[0] It's of course not increased when government unilaterally constructs low-income housing without reference to market conditions, which is why it's important to assure homeowners that this is not what upzoning entails.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
> Homeowners demand the value of their home keep going up and they vote.
Bypassing the will of the voters is ... difficult. It's not impossible to force your moral mores onto voters who don't want it, but it sure ain't easy, and it ain't easy for good reason!
> The first step to fixing the housing crisis isnt to figure out what kind of housing to build, it's to convince enough of the voting population there is a housing crisis that needs fixing.
The "convincing" is never going to be persuasive enough to convince the specific voters that they need to take a financial hit of several years of salaries "for the greater good".
The only permanent fix is to make less desirable places more desirable. With remote work a large and significant percent of the population can just buy somewhere cheap and far off from where they work.
By draining the currently highly contended places of workers, those accommodations will cost less, and the migrating workers will pay less anyway because they are, by definition, buying in a cheaper CoL area.
Highly contended centers that everyone migrates to is going to expensive no matter what you do. it doesn't matter if you double the housing in the next year, the demand will grow to fill it at current prices anyway.
The only solution is to reduce the contention for those centers. It's not a full solution, but it's a damn good start: leave the downtown offices all empty of workers and prices will adjust to reflect reality.
You can't have both "everyone should want to live in the same place" and then also want "everyone should be able to afford to all stay in the same place".
Highly contented areas aren't going to get cheaper even if you double the accommodation. The expensive areas are expensive because people either want to live there or need to live there.
If you reduce the amount of people who need to live there, prices will reduce accordingly.
We need to not cover all decently accessible land on the planet with either sprawl or agriculture. That's bad for the environment.
People need to have affordable access to medium-to-high density housing for reasons of physical and mental and cultural health.
Concentrating people in medium-to-high density housing makes it easier to achieve our decarbonization goals.
We need to work backwards from there. If the market doesn't cooperate, the problem is the market and how it's set up, not the goals.
Market schmarket, the thing not cooperating is people — families. Any plan that operates on the premise that people will be fine and willing to give up detached homes with useful amounts of land is doomed from the start.
In order to solve the housing crisis, we must fix the zoning codes to allow a much greater variety of development patterns, allowing gradual small-scale infill. Nobody is going to stop building single-family detached housing so long as there is a demand for it - but relaxing the zoning codes would mean that the existing, unmet demand for other types of housing could also be satisfied.
Physical and mental health is better out of the city than in it.
And cultural health is purely subjective: what on earth makes you think that what you consider good for culture is the same as what everyone else considers good culture.
This is what I meant by attempting to enforce your moral mores on everyone else.
> Concentrating people in medium-to-high density housing makes it easier to achieve our decarbonization goals
Well that's not the problem being discussed here, is it?
We're talking about how to make certain centers more affordable wrt housing.
Removing need is a good first step, as that lets people who want to live elsewhere, live elsewhere.
For some people.
I'm one of those out-of-the-city-is-better people. However, I would never try to force it on anyone as it would make them miserable and ruin the country for people who want to be there. Sadly, it is difficult to keep city lights in the city.
Come on now: "Surburbia has more negative effects of people's mental health than high-density living" sounds like both pure conjecture and wishful thinking on your part.
Were there any measurements actually done? What are you basing this assertion on?
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20230529/Study-shows-link-...
Prior to the normalizing of remote work and cloud computing, the infrastructure risks that a company needed to consider were related to hubs. Cloud computing moved a lot of the processing out of the hub, which is good from a risk perspective. This leaves the need to ensure the infrastructure related to workers accessing the computing is resilient.
If remote work becomes the foundation we building our cities on, we now expose our companies to the additional infrastructure problem related to internet connectivity while not resolving the connectivity issues inherent in the other grids of roads, power, and water. This is fine for companies that are natively born to this, but this is dangerous for the existing large cap companies and governments that are not.
And just as we're pushing for an increase in remote work, we are also in a period of time where our infrastructure is regularly attacked remotely.
Again, this is not to say remote work is bad. There's just a lot of transformation that needs to occur and I personally feel we should not take a darwinian approach to this when state and local governments are involved.
The instability we would introduce through this would likely lead to corporate funded infrastructure being stood up to ensure remote workers maintain access to cloud computing. I believe the company town concept [0] would make a comeback.
My main fear is that we would inadvertently create remote private corporate fiefdoms that would lead to corporate scrip [1] being used for local goods and services and non-transferable to other regions. The flexibility of remote work would, if my fears are realized, lead to a world of less flexibility than we have today. Not more.
I don't know what a better driver is though. How does one generate desire for a traditionally undesireable location?
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip
I'm not following this argument for two reasons:
1. I don't see corporate-funded infrastructure being stood up nationwide across a nation because the local services in a few places are not up to scratch. IMHO, those few places just won't get the migrants from the cities.
2. Even if the corporations built private infrastructure to support WFH, I don't see a probability of that leading to something like a company-town concept. IOW, I don't see how "Microsoft built private infrastructure to ensure WFH works" leads to "A Microsoft town in those places that has the MS infrastructure." After all, even if the alternative is unreliable, it's still there!. In company towns, your actual dollar was close to worthless - you had to spend it elsewhere.
I've many times recommended we allow the populace to take a more hands-on approach when it comes to determining where tax-money should be allocated. E.g. I want 20% of federal war spending to be redirected to housing. Oh, what's that, we don't all agree? Well then, good sir, take 20% of my portion of tax money that currently goes to war spending and allocate only that to housing.
/not being snarky with the quotes, btw, that's just how it came out of my brain.
What's needed is to Legalize Housing!
Easy access to large amounts of debt allow people to become heavily dependent to the value of their home, and we have been sold a story that your home is an investment that should play a large factor in your future net worth.
Go back in history and two things are true, debt wasn't much less common in general and homes were more often built to last. I honestly don't understand considering most homes built in the US today as an investment. The average home is poorly built using cheap materials that won't last. Most major components of the home will need to be replaced in a couple decades if not sooner, meaning you're left chasing large repairs and remodels when you should be paying off the loan and building equity.
I'd propose that the best way to solve the housing crisis is for us to stop treating it as a get rich quick scheme.
That's what you are investing in and voting to protect.
But yes, that is the core of the issue. You need an off ramp for the people who bought into this Ponzi scheme or they'll vote to perpetuate it.
Unfortunately I don't know what an off ramp would be other than a housing crisis similar to or larger than 2007-2008. A ton of "wealth" is locked up in real estate, and more importantly in mortgage debt. That can't be gently removed or wound down, the loans would have to be allowed to fail before we can move on from this idea that taking on huge amounts of debt is an investment in our future.
It's been like this since the dawn of civilization, and it isn't going to change. There's no substitute for physical proximity, unless you can invent the teleporter.
>We could alleviate housing costs by changing that as well; back to supply and demand.
No, you can't. You can't force people to want to live in the sticks.
>I hope that StarLink and WFH are big pieces of the puzzle that will move people away from mega-dense population centers. We certainly have the acreage.
Maybe you like staying at home all the time and never leaving your 40 acres, but other people actually like to go places, socialize, go out to eat, see cultural events, etc. You can't do that over a satellite internet connection.
Most people don’t dream of living in Sunnyvale. They are there because of the job. Any small city would be a fine substitution for many people.
If a significant amount of jobs truly were completely remote, those people could disseminate away from the big population centers and alleviate housing shortages, but that can't happen because full remote is fairly rare and can evaporate with an abruptness that isn't suitable to build big decisions like mortgages on. If you lose your job and your mortgage is tied to a place with a lot of work, you're probably okay. If it's tied to the sticks, you might find yourself trapped.
So everyone stays in Sunnyvale.
Probably related to public transport existing and commuting being less soul crushing.
For one thing, public transportation is absolute garbage and basically useless outside of NYC. DC, Chicago, and Boston are pretty much the only other cities where being dependent on public transportation is really viable. Of course you can do it in other places and millions of poverty stricken people do but it's rarely by pure choice.
Then it basically boils down to what's the point of living in the city? If opportunities for work are removed from the equation, it is mostly just going out to eat / drink and to the big ticket events that don't exist in smaller towns.
The dining and entertainment options are increasing and vast in small towns while urban venues are closing and there is a huge trend of the major event centers moving to suburban areas. The preference for outdoor recreation vs big ticket events means you are simply driving into the city for those things but able to enjoy much more of the things for which you had to previously drive out of the city.
The remaining big factor, which is probably not prevalent in Sweden to the extent that it is in the US is crime and the reality is you are far more likely to be victimized in urban environments. Police responses are lacking and most people don't even bother reporting low level property crimes anymore.
Still, I recognize it’s a gamble and I recognize some would prefer not to risk it. But I think more people are willing to do it than you might initially think.
"You can't force people to want"?
What are you trying to say? That sentence does not parse for me.
Of course you can convince people to happily move elsewhere: "Look, you can keep your current job, work remote, and instead of crammed into a 1-bedroom flat in a high-density block of multiple loud families, you can raise your kids here in Sleepyville, in a 3-bedroom house with a garage, a garden and an attic/basement for your hobbies."
People aren't stupid. The majority of them work to live, not live to work, and the substantial increase in quality of life afforded by large spaces let them live more than work.
The QoL increase in having an attic/basement for hobbies/workshop/kids/entertainment/whatever alone would get people to move. Then you add in things like usable private yard, much nicer room sizes, etc and for many people it's a no-brainer.
> people actually like to go places, socialize, go out to eat, see cultural events, etc.
You can, and many do, all of this just fine in all small towns and cities. You should, ironically, get out more.
There would be plenty of new opportunities popping up if people began leaving population centers and distributing more evenly across the land. We wouldn't have the economies of scale that make large, centralized industries viable.
We would almost certainly need more locally sourced food for example. That would come with huge benefits that most would probably prefer, from health benefits to reduced pollution and animal cruelty.
As soon as zoning here in Minneapolis was changed to allow for denser housing city-wide a lot of smaller multi-family units started construction almost immediately.
The housing market is broken because moneymakers would rather maximize profits and render everyone else homeless than participate in a functional society. Consider a world where investors own 80% of housing in the USA: would they rent it all out? Or would the small number of corporations collaborate to keep _most_ units off the market, massively spiking the cost of housing and increasing the value of their portfolios? Our healthcare market suggests that when it comes to necessities, people are willing to pay literally any price. And our society has become more and more unequal in the past couple of decades, with the top 1% controlling as much capital as the bottom 50%. Logic dictates that the small number of that 1%, or perhaps the top 10%, if forced to pay insane rents for housing, will provide more profit than setting rent prices that everyone can afford.
I don't think we should vilify the average homeowner who doesn't want to end up underwater on their mortgage. We should vilify the government that has allowed market forces to increasingly distort the residential real estate market, to the point where we're starting to squeeze essential jobs like teacher, firefighter, waitress, and nurse out of the market entirely. Both for rentals and purchases.
Right now it doesn't matter if we double the US housing supply in the next year: it'll still get bought up by investors with far deeper pockets than the average family, because those investors have a strong incentive to prop up the real estate bubble -- they've got more skin in the game than anyone else. And they're less discerning, waiving inspections and paying 10% over asking in cash because if the house turns out to be a lemon they'll just absorb it into margins. Or write it off as a business expense -- depreciation!
The US housing market needs a massive overhaul to disincentivize residential property ownership for anything other than owner-dwellings, co-ops, and small, local landlords (to provide flexible rental options for those who move around too much to justify one-time buying costs). Much like a monopoly or oligopoly in the any other industry, large market forces in the housing industry have deeper pockets, more lawyers, more lobbyists, and more time than any small-time player. And those large market forces have a tendency to squeeze everyone else out.
Housing should, first and foremost, put a roof over the head of every person in the country before anyone profits at all. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either directly or indirectly profiting from homelessness.
That's not a bad thing at all.