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Comment by throwaway041207 | Hacker News Reader

This reductionism doesn't seem useful. The population of people who want to buy homes has not grown in any way that is proportional to the cost of a home.

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I've yet to hear anyone say why "build more" isn't a valid answer to lowering the cost of housing. Even if new builds stay at exactly the same price they're at today, the price of older homes will decrease as supply increases.

And I don't just mean in this thread, I mean ever. It's always hand-wavey "it doesn't work like that" when the evidence suggests that it does.

The underlying issue is that converting single-family suburbia to medium-density multifamily ‘ruins the neighborhood’, and cities don’t have the courage to eminent domain homes and replace them with apartment buildings themselves, so they outsource the housing function to the Free* Market, which is most definitely not interested in terminating the SFH market. Between the profitless-ness of apartments for the real estate industry and the use of suburbia zoning to discriminate since the early 20th century (nowadays in the guise of HOAs), the problem to solve isn’t in housing or urban planning, it’s in dethroning capitalism and classism. That’s why no explanation presents itself for why more housing isn’t a good idea: it’s a fine idea, but the U.S. ethos of ‘fuck you, got mine’ takes precedence, and it’s uncouth to say that out loud here.

Commercial new-build apartments happen elsewhere in the world, plenty of them in my city.

And then it’s $2000/m for paper thin wall and cheapest materials possible and has more stringent qualification requirements than a mortgage.

I asked why "build more" isn't a valid answer and your response is that we need to dethrone capitalism and Reddit-tier nonsense about HOAs?

Why is your solution "put 3 families in this single-family home" and not "build more single-family homes?" If the market isn't "interested" in "terminating" single-family homes what makes you think it would be a good thing to do so, other than the fact that it would hurt a cohort of people you seem to hate?

If you got rid of height caps, minimum lot sizes, and loosened zoning capitalist developers you hate so much would jump at the chance to build medium (and even high!) density housing. No need to have the government steal homes from people to do it.

Most U.S. cities cannot sustain purely-capitalist upzoning from low to medium; the profits for developers simply aren’t there, and the elected officials aren’t willing to upset homeowners. Three of the five cities I’ve lived in over the past fifteen years made the changes you describe to single-family zones. Developers largely did not, as you suggest, jump at the chance to build higher density housing. In one case where they did, their bank demanded they as part of the loan terms to set a minimum rent per apartment that was higher than neighboring single family homes, leading to persistently high vacancy rates, nonstop turnover, and a profitless development with 0% ground-level retail rented in the middle of a business-tourism district. So, for most U.S. cities, either they need to step in and commission redevelopment of the single-family homes of their voters, and take the profits or losses themselves on both their accounting books and their election outcomes, or upzoning simply won’t happen at all.

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