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pointsofdata posted:When house prices are high of course new house prices are also high, it's not loving hard. The problem is not enough houses, not that the target market for expensive houses is rich people. Why aren't developers building more, cheaper houses in areas with less expensive land, like in Aurora, CO? There is clearly a market for it.
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Jun 10, 2015 14:26
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Lyesh posted:High housing prices have nothing to do with the cost of production and everything to do with the fact that land is about as far from a commodity as you can get. There are also the logistics of increasing density without first decreasing density for a few years (not to mention obtaining the contiguous land you need for larger buildings if you're going to go over four stories or so), the high overhead of moving compared to changing what car you drive, and a million other factors. According to pig slut lisa, the cost of building a house is like $100 a square foot. Obviously the scarcity of desirable property influences the total cost of a new home more in places like New York and the Bay Area, but the construction cost of a new home is not negligible. I quickly looked on the internet at the cost of land in my hometown, a medium-sized industrial city of ~70,000 in the Midwest which is dying and where property prices are really low, and the land cost per square foot is two orders of magnitude less than the construction cost of a new home. I don't know how the costs of building a new house break down, and maybe there is room for improvement there since maybe there isn't much motivation to changing the ways how we build houses. Obviously one thing that prevents mobile homes from being more popular and accepted is that there is kind of a stigma to living in mobile homes that doesn't really exist for other types of less expensive housing--see the term trailer trash.
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Jun 10, 2015 14:47
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silence_kit posted:According to pig slut lisa, the cost of building a house is like $100 a square foot. Obviously the scarcity of desirable property influences the total cost of a new home more in places like New York and the Bay Area, but the construction cost of a new home is not negligible. I quickly looked on the internet at the cost of land in my hometown, a medium-sized industrial city of ~70,000 in the Midwest which is dying and where property prices are really low, and the land cost per square foot is two orders of magnitude less than the construction cost of a new home. You don't NEED to build a house though, that's my entire point. If you want to get a brand-new, mass-produced mobile home or modular home (at like $25-$30/sqft) for cheap land you very much can. The housing in major metro areas is the problem that people are talking about in this thread and that has everything to do with land prices.
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Jun 10, 2015 14:59
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Radbot posted:This would be an interesting and insightful post had I not been advocating for smaller homes from my very first post. Again, according to poster pig slut lisa's post, the cost of building a new home doesn't perfectly scale with area. There are overhead costs, making the price per square foot go up when you build smaller houses. Like private jets, it is not clear to me that that new housing will ever be cheap. edit: Lyesh is claiming that you could buy a mobile or other mass-produced home for 1/4 of the cost. Ok, I guess that is one solution. Radbot, why don't you just live in a new mobile home in the boonies somewhere? Radbot posted:And yes, I would be whining if it were nearly impossible for poorer Americans to get a car, something required for daily life in most of America. And your whining about free market economics also would be totally misdirected and would betray a lack of understanding of what's going on in that hypothetical car market, too. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 15:35 on Jun 10, 2015 |
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Jun 10, 2015 15:04
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silence_kit posted:Obviously one thing that prevents mobile homes from being more popular and accepted is that there is kind of a stigma to living in mobile homes that doesn't really exist for other types of less expensive housing--see the term trailer trash. Also, when you're talking about housing in major cities with strong economies, the cost of building the house is entirely secondary to the cost of the land it's sitting on.
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Jun 10, 2015 15:05
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hey we rezoned this area for multi family mixed use development so our city will have affordable housing and walkable neighborhoods wait wait you're not supposed to build luxury condos and a starbucks/smoothie chain whaaaaaaaat is going on it's cool the high density we are allowing is in a smart growth corridor you don't need to put in parking oh poo poo the nearest transit stop is 4 miles with a hill you weren't supposed to drive wttttttffff
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Jun 10, 2015 15:22
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LemonDrizzle posted:That's not really true - there's plenty of social stigma associated with living in housing projects or on a council estate in England. The stigma arises from the fact that very cheap housing is often disproportionately attractive to people with... social problems and disordered lifestyles, not from the nature of the housing itself. Yeah, I thought about that, the fact that the stigma about living in the projects is just a result of poor people living there. But rich people live in other types of less expensive housing, like apartments, which are the same types of housing built for government projects, and there isn't that much of a stigma about living in apartments. However, I guess there's really no reason why a rich person would live in a mobile home, so your point regarding the stigma being derived by the class of people living there and not the particular type of housing is taken. LemonDrizzle posted:Also, when you're talking about housing in major cities with strong economies, the cost of building the house is entirely secondary to the cost of the land it's sitting on. The construction cost is not negligible though, and explains why new non-government subsidized housing is almost exclusively targeted towards the wealthy. I brought up the construction cost as a response to Radbot, who was complaining that the new 200k homes in the suburbs in Colorado are too expensive. That construction cost prevents the price of new homes from dropping much below that. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Jun 10, 2015 |
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Jun 10, 2015 15:23
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Great news! Washington D.C., which definitely doesn't have a housing affordability problem, voted just two days ago to downzone large swaths of neighborhoods like Capitol Hill and Columbia Heights. Now new construction infill rowhomes can only have two dwelling units, rather than three or four. Now that the vitally important neighborhood character has been
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Jun 10, 2015 16:09
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Radbot posted:Why aren't developers building more, cheaper houses in areas with less expensive land, like in Aurora, CO? There is clearly a market for it. A quick google suggests that there are loads of properties available at $200,000 and under in Aurora, CO, and Google maps satellite images makes it look a lot like these were built mostly in large groups, suggesting that developers have built lots of houses there. In any case, land being cheap in an area suggests that there isn't loads if excess domand for housing in area (or that it can't be legally used for housing). And how is building more houses in a suburb of Denver going to help high prices and underdevelopment in expensive urban areas? The problem is that many people don't want to live in a suburb of Denver or San Francisco and drive 2 hours to work each day.
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Jun 10, 2015 16:09
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Maybe the solution isn't trying to pack all the millions of people in each metropolis into a ten mile radius and instead spreading the jobs around to hundreds of 500kish towns.
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Jun 10, 2015 16:13
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silence_kit posted:Yeah, I thought about that, the fact that the stigma about living in the projects is just a result of poor people living there. But rich people live in other types of less expensive housing, like apartments, which are the same types of housing built for government projects, and there isn't that much of a stigma about living in apartments. However, I guess there's really no reason why a rich person would live in a mobile home, so your point regarding the stigma being derived by the class of people living there and not the particular type of housing is taken. There isn't just a stigma about living in a home for poor people - there is also a stigma about living near poor people. As a result, communities are just fine with not having affordable housing and will often move to actively block any attempts to build it. It also makes for a fairly effective legal proxy for other less savory sentiments - as it turns out, pricing the minorities out of the local housing market works almost as well as redlining did. Take, for example, this community in Australia, and how they feel about public housing: http://m.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/nicholls-residents-oppose-public-housing-near-primary-school-20150519-gh2p2z quote:Hundreds of Gungahlin residents have opposed plans for a new housing development in their suburb, indicating the kind of opposition the ACT government will face as it tries to "salt and pepper" public housing throughout Canberra. While this is from Australia, virtually the same thing happens whenever affordable housing is brought to communities in the US. Some of the objections, like lack of public transport and poor access to health facilities, are good ones. On the other hand, they're mixed in with people decrying the poor as "dirty laundry", "addicts and paedophiles", a "threat to the lifestyle we had envisaged", and a "negative impact" on housing values. Sure, it's public housing, which is a little bit different. But do you really think the woman who said she moved to Nicholas because it was a "prestige suburb" with "residents with relatively high average income" would be fine with non-public affordable housing? Communities don't want poor people; to them, the lack of affordable housing for the poor is a trend that should be encouraged, not fought.
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Jun 10, 2015 16:15
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mastershakeman posted:Maybe the solution isn't trying to pack all the millions of people in each metropolis into a ten mile radius and instead spreading the jobs around to hundreds of 500kish towns. People want to live in those areas. Nobody tried to pack millions of people into them.
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Jun 10, 2015 16:16
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pig slut lisa posted:Great news! Washington D.C., which definitely doesn't have a housing affordability problem, voted just two days ago to downzone large swaths of neighborhoods like Capitol Hill and Columbia Heights. Now new construction infill rowhomes can only have two dwelling units, rather than three or four. Now that the vitally important neighborhood character has been Maybe if the developers built cheaper houses!!!
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Jun 10, 2015 16:19
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mastershakeman posted:Maybe the solution isn't trying to pack all the millions of people in each metropolis into a ten mile radius and instead spreading the jobs around to hundreds of 500kish towns. What would be the benefit?
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Jun 10, 2015 16:19
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mastershakeman posted:Maybe the solution isn't trying to pack all the millions of people in each metropolis into a ten mile radius and instead spreading the jobs around to hundreds of 500kish towns. I would love to hear more detail on how you think this might be implemented, let alone succeed, because it sounds really authoritarian and ripe for failure
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Jun 10, 2015 16:22
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mastershakeman posted:Maybe the solution isn't trying to pack all the millions of people in each metropolis into a ten mile radius and instead spreading the jobs around to hundreds of 500kish towns. Nah, let's just build taller buildings to fit more people in
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Jun 10, 2015 16:23
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A textbook example of why direct democracy doesn't work - housing policy is one of those obvious areas, much like energy policy or tax policy, where putting it up for a vote is completely inappropriate. Having current area landowners vote on whether or not new housing is added to an area is absurd - it's like deciding whether or not to offer public schooling by having a vote amongst owners of private schools.
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Jun 10, 2015 16:23
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archangelwar posted:What would be the benefit? Affordable housing without needing to run trains 50 miles every direction or push everyone into megatowers. Better traffic too. Take Illinois for example, if the half dozen cities of between 100-200k grew (champaign, Springfield, Peoria, Rockford, Aurora, Joliet) and were self sustainable with plenty of white collar jobs there wouldn't be the giant demand in Chicago for extremely expensive housing, and the expensive roads and rail to support it. Basically get rid of the suburbs of the huge cities by having those people live and work in smaller cities and not commute hours to the megacity downtown. Unless you think all of America should live in like 5 metropolises. mastershakeman fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Jun 10, 2015 |
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Jun 10, 2015 16:26
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mastershakeman posted:Maybe the solution isn't trying to pack all the millions of people in each metropolis into a ten mile radius and instead spreading the jobs around to hundreds of 500kish towns. It certainly is possible to build sustainable smaller communities, though there's always going to be some tradeoff simply in terms of how much extra energy it takes to ship stuff to/from there. American suburbs are nowhere close to this, it seems bad to me to continue to enable the sprawling empty suburb where you can't see the walmart entrance from the target parking lot because of the curvature of the earth.
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Jun 10, 2015 16:26
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I care about this a lot because at the moment I'm looking for a new flat and they are running at about £1000pcm for 500sf
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Jun 10, 2015 16:36
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mastershakeman posted:Affordable housing without needing to run trains 50 miles every direction or push everyone into megatowers. Better traffic too. How are you going to achieve this? Currently a variety of different city sizes exist, I believe they follow an exponential size/number relationship. Perhaps we could wait for an earthquake to split LA into correctly sized communities?
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Jun 10, 2015 16:51
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mastershakeman posted:Take Illinois for example, if the half dozen cities of between 100-200k grew (champaign, Springfield, Peoria, Rockford, Aurora, Joliet) and were self sustainable with plenty of white collar jobs there wouldn't be the giant demand in Chicago for extremely expensive housing, and the expensive roads and rail to support it. Basically get rid of the suburbs of the huge cities by having those people live and work in smaller cities and not commute hours to the megacity downtown.
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Jun 10, 2015 16:53
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pointsofdata posted:When house prices are high of course new house prices are also high, it's not loving hard. The problem is not enough houses, not that the target market for expensive houses is rich people. it turns out the economies of the us and the uk are pretty different, and their housing markets even more so who knew???
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Jun 10, 2015 17:10
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Popular Thug Drink posted:it turns out the economies of the us and the uk are pretty different, and their housing markets even more so I was under the impression that the same problem was affecting major cities like DC, LA, and San Francisco but maybe eveythings great there!
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Jun 10, 2015 17:12
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mastershakeman posted:Maybe the solution isn't trying to pack all the millions of people in each metropolis into a ten mile radius and instead spreading the jobs around to hundreds of 500kish towns. there are efficiency advantages to concentrating jobs and people. it's just that in america people prefer socially inefficient but personally efficient (and expensive) ways to travel and live. also with the average employment length and the rate at which companies go out of business or get bought you'd see a lot of smaller metropolitan cities getting owned constantly by restructuring and job loss. sort of building some level of rust beltiness into your metro framework pointsofdata posted:I was under the impression that the same problem was affecting major cities like DC, LA, and San Francisco but maybe eveythings great there! i hate to break it to you, but major cities like DC, LA, and San Francisco are in the us, not the uk, where laws are different, attitudes towards regional planning are different, and cultural expectations are different. this is one of the other ways that 1:1 comparisons between housing markets in the uk are not the same as they are in the us example: there is no such thing as 'council housing' in the us, not even close another example: there are plenty of houses in the US. they are not easy to get to or afford for many people, and there is a big preference mismatch between the kind of houses people want to buy versus what is available a friend of mine lives in a brand new subdivision on the far outskirts of atlanta where about half of the homes have been vacant since they were built because you have to drive twenty minutes to get anywhere and they're still like $275k boner confessor fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Jun 10, 2015 |
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Jun 10, 2015 17:14
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Popular Thug Drink posted:i hate to break it to you, but major cities like DC, LA, and San Francisco are in the us, not the uk, where laws are different, attitudes towards regional planning are different, and cultural expectations are different. this is one of the other ways that 1:1 comparisons between housing markets in the uk are not the same as they are in the us I understand that there are differences but the general problems of extremely high prices in some urban areas, existing landowners preventing new development, and suburban sprawl are the same, although to different extents obviously. Also there is increasingly little council housing in the UK now, and it looks like the rate of the sell off is going to increase with the new parliament.
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Jun 10, 2015 17:25
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mastershakeman posted:Affordable housing without needing to run trains 50 miles every direction or push everyone into megatowers. Better traffic too. Let us wave our magic wand for a moment. Okay, now you have people in your cities of a few hundred thousand people. What do you do as the years pass and people naturally concentrate in some cities? Do you kick them out when housing prices get too high for the poor of those cities? Do you encourage the construction of high-rise apartment buildings? Do you just forbid people from moving to cities that have reached their allotted 500k people?
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Jun 10, 2015 17:27
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Radbot posted:Why aren't developers building more, cheaper houses in areas with less expensive land, like in Aurora, CO? There is clearly a market for it. OldHansMoleman posted:it's cool the high density we are allowing is in a smart growth corridor you don't need to put in parking mastershakeman posted:Maybe the solution isn't trying to pack all the millions of people in each metropolis into a ten mile radius and instead spreading the jobs around to hundreds of 500kish towns.
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Jun 10, 2015 17:58
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mastershakeman posted:Affordable housing without needing to run trains 50 miles every direction or push everyone into megatowers. Better traffic too. I don't really understand where to start to reply to this post, especially since it ends with some weird accusation that poisons the well. But your plan to address the issues with housing market by somehow forcing them to be smaller just seems weird when you could just directly address the market itself in the larger cities. Then you don't need as many extensive travel arteries. It is weird to claim that you don't want to build more subway lines and then encourage a pattern that requires a strong interconnected network of super highways, airports, and passenger/freight rail.
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Jun 10, 2015 18:41
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How about higher taxes on businesses in larger cities? This is what is done in Germany afaik.
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Jun 10, 2015 18:48
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Lucy Heartfilia posted:How about higher taxes Hah
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Jun 10, 2015 18:51
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Popular Thug Drink posted:i hate to break it to you, but major cities like DC, LA, and San Francisco are in the us, not the uk, where laws are different, attitudes towards regional planning are different, and cultural expectations are different. this is one of the other ways that 1:1 comparisons between housing markets in the uk are not the same as they are in the us
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Jun 10, 2015 18:55
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LemonDrizzle posted:It's true that different real estate markets have their own peculiarities. However, rent and house price growth have been dramatically outstripping wage growth in major urban centres across the anglosphere, and the things those markets have in common are probably more interesting than their differences. I mean, it could be a coincidence that housing costs in SF have been going up in the same ridiculous way and over the same period of time as they have in London and Auckland and Vancouver and Sydney, but... it probably isn't, you know? Yeah, I think you're right. I'm most familiar with American land use planning, but what I do know of Australian and British land use planning indicates that similar constraints on the building supply exist. They may or may not be implemented the same as here but the results are the same.
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Jun 10, 2015 19:03
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Shifty Pony posted:Actually it is true for houses. If you haven't plowed money into major renovations the house is likely worth less today than it was then. It is just that land appreciation masks it and land in desirable areas has gone way way up because cities have prevented it from being used for anything but single family homes. That may be true wherever you live (Detroit?) but it's not true in most of the country. Even after the housing bubble popped, most homes retained at least their original value, and many are worth much more. Case study: Phoenix was hit particularly hard by the housing bubble, but a house there worth $100k in 2005 is worth $200k today. Treating the land as a separate commodity in an attempt to obfuscate the point is extremely weird because usually you don't buy the land and the home separately, they come together. Most people aren't buying homes, bulldozing them, and then building new homes. Either way the car analogy is bad QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Jun 10, 2015 |
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Jun 10, 2015 21:34
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silence_kit posted:And your whining about free market economics also would be totally misdirected and would betray a lack of understanding of what's going on in that hypothetical car market, too. Hardly. It wouldn't be due to a lack of understanding, it would be due to being angry about a system that prevented poor people from owning cars. Cicero posted:There's a whole class of houses known for being cheap. They're called manufactured homes. I live in one right now! The stigma around them helps keep the price somewhat lower than renting an apartment. Then again, I live in the bay area so even renting a 1br manufactured home costs almost 2k/month. That's cool, good for you. Personally I'd rather pay to have a conventionally constructed, small home built for me (particularly because manufactured homes have lifespans that are much, much shorter than conventional homes), but apparently "free market economics" are the "obvious reason" that I can't find anyone willing to take my money.
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Jun 10, 2015 21:50
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QuarkJets posted:That may be true wherever you live (Detroit?) but it's not true in most of the country. Even after the housing bubble popped, most homes retained at least their original value, and many are worth much more. Case study: Phoenix was hit particularly hard by the housing bubble, but a house there worth $100k in 2005 is worth $200k today. Uhhhh land and structures are definitely different things with different values. They are assessed individually. And there's plenty of demo/new build all over the country. Sometimes it's a similar use, sometimes it's more intense (where zoning allows), someone's it's less intense (see e.g. Lincoln Park in Chicago where rich people are buying up multiple lots or knocking down three flats to put up single family houses). I understand why you think land and structures are the same commodity. I imagine most people who aren't familiar with development and property taxation think the same thing. It can seem counterintuitive. But thinking about land and structures as a combined entity is incorrect. e: here's a typical assessor's report for a random commercial building in my county 
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Jun 10, 2015 22:02
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LemonDrizzle posted:It's true that different real estate markets have their own peculiarities. However, rent and house price growth have been dramatically outstripping wage growth in major urban centres across the anglosphere, and the things those markets have in common are probably more interesting than their differences. I mean, it could be a coincidence that housing costs in SF have been going up in the same ridiculous way and over the same period of time as they have in London and Auckland and Vancouver and Sydney, but... it probably isn't, you know? yeah but rising housing prices isn't in question, it's why and what can be done about it. the kind of mass populist housing scheme that would be popular in the uk isn't going to fly in the us, where people tend to demand the government build bigger transportation infrastructure to privately developed housing
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Jun 10, 2015 22:12
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Radbot posted:That's cool, good for you. Personally I'd rather pay to have a conventionally constructed, small home built for me (particularly because manufactured homes have lifespans that are much, much shorter than conventional homes), but apparently "free market economics" are the "obvious reason" that I can't find anyone willing to take my money. actually you're just not looking hard enough, there's sure to be someone out there who will do it for you the reason nobody does this as a matter of course though is because you're a very niche minority and there's no profit to be made catering to a handful of weirdos who want shoebox sized custom built houses if you want a small house manufactured in large quantity, buy a trailer e: how many contractors have you called? if it's more than zero i'll be suprised. are you expecting just to pick a 750 sq/ft studio as a freestanding structure off a realtor's website or something? boner confessor fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Jun 10, 2015 |
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Jun 10, 2015 22:13
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Cicero posted:It's not like developers can shove hyper-expensive housing down everyone's throat anywhere they want. When I visit my sister in Utah I see plenty of billboard ads for new houses in the 200s, sometimes even lower than that. Of course it's easier and cheaper to build out than up, but letting people build up is still a lot better than not letting them build at all. $200,000 for a house is pretty high imo, but that's regional bias for you. Fasdar posted:What about high density, affordable housing that isn't terrible graham cracker boxes plopped on the nearest 'not technically the flood plain' flood plain? You don't even need to pack everyone into dystopian skyscrapers. LA and it's old suburbs are pretty drat dense (Inglewood is denser than Philadelphia), and they've got a lot of single family housing. The problem now is that no one builds small houses. The average new house is over 2000 square feet, whereas the post-war suburbs were built half that size. Those sprawling more-recent - last 30-40 years or so- suburbs could be twice as close to the city if they weren't all full of massive mini-mansions. mastershakeman posted:Maybe the solution isn't trying to pack all the millions of people in each metropolis into a ten mile radius and instead spreading the jobs around to hundreds of 500kish towns. Agreed, but most people on this forum thinks that anywhere outside of 5 or so big metros areas might as well be a farm town with nothing to do and no where to work above minimum wage.
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Jun 10, 2015 22:41
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Popular Thug Drink posted:actually you're just not looking hard enough, there's sure to be someone out there who will do it for you I don't think DINKs who want smaller homes are a "very niche" minority, but I'm willing to be convinced. Can I see the data that's informing your opinion? The data I have shows that Millennials can't afford many of the homes on the market and are delaying children until much later than their predecessors. Have YOU ever called a contractor to get a quote on a home built on land that you don't own yet? They tend to be a bit annoyed by that. Radbot fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Jun 10, 2015 |
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Jun 10, 2015 22:41
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