What if public housing were for everyone? | Hacker News Reader

What if public housing were for everyone?

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39 pointsmitchbob87 comments

public housing doesn't address the root of the problem. Housing prices are insane because it's expensive and difficult to acquire and develop land. There's two primary reasons- zoning, and speculative investment that keeps good land off of the market.

This make land very expensive to developers and limits competition. Developing, rezoning, acquiring land can take expertise and political capital. Small developers have a hard time getting involved in tight markets, where most development is now handled by the national builders on a huge scale.

We need to approach this from a different perspective. One is to kill speculative land investments with a land value tax, causing people who aren't using the land to sell off. Two is to streamline zoning and permitting processes to make it much easier for upstart developers to get started on smaller scales.

> There's two primary reasons- zoning, and speculative investment that keeps good land off of the market.

While I agree with the second point, I’m having a hard time understanding how zoning can affect pricing. Isn’t it just “you can’t build industry next to residential”?

A significant amount of zoning is about what type of housing you can build where, how much of it you can build, and how you have to build it.

For example, in Berkeley California, which was one of the first cities to implement "exclusionary zoning" has roughly the following zoning restrictions:

* R-1: One home per lot or estate, only. Bans apartments in 49% of the city.

* R-1A: One home per lot or estate, unless the parcel exceeds 2,400 SF which allows for an additional home.

* R-2: Two homes on one parcel, only.

* R-2A: One home per every 1,650 square feet on a parcel. A typical residential parcel in Berkeley is about 5,300 square ft thus commonly three homes maximum.

[source](https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/berkeleys-upzoning-would...)

Not in the US. It is segregating cities between places people work at, places people shop at, places people live in buildings with multiple units and places where people live in single family housing, without any intermingling. Trying to build a triplex where the neighborhood might already be zoned for it, but where most of the buildings are (or seem to be) detached houses is also an uphill battle because neighbors will fight tooth and nail against "changes to the neighborhood character". This leads to the only multi family housing that has gotten built in recent history to be larger towers, which leads to what urbanists call "missing middle".

Zoning limits the density of housing. I live near an area that used to be rural, now is suburban, and zoning around here often requires more than 1 acre per house.

The major developers are able to figure out how to rezone and build houses on less than a quarter acre, but if you wanted to do it on a small scale (i.e. buy an old house on 4 acres, tear it down, and build a small subdivision instead) it's just not practical.

In more urban areas, it can be similar. But rather than requiring 1 acre per house, the restriction is that you can't build multi-family, etc.

Past methodology applied to public housing has resulted in problems. Historically the method was “how cheaply can it be made so the local building cartel can make the most profit.”

America really needs to deal with the mid-1900s mafia family like mentality still running US politics; electoral turnover flushes rent seeker politicians and their financier’s political support: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29766

The US was trending progressive before it opened it arms to post World War racists and migrants fleeing Europe. Oh what an ironic narrative their progeny babble today

it's also "you can't build multi family housing" and "you must include 1 parking spot per resident"

- You can only build single-family units (no apartments, no duplexes, etc.) - Each lot must be at least a half acre - You must have at least one (or two) parking spots per lot. - You must have multiple stairwells and an elevator for any multi-floor shared units.

And on. And on. And on. Zoning and building restrictions are an absolute gauntlet in many places. For an extreme example, check this out: https://reason.com/video/2018/12/27/san-francisco-mission-ho... (He did eventually succeed, but the cost and effort was tremendous.)

There are more people in the United States than there used to be. When I was in grade school, I learned as a child that our population was just a bit over 250 million. Google's claiming that it is 335 million right now.

Wikipedia says in the early 2000s we were at about 1 million illegal immigrants, and about another 1 million legal. I am unable to find reliable numbers for more recent years, but can it actually have gone down?

The nation could be building a million new housing units each year, and the pressure on supply wouldn't lessen. Maybe the problem isn't zoning or nimbyism or speculative investment.

We get urban sprawl and people building towns and homes in wildly inappropriate areas, such as forests. Which is why you see people's house going up in flames due to wildfire.

Meanwhile, human habitation continues to be a very small portion of land usage. We like living in metropolitan areas for a reason.

Anyway, we get a lot of benefit from immigration. I don't suggest we stop, but rather that we should adjust to demand. Nimbyism and zoning is still a problem especially with urban sprawl.

> Anyway, we get a lot of benefit from immigration.

Sure. But that doesn't mean that there's no tradeoff. Be aware of it.

We can't really talk about tradeoff of immigration if we have grossly inefficient land usage patterns and the ability to construct enough home if we so choose.

As of 2018 there were about 11M people residing illegally in the USA. That number has probably risen significantly in the past few years. Regardless of one's opinion on immigration policy it's clear that this increases demand for housing.

https://www.dhs.gov/ohss/topics/immigration/population-estim...

In my area, illegals tend to occupy low rent housing in rural areas, and there really aren't any shortages in that market. Mobile homes and places to put them are are readily available and reasonably affordable.

Illegals make such massive contributions to the construction industry that their impact on the supply curve should more than offset their impact on demand

Public housing does help address one of the roots of the problem - this is a problem with multiple roots. Public housing does not need to factor in rent seeking in their pricing, as housing is end itself, not the means to another end. It also helps address the other factor of financing housing construction at scale - build standardized and in bulk, and you bring down the price of construction, which is not insignificant.

The government is also in charge of setting zoning policy, meaning that they are better positioned to change said policy.

The landlord problem has become so bad that in some cities the renter/owner ratio is hitting 50%.

These cities become prime picking grounds for anti landlord rules.

NYC is a unique case but cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco aren't. The future will be interesting.

Housing prices are mostly insane in some places because a lot of people have decided they want to live in the same places because of jobs/culture/etc. There's at least some evidence that areas where a fair bit of development has happened over the past couple of decades because of demand still can have very expensive housing.

Cities are economically advantageous for a reason.

I don't think people are suggesting we make cities less appealing. Rather, people are advocating for measures that make cities more livable, such as investing in mass transit and reducing the amount of space inefficient car infrastructure and usage.

And yet a lot of major US cities were losing population into the late 90s. And some (like Detroit) never really recovered. Even if there are various reasons to live in an economically prosperous region, lots of people have no interest in actually living directly in a city.

Because US cities became slums, and rich people lived in the suburbs. In the rest of the world the rich people live in the cities and the poor people live in the suburbs with long commutes, there is no reason USA can't work like that as well.

Except that the US has the space and many/most people don't choose to do so--at least full-time.

Even in places where the wealthy had to live in the city, they often had summer places (in particular) elsewhere.

If you don't need to live in a city, for a lot of people (including myself), it makes a lot of sense to live elsewhere and go in for things.

I could live in a city but I have no particular reason I have to. So I choose not to at this point in time. Which is true of most of my friends as well.

“Speculative land investments” doesn’t sound dramatic enough. How about: A Land Value Tax will prevent wealthy corporations from leeching off developing communities and pushing the property market out of the grasp of young families.

There is a 3rd reason: not (fast) enough transportation infrastructure.

If you don't provide good transport infrastructure, then people must live close to work which will increase housing demand close to work, which then increase prices.

You need to plan for high speed trains, subways and metros to provide enough transportation capacity, so people can live "far away, but short travel time".

Cars are really bad at this as they take up an enormous amount of space for parking and for roads. You also cannot get much stuff done while driving a car, much easier to do work in a Japanese high speed train.

Imagine there was multiple high speed rails lines going out from Silicon Valley: how far from SF can you get in 25 minutes using 300 km/h train versus how far can you get using a car in rush hour? Housing prices in SV would be much much lower if you could get from Stockton to Mountain View in 25 minutes with reliable service and a lot of metro for "last mile" transportation.

> Imagine there was multiple high speed rails lines going out from Silicon Valley: how far from SF can you get in 25 minutes using 300 km/h train versus how far can you get using a car in rush hour?

I think people who haven’t lived with such infrastructure don’t understand that it’s not as easy as it sounds.

Sure, the train may get you from point A to B very quickly, but you still have to get between your office and the train, then from the train to your housing. That’s three trips total, unless you’re lucky enough to live right next to the stop.

And it adds up: That's actually six trips total for a single day (round trip). If they don’t line up perfectly or you miss one, that’s four different places you have to sit and wait.

This is many why people still drive even when they have access to such transport: You spend so much time going through all the transitions and in-between transits that a long drive no longer sounds so bad.

I tried to use my laptop on the train, but the best I could do was answer a few emails before packing up for the next transit step. Better than nothing, but it’s much more complicated than the internet ideal version of taking a high-speed train straight from your apartment to the office.

I have a fairly reasonable, if not especially fast (in part because lots of stops) commuter rail on the rare occasions I go into a city office. But, yeah, I have to drive to the station--only a 7 minute drive but not reasonably walkable--and then it's either about a 35 minute walk or a subway+shorter walk. It ends up being about 2 hours door to door--similar to driving.

It's more pleasant to take the train in but if I'm not sure what my schedule will be I'll still sometimes drive because the train isn't that frequent especially outside commuting hours and I can park right next to the office. And this is a city that most people, at least in the US, would consider to have a well above average transportation infrastructure---and, really, isn't bad by overall European standards.

Driving in city is sometime a terrifying experience with occasional lack of parking spots. At some point, the road quality was so terrible that it was extremely bumpy.

I prefer trains when possible, but waiting for trains can be especially long, and I am sometime bothered by people, who might be mentally ill. Also, it's very noticeable when someone smoked weed, but that's about it. There's a distinct lack of transit employees for the most part.

Increasing train frequency and service would reduce the amount of time waiting, as well increased operation budget for human interaction issues. Upzoning around transit station will make trains more sustainable. Increased social service and effectiveness will take care of peripheral issues that's not the transit agency's job to fix.

Bikes and electric scooters are good at providing last_mile access.

In Copenhagen it's free to bring bike on subway trains. So a lot of people bike from home to subway station, take the subway, and then bike the last part from subway station to work.

Bikes work in Copenhagen because of all the seperate bike paths.

The metro also work very well as it is driverless trains which means it has very low marginal cost to run more trains in rush hours (and during night time) and when there is an unexpected high demand for trains.

A better alternative would be to set state policies that encourage economic development in Stockton rather than spending $100B on high-speed rail. It's really nonsensical to keep trying to cram more people and jobs into a geographically constrained region like the Silicon Valley. There's nothing special about Mountain View.

I appreciate every single new housing unit being built and think public housing is generally a good idea. But recently there seems to be a trend of people wanting to fast-track zoning and permitting for public housing only, while keeping private builders stuck in the quicksand of permitting.

This is not the way mainly because the state does not have the resources to satisfy all housing demand (but also because two-tier rental markets are really unfair to newcomers). What we need is radical reforms in permitting and regulation at all levels of government (but especially at the local level). Imo the main obstacle to these reforms is that it is too easy to shout them down with talking points like "neighbourhood character", "lawn space", "shoeboxes" or "greedy developers".

If North American cities zoned a quarter of their area as 5-story midrises with large parks and mixed use and made permitting quick and easy we could really bankrupt the rent-seekers.

> If North American cities zoned a quarter of their area as 5-story midrises with large parks and mixed use and made permitting quick and easy we could really bankrupt the rent-seekers.

I don’t believe that because it doesn’t happen in other countries that allow for 5 story midrises with large parks and mixed use and … the housing prices are often even more than North America in places that allow that in Europe and Asia. The only place with reasonable housing prices by our standards would be Japan, but housing is still expensive compared to what locals earn.

Well yes, obviously there will be a price floor on housing in a wealthy country. My point is that in recent decades the entire developed world has absolutely strangled their housing markets. Anywhere people want to move to, the wages:home prices ratio has gotten to unprecedented levels.

In Europe the reasons are slightly different. A big one is marking entire buildings, their facades or even their ornamentation as historical landmarks on a large scale (sometimes entire neighbourhoods). Buildings codes are quite a bit stricter than in the US (in all aspects, especially energy efficiency and fire code) and permitting is just as slow and vulnerable to lawsuits-after-the-fact.

The reasons I suggested midrises is because that is the style of building that was built in Europe during the late 19th / early 20th century population boom and it still holds up today (people want to live there).

European housing is expensive because people want to live there. I lived in Lausanne for two years, super expensive, although cheaper than Zurich or Geneva. Lots of mid rise housing, the only place you would see SFHs is by the lake in a very narrow corridor. Not much historical housing to consider, a lot of it was even ugly brutalesque. Yet supply still didn’t keep up with demand even according the Swiss density. Couple that with high paying jobs, and things were going to be tight. Even if you found something at a high price, you were in line with 20-50 people competing for the same rental.

American housing is on easy mode in comparison to Europe.

I think one of the big problems with public housing in the US is that we had a big push for it in the past but went about it in the wrong way and managed it poorly, and had very notoriously terrible results. Now the idea of building any at all for any reason is basically radioactive in most of the country and no politician wants to touch it.

My understanding is that one of the feature's of Singapore's public housing is that there is a range of qualities from basic to luxury. It seems to me that could help make such a program more palatable.

One of the other things about Singapore is that they will bring the hammer down on you for abusing the public housing. If you pee in an elevator, the doors will shut and the police will come. Compare that to public housing in America...

Public housing is neglected in the US because it pushes certain demographics in it and wants it neglected Imo.

Public housing is for the middle class. This isn’t low barrier or even housing for the poor like in the USA.

Singapore public housing is for the middle class, so it’s really different from American kind. Singapore also has subsidized/free housing for those that can’t even afford public housing, which isn’t exactly cheap, even if affordable to the middle class. Many Americans would think $500k for a flat was actually not reasonably priced at all, but locations is key.

Much like single payer healthcare (which even a majority of Republicans are in favor of), the program is perfectly palatable to voters.

The problem is that the investors who fund political campaigns and media oligarchs hate HATE HATE public housing, because it reduces the value of their property investments. Extra supply reduces the price of existing supply.

In order to win elections, you almost need those investors on your side more. The public will be swayed one way or another by their media and if you don't have the campaign financing they probably won't even hear about your exciting campaign platform to build lots of housing in the first place - you'll get cut out in an early race.

>The problem is that the investors who fund political campaigns and media oligarchs hate HATE HATE public housing

So pretty much anyone who owns property?

It's not like homeowners are fighting to have new apartments built in their neighborhood. It's very well known that even the most bleeding heart liberal areas still have insane NIMBY problems.

The blunt truth is that everyone who invested in a home in popular markets (read: a regular everyday metro homeowner) is going to have to take a big hit on the largest investment most of them will ever make in their life. This intrinsically makes it very unpopular on the whole. It's not some shadowy organization pulling strings behind the scenes. It's just about everyone who pays a mortgage and votes.

Just read a housing expansion approval measure through a homeowners eyes:

"Do you approve a measure to lower your home's sale price by 10-20% in order to allow people who earn less than you to move into the area? To grow classroom sizes and increase traffic?"

It's like asking people to volunteer to have needles stuck in their eyes. What is the upside for them?

"Lower your home's sale price by 10% or 20%" is bad framing. For one thing, it's speculative: there's no way to tease any particular nearby building project's effect out of the thousands of other factors (most of them orders of magnitude more significant - like local and temporal macro-economic conditions) that effect home prices.

For another, it ignores potential positive effects. If new building improves local economic conditions, then your home's price (still speculatively, mind you) could equally as well be increased. (With relaxed zoning you might hit the lottery, and find that your lot is worth building an apartment on, and never have to work again!) Focusing entirely on potential negatives is unfair argumentation.

Even apart from price, this approach places emphasis on (potentially) negative second-order ("traffic"), while ignoring (potential) positive second-order effects. In my case I'd straight up trade a 20% decrease in my homes sale price in twenty years (I'd still come out $$ ahead) for twenty years of living near a re-vitalised (instead of currently derelict) commercial strip.

I don't think it'd work out that way: I think living walking distance from, say, a nice coffee shop, pub, grocery store, and cinema (those buildings already exist, by the way, they just need to re-open, which can only happen if more people are nearby) would increase my home's eventual value. That's speculation, too, but equally worthy of consideration as the negative cases.

> the program is perfectly palatable to voters. [...] The problem is that the investors who fund political campaigns and media oligarchs hate HATE HATE public housing, because it reduces the value of their property investments.

I'm not sure that's largely true. I suspect that many property-owning voters are okay with the concept of public housing, but are less ken on the actuality that building public housing increases the supply of housing which reduces the value of their property.

There's also the weird conservative thinking that public housing provision somehow amounts to people getting "something for nothing".

> getting "something for nothing"

With renting, you never get anything. You just are allowed to live there while you pay.

> There's also the weird conservative thinking that public housing provision somehow amounts to people getting "something for nothing".

Isn't this true though? You tax away peoples' purchasing power to give away free goods/services to a subset of the population excluding those that paid for it.

Why not instead make a private company that provides free housing conditional on those living there working X hours in a factory producing widgets? So long as both parties agree, that would be a better solution as it is pareto optimal.

Wouldn't that more or less be a company town?

Yes, and they have a very… mixed… history.

I'm not saying it's an ideal situation. But it sure as hell beats redistributory theft. Housing cannot be a public good simply because it fails the definition: nonrivalous and nonexcludable.

It is by definition rivalous and excludable. Why does Joe get the free house on the beach but my free house is in the desert? Not at all fair!

But what is fair? Voluntary transactions with private property.

What happens when the company lays people off, or shuts down?

Then people move out or go elsewhere based on their negotiated grace period after emoloymejt termination.

> The problem is that the investors who fund political campaigns and media oligarchs hate HATE HATE public housing, because it reduces the value of their property investments. Extra supply reduces the price of existing supply.

While this is obviously correct, you completely ignored that all owners of housing have the same incentives. "All homeowners" is a much more consequential demographic, especially in local elections.

More than that, these people aren't just against public housing, they are against any housing being built. It's so tiresome when people selectively ignore basic facts in order to pin the blame on their favourite scapegoats.

> In order to win elections, you almost need those investors on your side more than the actual public

…because those few elite investors outnumber the voting public at the voting booth?

This claim doesn’t make any sense. It’s weird conspiratorial thinking.

EDIT: Yes, people. I’m familiar with Fox News and the concept of campaign donations. However, Fox News’ prime time viewership is around 0.5% of the US population and the average size of presidential campaign contributions is well under $100.

Claiming that elections are decided by a shadowy cabal of elite investors who trick unwitting voters into voting against their self interests is the election equivalent of claiming anyone who disagrees with you online is a bot or a shill.

One way the super wealthy can over whelm the intent of voters is through emphasis of information. It doesn't matter if candidate A supports 2 or 3 things most people like, if they also support or symbolize something they hate. By emphasizing a less important true thing through disproportionate marketing budgets, you can decrease the chances of people voting in favor of their own interests.

I'm sure most homeowners (especially those owning multiple properties but not even remotely close to being "super wealthy") would gladly vote against their interest as long as lobbyists stopped trying to influence public opinion...

It's actually well established in the research. In the below article, it summarizes the issue by saying:

"Basically, average citizens only get what they want if economic elites or interests groups also want it."

https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-...

You need immense financial resources to win elections in the US. To get those, you need the support of elite investors.

This is why other countries legally cap election campaign spending.

This is why iowa has the first caucus. As a small state you need much less money to reach everyone and a win will get you attention and money to target other states.

as an Iowan I hate it as so many caucus only for the strawpoll.

The problem is that getting to run for president requires a constant stream of money throughout your entire political career (or you need to have your own funds to contribute). This acts as a filter for any candidates that take anti-investor stances.

Because most "normal" homeowners or those who own a couple of properties would be extremely happy to vote for policies which would potentially reduce their equity...

Political campaigns today are decided by advertising budgets. It isn’t conspiratorial to think that the people funding these media campaigns would want something in return.

Advertising helps but it's not decisive. In the 2016 Presidential campaign, Clinton spent far more than Trump on advertising but she still lost. Savvy politicians have figured out how to leverage grass roots social media campaigns at very low cost.

Have you heard of Fox News? It's a TV channel that runs completely fair and balanced news. Anybody who says otherwise is a weird conspiracy theorist. /s

Those elite investors can run large scale propaganda campaigns via the media that they own to sway voters from candidate A to candidate B.

Their preference is to cut candidate C (the kind that likes stuff like public housing, single payer healthcare, reducing military spending) out of the political system at a low level and let voters fight over A and B at the highest levels (e.g. president) safe in the knowledge that A and B both have billionaire best interests at heart and that voters really feel like they're getting a choice.

Which, of course, they are not: https://www.princeton.edu/~davidlee/wp/voterspolicies.pdf

what is california's excuse for not solving the problem? non-republicans control everything and have for decades - and yet the problem remains.

I guess it is much easier to just blame 'someone else', rather than solve the problem?

Except that’s not actually true. While overall California leans Democratic, there are substantial pockets of Republicans in the north and in the central valley.

Any weirder than the idea that, having managed to eventually buy my own home, I secretly want to go live in section 8?

Why is that?

Around two thirds of the Viennese population lives in public housing. The City of Vienna is Europe's largest landlord.

On a related note, Vienna has been leading Global Quality of Life rankings for years.

See also this short documentary about what that looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxuACFQBwxs

The apartment building they highlight (in Montgomery County,MD) might be a good start, but it’s also missing larger floor for families. By sqft, two plans are planet big (1100, 1200sqft) but only 2 bedroom (using space for large open plan living space).

I would like to see apartments more suitable for families. 3 bedrooms.

Loads of families only want 2 bedrooms. While I tend to agree that it would be nice to have more 3-4 bedroom homes, I think it is a larger acute problem to build more 0-2 bedroom homes first. That relieves the over-housing problem of seniors living alone in large houses.

Only < 30% of US households have children present. The majority of households will be satisfied with 2 bedrooms or less.

A fairly typical pattern over the past few decades in the US, at least for professionals, is that they'd live in or near a city after graduation and then move out to suburbs/exurbs when they got married and started a family. There's been an influx (reversing an outflux) to certain cities over the past couple of decades. Of course, there's no law of nature that will continue.

What problem is public housing supposed to solve? The current housing crisis is a supply problem. We aren't building enough housing in places with high demand, so prices are going up. Even if public housing was subsidized to be cheaper than the market rate, it doesn't matter because the public housing will just fill up right away and then we're back to square one. Is there something about public housing that would allow them to build more than the private sector?

Public housing would likely be even more difficult to build. If you think that NIMBYs created obstacles before just wait until a politician proposes building "housing projects" in their neighborhood.

This article is a joke. The apartments mentioned have a 1BR starting at $2,125. And it doesn't seem to be 'public housing' as much as it seems to be 'publicly subsidized private housing.'

We can't have heathly dense public housing when some of us act like feral animals.

Local governments need to change zoning.

The federal government needs to extend low-interest (<4%) credit to home builders.

Public housing is for the poors and the ethnics. That will not change as long as policy is set in the interests of neither. Regulations are captured to Keep Your Hands Off My Stash and to possibly embiggen it.

It is the way.

US has people that has no ethnicity? That's pretty wild.

> Governments have successfully addressed housing shortages through publicly developed housing in places like Vienna, Finland, and Singapore in the past, but these examples have typically inspired little attention in the US

Those countries demographics are way different than the US for affordable housing. It’s comparing apples and tennis balls.

Singapore was a third world country when it started its public housing program. Are you arguing that the US's starting point is somehow worse than that?

If so how?

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