8 ms·

Ask HN: Will we ever have affordable and attractive urban housing for all?

• facepalm 10y ago
  Is it technology holding housing back, or politics? I thought it was mostly the latter?
  • Inconel 10y ago
    I too believe it's mostly political. If some hypothetical SV startup invented a shoebox sized device that cost $100 and when sprinkled with water would unfold into a multi unit residence, we would still be faced with a ton of other issues relating to zoning, particularly density and parking requirements, that would continue to make housing prohibitive. Also, Americans have been sold on the idea of real estate as an investment and I'm not sure how we will ever get policies that lead to lower housing prices when that essentially means that a large part of the population will have to agree to enact policies that will result in depreciation of their primary asset.
    • bbcbasic 10y ago
      Otoh a device to shrink humans to fit in a shoebox would be disruptive.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• w1ntermute 10y ago
  The reason housing is expensive regardless of technological advances is because it's a people problem, not a technological problem. The people who would benefit the most from cheaper urban housing are not in a position to vote for the policies that would cause that to happen, as the vast majority of them don't live in those cities. The only way to solve this problem is to wrest control of local policy decisions away from municipal governments and make them instead at the state or national level. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening any time soon, since those already living in cities are much more incentivized to fight to retain the status quo than those who don't live there are incentivized to fight for changes that could hypothetically help them.
  • akanet 10y ago
    Hi there! This is exactly the problem we work on daily at the local SF YIMBY coalition (sfyimby.org). If you're interested in making a difference in local SF politics, especially around improving the housing situation, come to one of our meetings! We move votes :)
  • Inconel 10y ago
    Even if we wrested control away from local municipalities, we would still be faced with pushback from homeowners nationwide who don't want to see a reduction in housing prices. I think realistically we'll only see policy improvements on this front when we reach a point were the overwhelming majority of Americans have been priced out of home ownership and no longer view real estate appreciation as personally beneficial.
  • capkutay 10y ago
    The state senator for San Francisco (Scott Wiener) is trying to do just that[0]. In a city known for wacky politicians, Scott Wiener was a breath of fresh air. He also signed the city's long term Subway plan[1]. 0: https://artplusmarketing.com/housing-is-a-statewide-crisis-and-all-communities-need-to-pitch-in-21b921a9af3c#.rti7radae https://artplusmarketing.com/housing-is-a-statewide-crisis-a... 1: http://connectsf.org/components/subway-vision/ http://connectsf.org/components/subway-vision/
  • anon363764 10y ago
• cagenut 10y ago
  Its a really fascinating problem and if I ever won the powerball I'd take a crack at it. It touches everything, from the fundamental differences between capitalism and communism to the raw math of just how much steel and concrete (or w/e) it would take to give everyone ~30+m^2. Which, when the nominator is all sorted out, inevitably leads to the question of what to do with the denominator. Realistically we either need a massive borderline miraculous leap forward in materials science and construction technology (like carbon nanofiber weaving spider drones) or a completely different system from capitalism for allocating for basic needs, or a looooot less people. Its not really a space problem at all so much as a energy cost and societal values one.
  • bbcbasic 10y ago
    Maybe check out the venus project https://www.thevenusproject.com/the-venus-project/ https://www.thevenusproject.com/the-venus-project/
  • edblarney 10y ago
    It has zero to do with steel, concrete or anything material. The cost of making the building is not the issues. It's the property price that is the issue, always.
    • cauterized 10y ago
      In places that are already dense and have no room for further sprawl, the cost of building in ways that add capacity can be quite high. It's not just about the raw materials. It's also about labor, safety, regulations (many of which are there for good reasons like preventing people from dying in fires due to cheap construction or lack of escape routes). Even the cost of trucking in the materials and paying for parking tickets/getting permits to inconvenience the neighbors for months on end can be a major expense.
    • spoonie 10y ago
      It's the property price that is the issue And a Land Value Tax instead of traditional property tax would go a long way to solving this problem. (Basically, tax the value of the raw land, not the man-made property on top.) It would prevent speculative ownership of land and encourage development of underused land in high-value areas. It would also capture a lot of the value of urban development, so that the urban area gets the money rather than private owners who simply got lucky enough to buy the property.
• MrFantastic 10y ago
  The problem is lots of people want to live in the same areas.
• DasIch 10y ago
  Housing is partly a status symbol and those that can afford it often put measures in place to make sure that those they don't want to have living next to them can't afford to. Housing that is affordable for all, will by definition not be attractive for all. You imply the existence of a goal that doesn't actually exist and for which there is no consensus. Even if that were a goal, you couldn't reach it because there is only so much space. This would be a problem even, if we were to use what space is available, which is usually not the case for political reasons. Improved technology won't help you and even changing politics wouldn't get you to this.
• bobochan 10y ago
  Why does it have to be urban? As a rural resident I do not understand the attraction. I can walk or bike everywhere that I want to go. Thousands of miles of trails branch out in every direction depending on my heart's content. Farms within easy distance produce a bounty to enjoy, including world class beer. I am not sure why the growing trend toward global mega-cities is in our best interest.
  • ajb 10y ago
    Well, in the UK, rural voters largely vote to prevent urban people moving to the countryside, by maintaining restrictive planning laws.
    • dpwm 10y ago
      The UK also has a long history of poorly distributed land "ownership" [1]. Considerably more than half the land in the UK is controlled by approximately 6000 families. The wealthiest were given real law-making / killing power through the House of Lords until 1999, when most (but not all) hereditary peerages were removed. Much of this land comes with subsidies and titles. Immense amounts of money can be made from grouse shooting. There's not really an incentive to sell land. There also tends to be a stigma in selling off inherited land -- like the end of a dynasty. Much of the land that is bought by developers is land that was sold by developers. When land is sold from these families, it is sold for very high amounts because demand is high and supply is low. Land can make up ~50% of a new house price. I do not know if there is any collusion amongst those who do own the land, but any such collusion would bring enormous advantages and would almost certainly not be condemned in any way. Affordable housing in the UK is a needlessly scarce resource. Instead of focusing on supply, which would lead to a long-term solution, much of the media has jumped through hoops to focus on the short-term demand caused by immigration whilst ignoring the slightly peculiar policy to sell off state-owned affordable housing to banks. --- [1] Land ownership in England and Wales is interesting -- the Crown owns all the land, and landowners buy a title to the land. Scotland is different again and a greater proportion of land is in the hands of a smaller proportion of the population.
  • trynewideas 10y ago
• dmritard96 10y ago
  I am very aware of the benefits to urban living, but i do wonder if humans are inherently happier living in high density environments. I feel like the benefits of urban living are less crucial if the human population was prevented from growing or even reduced with time.
  • reustle 10y ago
    I've spent a considerable amount of time living in Tokyo and New York City. In NY, most weekends I would take the bus to my tiny hometown in Pennsylvania where I was surrounded by nature. I find that the things I get mentally from the city is extreme amounts of social interaction, and from the countryside I get the deep connection with nature. I think it is near impossible to find the social interaction I'm looking for in small towns, as I want a high concentration of smart, open minded people.
    • sjg007 10y ago
      Woah woah.. it's not very open minded of you to say that small town folks are dumb and closed minded!
      • PeterisP 10y ago
        It's a bit of a different point - no matter how nice small folks are, for any given type of person there isn't a high concentration of them. Niche activities cannot flourish or even exist if there isn't a sufficient "critical mass" of people interested in that niche, so a small town simply can not have as much diversity in such niches as a large city.
      • true_religion 10y ago
        It's true, dumb is the opposite of smart, but nothing there implies that small town folk are dumb. Small town folk are of average intelligence, with a lower concentration of significantly smarter people simply due to the fact that high paying jobs are concentrated in urban areas. If you were to concentrate high paying jobs in small towns, you'd see the reverse happening. As for being closed minded---I'd find that people from urban areas are more close minded if they happen to live in their enclave without much interaction outside of it. Many people in cities are highly mobile, but many people in cities just treat their neighborhood as a walled garden, and are highly defensive against other types of people.
• Spooky23 10y ago
  Yes. The internet allows you to avoid high cost areas. I pay about 25% of the cost of a 1 bedroom apartment in SFO for a 4 bedroom house with a great yards, with a 15 year mortgage. Any gap in salary for not living in SFO/NYC/BOS is more than accounted for. In my case, over my lifetime I'll come out $4M ahead.
  • nether 10y ago
    What's the catch?
    • Spooky23 10y ago
      You either need to find a job locally, which is a bit of a hustle, or travel. You won't be working for a hit new startup.
    • aerovistae 10y ago
      He lives in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
• hanoz 10y ago
  Technologists giveth, rentiers taketh away. "Will we ever have affordable and attractive urban housing for all?". No, not as thing stand. Those with a monopoly on credit will continue to use competition for accommodation as a means to leach every spare drop of wealth from the productive members of society.
• ryao 10y ago
  Capsule hotels could work nicely for single people if an entrepreneur brought the concept to the US: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_hotel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_hotel By the way, someone really ought to define what they mean when they discuss affordable things. It seems everyone has a different idea of what that means.
• massysett 10y ago
  Technology has improved the cost of housing. In the USA, the average house size has grown. So has its quality. It has air conditioning standard in warm climates. It has safer electrical systems that handle higher loads. It has more carpeting. More bathrooms. Better appliances, with washers and dryers standard. More, bigger windows. Higher ceilings in basements. Lower-maintenance building envelopes. Better fire safety, with fire sprinklers being required in many jurisdictions. Off-street parking. The list goes on and on. Technology helps explain why housing has improved so much. Much of the home is fabricated offsite and trucked in. Computers help make more efficient use of materials. Manufactured building products (like oriented strand board) make more efficient use of lumber, and create more durable products. The labor savings are immense: compare the labor to sweat a house of copper pipes versus using pex. Compare plastering a house versus drywall. Not even in the same league cost wise. Do not make the mistake of looking at a few extraordinarily high cost areas like SF or NYC and believe they represent anything typical. They do not. Housing has improved dramatically in just a few decades.
  • eecks 10y ago
    What's relevant is the cost of housing where people want to live.
    • spoonie 10y ago
      Yes, but that's too subjective to measure. A better proxy may be housing cost relative to wages.
  • ksec 10y ago
    I think that is the issues that should be discussed. Housing price is Land + Building Cost + Profit with Supply and Demand. Land is politics which you cant improve much, Supply and Demand is a market force you cant change. So really the only thing you can do is Building Cost. But what i think the housing mentioned here being better really are houses, not Flat. i.e High Rise Building. And all of those Appliances has nothing to do with building itself. What i really want to see, is technology improving High Rise Building in Cites, so when the time for land approval comes, it could be built and sold ( live in ) within 6 months. Preferably even sooner. They should be durable, easy to assemble, easy to fit in floors, Windows ( Without leaking water ), Pipes, etc. I have seen Office Building being built in that time frame but not residential. In Hong Kong it is common to see these Office building built in Metal / Steel frame compared to Residential being concrete only. I guess that is a cost issues involved. At the moment, fitting pipes, Windows, and polishing etc after the block of concrete lay on each floor is still very labour intensive and slow. To me, technology hasn't improved at all in these regards.
• Bjorkbat 10y ago
  With regards to the US, there is affordable and attractive urban housing, just not in cities that people particularly want to live in. I mean, look at the Midwest. Houses there cost nothing compared to houses in metro areas along the coast. It's not like cities there are terribly middling either. You look at the Cleveland Metro, and it has 3.2 million people, it has a lot of historical architecture, it has good infrastructure, it's alright overall. But everyone wants to live in LA, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Denver, New York, Miami, or pretty much any other major city along our nation's western or eastern coasts (not so much the southern coast, unless you like living in a greenhouse in the summer). I mean, I get it, all the cool stuff is happening elsewhere, but Midwesterners are still having a good time, sans beach. In case you're wondering, I myself live in New Mexico in a place called Albuquerque. Affordable, but not as affordable as some Midwestern cities. Because the city wasn't in the Rust Belt there's also fewer older structures. The boom took place once all the nuclear scientists moved in and gas was cheap, so it's pretty badly sprawled out.
  • shostack 10y ago
    You're omitting a major factor in this. Jobs. I moved from Chicago to the Bay Area and while I'm not a developer, the opportunities are still night and day in terms of the job options, the pay, benefits, etc. A cheap mortgage on a nice house in a good neighborhood means squat if there are not a lot of job options, or only ones a long commute away. Personally I think the best thing to help this is make remote work more viable for non developer professions that don't have as much demand or leverage. This would enable more people to live in affordable areas if getting another remote job were comparable to living in a market flush with jobs.
    • Bjorkbat 10y ago
      That is true, I am conveniently omitting the jobs part. So maybe the right answer to ask is not how to create more affordable and attractive housing, but rather how to spread the jobs out to cities overlooked by employers. Why isn't there a satellite Google office in Cincinnati, in other words?
• dragonwriter 10y ago
  No we won't ever have affordable and attractive urban housing for all, because standards of attractiveness will naturally adjust to be somewhat beyond whatever is affordable and accessible to all.
• bgitarts 10y ago
  It's a supply and demand issue at the core. There is simply more demand for housing units than available and so prices continue to rise until demand tapers off. Using New York City as an example there are about 3.4 million residential housing units available and a population that is set to reach 9 million in the next few years (500k increase). It's true that there is not much raw land left for new development, but the city can change zoning in areas. Imagine if 100,000 1 family houses are rezoned to allow for even just 8 unit multi-family walkup. 800,000 new housing units would help counter the demand that causes the price to keep rising. The home construction industry also has issues which end raising the finished cost of housing. An interesting read is "Sweat Equity" by Larry Angell, A self-published book where the author describes why it made financial sense for him to leave his job for a year to build his own house rather than buy a house and continue working.
  • sjg007 10y ago
    Yep. The math works, you take 1m house and turn it into 8 new condos.
  • JBlue42 10y ago
    Zoning is also a big issue in LA and hasn't been updated since the 70s I believe. If you look at a satellite view of the city, there are nodes of density with massive amounts of individual house spaces. But it's expensive all over. I don't think there's any real solution to that outside of another real estate collapse here (which only set things back for a few years and stopped some gentrification creep).
• jvickers 10y ago
  No. I hope not. Not everyone wants it anyway.
  • epistasis 10y ago
    Why would you not want some people to get what they want? If they were happy would their happiness make you unhappy?
• superuser2 10y ago
  The prevailing winds in the regulatory climate do not seem to point towards a skyscraper construction boom anytime soon. Over in technology, we're rapidly marching towards cheap household-scale solar panels and batteries, commodity autonomous driving technology, and cheap electric cars. Elon Musk's satellite constellation will deliver decent internet service regardless of the population density/economics needed to support fibre buildout. Telepresence is already good and keeps getting better. The society coming down the line is one made of energy-independent prefab houses with no particular constraints on location (so they'll go to where land is cheapest), drastically improved freeway throughput (autonomous cars can pack much more densely), and car interiors not much different from small apartments (you'll be able to eat, sleep, and work while the computer drives). So, as it gets easier to live farther from work, the economic incentives for everyone to cluster into a few square miles will diminish greatly.
• ddw 10y ago
  The answer is to rework city zoning laws to allow for more vertical building and less car parking requirements, but $$$, nimbyism and "I was here first" thinking gets in the way. Way more people want to live in cities than can afford it and it's a shame that cities aren't thinking about this enough. It's a people problem, not a technology one - the elevator was already invented. "The Rent Is Too Damn High" is a good, short book on this.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• ljsocal 10y ago
  When (not if!) ride-sharing in electric cars becomes much bigger, it will free up a huge amount of real estate from car-related use to other uses. (Fun fact: In the U.S., there are four parking spots for every one of the 255 million cars.) Add to that, all of the gas stations, oil change outfits, car washes, auto parts stores, auto dealerships, etc., etc. Every home that elects to go car-less will now have whatever garage, carport, driveway space available for an extra bedroom, garden, etc. The other urban trend of smaller housing unit zoning will allow increased density which will also bring the cost of housing down. The demand is there a NY Times article reported that when new micro apartments (260 to 360 square feet) were available, 60,000 people applied for one of the the 55 units. Article: http://tinyurl.com/ntdjvt9 http://tinyurl.com/ntdjvt9
• edblarney 10y ago
  Understand a few things first: A) The 'cost of housing' is usually not the building itself. It's the land. So, we can't compare to other products. B) It's greatly affected by financing, interest rates, accepted norms. Ex: when interest rates drop, housing prices balloon. Also - as people accept longer and longer mortgages, housing prices ballon. C) It's a relative thing, not a 'cost' thing. There are x number of people and say, roughly x spots for housing. The riches people will live where they want. The others go elsewhere. If rich people want to live in an urban area, there is nary a solution for 'low cost' housing in that area. Some things like 'rent control' - if applied responsibly can maybe help, but they can also create other weird problems. Social housing might help, but also, some other odd problems. The only want to allow poor people to live in expensive areas is to seriously mess with market forces, and that can be problematic. The 'problem' we are trying to address here is age old: 'the fair and equitable distribution of resources'. It's not going to be solved with some new technology or process :), it will probably be some smart economic thinking.
• nunez 10y ago
  As long as demand outstrips supply, I can't foresee that happening.
  • gozur88 10y ago
    Demand will always outstrip supply in trendy areas.
• ksec 10y ago
  I would imagine, in 15 - 20 years time, when self driving Car is a thing, the need for Urban Housing will drop. You car can be summoned whenever you need and not worried about where to park it as it will find and park itself.
• joeclark77 10y ago
  I think that "affordable", "attractive", and "urban" form kind of an Iron Triangle in the sense that you can have any two out of three.
• wiseleo 10y ago
  Clustering low income residents creates the "street prison" phenomenon. Such housing complexes often have bars on windows for residents' protection. They may have increased frequency police patrols. In effect, people voluntarily incarcerate themselves. We need to solve that problem first. Sadly, I don't have a solution.
• leojg 10y ago
  I believe that we eventually will have a reliable and cheap way of making durable houses, maybe 3D printing. There are machines capable of doing so now, its just a matter of refining and provide them with enough availability The main issues I see are: Construction is a low skill labor intensive source of jobs, so unions and government don't want to cut it. And a more efficient way of building will probably mean less people working. Most people loves being showing off, a huge house is the best way of showing how much money and power you have. Why print this wall when you could buy some expensive material?