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Comment by bdowling | Hacker News Reader

Homeless people want to live in cities, for all the reasons other people want to live in cities. In cities, affordable housing is extremely expensive. For example, in Santa Monica, California, an affordable housing project can cost over $1 million per unit.

https://www.surfsantamonica.com/ssm_site/the_lookout/news/Ne...

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They don't cost $1M a unit just because. The article you posted highlights a number of reasons it was as expensive as it was, many of them policy choices that could be undone with the stroke of a pen and a round of votes. There is nothing about building housing in cities that makes it that expensive other than the regulations, many of which could use a re-think or a re-scope.

Otherwise, what's Finland's secret? Are they building houses for the homeless in the middle of nowhere? How do they manage to build public housing in the city without it ballooning into a $1M per unit boondoggle?

Finland is a model of 1) good land use policy (Anna Haila's study of Singapore is also fantastic for understanding this), 2) excellent efficiency of organization and design in social housing (they run competitions and stamp out winning designs many times, getting economies of scale), and 3) understanding market economies and using the buying power of a large builder to be ruthlessly efficient in construction, 4) somewhat sane permitting processes and allocation of resources to social housing builds.

4 and to a lesser extent 3 above are the biggest differences with the non-profits that build below-market-rate housing in California. In California, the non-profits must fight like hell to get any permission to build, and that process can easily take years upon years, with uncertain delays along the entire process. In the meantime, funds that might go to the project will have deadlines on them, and any project will actually be assembled from a large and diverse set of sources that vary from grants, to loans, to LIHTC tax credits. And for the funding that comes from an application process to other organizations.

All this means that the entire build must be 100% subservient to the needs of getting local build approval and funding gathered all at the same time. Any project that focuses on minimizing costs is going to fail because the other parts are so hard to pull together.

IMHO there should be changes to local approval such that when plans are submitted, the city has 90 days to give final approval or rejection, with zero, absolutely zero extensions. And if the city rejects projects that follow the rules, or takes longer than 90 days, then that city loses any control over permitting for a year and a disinterested state board takes over, with the city paying the state for that cost.

Policy of building social housing, well since the war. So there is quite a lot of social housing stock that can work as near last resort. Also generally prices in most areas have not ballooned out of reach.

Being lot smaller helps, but it seems in large town new build pretty close to downtown is 150k€ for tiny apartment(23m^2).

I agree. The affordable housing costs $1M per unit because that is the market price for constructing any housing in those areas.

They’re not just trying to be close to museums, hip bars, and top notch ethnic food. Homeless people want to live in cities because if they can’t afford an apartment, they probably can’t afford a car, suburban areas rarely have any resources for them, there’s safety in numbers, and most bored suburban and rural cops wouldn’t let people camp even 5 minutes on public land, let alone tolerate it long enough to be tenable. Cities are the only place a significant homeless population can feasibly exist in the US.

The reason it's expensive is or because the US is bigger. It's because the people in cities want to keep people out so they make it very expensive. Which in turn fuels homelessness.

The desire to exclude, the refusal to permit enough housing, and the rejection of density are the fundamental cause.

The scale of the US has nothing to do with it. It's merely a cultural choice by a prior generation that younger generations have not yet been able to overrule. But they will.

The answer is to just build a lot more housing. Increasing the housing stock by 10% everywhere would be a good start. If there is so much housing available that buyers don’t get into bidding wars and landlords have to struggle to find tenants, then prices will come down.

Why doesn’t this happen? Because developers will have to do more work for less money.

More housing is absolutely the answer. But your cause is wrong.

The impediment to housing in California is capture of land use policy by homeowners and landlords. We should expand the category of home builders beyond developers, but developers make zero money when they are not building. So developers are not holding back housing in California. The few remaining developers in California tend to be more land bankers than developers. But if we made the process for decelopnrt straightforward, then small builders and contractors could build all sorts of projects. At the moment the process is so complex and difficult that getting approval to build on a site is a hugely valuable financial product that increases the value of a parcel of land significantly (though necessarily less than the cost of getting that approval).

The reason we do not have enough housing all comes down to that NIMBY neighbor who doesn't want to allow apartments anywhere nearby and who has also been given lots of wrenches to throw into the process of approval. We don't have that sort of approval process for single family homes, it's a night and day difference. Anybody is allowed to build a massive mansion without any community input, but for anything more affordable, neighbors can veto it, and do.

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