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Comment by spirit557 | Hacker News Reader

We don't build small starter homes anymore. 1-3 bedroom, 1-2 bath homes, single car garage. A small bungalow - the only ones you see were built in the 50s and 60s. You simply never see them in new construction. Actual small, modest affordable homes without expensive features or excessive size. I don't know why it is this way, but it's frustrating to observe this. You have to look in the old neighborhoods for these and sometimes they are bad areas, sometimes they are good. In the good areas a lot of these homes get torn down and replace with expensive homes 2-3x the size.

In America, we simply stopped building small affordable, HOA-free homes. Why?

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- We still build some 800 - 1500 sq foot living spaces. They're called "condos" or apartments. We should be building a lot more of them, but we do still build some.

- Small bungalows should still be built in rural areas, but they're highly inappropriate in urban areas. The secondary costs of the car-dependent sprawl required by inexpensive single family homes is massive. They may have been built for $6,000 in the 50's but today likely cost the cities that house them more than $6,000 per year in infrastructure maintenance costs.

There was some report published here a few years ago that I'm too lazy to look up that did it cost analysis of City infrastructure and found that cities make money in the highly dense impoverished areas and lose money in the Richer areas simply because of the cost of distance that roads, pipes, cops, etc have to travel down.

That, of course reminded me of the New Orleans shotgun and the reason for it: for a while, property taxes were based on linear frontage feet, directly proportional to the length of the road in front of the house, because that was its cost to the government according to the rational French...

Townhouses/rowhouses can also be a good middle ground.

Definitely, those and other forms of the "missing middle" that traditionally dominated cities.

We rented a townhouse for several years before buying our place. If one had gone up for sale while we were looking we would have stayed in that community. It was perfect for us, small community/neighborhood, and the house was just the right size. A two car garage would have been nice but we made it work.

We ended up in a house on the smaller end of what was available and we still think its probably too big for us (great neighborhood though).

This is why we should be charging taxes based on some combination of land value/servicing cost (or just straight land value if we calculated that as if the land were maximally utilized for its given zoning and zoned everything appropriately densely).

We got too enamored with sticking it to rich people because they are rich and build opulent things rather than focusing on charging rich people for the things they do that negatively impact the rest of the city and that has very little to do with how opulent their mcmansion is and very much to do with the fact that it's sitting on a large lot, with large frontage that increases the cost of delivering all services to everyone.

If we did this the change would go something like this: That 50's era bungalow on a inner city lot would be zoned for a lot more units (4-10 depending on lot size and other considerations that might allow 4+ stories to be built) and it's taxes would go from say 3500 under the old system to 8000-12000 which would let them choose to live in low density and pay for it, or sell to a developer, develop themselves. At the same time the mcmansion would see a smaller change in their property taxes and may be slightly higher or lower depending on lot utilization, or may have an opportunity to subdivide and develop what was once the landscaped garden area into more density to lower their tax bill under what it was before.

But you don't really own a condo. I mean you do, but you still have to pay condo fees which in many cases are so high it might as well be rent.

I have a home exactly like that. Its market value is about $900K at the moment, so even if they were still being built, nobody can afford them.

Is that the value of the structure or the land it’s on ?

First of all, this is unrelated to the article which is discussing rent.

Second of all, we do build starter homes in the burbs. The problem is that a growing amount of those homes are bought by private equity to sit on and invest, partition and rent out or convert to Airbnb.

Third, these homes are simply just not as profitable to be built. So the incentives in our economy mean more luxurious homes which have a higher return.

NIMBYism, which is mostly driven by:

Homeowner Greed - if fast-rising home prices are making you richer & richer, then (per the classic supply vs. demand price curve) you only want a token number of very upscale homes to be built anywhere near your house.

Municipal Finances - when local government is mostly supported by property taxes, a $4M luxury house pays 40X the taxes that a $100K starter house does, and the cost of providing municipal services is not much different between the two...guess what?

"Wrong Sort" FUD - if lots of people are scared of (or bigoted against) anyone who's poorer than them, or has darker skin, or ... well, they'll for-sure find reasons to zealously oppose anything that might attract "those sorts" to the area around their homes.

These reasons are used mostly for dense projects like apartment blocks, not small homes.

There are, on the other hand, plenty of reasonable objections that arise from the nature of dense housing in certain areas, rather than from people's race/class/etc. Sometimes development projects really do destroy nice lower-middle to middle class communities (consisting of exactly the homes the parent is describing), that people have worked their whole lives to live in (one of the last remnants of the simple version of the American Dream).

Developers are no more rational/benevolent than governments, and therefore not everybody who has opposed any one development project is a villain who is racist/elitist/immoral in comparison to you.

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