Hacker News Reader

Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

Where I live, if a developer wants to build a subdivision, they pay for the water and sewer lines. They pay to connect those lines to the city infrastructure. If the city infrastructure needs to be upgraded to handle the new volumes, they pay for at least a proportionate share of that too. The ongoing maintenance becomes part of the city's budget eventually, but not the costs of the build out.

All those costs go into the price of the houses built there.

And this is also part of why building "affordable" houses rarely happens. All the infrastructure costs the same whether the houses cost $100K or $1 million.

View on HN

That's smart. Do they do it with roads also? That's a big one near me - developers buying hundred acre farms on unpainted 2 lane country roads and jamming in 2000 houses. Then inevitably the road becomes unusable until the city or county gets around to addressing it.

Always wondered why the county didn't require the road work, or money for it, up front.

In my hometown in Idaho in the 1990s and 2000s yes, this includes access roads and improvements to the surrounding area. A car dealership and Wal Mart both paid for road improvements and traffic lights as part of development.

The developer gets to at least name the roads. I worked for a city, the developers would submit names and while the city had the final call 99% of the time they would just accept whatever the developer submitted. The only times that I saw it get denied were times where it would create confusion like a similarly named road already existed or it could be construed as something profane

That's negligence on the part of the county/township. Around here, every new development is required to pay for the traffic and utilities improvements that will be required once the thing is built. (And all the engineering that goes into figuring out the impact in the first place.)

The “affordable” housing thing seems like such a misdirection. I can’t help but daydream that some moneyed interest somewhere fans those flames, as it looks like a dead end that can absorb endless fervor.

You know what you do if you want an affordable car? You buy used. I think most people understand Ford is never going to build another a car that costs $10k brand new, and the last new car near that price barely sold because it was so stripped.

>The “affordable” housing thing seems like such a misdirection. I can’t help but daydream that some moneyed interest somewhere fans those flames, as it looks like a dead end that can absorb endless fervor.

Do you really need a conspiracy by "moneyed interest" when the general public is perfectly happy to support similarly bad policies like rent control?

It's almost like "affordable hosuing" are the vacancies that the people moving into shiny new homes leave behind.

Houses don’t shrink as they age.

When everything is built huge you don’t end up with homes that are cheap to heat, cool, or maintain. That’s why building affordable houses is actually a real issue.

What’s really dumb is the average number of people living in a house has tanked over time but the median new home just keeps getting larger. In an efficient market you’d expect new homes to match what buyers want, but regulatory capture has severely distorted the market.

What makes me crazy is these big houses aren't even that nice. They don't have significantly more rooms. It's all just stretched out to maximize sq ft for minimal costs. Sometimes with so many cut corners they're unsafe.

So if you have a big family or multigenerational needs then often you have to do significant remodeling or sell anyway.

If a gornment changed policy to make houses depreciate like cars, it would not be a government for long.

And the car analogy is n9t fitting, unless we talk about cars bundled with the parking spot. But then they would not depreciate that much, and the banger with a parking spot in Manhattan would cost more than the Ferrari that could only park in shitsville.

The property a home sits on and the property a car sits on would depreciate the same.

But in reality neither has to depreciate, just stop growing at these insane rates. Below the cost of inflation, until the average worker can afford a home again.

It is similar in Seattle. Large residential developments have a wastewater surcharge for several years to help upgrade infrastructure. Which normally just gets added as a line item in the utilities bill they pass off to residents.

What a smart idea! As a home owner I approve of this way to keep supply out of the market (or at least make it expensive enough to prop my price up). Can we invent any more charges?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com