Comment by jameswilsterman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jameswilsterman | Hacker News Reader

jameswilsterman

Everyone should read the author's e-book (it's a really short ~30 min. read).

http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Damn-High-ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO

After reading his book, I am convinced that overpriced rent is a massively important problem that makes countless aspects of society worse.

I've read that people spend roughly 1/3 of income on housing, 1/3 on food and 1/3 on everything else. The long term trend in the U.S. has been to greatly reduce the % of our income we spend on food (due to agricultural and tech innovation). We need to do the same for housing prices over the next 20 years. A small space to live for one person in NY or SF should simply not cost ~30% of your annual income! The materials are very cheap to build a square box! And there is lots of vertical room in our nicest cities to build square boxes. The issue is solely constrained supply due to building regulations (many at the local level).

For tech leaders in SF, this seems like it should be the next big political fight (after immigration).

It's a great read. Don't be dissuaded by the low ratings at Amazon; they're from conservative trolls over comments he made after the death of Breitbart.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/06/andrew-breitbart-fa...

The ironic thing it that deregulating zoning laws is something that conservatives commonly argue for. Well maybe not conservatives but libertarians do.

I'm guessing the only reason people don't spend a larger percentage of their income on rent is that most landlords require, as an absolute minimum, 3x rent as income per month.

Speaking of which, that rule will probably force me to get a job that I don't need just to rent an apartment as a student.

What about solving this on the technology side?

We have fantastic technology in many aspects of life, but housing seems practically unchanged. I mean, buildings are constructed by teams of men placing pieces of wood by hand. Is that really the best we can do?

Dear VCs, you think a billion dollars is cool? How about a trillion dollars? Housing is that big.

For instance: http://gizmodo.com/5045863/concrete+jet-printer-gets-caterpi...

If Caterpillar, a hyper-conservative, risk-averse organization can fund this kind of stuff, surely VCs can.

> We have fantastic technology in many aspects of life, but housing seems practically unchanged. I mean, buildings are constructed by teams of men placing pieces of wood by hand.

That's simply not true. The kind of high-intensity housing he is talking about is built by arranging large pre-fab pieces on steel frame. In modern tower buildings, the pre-fab pieces are built on an assembly line and actually finished and furnished before bringing them on site and placing them on buildings. It's a much more efficient industry than concrete jet printers ever could be.

Sorry, by "buildings" I wasn't specifically referring to steel towers. Obviously these aren't merely made of wood.

Whether we're talking about one and two story constructions, or tall towers, I still feel that there must be room for "more, better, faster, cheaper" through technology here. I won't be satisfied until everyone can afford (but not necessarily chooses to purchase) their own mansion-sized living space, cheaply.

Were I'm from NO building is made of wood period.

I don't get why Americans pay top dollars for "houses" made of wood, plastic, etc, and with crappy construction (I've lived in several all around the US).

I'd take EU-style bricks, concrete, stones, etc any day of the week.

Where I'm from we have earthquakes.

Which is orthogonal.

No it's not. For example, the vast majority of 1-2 storey buildings in New Zealand have wooden framing, because it allows seismic resistance at a relatively low cost.

Most people that died in the Christchurch earthquake a couple of years ago were killed by falling bricks and stone, and a couple of collapsed concrete block buildings.

Building technology actually has advanced at a really good pace and most construction has been significantly automated. Most homes and buildings go up amazingly fast due to a lot of prefab and modular designs as well as a lot of process mechanization. The guys you see on the construction site today are usually doing more assembling rather than "building."

The conceptual 3d printed type homes are interesting but they are limited in scope in that seismic and load issues require materials and configurations that are not per say printable. (In other words you would likely not want to live in a 3d printed home in SF).

I think you're missing the point. The cost of construction is already comparatively cheap. The problem is that construction to meet market demand is forbidden by zoning regulations.

Agree and understand that the bigger issue is property costs (especially politically created costs, from what it sounds like) rather than construction costs. But seeing as this is Hacker News, I feel that it's worthwhile to discuss the technology piece too.

There is a cool system called ConXTech that uses robots to make big chunks of buildings that can be assembled on site with far less work than conventional steel-frame construction.

Think of it as a lego type snap-together system

http://www.conxtech.com/conx-system/manufacturing/

Outside the book, this is also a frequent topic on his blog. I highly recommend reading some of his previous thoughts on this. It's land that is valuable, not the construction on it. And we should be maximizing that value.

Looks good, but it's not available in the UK. Anything related?

The author has been a prolific blogger for around five years now. While he's moved around a bunch, his name is about as google-able as it gets (yg arrow pass the Norse world tree thing).

Send me an e-mail, and you should have an e-mail address in your profile.

Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City covers the same ground in a more academic tone and is available in the UK.

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