Comment by wolpoli | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wolpoli | Hacker News Reader

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> Building more large, expensive homes that are gobbled up by investors or people 'parking' money isn't going to help people that need cheap dwellings to actually live in.

Investors that gobbled up properties are renting them to renters (assuming it isn't on airbnb) to pay their holding costs (mortgage, tax, maintenance), since they are by definition investors. They actually increase the pool of property for renters, keeping rent price lower, which fights rental inflation. This does drive up purchase price for the home itself, but that's a separate topic.

Same with people parking money, why would they be leaving the homes empty when they could rent it out for additional cash flow?

That's the theory, and the practice is that there's a serious undersupply of entry-level housing. There's simply not enough housing of type 3 BR, up to 1500 sqft being built, and the existing stock is deteriorating.

People will say, yabbut, airplane hangar houses out on the bajada, but you cannot subdivide those monstrosities into apartments.

If zoning was fixed as GP was saying, then more housing people want would get built rather than what pencils out best for developers.

Zoning issues like low height limits, and high parking requirements etc. contribute to the shortage by making it infeasible build a lot of 3BR/1500sqft units because returns are better by building 2 smaller units in the same footprint, and because there's a shortage of housing, they'll be able to sell less than optimal units to people that need them.

Can there be enough entry-level housing? Parcels of land near me are like $200k and I'm not in a swanky suburb... ? Every new house built out in the hinterlands (1hr+ from MPLS) is like $600k. I'm in MN which is considered affordable.

This is because of zoning. When it takes a year+ to get approval there's no reason to ever build anything but luxury. If we allowed more to be built and but red tape lower cost buildings would make sense.

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