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Comment by intrasight | Hacker News Reader

That's not broken. That's location, location, location.

Also, your average 100 year-old house is a much higher quality structure than your average new house. And 100 years old is about the pinnacle of craftsmanship.

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Higher location values are supposed to lead to more intensive land use (more dwelling units per acre) but we don’t tax land enough for this to work properly. I’d still consider a housing market without land value tax to be fundamentally broken. Adding on arbitrary constraints on building (eg, beyond health and safety regulations) makes it si much worse.

As for 100 year old houses being considered high quality… there’s definitely going to be a survivorship bias for such buildings that didn’t get replaced while they could (prior to mass downzoning on the 1970s) but they literally didn’t have building codes back then. Lots of money needs to be spent to retrofit old buildings for modern seismic and energy standards.

Also — not saying you’re guilty of this — there is a lot of racial prejudice when folks criticize the “poor craftsman” of modern construction workers compared to those of past generations, as they more often tend to be Latino workers these days.

> "there is a lot of racial prejudice when folks criticize the “poor craftsman” of modern construction workers compared to those of past generations, as they more often tend to be Latino workers these days."

This is nonsense. The reason people say nearly all modern construction and manufacturing sucks is because the primary focus is on reducing costs and increasing production efficiency/speed. Something that needs to be replaced sooner is also seen as a benefit rather than a problem - planned obsolescence.

“Modern craftsmanship is shit” mainly comes from using things like OSB and laminated beams. Anyone who actually studies modern building techniques realizes that modern houses are significantly better than old ones in many many ways - perhaps the only one they’re not being that they’re not using old growth lumber.

> laminated beams

Is there a drawback with those except price? Like do they fall apart earlier?

Where I live there is a separate tax on land and structure. But my understanding is we're unusual that way.

Land tax reform is debated amongst economist. It is a form of wealth taxation, and in America we generally don't tax wealth. And even if we did, unlike having $1 million in the bank - which is a known amount of wealth - the value of land is rather hard to quantify. You could arbitrarily say that all land in the city is taxed at $10 a square foot per year. Clearly that would be inequitable by some land is worth considerably more.

Land, unless it's farmland, generates no income and our tax policy is generally based upon income income tax.

Your average surviving 100 year old house, maybe. I’ve seen enough of them to realize that though they may be build out of wood that is old and hard and thick, they’ve tons of issues that just pile up over time.

Perhaps it is different in temperate climates, but old houses can be an absolute hassle.

Wood isn’t used because it will last forever - brick and stone are better for those purposes. Wood is excellent, just not the best. It’s much more efficient though.

That’s probably a big part of it, but of course making anything stand the test of time is extremely difficult.

Maybe you live in a tropical climate but wood can last 100s of years as long as the roof is maintained. Unless it is a timber house the outer walls will need replacement every 100 years though.

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