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Popular Thug Drink posted:much of europe has much stronger bureaucratic control allowing them to do regional level plans which are extremely rare in the us I agree, the US hosed up and there is a reason, but usually the cities with the better infrastructure, especially urban heavy rail systems are more or less are doing better (DC, NYC, Boston, Bay Area). Chicago less so recently, but that city's politics are so unsalvageable I don't know what could help it. Popular Thug Drink posted:in a lot of places in the us you have bugfucked setback requirements, occupancy limits, minimum parking requirements, etc. that artificially limit density. permitting developers to get past these weird restrictions and start building like rowhomes with one space per would be a good start More or less Beaverton (Portland Metro Area) did this and the results are mixed, especially since there is still limited rapid transit where they expanded construction. They built without considerable of livability of infrastructure in mind and it shows. Sure it is cheaper than Portland, but I don't know I would say it is affordable either. In the end, rezoning without investment is probably going to be the route that happens in the US but you are more or less increasing supply with increasingly more punishing consequences.
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Jun 8, 2015 18:54
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Ardennes posted:I agree, the US hosed up and there is a reason, but usually the cities with the better infrastructure, especially urban heavy rail systems are more or less are doing better (DC, NYC, Boston, Bay Area). Chicago less so recently, but that city's politics are so unsalvageable I don't know what could help it. thats a bit of a correlation/causation problem tho, cities which built heavy rail generally are more resistant to hollowing out due to automotive suburbanization Ardennes posted:In the end, rezoning without investment is probably going to be the route that happens in the US but you are more or less increasing supply with increasingly more punishing consequences. yeah but this is entirely a political problem. saying "i will spend more on mass transit than roadways" as an american politician is equivalent to saying that you're a gun-control communist who hates god
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Jun 8, 2015 18:57
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http://m.research.stlouisfed.org/fred/series.php?sid=SANF806BP1FH&show=chart&range=max&units=lin I wonder why prices are so high?
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Jun 8, 2015 19:22
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Popular Thug Drink posted:thats a bit of a correlation/causation problem tho, cities which built heavy rail generally are more resistant to hollowing out due to automotive suburbanization Well it could be a combination of both, they lost less population and more of those losses being quickly recovered. The cities that resisted the modernism of the 1950s/60s more are doing better even if practically every American city was touched by then. What would NYC looked today if Moses got what he wanted? Another example is Portland which might have been saved by combative NIMBY'ism over the Mount Hood Freeway (which spurred the region to take an entirely different direction). It is a political problem, but I am not convinced it is unsolvable and despite everything improvements are being made. I don't think they will be enough but I don't know if it entirely hopeless (at least for some cities, LA/Houston/Atlanta are hopeless).
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Jun 8, 2015 19:25
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pig slut lisa posted:LMAO have you ever looked at the zoning maps and codes for Denver and its suburbs? I'm guessing not, or you'd know exactly what legal restrictions on supply exist. No, I haven't. Mind linking me to zoning maps for the areas surrounding Denver, in particular, since you apparently know where they are? Denver is almost completely built out (DIA area excluded) so undeveloped, zoned areas are of particular interest. pointsofdata posted:http://m.research.stlouisfed.org/fred/series.php?sid=SANF806BP1FH&show=chart&range=max&units=lin So single family home starts declined right before the recession and haven't yet recovered? What is this supposed to show? That you'd prefer more low density housing to be built? Radbot fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Jun 8, 2015 |
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Jun 8, 2015 19:31
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edit: doublepost
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Jun 8, 2015 19:32
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Radbot posted:No, I haven't. Mind linking me to zoning maps for the areas surrounding Denver, in particular, since you apparently know where they are? Denver is almost completely built out (DIA area excluded) so undeveloped, zoned areas are of particular interest. http://bfy.tw/ETq pointsofdata posted:http://m.research.stlouisfed.org/fred/series.php?sid=SANF806BP1FH&show=chart&range=max&units=lin this is just for single family homes, you'd have to combine this with something else to create a substantive argument about all housing versus just "why are single family homes so expensive"
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Jun 8, 2015 19:50
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The other problem with urban planning is you get private land owners who want to sell and develop their land right now and will use the local planning commission to try and force that so there's residential build, just like has been which gives a temporary boon to the tax base but 10-20 years down the line when all that stuff is built out you have no money for services and infrastructure and then it's the cities fault for doing exactly what the populace demanded. It's never their own fault, the land owners are consolidated and gone now.
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Jun 8, 2015 20:20
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Radbot posted:No, I haven't. Mind linking me to zoning maps for the areas surrounding Denver, in particular, since you apparently know where they are? Denver is almost completely built out (DIA area excluded) so undeveloped, zoned areas are of particular interest. As Popular Thug Drink already pointed out, Google is your friend here. Nevertheless, here are links to Denver, Arvada, Lakewood, Aurora, and Centennial. Notice that the predominant color in all of these maps is various shades of light yellow, which represent low density zones where it is generally illegal to build anything more intense than a single family home. Also, I don't know why you'd focus on the zoning of undeveloped land when the major source of housing affordability is the fact that already developed land isn't allowed to redevelop in a more intense fashion.
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Jun 8, 2015 20:30
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RuanGacho posted:The other problem with urban planning is you get private land owners who want to sell and develop their land right now and will use the local planning commission to try and force that so there's residential build, just like has been which gives a temporary boon to the tax base but 10-20 years down the line when all that stuff is built out you have no money for services and infrastructure and then it's the cities fault for doing exactly what the populace demanded. yeah this is an important dynamic. overly residential jurisdictions are nice and quiet and safe, there's not much traffic and generally low crime, but as the population ages out the tax base will stay very low as residential uses are the least tax-producing and most expensive kinds of development. homeowners and landlords like to keep property taxes low, they vote much more aggressively, and residential uses demand expensive things like education, parks, and proximate healthcare that commercial or industrial uses don't care about it's kind of a wild west situation right now as the lifecycle of communities is a decades-long timeframe and population preferences and movements are shifting the character of communities well within that cyclical period. this is why things like gentrification happen, and i'm certain that in the next decade or so we're going to see a sort of reverse-gentrification by reverse gentrification i think we're going to see boomers and gen X'ers who moved to nice tract subdivisions end up disappointed. the market demand they count on to keep their suburban home prices up will collapse because of a mismatch in preferences. wealthy millenials pile up on top of each other to live in cities, meaning that outer-ring suburbs are relegated to less-cool millenials who want a yard, recent immigrants, and the formerly urban poor who can't compete in the cities and are forced out to the burbs. i'm not saying that suburban home prices will collapse, but that market pressure which drove home prices up on the outskirts of metros will dissipate, meaning these home prices will stay relatively stagnant, which is going to gently caress over a lot of people who counted on increasing real estate to provide a pseudo retirement fund. so instead of a sudden rise in rents, we're going to see a sudden stagnation in rents in a lot of exurban bedroom communities which is going to be weeeeird
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Jun 8, 2015 20:44
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Cicero posted:A lot of progressives REALLY hate developers. They'd rather deny the developers as much profit as humanly possible than focus on helping the poor and middle class with their rents. I would agree with your argument without context but I can understand the "gently caress developers" sentiment in some cases. Here in Minneapolis pretty much every developer dispute seems to involve developers that want to come in and build ultra high priced luxury apartments with rents higher than the mortgage on a decent sized house. Most of the progressive opposition to these projects is just thinly veiled "gently caress the rich" and I can't really say I disagree. At least whatever they're trying to defend in the name of "character" is probably a lot more useful to 99% of the general public than these ridiculous apartments are.
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Jun 8, 2015 20:45
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MaxxBot posted:I would agree with your argument without context but I can understand the "gently caress developers" sentiment in some cases. Here in Minneapolis pretty much every developer dispute seems to involve developers that want to come in and build ultra high priced luxury apartments with rents higher than the mortgage on a decent sized house. Most of the progressive opposition to these projects is just thinly veiled "gently caress the rich" and I can't really say I disagree. At least whatever they're trying to defend in the name of "character" is probably a lot more useful to 99% of the general public than these ridiculous apartments are. yeah this is because for-profit developers target the high ends of the market. housing provision in america (that isn't explicitly mandated by the government) always targets the rich and upper middle class, which then filters down to the middle class and finally poor over a period of time it'd be like if there was nobody at all manufacturing cheap sedans like honda or toyota and all poor people were driving beat to poo poo used jaguars and beemers will.i.am levit was revolutionary because he was the first guy to crank out cheap middle class housing in the 20th century, like the industrial rowhouses of the midatlantic in the mid 19th century boner confessor fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Jun 8, 2015 |
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Jun 8, 2015 20:47
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The nicest neighborhood in Chicago has lost as many housing units over the last decade as the worst, because of billionaires building mansions there. I'm sure it's the same in a lot of cities, because there's restrictions on maximum density but none on minimum.
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Jun 8, 2015 21:01
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pig slut lisa posted:As Popular Thug Drink already pointed out, Google is your friend here. Nevertheless, here are links to Denver, Arvada, Lakewood, Aurora, and Centennial. So all we need to do is lobby our city council to change this, right? I'm sure the people that already live in these neighborhoods are 100% on board with apartment buildings coming in. It also doesn't answer the question as to why we haven't seen single family homes being built at anything approaching reasonable prices. gently caress apartment living.
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Jun 8, 2015 21:07
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Radbot posted:So all we need to do is lobby our city council to change this, right? I'm sure the people that already live in these neighborhoods are 100% on board with apartment buildings coming in. you originally were talking to a guy explaining why housing is so high in nationally important metros, not on the outskirts of a regional city but yeah minimum lot requirements, setbacks, bedroom limitations etc. all do mandate a certain kind of single family home. i don't know what you want though, are you expecting developers to build dozens of little one bedroom houses on 1/10th acre lots or something single family houses are built at reasonable prices, they tend to exist way out in the sticks or in a trailer park or something
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Jun 8, 2015 21:11
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Popular Thug Drink posted:but yeah minimum lot requirements, setbacks, bedroom limitations etc. all do mandate a certain kind of single family home. i don't know what you want though, are you expecting developers to build dozens of little one bedroom houses on 1/10th acre lots or something Yeah, sure. Why not? Tiny homes are awesome. And why was my home affordable for the working class to buy in 1951 when it was built, yet it's worth over $300k today? Your position is zoning, correct? Did zoning not exist in the 50s?
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Jun 8, 2015 21:20
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Radbot posted:So all we need to do is lobby our city council to change this, right? I'm sure the people that already live in these neighborhoods are 100% on board with apartment buildings coming in. Yes. This is what I was talking about when I said the problem facing urban planning is not a lack of funding but a lack of political will. The idea that only the people who currently live in a particular neighborhood should get to weigh in on that neighborhood's land use laws excludes people who: (a) currently live in other neighborhoods but are nevertheless still affected by the land use laws in the particular neighborhood (for instance, residents of a low-income neighborhood who are being displaced by wealthier people who would prefer to move into a different, but supply-restricted, neighborhood) and (b) future residents, who may be willing or even prefer to live in a version of the neighborhood that is, e.g., somewhat denser but also more affordable Radbot posted:It also doesn't answer the question as to why we haven't seen single family homes being built at anything approaching reasonable prices. gently caress apartment living. You can't solve the affordability problem by only building single family homes, holy poo poo. Not to mention that there's a whole lot of housing choice in between "single family home" and "apartment building" that you seem to be unaware of.
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Jun 8, 2015 21:23
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Radbot posted:Yeah, sure. Why not? Tiny homes are awesome. I guarantee the zoning hasn't changed in any material way since the house was first built, but the demand sure has!
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Jun 8, 2015 21:25
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Radbot posted:And why was my home affordable for the working class to buy in 1951 when it was built, yet it's worth over $300k today? Your position is zoning, correct? Did zoning not exist in the 50s? there are more people demanding houses now. increased demand in the face of limited supply tends to raise prices
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Jun 8, 2015 21:33
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Why not focus on building tiny homes under 1,000 sqft? This way you'd get around (some, not all) zoning limitations and you'd get many of the benefits of single family home living at a lower cost.
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Jun 8, 2015 21:47
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Radbot posted:So single family home starts declined right before the recession and haven't yet recovered? What is this supposed to show? That you'd prefer more low density housing to be built? Woops, phoneposting, was meant to be the full time series, new starts have decreased massively since the mid 20th century.
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Jun 8, 2015 21:53
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Radbot posted:Why not focus on building tiny homes under 1,000 sqft? Thus way you'd get around (some, not all) zoning limitations and you'd get many of the benefits of single family home living at a lower cost. Why are single family homes so superior that other housing types should be illegal to build? Also, building smaller houses is an idea with limited utility in a city that still has minimum lot size regulations.
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Jun 8, 2015 21:59
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Also to be honest if you want the city to more than single people, you need more than 1,000 square feet but that includes apartments. There is obviously a middle ground here though, people don't need McMansions (which are completely useless) but at the same time planning needs to be about balancing housing supply with livability. Europe is way ahead of us in this aspect, but ironically enough white flight is starting to happen.
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Jun 8, 2015 22:16
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Radbot posted:Why not focus on building tiny homes under 1,000 sqft? This way you'd get around (some, not all) zoning limitations and you'd get many of the benefits of single family home living at a lower cost. this is a totally different question from "why don't developers build tiny homes" to which i assume the answer is "the market for tiny homes is very small and people who want to live in small housing units live in apartments and other kinds of multi-unit building" but in many places tiny homes are strongly discouraged by zoning codes. most people who do have tiny homes build them in a backyard or something, there are very few people who buy a whole quarter acre lot (~11k square feet) just to put like a 1k sq/ft house in the middle, at that point the land might be more expensive than the structure boner confessor fucked around with this message at 22:28 on Jun 8, 2015 |
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Jun 8, 2015 22:25
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pointsofdata posted:It's loving ridiculous, I can understand why the right is prepared to drop their principles in favour of shortsighted selfishness, but when so called progressives oppose development for the sake of the "village character" of a suburb or out of unthinking opposition to "developers" it's beyond belief. Of course it's true that developers try to make luxury everything when supply is already tightly constrained, because when they have to buy the land at some ridiculous $$$ price, making housing for poors/middle-class is business suicide. rich white faglord posted:If your rent is too much, move it is not that hard of a concept. I'm sure apartments are plenty cheap out in north dakota quote:Protectionist housing policies are bad for people who’d like to work in Silicon Valley, of course. But NIMBYism is also bad for the nation as a whole. Even though labor productivity has grown the most over the last few decades in three specific U.S. cities—New York, San Francisco, and San Jose—that local growth hasn’t translated to greater national growth at all, thanks to a lack of housing.
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Jun 8, 2015 23:36
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Ardennes posted:Also to be honest if you want the city to more than single people, you need more than 1,000 square feet but that includes apartments. According to this article the average home size in the US is ~2100 sq ft, whereas in the UK it's ~800 sq ft. That's actually a lot lower than I expected for the UK, wow: http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/how-big-is-a-house
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Jun 8, 2015 23:41
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Cicero posted:1000 sq ft. is actually fine for a couple with 1 or 2 kids, assuming sufficient neighborhood amenities. 1000 sq ft. was an average sized house back in the 50s, and average household size was bigger then than now. We've just gotten used to really big homes here in the states. The issue is being that house stock is already there and we are already use to that type of space, families will simply stay or migrate to the suburbs.
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Jun 8, 2015 23:45
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Radbot posted:Why not focus on building tiny homes under 1,000 sqft? This way you'd get around (some, not all) zoning limitations and you'd get many of the benefits of single family home living at a lower cost. Cheap houses are not as profitable. Why do you think everything has to be "luxury" or "premium" today? It's not because people are that much more conceited. It's because there's no profit to be had on the low end.
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Jun 9, 2015 00:01
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Ardennes posted:The issue is being that house stock is already there quote:and we are already use to that type of space, quote:families will simply stay or migrate to the suburbs.
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Jun 9, 2015 00:27
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ChipNDip posted:Cheap houses are not as profitable. Why do you think everything has to be "luxury" or "premium" today? It's not because people are that much more conceited. It's because there's no profit to be had on the low end. 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.
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Jun 9, 2015 00:32
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Cicero posted:The low end is always less profitable. But the flip side is there's a lot more of it, so in most industries you end up with some companies going for low volume/high profit per item, others go for high volume/low profit per item. But when you restrict production in an industry such that high volume is impossible, guess what happens? When I explain this to people I like to  Right now there's no supply restriction on how many cars can be built. There are minimum safety requirements, which I suppose maybe reduce supply somewhat by excluding the super cheap deathtrap from the showroom floor. But by and large manufacturers can make as few or as many cars as they want. And so we see tons of cheap Hondas, some midlevel Volkswagens, and a few expensive Maseratis. But if we said "only 10,000 new cars can be sold in the US per year", then you can bet those things would be blinged out as hell and unaffordable to just about everyone. It's the same thing with housing. True, there are some people who are poor enough that no developer will ever be able to build housing for them at a profit. And there is also a place for building codes to exclude housing that is super cheap by dint of being a deathtrap. But by and large, metros that are seeing only luxury housing being built have brought it on themselves with ridiculous supply restrictions in the form of low density zoning. e: I forgot the other important aspect of this analogy, which is that nobody freaks out about the fact that some poor people can't afford new cars, because there are plenty of good used cars out there. Yet people freak out about the fact that some poor people can't afford even the cheapest new housing, despite the fact that there's plenty of good used housing out there. pig slut lisa fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Jun 9, 2015 |
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Jun 9, 2015 02:48
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What about high density, affordable housing that isn't terrible graham cracker boxes plopped on the nearest 'not technically the flood plain' flood plain? That is to say, where the gently caress are our arcologies already?
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Jun 9, 2015 03:02
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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?   In all seriousness though, for the US you'd only need buildings that tall right in the urban core.
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Jun 9, 2015 04:10
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Ardennes posted:Somehow much of Europe was still able to figure it out, and it is certainly a better idea than "let the free market roam." You want high density without meddling bureaucrats and public investment, good luck. Was Europe really smarter about this politically, or did it just get the benefit of having most of its cities built before age of the automobile? silence_kit fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Jun 9, 2015 |
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Jun 9, 2015 04:16
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You don't even need highrises. You can get excellent walkable neighborhoods by building structures of 2-6 stories along a street network that is primarily composed of narrow streets 12-18 feet wide. Gotta have a few arterials sprinkled in there, but it really starts with the street network.
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Jun 9, 2015 04:17
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silence_kit posted:Was Europe really smarter about this politically, or did they just get the benefit of having most of its cities built before age of the automobile? The history helps, but plenty of new cities (e.g. rebuilt areas of Tokyo and other Japanese cities) follow the same successful formula, which is (1) narrow streets with (2) mixed use buildings (3) located close to each other. e: in contrast, even if you look at American downtowns that were built well before the automobile, the streets were generally built WAY WAY wide, such that when the automobile came along it was no problem to stripe 4 traffic lanes on them pig slut lisa fucked around with this message at 04:22 on Jun 9, 2015 |
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Jun 9, 2015 04:19
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pig slut lisa posted:You don't even need highrises. You can get excellent walkable neighborhoods by building structures of 2-6 stories along a street network that is primarily composed of narrow streets 12-18 feet wide. Gotta have a few arterials sprinkled in there, but it really starts with the street network.
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Jun 9, 2015 04:21
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Cicero posted:I agree that's true almost all of the time, and I'm a big proponent of that kind of mid-rise mixed-use development. In some places I do think the level of demand necessitates at least some high rises; I'd put a good chunk of SF's core in that bucket, for example. Oh for sure, especially in employment centers. And highrises also fill a segment of market demand, so yeah let's have some.
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Jun 9, 2015 04:24
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One thing that I've been thinking about recently is the stigma around public housing in America, and I think a big part of it is that it usually specifically targets poor people. Building inexpensive housing for those who need it most sounds like a good idea, but it seems like that means you have the demographic with the most social ills highly concentrated in one place, which inevitably exacerbates crime, or at least creates that association in people's minds. So that doesn't help politically, and then you have to figure that all the middle-class people know that "public housing isn't something that helps me" so why vote for something that only helps those people. It just seems like you could make public housing a lot more popular if it was mixed-income, like in Singapore. Then you'd have fewer problems associated with it in the public's mind, and a wider and more diverse political base.
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Jun 9, 2015 04:31
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pig slut lisa posted:When I explain this to people I like to That's not a good analogy. Cars depreciate very quickly, so good used cars are actually really affordable. That's not true for most houses. A house that cost $100k in 1990 is likely worth several times that now, despite the real estate crash, whereas a car that cost $20k in 1990 is worth a small fraction of that price now. Even in the worst case, it's hard to find a house that actually loses a significant fraction of its value on that timescale, which is the opposite of the car world. People aren't freaking out that poor people can't afford brand new houses, the issue is that good old houses are extremely expensive and new developments aren't ever any cheaper because there's less profit to be made in producing lower-income housing. So poor people get shafted with higher payments no matter what, because developers just want to build really expensive low-density housing, which isn't too great for the renter market.
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Jun 9, 2015 07:04
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