5 ms·

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.

by sama 11y ago

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.
  - bkmartin 11y ago
    Any idea of how long those initial cost savings will provide those services? Do you charge a certain monthly fee for food, energy, laundry supplies? Who decides the menus? It is really quite the logistical challenge to create a set of rules and procedures that people will be able to agree to. This is especially true when you start mixing omnivores with vegetarians with vegans with the myriad food allergies. I like the concept, but I'm skeptical that it could be successful as a cultural shift in general.
  - bradleyjg 11y ago
    I mostly eat professionally prepared food for breakfast and dinner but make my own lunch. I've seen plenty of claims that it saves money to cook, but as a single person every time I actually go to make something it ends up costing a bunch. Maybe if I perfectly planned meals so that every ingredients was used in many dishes across a week, or if I were willing to eat the same thing reheated 3 or 4 days in a row, but otherwise I don't see it. Taste-wise the professionals beat me hands down. The only area where homemade wins is health-wise. The math may well work out differently for a family of four.
- branchless 11y ago
  Who pays for the transportation and services? The people via taxes. Who reaps the benefit? The land owner. Tax land. Tax capital gains on land. Untax labour.
surfmike 11y ago
I often think about big cities where people have reasonably priced housing options available. Two great examples for me are Tokyo and Berlin. I think a big factor in both is a combination of dense traditional city planning, and transportation. I really enjoyed this piece on traditional cities: http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20130330.php http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20130330.php
- fscherer 11y ago
  Berlin also sees housing prices surge drastically, so the problem exists there as well
jacquesm 11y ago
To drive down the cost of housing you'd have to drive down the cost of land in places where lots of people want to live. The house is the smaller part of that equation, unless you're looking at the third world and there a whole pile of other problems come in to play.
- branchless 11y ago
  And to do this you'd have to stop the banks financialising people's lives. They are simply working out how much of labour they can possibly take and then that is how much the land is. In the UK women going to work saw banks change their lending criteria from: * 3 times primary income to: * 3 (or 4) times household income voila prices double, the rentiers get more interest and the govt sees more money printed via mortgage lending and call it "growth". Meanwhile the man on the street hands over all his labour to the money creation monopolists.
- spikels 11y ago
  Building up and downsizing unit size is the natural solution to expensive land (i.e. just use less land per home). While building up has some costs it is zoning/planning regulations that prevent this in practice.
- Mikushi 11y ago
  > To drive down the cost of housing you'd have to drive down the cost of land in places where lots of people want to live I wouldn't say want to live as much as have to live. I live in London, but trust me I do not want to live there, I have to.
logfromblammo 11y ago
Factory-produce modular housing units that fit inside a 40' high cube shipping container. Factory-produce the 88"L x 40"W X 30"H modules and the 4"L x 80"W x 90"H bulkheads that separate them. Each unit would have four internal bulkheads and up to 18 room modules that aren't a 40" wide pass-through space. Each "room" would consist of three or six stacked modules, and each module is small enough to fit through the doors when disassembled. Side doors can be opened on each side of rooms 2 and 4. On-site construction consists of a concrete foundation pad, steel racks, and an outer weather shell appropriate for the region. Utility hookups are provided for each berth. When a new housing unit is needed, it arrives in an intermodal shipping container, rolls into an open berth in the rack, is anchored in place, and the utilities are connected. If anyone needs more space, the internal doors and modules can be reconfigured to join multiple units internally. Current manufactured housing in the US is premised upon hauling the pieces to the site by truck. If housing could also be moved by container ship and stacktrain, it is more easily importable and exportable. A size standard for home modules opens up a huge aftermarket. Don't like the factory-installed kitchenette or don't cook? Swap it out for an exercise room or workbench or hydroponics garden or nursery or whatever else you may want in its place. It fits. The utility connectors are in the same place. The number of berths in a rack and the size of the outer weather shell can be different for different housing markets. One near a city might have multiple levels, cramming dozens of units into a single shell with a fashionable brick facade. One far out in the country could have space for as little as just one unit--and it might not even be filled all the time--but it might also have a tornado-resistant outer concrete shell. If you change jobs, rather than pack up your possessions, you could just secure all your loose items inside and ship your owned housing units to an empty berth in a new rack, across town or in a different city. The major problem is lack of elbow room. You just can't cram very much living space inside a shipping container, so even if you connect many units, your home still consists of a maze of doors joining a bunch of 48 sq.ft. rooms.
- silverlake 11y ago
  I looked into this for a weekend home in the country. It's just not cost effective, nor is it faster to build right now. I was in South Africa recently where they are building mass housing for those in townships (aka slums). They are building in the traditional on-site way. If it's faster and cheaper to do modular, than there might be an opening there.
spikels 11y ago
This is the key because it drives up the cost of everything in a vicious cycle. This is theoretically the one of the easiest big problems to solve - just stop preventing developers from building new housings and they will gladly build as much if not. Ore than we need. Unfortunately in practice it would take something like a revolution. Are there any examples of this happening? I only know of examples where we make the problem worse and worse.
ksec 11y ago
I am not sure if i have anything more intelligent to add, but i will post some of my experience for being poor, I guess most here dont have such experience in their life. First I would say It is not only "critical", I argue it "IS" the problem of basic income. For those who has been crying out about property pricing in your area, you should take a look in Hong Kong. The most ridiculously expensive location on earth. http://www.scmp.com/property/article/1905261/hong-kong-most-expensive-housing-market-world-sixth-year-row-survey http://www.scmp.com/property/article/1905261/hong-kong-most-... A lot of people here are going on about Health Care, and Education System. But to me, those are different part of the equation. Do you ever see poor people buy insurance for health care or get a book to read to "enrich" themselves? Poor People only cares about a few things, whether they have enough money left this month, How long will these savings last them to pay for food and rent. There are 3 things that is what I think should be needs of basic income, Clothes, Food, Housing. Clothes are commodities these days, you can get all the clothes you need for a tiny amount of money. As long as you dont care about fashion. What needs to be done here is clothing for extreme weather, namely Cold weather. Food, at one point in my life i spend average less then $2 USD per day on food. For nearly 12 months. People here claiming their Basic Income should cover their meal for McDonald or other outgoing dinning. ( May be in US only ) But that is not the point, real poor would care about savings. You can buy your food in bulk for extremely cheap prices, pasta or spaghetti, then get some Hams or Vegetable. As long as you go to supermarket and watch your pennies, there is no reason why you cant feed yourself for less then a Fiver a day. You just have to cook it yourself. Nutrients being another problem on $2, you should get by ok with $5. Even without such thing as basic income, it is not hard to see as long as you get a Job today, as a hard working labor intensive job or part time, you can can enough for clothes and food and not worry about starving to deaths. The problem then, lies down to Housing. Renting leaves you with the feeling you may get kicked out any day, and you will spend hopeless amount of hours trying to find a place that fits your budget. I suggest anyone who has never been through living on the streets to watch the "Pursuit of Happiness" by Will Smith. Although most people would had an different ending then the movie. Rent also cost you the largest percentage amount of your income. Where you can save a lot on Clothing and Food, there is no such thing as saving on Rent. Food and Clothes as commodities, it happens the most expensive out of the three is not a commodities but instead an Monopoly. For Example what is the point of having $1000 basic income when $800 of it goes to Rent? And rental prices is being driven up by lots of factors. Therefore as long as Housing market remains an investment asset, susceptible of being driven up by insane amount. ( Think about Rent in 2008 and now ), it will remain an unsolvable problem no matter how you price the Basic Income. Germany and some other European countries has rule to protect tenants from rent price hike. Some even take % of Housing Market profit as tax on top of the tax in place. Government needs to provide basic housing, small even 15-20 meter square will do, with basic such as hot water, electricity and Internet ( Soon to be a basic need ), at rate that relate to their basic income percentage. And a promise they wont be kicked out unless they do things silly. And if all these are too government related, we need technology to built public housing cheaply, and efficiently in short space of time. And open up the cost structure to let people know they are not being ripped off. Property market is an monopoly that derails much of our society.

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.

by 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.
- bkmartin 11y ago
  Any idea of how long those initial cost savings will provide those services? Do you charge a certain monthly fee for food, energy, laundry supplies? Who decides the menus? It is really quite the logistical challenge to create a set of rules and procedures that people will be able to agree to. This is especially true when you start mixing omnivores with vegetarians with vegans with the myriad food allergies. I like the concept, but I'm skeptical that it could be successful as a cultural shift in general.
- bradleyjg 11y ago
  I mostly eat professionally prepared food for breakfast and dinner but make my own lunch. I've seen plenty of claims that it saves money to cook, but as a single person every time I actually go to make something it ends up costing a bunch. Maybe if I perfectly planned meals so that every ingredients was used in many dishes across a week, or if I were willing to eat the same thing reheated 3 or 4 days in a row, but otherwise I don't see it. Taste-wise the professionals beat me hands down. The only area where homemade wins is health-wise. The math may well work out differently for a family of four.
branchless 11y ago
Who pays for the transportation and services? The people via taxes. Who reaps the benefit? The land owner. Tax land. Tax capital gains on land. Untax labour.

surfmike 11y ago

I often think about big cities where people have reasonably priced housing options available. Two great examples for me are Tokyo and Berlin. I think a big factor in both is a combination of dense traditional city planning, and transportation. I really enjoyed this piece on traditional cities: http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20130330.php http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20130330.php

fscherer 11y ago
Berlin also sees housing prices surge drastically, so the problem exists there as well

jacquesm 11y ago

To drive down the cost of housing you'd have to drive down the cost of land in places where lots of people want to live. The house is the smaller part of that equation, unless you're looking at the third world and there a whole pile of other problems come in to play.

branchless 11y ago
And to do this you'd have to stop the banks financialising people's lives. They are simply working out how much of labour they can possibly take and then that is how much the land is. In the UK women going to work saw banks change their lending criteria from: * 3 times primary income to: * 3 (or 4) times household income voila prices double, the rentiers get more interest and the govt sees more money printed via mortgage lending and call it "growth". Meanwhile the man on the street hands over all his labour to the money creation monopolists.
spikels 11y ago
Building up and downsizing unit size is the natural solution to expensive land (i.e. just use less land per home). While building up has some costs it is zoning/planning regulations that prevent this in practice.
Mikushi 11y ago
> To drive down the cost of housing you'd have to drive down the cost of land in places where lots of people want to live I wouldn't say want to live as much as have to live. I live in London, but trust me I do not want to live there, I have to.

logfromblammo 11y ago

Factory-produce modular housing units that fit inside a 40' high cube shipping container. Factory-produce the 88"L x 40"W X 30"H modules and the 4"L x 80"W x 90"H bulkheads that separate them. Each unit would have four internal bulkheads and up to 18 room modules that aren't a 40" wide pass-through space. Each "room" would consist of three or six stacked modules, and each module is small enough to fit through the doors when disassembled. Side doors can be opened on each side of rooms 2 and 4. On-site construction consists of a concrete foundation pad, steel racks, and an outer weather shell appropriate for the region. Utility hookups are provided for each berth. When a new housing unit is needed, it arrives in an intermodal shipping container, rolls into an open berth in the rack, is anchored in place, and the utilities are connected. If anyone needs more space, the internal doors and modules can be reconfigured to join multiple units internally. Current manufactured housing in the US is premised upon hauling the pieces to the site by truck. If housing could also be moved by container ship and stacktrain, it is more easily importable and exportable. A size standard for home modules opens up a huge aftermarket. Don't like the factory-installed kitchenette or don't cook? Swap it out for an exercise room or workbench or hydroponics garden or nursery or whatever else you may want in its place. It fits. The utility connectors are in the same place. The number of berths in a rack and the size of the outer weather shell can be different for different housing markets. One near a city might have multiple levels, cramming dozens of units into a single shell with a fashionable brick facade. One far out in the country could have space for as little as just one unit--and it might not even be filled all the time--but it might also have a tornado-resistant outer concrete shell. If you change jobs, rather than pack up your possessions, you could just secure all your loose items inside and ship your owned housing units to an empty berth in a new rack, across town or in a different city. The major problem is lack of elbow room. You just can't cram very much living space inside a shipping container, so even if you connect many units, your home still consists of a maze of doors joining a bunch of 48 sq.ft. rooms.

silverlake 11y ago
I looked into this for a weekend home in the country. It's just not cost effective, nor is it faster to build right now. I was in South Africa recently where they are building mass housing for those in townships (aka slums). They are building in the traditional on-site way. If it's faster and cheaper to do modular, than there might be an opening there.

spikels 11y ago

This is the key because it drives up the cost of everything in a vicious cycle. This is theoretically the one of the easiest big problems to solve - just stop preventing developers from building new housings and they will gladly build as much if not. Ore than we need. Unfortunately in practice it would take something like a revolution. Are there any examples of this happening? I only know of examples where we make the problem worse and worse.

ksec 11y ago

I am not sure if i have anything more intelligent to add, but i will post some of my experience for being poor, I guess most here dont have such experience in their life. First I would say It is not only "critical", I argue it "IS" the problem of basic income. For those who has been crying out about property pricing in your area, you should take a look in Hong Kong. The most ridiculously expensive location on earth. http://www.scmp.com/property/article/1905261/hong-kong-most-expensive-housing-market-world-sixth-year-row-survey http://www.scmp.com/property/article/1905261/hong-kong-most-... A lot of people here are going on about Health Care, and Education System. But to me, those are different part of the equation. Do you ever see poor people buy insurance for health care or get a book to read to "enrich" themselves? Poor People only cares about a few things, whether they have enough money left this month, How long will these savings last them to pay for food and rent. There are 3 things that is what I think should be needs of basic income, Clothes, Food, Housing. Clothes are commodities these days, you can get all the clothes you need for a tiny amount of money. As long as you dont care about fashion. What needs to be done here is clothing for extreme weather, namely Cold weather. Food, at one point in my life i spend average less then $2 USD per day on food. For nearly 12 months. People here claiming their Basic Income should cover their meal for McDonald or other outgoing dinning. ( May be in US only ) But that is not the point, real poor would care about savings. You can buy your food in bulk for extremely cheap prices, pasta or spaghetti, then get some Hams or Vegetable. As long as you go to supermarket and watch your pennies, there is no reason why you cant feed yourself for less then a Fiver a day. You just have to cook it yourself. Nutrients being another problem on $2, you should get by ok with $5. Even without such thing as basic income, it is not hard to see as long as you get a Job today, as a hard working labor intensive job or part time, you can can enough for clothes and food and not worry about starving to deaths. The problem then, lies down to Housing. Renting leaves you with the feeling you may get kicked out any day, and you will spend hopeless amount of hours trying to find a place that fits your budget. I suggest anyone who has never been through living on the streets to watch the "Pursuit of Happiness" by Will Smith. Although most people would had an different ending then the movie. Rent also cost you the largest percentage amount of your income. Where you can save a lot on Clothing and Food, there is no such thing as saving on Rent. Food and Clothes as commodities, it happens the most expensive out of the three is not a commodities but instead an Monopoly. For Example what is the point of having $1000 basic income when $800 of it goes to Rent? And rental prices is being driven up by lots of factors. Therefore as long as Housing market remains an investment asset, susceptible of being driven up by insane amount. ( Think about Rent in 2008 and now ), it will remain an unsolvable problem no matter how you price the Basic Income. Germany and some other European countries has rule to protect tenants from rent price hike. Some even take % of Housing Market profit as tax on top of the tax in place. Government needs to provide basic housing, small even 15-20 meter square will do, with basic such as hot water, electricity and Internet ( Soon to be a basic need ), at rate that relate to their basic income percentage. And a promise they wont be kicked out unless they do things silly. And if all these are too government related, we need technology to built public housing cheaply, and efficiently in short space of time. And open up the cost structure to let people know they are not being ripped off. Property market is an monopoly that derails much of our society.