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"What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?" I think cheap quality housing is a huge area that would help everyone. Taxes and housing together e

• samstave 11y ago
  - applying technology to building denser housing. for example, imagine cheap robotic excavation, so every house and building could bury all their parking lots and long term storage areas below ground instead of occupying valuable real estate. You need to watch this: Digging down is for the 1% it would seem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLJ0zZQb9x0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLJ0zZQb9x0
  • surfmike 11y ago
    Yup, it's expensive so generally only used in expensive projects. But it's a way of manufacturing land (or rather, saving land that would otherwise go for garages, storage, or other facilities that don't need windows). This makes housing cheaper because you then need to pay for less land per housing unit.
• larsiusprime 11y ago
  Georgism is another option to tackle the housing issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
  • branchless 11y ago
    Spot on. This is the solution.
  • cma 11y ago
    Martin Luther King, Jr. touches on Georgism a bit in this writing shortly before his death: http://www.wealthandwant.com/docs/King_Where.htm http://www.wealthandwant.com/docs/King_Where.htm
• kansface 11y ago
  All of those problems are political; ie, we already know how to build more densely, how to make better trains, how to zone, etc. etc. For that matter, I doubt Uber for Houses would be successful (ignore all permits and just build).
  • surfmike 11y ago
    Excavation is expensive and that's the main reason people don't use it. Trains are hard to build in established areas but self-driving cars, ride sharing, and hyper loop point to new ways enabled by technology. I agree that zoning is the big political obstacle. But I feel like some development entrepreneurs could convince some cities and make some great examples of dense livable neighborhoods.
    • abakker 11y ago
      In can't help but think that the only real answer to getting housing to be appropriately cheap is to manufacture it 100% off site and bring it to the site in easy to assemble pieces.
      • surfmike 11y ago
        edit: The more I think about it, the more I think this is important regardless of the cost of land. If it became cheaper to "start over" and redevelop underused lots, you could scale up density a lot faster. In that vein, technology to make demolition cheaper/faster would help too. --- original: That's definitely part of it. But cost of land often dwarfs the construction costs. And some things like excavation (which lets you avoid wasting land on low-value uses) need to be done on site.
        • abakker 11y ago
          The major cost in time is also weather related. Materials are damaged if they sit in the rain, things have to be done in a specific order, in many places the livable build season is short (in the rocky mountain states, eg.) and the opportunity fir error is huge. If things arrive as a mostly prefab kit, then things are faster to put up on site, which avoids tons of complexity. It especially avoids a lot of the challenges with multiple subcontractors and scheduling. Making demolition cheaper and easier would be a major improvement. Of course, demolition is one area where care is very important, for safety of the workers and the environment. It is amazing the types of hazmat that are in old buildings and houses. (Asbestos, lead, mercury, etc.) Containing it all is very hard.
• Eridrus 11y ago
  Regardless of basic income, fixing housing is super important since it's one of the biggest drains on everyone's income and the fixed nature of it suggests that just giving everyone more money will cause a lot of that money to just end up in landlord's pockets. I think a lot of the change must be policy change though and cannot be purely free-market oriented since there is a public interest in seeing more housing stock built than a capitalist would want.
  • branchless 11y ago
    So much this. We've see this over and over. If we get more productive the rentiers take it. We need to squash the rentier starting with land value tax. And stop taxing labour. Then you have the true choice because you can achieve financial autonomy through work and then tell the man where he can stick his job if he refuses to pass on enough of your value added. Cheaper land will see less people forced to work which will mean higher wages and more disposable income. And all the people doing nothing other than "investing" in extorting money from workers for the right to occupy space will have to suck it up. This topic basically terrifies me. When I see people asking for basic income without addressing land issues (and money creation) it just shows they are on the wrong track. Big time. Basic income will just become "landlord income". In the UK we have "housing benefit" which sets a floor on rent and guarantees land owners get more than the market can support. It's "landlord benefit".
    • pyoung 11y ago
      BI could have an impact because it could relieve the pressure on job centers (SF, NYC, LA, etc...) as people wouldn't be forced to move to look for work (and I imagine plenty of folks would leave those areas as well, because they are no longer as dependent on their job as they once were). At least in the US, there are a ton of midwest and rustbelt towns that have really cheap cost of living and plenty of land, but due to lack of jobs, are in really poor shape. BI could allow for people to relocate there, and the new influx of people (and income) could lead to revitalization.
      • branchless 11y ago
• sama 11y ago
  Yes--driving down the cost of housing is one of the things I think about the most. It seems so critical to the whole equation.
  • PabloOsinaga 11y ago
    I wonder if we are thinking about the housing cost problem properly. I live in NYC and there are a lot of affordable options. That's certainly not the case about the most desirable locations. But ipso facto those locations will continue going up in price. Perhaps the problem is not so much about housing cost but transportation and access to services (eg uber, doordash), which seem to be advancing and making a lot of progress. Would love to hear your thoughts about this.
    • lxmorj 11y ago
      I think it's absurd that there are millions of kitchens in NYC. There is a project in my old town - Syracuse - that I think has a lot of benefits: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/coliving/414531/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/coliving... It's kind of a modern take on boarding houses. Actually, I think that the optimal situation is much closer to a boarding house. Take 10-15 units, remove the kitchen and laundry entirely. Use the savings to pay a full time cook and laundry staff (2-3 people) to cook at-cost meals and do laundry.
      • taurath 11y ago
        I feel like it wouldn't work as well once you consider the politics that goes into shared resources. What does the cook cook? Why should a person who doesn't eat there pay for the cook? In many apartment buildings in southeast asia (especially those that cater to foreigners/wealthy immigrants) there'll frequently be a shop and a small restaurant at the first level that mostly caters to the people who live in the building. No reason we couldn't have something like that here, though admittedly the cost of running both those types of services are probably pretty high given regulations. Expect a lot of politicking at the condo boards though.
      • 11y ago
• jib 11y ago
  I'm not sold on density. I think improving rural logistics is more key. Make more land attractive rather than making more use of current land. That is logistics both for people, data, and goods.
  • benmathes 11y ago
    It does seem attractive, all the empty land out there. But the point of cities is to be near lots of other people all the time. There's a tipping point of human flourishing from the intermingling. Great cities outlasted empires. Interaction density is the important thing, and it grows combinatorially with human density. There's no way you're going to get rural logistics to that level.
    • boxy310 11y ago
      Also there's a significant problem of infrastructural efficiency. There's research indicating that city infrastructure follows a 3/4ths-power distribution, where doubling the population only increases the need for infrastructure by 68% [1]. The more generalizable format of this is Kleiber's Law [2], which notes that animal metabolisms scale along that same distribution by body mass. The implication is that cities like Detroit that are rapidly contracting in population and per-capita income are getting a double-wammy of decreasing tax revenues and increasing per-capita infrastructure costs. [1] http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/math-and-the-city/?_r=0 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/math-and-the... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber%27s_law
    • jgord 11y ago
      Its possible the internet has solved some of that benefit of closeness, but that socially we haven't yet caught up, but will gradually. eg. Having good broadband plus good VR goggles and cameras might make remote working much more immediate and a viable replacement for all those commuter cars on the road.. the technology to make that effortless might be here in 2 years and our social norms might catch up in 10 years after that..but maybe its much longer, and/or a carbon tax or higher fuel or road use tax is needed as an incentive.
  • 11y ago
• tluyben2 11y ago
  Why not have startups have their employees work from home? Much simpler and easier to implement solution. I don't have the obsession of wanting to live in a city but I'm aware most people I know who don't have that obsession either still have to because their bosses does not let them work from home. If you only have to come in once a month or less you can live in a region where housing is affordable; I could buy a livable house every 2-3 months in my region. It's not for everyone but it would provide greater quality of life for many and would certainly allow people to own their own houses / land without having the risk of the bank to throw them out no matter what goes wrong (you don't need a mortgage).
  • marknutter 11y ago
    Instead you have companies like YCombinator and Facebook requiring people to move into an already overpopulated area to do work that could just as easily be done over the wire.
    • sah2ed 11y ago
      Well, this is not strictly true about YC since they now have YC Fellowships [1] that can be completed remotely. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10974552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10974552
  • surfmike 11y ago
    Better remote work technologies would certainly help. For now, most tech companies have found that working face to face is really vital.
    • tluyben2 11y ago
      They must employ the wrong people (or, more likely, the wrong managers) IMHO. I cannot see how it is vital to sit together every day or even most days of the month. Sure you need it sometimes but so often you need to buy/rent a house 'close' to the office cannot be true. Maybe they are doing something different than the management/development I do?
    • 11y ago
• bradleyjg 11y ago
  A good first step would be for governments to stop doing everything in their power to make sure the cost of residential housing increases every year more than the rate of general inflation. I understand _why_ they do so, homeowners are a big and powerful constituency, but it is an incredibly inefficient and counterproductive way to go about doling out pork. This means things like eliminating the mortgage deduction, property tax deduction, special cap gain rules, getting rid of Fannie, Freddie, FHA, forbidding the Fed from buying up MBSs, eliminating the homestead exemptions, and getting rid of no recourse rules. Not sure how much of a role start up can play in this sort of political reform. A good next step would be decoupling education from housing so that the purchase or rental of a home doesn't implicitly include quasi-private school tuition. Here I see a good role for the private sector. While for-profit charter operators can be very controversial, excellent charter schools with scalable models are a necessary precondition to selling the public on a voucher system which implicitly buys you larger catchment areas and has the desirable decoupling effect. If the private sector can do that, godspeed as far as I'm concerned.
  • Eridrus 11y ago
    I don't think eliminating subsidies will make housing much more affordable or accessible, but it is probably still a good idea (since tax deductions tend to favor people in higher tax brackets). Conversely, I don't think that eliminating subsidies should really be a first priority, since I don't believe it will have a large impact, though I can't really say I know what should be beyond relaxing zoning rules.
  • brc 11y ago
    Just create areas with relaxed zoning. Inspect only for service and building quality and let people build what they want. This will create affordable housing. The incredibly high fixed costs on development push the model towards high priced units.
• Tsagadai 11y ago
  Housing is almost impossible to fix at this point. Housing is seen more as an asset class than a social requirement (although, not everyone thinks this way there are enough people with money that it doesn't matter what they think, it is an asset class). The majority of the issues you highlight are caused by the amount of capital moving into real estate and the amount of resistance to change is directly proportional to how much the house is worth. Almost any change in housing will be universally opposed by owners unless it improves their house values (sometimes a change may improve one set of owners while diminishing another but that just makes for more media friendly conflict). Tenements and social housing have been tried and mostly failed. Interest rates and taxation only have a marginal affect until they reach extremes. Emigration from an area has been shown to lower prices but at great social and economic cost. Then there is demand, everyone needs somewhere to live. Don't just consider local demand, consider international demand. How culturally, economically or socially appealing an area is to an international audience (that is, does nearly everyone want to live there). I view it as almost impossible for housing to improve for everyone while it is an asset and there would need to be utterly draconian or utopian changes to switch high quality housing from an asset to something universally available.
  • petra 11y ago
    A thought experiment: What about building a new city in the middle of nowhere, with the sole goal of extremely reducing living costs , and designing the laws specifically for that ,including making housing costs extremely cheap?
    • Tsagadai 11y ago
      No need for thought experiments, we have history. Company towns are good examples of this (see [Roxby Downs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxby_Downs,_South_Australia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxby_Downs,_South_Australia)) as are cult headquarters. An oil rig is another example, housing costs are usually free (covered by employment), living facilities are provided free of charge and costs are usually fixed through corporate oversight and union opposition to changes. The funny thing is, most people don't want to live in places like that.
• deleted 11y ago
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• prawn 11y ago
  Keen to see the improved use of space that you describe. It's senseless to have driveways and garages taking up prime real estate. Or room on residential rooftops used only by a TV aerial rather than gardens.
• lucaspiller 11y ago
  > applying technology to building denser housing [...] The technology for this isn't anything new, the first underground carparks opened in 1930s [0][1]. It's not so much a technology problem as it is a people problem. People (NIMBYs, the middle classes) don't want massive blocks of housing in the middle of their cities, and what is being built 'affordably' is tiny and/or poor quality (in the UK at least). [2] [0] http://www.1066online.co.uk/hastings-history/hastings-town/carlisle-parade-underground-car-park.html http://www.1066online.co.uk/hastings-history/hastings-town/c... [1] http://www.nailhed.com/2015/05/the-worlds-first-underground-parking.html http://www.nailhed.com/2015/05/the-worlds-first-underground-... [2] http://www.propertywire.com/news/europe/new-homes-uk-poll-2015061810646.html http://www.propertywire.com/news/europe/new-homes-uk-poll-20...