market do its job.

Urban SFH needs to be replaced with the missing middle of housing. 4-5 stories, larger mixed-use buildings

Building more SFH on the peripheries is fine for people who want that, but it's not part of the solution to lowering prices.

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