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Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

Where possible, states should build more tiny house communities, or have land where putting up a tiny house is legal and pain-free. There should also be a law prohibiting a person from owning more than one of them, except for temporary periods of moving out of one and into another. (The same should hold for regular houses, too.) Effectively, land is a different sort of commodity than most others: it is truly finite, and people should not be able to make as much money off it as an investment as they currently do.

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>Where possible, states should build more tiny house communities, or have land where putting up a tiny house is legal and pain-free.

But let's just call them what they are: Trailer parks. I just don't see how trailer parks are going to solve the problem. You may have cheap land but if you put 500 trailers on a plot you're still going to need sewage hookup, power and water for 500 homes.

What’s the issue? Utilities benefit from density; it’s much chapter to run pipes when they’re shorter per house.

Sure, it's cheaper to construct utilities on a per-unit basis in dense areas. The problem is that in medium-density areas the utilities were built out decades ago and are near capacity now. So, in order to add more housing units and residents in a neighborhood they have to rip out and replace many of the utilities. This is extremely expensive, and disruptive for existing residents.

They don't have to look like traditional trailer parks -- at least not the kind that I've seen. But besides that, they will be cheaper. That's the point.

How much of the cost of housing is construction vs land costs, utility hookups, developer profit and permits? Tiny houses are relatively energy inefficient (a lot of wall surface for the living space), inefficient in land usage and very expensive per square meter. And they are not suited for families with children. I wonder if these trade offs are worth it against building a reasonably sized prefab home.

What the US needs is some expectation adjustment. If you make all your houses and lots 2x smaller suddenly you can fit four times as many people in the same space.

If you work this problem long enough you're going to converge on apartments/condos. It solves the problem you care about and all the caveats mentioned.

Urbanization facilitates specialization which is the engine that drives inequality. So, make all your houses and lots 2x smaller and suddenly you can have more density and higher levels of inequality. Yay?

Wait, you’re missing the important linkage. Urbanization facilitates specialization only because it produces excess productivity. Growth it’s very self produces inequality when the benefits of increased productivity are not evenly distributed. This is not a fault of urbanization, and certainly a poor reason to oppose urbanization.

I didn't miss it. Read the entire (tiny) subthread...

Logically I agree that this is a "distribution" or "social" problem, not solely "the fault" of urbanization (that is, the "correct" social policies ought to be able to mitigate the natural downsides).

Unfortunately, however, we have thousands of years of data in which no society has managed to discover what these correct policies are (or at the very least, they've been unable to be deployed at scale). This observation gives me some pause and causes me to re-evaluate some of my prior assumptions.

A poor reason to oppose urbanization, perhaps. But not a poor reason to oppose kneejerk urbanization without critical thought (a prevailing trend as of late).

Whatever the case, this force is a powerful one and should not be casually dismissed, even by those who believe workable solutions are (finally) imminent.

This does not bear out in any location I have lived.

Really? It bears out everywhere I've ever lived and also in the archaelogical record.

Don't make the mistake of equating inequality with poverty. Specialization is certainly a great driver of efficiency and wealth creation. This trade-off can be fine (in a rising tide floats all boats sense) but we have to keep our eye on the levers.

I mean, if your definition of equality is 'everyone is equally poor', then I suppose subsistence farming is what you want to aim for.

If you then urbanize, your inequality increases rapidly. But since we already have an urban, industrialized society, increasing density is not going to move the needle on inequality. It's arguable it'd move backwards because more people can suddenly live in a desirable area.

One must also ask in addition to your pertinent questions, can the market bear putting the same price on a tiny house as it can with a large house? It's about perceived value. It's the same as anything "wedding". The price will go up just because the word "wedding" is there: wedding photography, wedding invitations, wedding catering.

With tiny houses, you're going to get the opposite effect of the price being lower because if of the "tiny" aspect.

What would you say differentiates a tiny house from a trailer set up in a trailer park? And from a tiny house estate to a trailer park?

Then do that. That isn't nearly the majority of the cost of a home.

How about developing the "missing middle" in urban development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_middle_housing

Efficient and healthy land use for housing was solved in the 1900s - we don't need tiny homes.

In my city they looked at that. My city is not one of the most expensive in the country (upper middle?), but it has been generally near the top of the "biggest YoY increases in home values" over the last decade of so.

All sorts of feasibility studies. Options.

And then out came the NIMBYs. "My grandkids play in the street and I'm scared they won't be able to anymore", "there's going to be cars parked everywhere on the street and we won't be able to find parking" (uh, you have driveways and garages, no?)

"What's this going to do to our property values?" This was the kicker. "Well the most conservative of our studies showed that it looks like we'd go from 11% YoY value increases to 8-9%."

Wow. You would have thought the city was pouring water in everyone's gas tanks, or assaulting their grandmothers.

"HELL NO. I have a right to double digit property value increases!" Even when the lower increases would still be in the top 20% of property markets in the country (and being clear, still an 8%+ ROI), no way in hell were any of those proposals going to pass.

Yeah, American houses are massive compared to what we have in Europe and often have large amounts of space around the house too.

In England, row housing is quite common and that seems a good compromise between density and comfort.

I live in an apartment block in Spain and it's quite a lot worse than even row housing due to noise from neighbours, lack of parking etc.

It's okay for young people, but it'll be hard to raise a family in, which is probably partly why we have such low birth rates here.

I have lived in an apartment my entire life. I'm in a building with 15 floors and 5 flats on each right now. My direct neighbors have a newborn baby. I don't hear a thing, literally - I wouldn't know there are other people if I wasn't 20 meters above the ground. Don't compromise on build quality like the Spanish do, build it like the Germans, Poles, Czechs and Slovaks do - and you won't have any issues.

People living their whole life in apartments do not create nearly as much nuisance as people who moved into apartments from detached houses, where they grew up. They don't wear hard-soled shoes inside, they don't drop stuff on the floor, they don't blast music and don't even own 1500W subwoofers, or weight racks, or treadmills.

For some reason people believe that a little baby is the most noise possible and it's often used in such discussions as an evidence of complete sound-proofing of their dwellings. While people do instinctively get agitated from a child's screams the power of these screams is very low. This is why parents get baby monitors as the screams don't propagate well even between floors in a single-family house. Even adults, unless trained, can't scream nearly as loud as a 200W Bluetooth speaker. Get your neighbor upstairs to drop an empty barbell bar and see how you won't notice it. And in the US your neighbor can be dropping a 300 pounds barbell while having a party with people dancing with accompaniment of 2.5kW sound system, at 2:30 am.

Rented six apartments in the US. Only once had a noise problem, solved by an email to the leasing office. Though admittedly they were all in the "nice" neighborhoods.

With the 46.8M multi-family units in the US, that bing shows, your sampling of six is not very significant.

If the percentage of noisy apartments were 90%, the probability of me randomly landing in 6 quiet apartments out of 6 would be 0.1^6, or one in a million. If the percentage of noisy apartments was 10%, that probability would be 0.9^6 = 0.53. So, given my experience, the latter case is 0.53 / 0.000001 = 530,000 times more probable.

"conditional probability" is the concept you might find enlightening.

You may start with "How Many Jelly Beans?: A Giant Book of Giant Numbers" by Andrea Menotti.

Yeah, that's true. I guess I don't trust developers to build decent buildings, especially affordable ones.

In England, the new-build homes are often of a far inferior build quality to the older ones built after the war.

Yup. You would think "builder grade" materials and work in a home was a sign of quality, a la "craftsman"... but no, it's "built using the cheapest shit that met code, and put together on deadlines".

And Australian houses are, as I understand it, bigger again. There was a thread somewhere about where to put your washing machine: bathroom or kitchen. And every Australian was in there getting completely confused because the vast majority of houses in Australia have a dedicated laundry room usually with a trough, bench top, washing machine, dryer, etc.

And yet there is a shortage of urban units with 3+ bedrooms in most US cities.

A Land Value Tax is much simpler to enforce, more generally applicable across all housing product types, and a lot less artificially constraining of local decision making.

Agreed land is totally unique and should be handled very differently from other forms of wealth.

Yes, that is true. Though I would argue that we still need some rules on land ownership to begin with that is independent of the prices set by a market.

We used to have housing of last resort, places like SROs that were unpleasant but cheap (and to be fair, they were often firetraps). But then we decided it was inhumane so we banned or greatly restricted them, and surprise, the people that would have been in an SRO now live in cars or tents, definitely not an improvement.

Row houses and flats are better. Zoning laws prohibit them in most neighborhoods though.

We used to just have boarding houses, apartment buildings for this sort of thing.

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