8 ms·

>Housing is in many places (mostly successful cities) the economic disaster. Fully exposed to financialization, business cycles, inflation prone. Rather than si

>Housing is in many places (mostly successful cities) the economic disaster. Fully exposed to financialization, business cycles, inflation prone. Rather than signalling to supply, prices adjust to whatever the median person can afford to pay Why should housing not be to governed by market forces? Housing shortages are due to regulations, from limiting new development outright, to limiting high density buildings, to heavy rent control (disincentivizing investment and maintenance), to regulations that just make housing investment expensive. Reasonable regulations should be the guideline, but they aren't. The most aggregious local example is San Francisco. Soviet housing never worked. More to the point the wait lists for apartments was measured in years (ripe for corruption). The buildings were shoddy and depressing (hope you like grey). Urban planning was haphazard and may or not may have corresponded to where people actually wanted to live.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
Many supply restrictions are geographic rather than based on regulation. Also, Singapore has a semi-socialized system that seems to work.
- macspoofing 9y ago
  >Many supply restrictions are geographic rather than based on regulation. That's true. At the end of the day there are only so many desirable beachfront properties, or direct views on Central Park. Those are going to be expensive. >Singapore has a semi-socialized system that seems to work. I know very little about Singapore, but I'll make two comments: 1) I'm skeptical about the feasibility of models that work in tiny regions with very specific constraints and applying them to big nations. But maybe there's something there to learn from. 2) At the end of the of the day, it's not magic. You have a lot of people, in a relatively small geographic area - you need to focus on density. You don't need a heavily socialized system to build dense housing - you just need to align regulations.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Singapore is dense like NYC is, and, outside of its public housing program, is equally, if not more, expensive than NYC. Singapore is otherwise a very capitalistic country, and its housing program is basically ownership with restrictions that fade overtime. But more to the point: every super dense city I’ve lived in has had more expensive housing than the lesser dense cities I’ve lived in. Obviously something else is going on, density itself isn’t magic.
    - saosebastiao 9y ago
      > Obviously something else is going on, density itself isn’t magic. Of course it's not. You can have dense cheap cities (Tokyo, Chicago), dense expensive cities (Hong Kong, NYC), sprawled cheap cities (Houston, Indianapolis), and sprawled expensive cities (Palo Alto, Los Angeles). Density doesn't make a city cheap any more than it makes it expensive. Supply relative to demand does. If you want a nearly perfect predictor of housing prices, don't look at density, look at the vacancy rate. The vacancy rate is probably the most direct way of measuring supply vs demand. If you have a high vacancy rate, you have a cheap city, and if you have a low vacancy rate, you have an expensive city. The reason density is often touted as the solution is because increasing density is an increase in supply. It only moves the needle in one direction. Sprawl also moves the needle in that same direction. Cities with lots of space to move out have both options, and typically sprawl is cheaper. A city like Seattle or San Francisco doesn't have both options, so density is the only way to increase supply.
dominotw 9y ago
> More to the point the wait lists for apartments was measured in years (ripe for corruption). The buildings were shoddy and depressing (hope you like grey). Urban planning was haphazard and may or not may have corresponded to where people actually wanted to live. This tv show on amazon prime was really good insight to soviet life during stalin times, based on the life of Regina Zbarskaya. I really enjoying looking at the houses across social classes, streets in different cities, law enforcement, morality, relationships(eg: giving up your apartment is the biggest favor you could do, staying in relationship with someone because they have govt allocated apartment ect) https://www.amazon.com/Part-9/dp/B01GU8D4IK/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1522672975&sr=8-5&keywords=the+red+queen https://www.amazon.com/Part-9/dp/B01GU8D4IK/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UT...
renw0rp 9y ago
while definitely pre-fabricated building were grey and ugly, they still look better than British council houses in London; especially after many of them, for example in Warsaw, got renovated, insulated, covered with plaster and colourfully painted.
- kingofhdds 9y ago
  Worth mentioning these pretty renovations happened well after the system which brought them stopped its existence.
  - renw0rp 9y ago
    that's for sure, mostly 10-15 years after. Doesn't change the fact that this never happened in the UK; old council houses are still ugly, energy inefficient and often mouldy inside... not to mention some awful&impractical design choices
    - kingofhdds 9y ago
      Well, after I stayed in a typical British house for some time, with its coldness even in a relatively warm weather, and two separate taps system in bathroom, I started to believe that impractical designs in building could be an inseparable part of British culture :-)
- snidane 9y ago
  This is a reault of huge EU subsidies coming from Brussels/western Europe. Causing set of new problems in the region like making rich people and firms who can orient in the subsidy bureaucracy labyrinth. Which makes it quite similar to Soviet era economics where you had to be well connected to get around.
zeth___ 9y ago
>Soviet housing never worked. More to the point the wait lists for apartments was measured in years (ripe for corruption). The buildings were shoddy and depressing (hope you like grey). Urban planning was haphazard and may or not may have corresponded to where people actually wanted to live. And yet there was no homelessness in the USSR. If that's a system that doesn't work, sign me up for two.
- simonbarker87 9y ago
  Wasn’t the lack of homelessness and unemployment because both of those were designated as a crime and so you got sent of to a work camp?
  - kofejnik 9y ago
    More or less so. Plus, you also could not just decide to go to Moscow (or other city), you needed "propiska" (residence permit). And those born in countryside didn't have passports until _1974_ so had no freedom of movement at all. Seriously, I cannot find polite words for people praising USSR
- zo1 9y ago
  You'd be surprised at how humans "make a plan" when it comes to those things, as long as family/community is not broken. Either way, there probably was some homelessness, but we'd have to look at actual records/stats on it. But the USSR was just one system of social housing. Have a look at what's happening right now in South Africa with what they call RDP housing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_and_Development_Programme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_and_Development... Sounds good on paper. However it has so many problems: https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2017-03-16-government-needs-to-live-up-to-its-housing-promises-break-the-legacy-of-apartheid-and-restore-the-dignity-of-millions/ https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2017-03-16-gover... http://www.corruptionwatch.org.za/cracks-exposed-in-rdp-housing-system/ http://www.corruptionwatch.org.za/cracks-exposed-in-rdp-hous... http://www.cplo.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/BP-432-RDP-Housing-May-2017.pdf http://www.cplo.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/BP-432-RDP...
Retric 9y ago
> Why should housing not be to governed by market forces? The limit is transportation/infrastructure. not buildings. You need NYC's roads, schools, and subway etc before block after block of 40+ floor building are viable. It'a very much a tragedy of the commons situation as a single high rise is fine but 100 of them are not. Unfortunately, most areas are regulated at the local level which while better than a free for all creates massive problems. I would posit that the best solution is state level control + an infrastructure tax on new development. Charging ~30k per SFH might seem to make things more expensive but by allowing new entry to pay their own way let market forces work while adjusting for externalities.
- saosebastiao 9y ago
  Nobody needs, or can even afford for that matter, infrastructure for people that don't exist yet. That's why that process never works. It is nothing more than a giant concern troll: you get to look like the smart one who insists on planning ahead for more development, knowing full well that nobody will seriously propose adding more infrastructure for people that don't exist yet. Luckily, you can build infrastructure as it's needed. If traffic gets bad because 100k people moved in and it's straining the transit system, you've got an additional 100k people who will help pay for it. We've been doing it this way for thousands of years, so it's pretty hard to argue that it doesn't work.
  - Retric 9y ago
    It's a question of collecting money not building infrastructure. When 100k people move in and you need a new water treatment plant. Those 100k people should pay for the water treatment plant not everyone that lives in the area who also paid for the last water treatment plant. Further, you need to start building infrastructure now, not in 20 years when the new people have paid enough in taxes to pay for it. It's not like you need a new police station and a new school from a single new home but you do need them after X new homes. Debt seems like the obvious solution to time shifting infrastructure, but that increases costs, adds risks, and still forces everyone to pay for new infrastructure. When a tiny home is worth 3x what would be somewhere else that value is from the existing infrastructure not the cost of building the house so adding a tax to capture that surplus is completely reasonable.
snidane 9y ago
> Why should housing not be to governed by market forces? Housing can and should of course be managed by market forces. Land usage rights distribution is where the problem lies. For physical reasons there is no supply of new land. We'd have to wait until Mars or Moon colonization, which would pop the ongoing land price inflation. Until then it's just a market in which the sooner you get in the better off you'll be. Which is why older generations and aristocracy benefit from such arrangement. Later generations are just told to shut up and accept that you have to slave more and more each decade to be afford living. Until a revolution of some sort. The funny thing is the misnomer 'to own land'. The only thing you own is a right to use the parcel, which is guaranteed by no one else but the population. And the population is not paid to provide such a service. Payment for actual usage on ongoing basis is a solution. Such as land tax or government lease. Worked wonders in countries founded on this principle. https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/successfull-examples-of-land-value-tax-reforms/2011/02/05 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/successfull-examples-of-land-...

seanmcdirmid 9y ago

Many supply restrictions are geographic rather than based on regulation. Also, Singapore has a semi-socialized system that seems to work.

macspoofing 9y ago
>Many supply restrictions are geographic rather than based on regulation. That's true. At the end of the day there are only so many desirable beachfront properties, or direct views on Central Park. Those are going to be expensive. >Singapore has a semi-socialized system that seems to work. I know very little about Singapore, but I'll make two comments: 1) I'm skeptical about the feasibility of models that work in tiny regions with very specific constraints and applying them to big nations. But maybe there's something there to learn from. 2) At the end of the of the day, it's not magic. You have a lot of people, in a relatively small geographic area - you need to focus on density. You don't need a heavily socialized system to build dense housing - you just need to align regulations.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Singapore is dense like NYC is, and, outside of its public housing program, is equally, if not more, expensive than NYC. Singapore is otherwise a very capitalistic country, and its housing program is basically ownership with restrictions that fade overtime. But more to the point: every super dense city I’ve lived in has had more expensive housing than the lesser dense cities I’ve lived in. Obviously something else is going on, density itself isn’t magic.
  - saosebastiao 9y ago
    > Obviously something else is going on, density itself isn’t magic. Of course it's not. You can have dense cheap cities (Tokyo, Chicago), dense expensive cities (Hong Kong, NYC), sprawled cheap cities (Houston, Indianapolis), and sprawled expensive cities (Palo Alto, Los Angeles). Density doesn't make a city cheap any more than it makes it expensive. Supply relative to demand does. If you want a nearly perfect predictor of housing prices, don't look at density, look at the vacancy rate. The vacancy rate is probably the most direct way of measuring supply vs demand. If you have a high vacancy rate, you have a cheap city, and if you have a low vacancy rate, you have an expensive city. The reason density is often touted as the solution is because increasing density is an increase in supply. It only moves the needle in one direction. Sprawl also moves the needle in that same direction. Cities with lots of space to move out have both options, and typically sprawl is cheaper. A city like Seattle or San Francisco doesn't have both options, so density is the only way to increase supply.

dominotw 9y ago

> More to the point the wait lists for apartments was measured in years (ripe for corruption). The buildings were shoddy and depressing (hope you like grey). Urban planning was haphazard and may or not may have corresponded to where people actually wanted to live. This tv show on amazon prime was really good insight to soviet life during stalin times, based on the life of Regina Zbarskaya. I really enjoying looking at the houses across social classes, streets in different cities, law enforcement, morality, relationships(eg: giving up your apartment is the biggest favor you could do, staying in relationship with someone because they have govt allocated apartment ect) https://www.amazon.com/Part-9/dp/B01GU8D4IK/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1522672975&sr=8-5&keywords=the+red+queen https://www.amazon.com/Part-9/dp/B01GU8D4IK/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UT...

renw0rp 9y ago

while definitely pre-fabricated building were grey and ugly, they still look better than British council houses in London; especially after many of them, for example in Warsaw, got renovated, insulated, covered with plaster and colourfully painted.

kingofhdds 9y ago
Worth mentioning these pretty renovations happened well after the system which brought them stopped its existence.
- renw0rp 9y ago
  that's for sure, mostly 10-15 years after. Doesn't change the fact that this never happened in the UK; old council houses are still ugly, energy inefficient and often mouldy inside... not to mention some awful&impractical design choices
  - kingofhdds 9y ago
    Well, after I stayed in a typical British house for some time, with its coldness even in a relatively warm weather, and two separate taps system in bathroom, I started to believe that impractical designs in building could be an inseparable part of British culture :-)
snidane 9y ago
This is a reault of huge EU subsidies coming from Brussels/western Europe. Causing set of new problems in the region like making rich people and firms who can orient in the subsidy bureaucracy labyrinth. Which makes it quite similar to Soviet era economics where you had to be well connected to get around.

zeth___ 9y ago

>Soviet housing never worked. More to the point the wait lists for apartments was measured in years (ripe for corruption). The buildings were shoddy and depressing (hope you like grey). Urban planning was haphazard and may or not may have corresponded to where people actually wanted to live. And yet there was no homelessness in the USSR. If that's a system that doesn't work, sign me up for two.

simonbarker87 9y ago
Wasn’t the lack of homelessness and unemployment because both of those were designated as a crime and so you got sent of to a work camp?
- kofejnik 9y ago
  More or less so. Plus, you also could not just decide to go to Moscow (or other city), you needed "propiska" (residence permit). And those born in countryside didn't have passports until _1974_ so had no freedom of movement at all. Seriously, I cannot find polite words for people praising USSR
zo1 9y ago
You'd be surprised at how humans "make a plan" when it comes to those things, as long as family/community is not broken. Either way, there probably was some homelessness, but we'd have to look at actual records/stats on it. But the USSR was just one system of social housing. Have a look at what's happening right now in South Africa with what they call RDP housing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_and_Development_Programme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_and_Development... Sounds good on paper. However it has so many problems: https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2017-03-16-government-needs-to-live-up-to-its-housing-promises-break-the-legacy-of-apartheid-and-restore-the-dignity-of-millions/ https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2017-03-16-gover... http://www.corruptionwatch.org.za/cracks-exposed-in-rdp-housing-system/ http://www.corruptionwatch.org.za/cracks-exposed-in-rdp-hous... http://www.cplo.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/BP-432-RDP-Housing-May-2017.pdf http://www.cplo.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/BP-432-RDP...

Retric 9y ago

> Why should housing not be to governed by market forces? The limit is transportation/infrastructure. not buildings. You need NYC's roads, schools, and subway etc before block after block of 40+ floor building are viable. It'a very much a tragedy of the commons situation as a single high rise is fine but 100 of them are not. Unfortunately, most areas are regulated at the local level which while better than a free for all creates massive problems. I would posit that the best solution is state level control + an infrastructure tax on new development. Charging ~30k per SFH might seem to make things more expensive but by allowing new entry to pay their own way let market forces work while adjusting for externalities.

saosebastiao 9y ago
Nobody needs, or can even afford for that matter, infrastructure for people that don't exist yet. That's why that process never works. It is nothing more than a giant concern troll: you get to look like the smart one who insists on planning ahead for more development, knowing full well that nobody will seriously propose adding more infrastructure for people that don't exist yet. Luckily, you can build infrastructure as it's needed. If traffic gets bad because 100k people moved in and it's straining the transit system, you've got an additional 100k people who will help pay for it. We've been doing it this way for thousands of years, so it's pretty hard to argue that it doesn't work.
- Retric 9y ago
  It's a question of collecting money not building infrastructure. When 100k people move in and you need a new water treatment plant. Those 100k people should pay for the water treatment plant not everyone that lives in the area who also paid for the last water treatment plant. Further, you need to start building infrastructure now, not in 20 years when the new people have paid enough in taxes to pay for it. It's not like you need a new police station and a new school from a single new home but you do need them after X new homes. Debt seems like the obvious solution to time shifting infrastructure, but that increases costs, adds risks, and still forces everyone to pay for new infrastructure. When a tiny home is worth 3x what would be somewhere else that value is from the existing infrastructure not the cost of building the house so adding a tax to capture that surplus is completely reasonable.

snidane 9y ago

> Why should housing not be to governed by market forces? Housing can and should of course be managed by market forces. Land usage rights distribution is where the problem lies. For physical reasons there is no supply of new land. We'd have to wait until Mars or Moon colonization, which would pop the ongoing land price inflation. Until then it's just a market in which the sooner you get in the better off you'll be. Which is why older generations and aristocracy benefit from such arrangement. Later generations are just told to shut up and accept that you have to slave more and more each decade to be afford living. Until a revolution of some sort. The funny thing is the misnomer 'to own land'. The only thing you own is a right to use the parcel, which is guaranteed by no one else but the population. And the population is not paid to provide such a service. Payment for actual usage on ongoing basis is a solution. Such as land tax or government lease. Worked wonders in countries founded on this principle. https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/successfull-examples-of-land-value-tax-reforms/2011/02/05 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/successfull-examples-of-land-...