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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

> simply outpace any building efforts we could achieve with the current workforce we have.

Trades are learnable skills, my father built two of his houses (one after the other), I've built a house of my own, worked on a sheep shearing robot and contributed to brick laying robots:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBhcm-kRA68

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s17IAj-XpU

Modern building efforts include lots of prefab and the ability to push up structures fast - pressures in the west that depress housing construction go far deeper than an inability to build; there are financial and zoning factors at play.

Talk to residents of many SE Asian countries, eg: Tokyo and elsewhere and work out how they can build enough to house higher and denser populations whereas "the West" struggles.

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> Talk to residents of many SE Asian countries, eg: Tokyo and elsewhere and work out how they can build enough to house higher and denser populations whereas "the West" struggles

Last time I checked was before the pandemic, but from what I remember in Tokyo most flats and housing is way out of the league of normal people and if you are wealthy enough to get on the housing ladder then it’s a tiny flat literally the size of a shipping container where you have to fold your bed away to turn it into a dining table because you’re squeezed into a tiny space like a chicken in a battery and for that “luxury” you’ll have to pay off debt for the best part of your life.

Kind of proves my point, no?

When you have that many people in cities you need either nigh on unlimited surburbia and magical public transport OR a willingness to live in a compact space.

Western housing crisis results from an unwillingness to mostly have dense cities and sensible suburbs with dense multi family blocks interspersed with common parklands.

We can't all have a McMansion with indoor shooting range and swimming pool.

I’m not debating here fictional solutions to how urban areas are being built.

I’m just stating the fact that due to a still very much accelerating population explosion until 2100 combined with a decrease of habitable space it will inevitably create a huge (further) boom in house prices. Wether we start accommodating people in shoe boxes or McMansions has little impact on what I am saying, because the point is, if you buy a nice property today then it will go up in value because there will be market pressure and anyone who will be able to afford a nice home will outbid each other in the free market for the stock of nice housing which we have.

>We can't all have a McMansion with indoor shooting range and swimming pool.

my guess is we will have virtual solutions for that and our bodies will spend most of our time in our broom closet size apartments (or coffin size)

Wow, you know absolutely nothing about Tokyo.

It's not like America, where everyone lives in a McMansion with 40 acres, even in the middle of NYC. I read it on the internet, so it must be true.

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