People debating about what kind of housing to build are getting ahead of themselves. The housing crisis is intentional. Homeowners demand the value of their home keep going up and they vote. They way to do that is to keep supply lower than demand. The first step to fixing the housing crisis isnt to figure out what kind of housing to build, it's to convince enough of the voting population there is a housing crisis that needs fixing.
This is sort of true, but confused, because it's land that has value, not housing, and the value of land increases when it's upzoned. [0]
[0] It's of course not increased when government unilaterally constructs low-income housing without reference to market conditions, which is why it's important to assure homeowners that this is not what upzoning entails.
There is land, there is housing, and then there is who lives there. Some people bring value, some people take it away. Naturally the people who bring value get to keep some of it, as they can chose to bring it elsewhere if they don’t.
I'm not american but if most people in America can right now classify as low income (paycheck to paycheck) then open up the floodgates on low-income housing everywhere?
"Paycheck to paycheck" is not an official term or (to be frank) even a meaningful one. The fact is that Americans are extraordinarily wealthy and by no reasonable measure are "most" of them "low income."
That same logic applies to cryptocurrencies. Nobody actually cares about the "utility" of Bitcoin or Ethereum. An expensive cryptocurrency also means expensive fees which diminishes the net benefit of the cryptocurrency. So in practice homeowners and cryptocurrency speculators are making money off the collapse of their community.
There are big differences between homes and cryptocurrencies too though. You can actually live in your home, for example. Crypt I currencies have zero useful value and are somewhere between gambling and a ponzi scheme.
Doesn't matter what you do, some places are more desirable than others to live in, and the end up attracting a premium.
> Homeowners demand the value of their home keep going up and they vote.
Bypassing the will of the voters is ... difficult. It's not impossible to force your moral mores onto voters who don't want it, but it sure ain't easy, and it ain't easy for good reason!
> The first step to fixing the housing crisis isnt to figure out what kind of housing to build, it's to convince enough of the voting population there is a housing crisis that needs fixing.
The "convincing" is never going to be persuasive enough to convince the specific voters that they need to take a financial hit of several years of salaries "for the greater good".
The only permanent fix is to make less desirable places more desirable. With remote work a large and significant percent of the population can just buy somewhere cheap and far off from where they work.
By draining the currently highly contended places of workers, those accommodations will cost less, and the migrating workers will pay less anyway because they are, by definition, buying in a cheaper CoL area.
Highly contended centers that everyone migrates to is going to expensive no matter what you do. it doesn't matter if you double the housing in the next year, the demand will grow to fill it at current prices anyway.
The only solution is to reduce the contention for those centers. It's not a full solution, but it's a damn good start: leave the downtown offices all empty of workers and prices will adjust to reflect reality.
Your alternative is more sprawl that will need to be supported by more new infrastructure that we already struggle to build out and maintain? I think we need to keep looking.
Well the consolidation to make things cheaper isn't working out so well at making things cheaper, is it?
You can't have both "everyone should want to live in the same place" and then also want "everyone should be able to afford to all stay in the same place".
Highly contented areas aren't going to get cheaper even if you double the accommodation. The expensive areas are expensive because people either want to live there or need to live there.
If you reduce the amount of people who need to live there, prices will reduce accordingly.
> People need to have affordable access to medium-to-high density housing for reasons of physical and mental and cultural health.
Physical and mental health is better out of the city than in it.
And cultural health is purely subjective: what on earth makes you think that what you consider good for culture is the same as what everyone else considers good culture.
This is what I meant by attempting to enforce your moral mores on everyone else.
> Concentrating people in medium-to-high density housing makes it easier to achieve our decarbonization goals
Well that's not the problem being discussed here, is it?
We're talking about how to make certain centers more affordable wrt housing.
Removing need is a good first step, as that lets people who want to live elsewhere, live elsewhere.
> Physical and mental health is better out of the city than in it.
For some people.
I'm one of those out-of-the-city-is-better people. However, I would never try to force it on anyone as it would make them miserable and ruin the country for people who want to be there. Sadly, it is difficult to keep city lights in the city.
I wrote medium-to-high density, which means anything between city and "walkable town with a core". This doesn't preclude detached homes. It does preclude sprawling car-centric suburbia, which is similar to rural isolation in terms of the effects it has on the most people's mental health.
ah, I understand. I've lived in both city and "walkable town with a core. I now live 2 miles outside of a New England mill city. The value of each place has been for what I can reach, not the place itself.
> It does preclude sprawling car-centric suburbia, which is similar to rural isolation in terms of the effects it has on the most people's mental health.
Come on now: "Surburbia has more negative effects of people's mental health than high-density living" sounds like both pure conjecture and wishful thinking on your part.
Were there any measurements actually done? What are you basing this assertion on?
> If the market doesn't cooperate, the problem is the market and how it's set up, not the goals.
Market schmarket, the thing not cooperating is people — families. Any plan that operates on the premise that people will be fine and willing to give up detached homes with useful amounts of land is doomed from the start.
Who is asking them to? The US has an enormous supply of such housing, after decades of restrictive zoning codes which make it difficult to build much of anything else. Some fraction of the US population live in single-family detached suburban-style homes not because they value those features but because that was all they could find. People who might prefer city living often can't have it, because the old forms of development which used to cover the spectrum between the single-family detached house and the downtown high-rise have generally been banned.
In order to solve the housing crisis, we must fix the zoning codes to allow a much greater variety of development patterns, allowing gradual small-scale infill. Nobody is going to stop building single-family detached housing so long as there is a demand for it - but relaxing the zoning codes would mean that the existing, unmet demand for other types of housing could also be satisfied.
Just want to point out that people already "take a financial hit" in the form of taxes. I don't agree with it, but we pay taxes for a reason. So the answer may not lie in asking for "more", but rather in doing "better" or more "targeted" things with the money we already give out every month "for the greater good".
I've many times recommended we allow the populace to take a more hands-on approach when it comes to determining where tax-money should be allocated. E.g. I want 20% of federal war spending to be redirected to housing. Oh, what's that, we don't all agree? Well then, good sir, take 20% of my portion of tax money that currently goes to war spending and allocate only that to housing.
/not being snarky with the quotes, btw, that's just how it came out of my brain.
While I agree with your general premise, I'm not convinced that remote work is the driver we should rely on. As a peer comment mentioned, infrastructure is a weak point right now, and remote work would add another dynamic that would make the situation more risky instead of less. Up front though, I should clarify I am a huge proponent FOR remote work. The rest of this is focused on why remote work should not be a foundation to build American housing on.
Prior to the normalizing of remote work and cloud computing, the infrastructure risks that a company needed to consider were related to hubs. Cloud computing moved a lot of the processing out of the hub, which is good from a risk perspective. This leaves the need to ensure the infrastructure related to workers accessing the computing is resilient.
If remote work becomes the foundation we building our cities on, we now expose our companies to the additional infrastructure problem related to internet connectivity while not resolving the connectivity issues inherent in the other grids of roads, power, and water. This is fine for companies that are natively born to this, but this is dangerous for the existing large cap companies and governments that are not.
And just as we're pushing for an increase in remote work, we are also in a period of time where our infrastructure is regularly attacked remotely.
Again, this is not to say remote work is bad. There's just a lot of transformation that needs to occur and I personally feel we should not take a darwinian approach to this when state and local governments are involved.
The instability we would introduce through this would likely lead to corporate funded infrastructure being stood up to ensure remote workers maintain access to cloud computing. I believe the company town concept [0] would make a comeback.
My main fear is that we would inadvertently create remote private corporate fiefdoms that would lead to corporate scrip [1] being used for local goods and services and non-transferable to other regions. The flexibility of remote work would, if my fears are realized, lead to a world of less flexibility than we have today. Not more.
I don't know what a better driver is though. How does one generate desire for a traditionally undesireable location?
> The instability we would introduce through this would likely lead to corporate funded infrastructure being stood up to ensure remote workers maintain access to cloud computing. I believe the company town concept [0] would make a comeback.
I'm not following this argument for two reasons:
1. I don't see corporate-funded infrastructure being stood up nationwide across a nation because the local services in a few places are not up to scratch. IMHO, those few places just won't get the migrants from the cities.
2. Even if the corporations built private infrastructure to support WFH, I don't see a probability of that leading to something like a company-town concept. IOW, I don't see how "Microsoft built private infrastructure to ensure WFH works" leads to "A Microsoft town in those places that has the MS infrastructure." After all, even if the alternative is unreliable, it's still there!. In company towns, your actual dollar was close to worthless - you had to spend it elsewhere.
I'd argue that this is caused by two factors, both which would be really simple to fix if we cared enough.
Easy access to large amounts of debt allow people to become heavily dependent to the value of their home, and we have been sold a story that your home is an investment that should play a large factor in your future net worth.
Go back in history and two things are true, debt wasn't much less common in general and homes were more often built to last. I honestly don't understand considering most homes built in the US today as an investment. The average home is poorly built using cheap materials that won't last. Most major components of the home will need to be replaced in a couple decades if not sooner, meaning you're left chasing large repairs and remodels when you should be paying off the loan and building equity.
I'd propose that the best way to solve the housing crisis is for us to stop treating it as a get rich quick scheme.
It's not the home itself that's the investment. It's the plot of land on which you are allowed to build a certain type of home and in an area where you are banned from doing other things that would reduce the home's value, like building high density housing.
That's what you are investing in and voting to protect.
But yes, that is the core of the issue. You need an off ramp for the people who bought into this Ponzi scheme or they'll vote to perpetuate it.
If you're getting at revoking building codes or zoning laws, I'm all for that!
Unfortunately I don't know what an off ramp would be other than a housing crisis similar to or larger than 2007-2008. A ton of "wealth" is locked up in real estate, and more importantly in mortgage debt. That can't be gently removed or wound down, the loans would have to be allowed to fail before we can move on from this idea that taking on huge amounts of debt is an investment in our future.
Another problem is a vast majority of people want to / have to live in a very few select places. We could alleviate housing costs by changing that as well; back to supply and demand. I hope that StarLink and WFH are big pieces of the puzzle that will move people away from mega-dense population centers. We certainly have the acreage.
>Another problem is a vast majority of people want to / have to live in a very few select places.
It's been like this since the dawn of civilization, and it isn't going to change. There's no substitute for physical proximity, unless you can invent the teleporter.
>We could alleviate housing costs by changing that as well; back to supply and demand.
No, you can't. You can't force people to want to live in the sticks.
>I hope that StarLink and WFH are big pieces of the puzzle that will move people away from mega-dense population centers. We certainly have the acreage.
Maybe you like staying at home all the time and never leaving your 40 acres, but other people actually like to go places, socialize, go out to eat, see cultural events, etc. You can't do that over a satellite internet connection.
Unfortunately I think the bump to WFH during the pandemic just further underlined this. A lot of tech people moved places away from where they work, or took distant remote jobs, only to suddenly have their employer demanded (some) physical presence.
If a significant amount of jobs truly were completely remote, those people could disseminate away from the big population centers and alleviate housing shortages, but that can't happen because full remote is fairly rare and can evaporate with an abruptness that isn't suitable to build big decisions like mortgages on. If you lose your job and your mortgage is tied to a place with a lot of work, you're probably okay. If it's tied to the sticks, you might find yourself trapped.
In Sweden I haven't heard of a single person moving to a shithole because of WFH. Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö metro areas are nicer to live in than bumfuck nowhere.
Probably related to public transport existing and commuting being less soul crushing.
That's Sweden though, there's a huge difference in the major metros and remainder. In the US it's far different. Outdoor recreation is a huge driver which in Sweden is very much comparatively limited. Rural / non-major metro areas homes have values have been increasing even faster as well as the rates of new construction in those areas.
For one thing, public transportation is absolute garbage and basically useless outside of NYC. DC, Chicago, and Boston are pretty much the only other cities where being dependent on public transportation is really viable. Of course you can do it in other places and millions of poverty stricken people do but it's rarely by pure choice.
Then it basically boils down to what's the point of living in the city? If opportunities for work are removed from the equation, it is mostly just going out to eat / drink and to the big ticket events that don't exist in smaller towns.
The dining and entertainment options are increasing and vast in small towns while urban venues are closing and there is a huge trend of the major event centers moving to suburban areas. The preference for outdoor recreation vs big ticket events means you are simply driving into the city for those things but able to enjoy much more of the things for which you had to previously drive out of the city.
The remaining big factor, which is probably not prevalent in Sweden to the extent that it is in the US is crime and the reality is you are far more likely to be victimized in urban environments. Police responses are lacking and most people don't even bother reporting low level property crimes anymore.
As someone in the US who has lived in small/er towns for over half my life and now lives in a major metro area, the benefits of denser urban areas greatly outweigh smaller towns at this stage in my life. Outside of the western states, much of the US is private land, so outdoor recreational opportunities are limited even in rural areas. In my personal experience quality local entertainment and dining has not increased in small towns, if anything its gone down as more people source entertainment online and big corporate chain restaurants take over real estate. In my experience denser urban areas have more to offer in terms of diversity of art, culture, and thought. Economies of scale make it possible to sustain niche endeavors. Access to international airports is also a major boon.
I don’t know. I know the news is often flooded with companies reversing their remote work policies, but I’ve had no issue staying remote since 2020. Maybe my anecdotal experience is unique, but I happily moved “to the sticks” in 2022. I’ve never been the only one at work, either. One guy I work with even has his own farm in rural upstate NY.
Still, I recognize it’s a gamble and I recognize some would prefer not to risk it. But I think more people are willing to do it than you might initially think.
> No, you can't. You can't force people to want to live in the sticks.
"You can't force people to want"?
What are you trying to say? That sentence does not parse for me.
Of course you can convince people to happily move elsewhere: "Look, you can keep your current job, work remote, and instead of crammed into a 1-bedroom flat in a high-density block of multiple loud families, you can raise your kids here in Sleepyville, in a 3-bedroom house with a garage, a garden and an attic/basement for your hobbies."
People aren't stupid. The majority of them work to live, not live to work, and the substantial increase in quality of life afforded by large spaces let them live more than work.
The QoL increase in having an attic/basement for hobbies/workshop/kids/entertainment/whatever alone would get people to move. Then you add in things like usable private yard, much nicer room sizes, etc and for many people it's a no-brainer.
> people actually like to go places, socialize, go out to eat, see cultural events, etc.
You can, and many do, all of this just fine in all small towns and cities. You should, ironically, get out more.
I think the biggest factor that decides where you live is work. You move where the work is, that’s how you survive. You don’t have to use a hyperbole like living on 40 acres. There’s many cities and towns that have social events but aren’t as crammed as SF or NY.
Starlink and WFH only matter if you assume jobs will primarily be online.
There would be plenty of new opportunities popping up if people began leaving population centers and distributing more evenly across the land. We wouldn't have the economies of scale that make large, centralized industries viable.
We would almost certainly need more locally sourced food for example. That would come with huge benefits that most would probably prefer, from health benefits to reduced pollution and animal cruelty.
if this is true won't market forces attract more builders? If there is no promise of a healthy profit (and with growing material prices worldwide you can't keep property prices flat) - there won't be a lot of construction? If anything you need to address construction materials shortage/supply issues.
You can only build what the zoning allows, and that's what the issue is with SFH owners in big cities and how they vote. Many of them don't want to allow denser development in order to keep those market forces in their favor by keeping housing pricing high.
As soon as zoning here in Minneapolis was changed to allow for denser housing city-wide a lot of smaller multi-family units started construction almost immediately.
Why do housing prices go up? Partially inflation. But mostly because purchasing a house and renting it out is massively profitable, state subsidized, and a safe way to invest a store of wealth. Owners of capital seek out niches with good risk:value ratios. Look at housing prices over the last 5 years: even if your investment home sat empty, it's probably gone up 70% or more in price. Rent is just profit on top of those (also state-subsidized, way more than any other asset class!) asset gains. Mortgages that are all-but-guaranteed by the state allow even the least-qualified investors to massively leverage themselves into multiple million dollar properties.
The housing market is broken because moneymakers would rather maximize profits and render everyone else homeless than participate in a functional society. Consider a world where investors own 80% of housing in the USA: would they rent it all out? Or would the small number of corporations collaborate to keep _most_ units off the market, massively spiking the cost of housing and increasing the value of their portfolios? Our healthcare market suggests that when it comes to necessities, people are willing to pay literally any price. And our society has become more and more unequal in the past couple of decades, with the top 1% controlling as much capital as the bottom 50%. Logic dictates that the small number of that 1%, or perhaps the top 10%, if forced to pay insane rents for housing, will provide more profit than setting rent prices that everyone can afford.
I don't think we should vilify the average homeowner who doesn't want to end up underwater on their mortgage. We should vilify the government that has allowed market forces to increasingly distort the residential real estate market, to the point where we're starting to squeeze essential jobs like teacher, firefighter, waitress, and nurse out of the market entirely. Both for rentals and purchases.
Right now it doesn't matter if we double the US housing supply in the next year: it'll still get bought up by investors with far deeper pockets than the average family, because those investors have a strong incentive to prop up the real estate bubble -- they've got more skin in the game than anyone else. And they're less discerning, waiving inspections and paying 10% over asking in cash because if the house turns out to be a lemon they'll just absorb it into margins. Or write it off as a business expense -- depreciation!
The US housing market needs a massive overhaul to disincentivize residential property ownership for anything other than owner-dwellings, co-ops, and small, local landlords (to provide flexible rental options for those who move around too much to justify one-time buying costs). Much like a monopoly or oligopoly in the any other industry, large market forces in the housing industry have deeper pockets, more lawyers, more lobbyists, and more time than any small-time player. And those large market forces have a tendency to squeeze everyone else out.
Housing should, first and foremost, put a roof over the head of every person in the country before anyone profits at all. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either directly or indirectly profiting from homelessness.
If there was any validity to what you're saying, why do places with more permissive zoning and less insane permitting processes see consistently lower rent and property price growth (see: Austin, Minneapolis)?
