5 ms·

I think what you and others don't understand is that, there is SO MUCH demand, and SO MUCH money that no matter how much you build, the prices simply won't go d

I think what you and others don't understand is that, there is SO MUCH demand, and SO MUCH money that no matter how much you build, the prices simply won't go down. From a developer's perspective, building a brand new apartment building is ludicrously expensive, you simply MUST charge very high rent, or your whole project is not feasible.

lazyasciiart 8y ago
This isn't true, unless you're silently inserting caveats like "given that we all know that we can't build enough to meet demand" which turn it into a vacuous tautology. Consider: if the amount of housing available within Seattle city limits was multiplied by 10 tomorrow, would prices go down?
- debatem1 8y ago
  Yes, I was speaking to the actual situation in Seattle with all the caveats that implies. Most important among those is that HALA is an actual policy that describes what will be rezoned, how, and when. It notably will not permit 10x growth in Wallingford.
  - lazyasciiart 8y ago
    Ok, so what you actually meant to say was "the Seattle housing market is totally responsive to supply and demand, but we are consciously limiting supply". Since we both agree that 10x the current number of houses would bring prices down, then there's a far more useful investigation to be done into what the lowest number of houses that needs to be built in order to reduce prices. That discussion is the one that needs to be actually had in order for policies like HALA to come from an informed and rational plan. Claiming "nothing will ever lower prices!!!!!1" is the opposite of that discussion. edit: wait, you're not even the poster I responded to. What the hell?
    - debatem1 8y ago
      Frankly, I don't think starting out with spherical cows and a neoclassical economics textbook is a rational approach to the housing problem. If you want to engage in it that's cool and you do you, but it's a bit like expecting everyone to start speaking Esperanto just because you happen to think it's a good idea. In my view, any successful policy is going to have to be both incremental and carefully balanced to take everyone along for the ride. That will piss off lots of people who think the other side is trying to destroy or deny them the things they love, but it's pretty much the only way forward.
chrischen 8y ago
Even if that were true, that's not an argument to not build. People need houses, the pricing is reflecting a shortage, denying house is denying people housing and there's no way to spin that reality.
- iamcasen 8y ago
  I agree with you, building must commence. But it will not help lower income people or make things more affordable. It might lower the price from astronomical to, very, very high, but really what it will do is create more housing stock for more upper middle class people to move into the city. So what you'll be left with is even more wealthy folks coming in, and never anything affordable for the blue collar folks.
zanny 8y ago
So for one there is no such thing as "infinite demand". We can talk about Seattle having an unmeetable housing demand when the whole city is hundred story condo buildings and the population density is twice that of Tokyo. Of course in the short term, wherever you lift the crippling shroud of insane zoning policy, new housing will still be very expensive. It is pent up demand. But by building density you exhaust said demand. And on top of that, the denser and larger you build, the most scale you apply, the cheaper it gets per unit to house people. Economies of scale plus a bunch of other scaling effects on construction. One thing the first bastions of reasonable zoning policy will probably fail to do, though, is remove some fairly insane mandatory minimum square footage requirements, which puts a kink in any reasonable approach to housing - developers need profit, and the smaller you can make units the larger your market can be because you can fit more people into the same building footprint and thus afford to charge less per unit, and thus enabling poorer people to live there. Without that you do just end up with the luxury 2000 sqft condos that are only better than the status quo because they reduce pollution and traffic. They also dramatically help the local economy by enabling high income earners to live there in greater numbers. But to actually help the poor, you need to unrestrict not just the outside building size but the inside as well.
- iamcasen 8y ago
  Yeah spot on. I think the square footage thing, and the various zoning laws and requirements for permits are probably one of the biggest reasons housing is not affordable. As it is now, if you build more housing, more wealthy people will move in to fill that housing, and more and more, and on and on until you hit a plateau. That plateau will never be affordable for a blue collar worker unfortunately. My point is that building more houses is not the answer all by itself. Drastic changes to our understanding of property rights and landlording are required as well.
  - zanny 8y ago
    My whole point is that the plateau is only for the luxury first-wave large family condo type housing (at the highest denstiy, at least - if you aren't there yet, you need more density until you get there, then you move on to phase 2) and that if you let builders build housing smaller you can avoid such plateaus because after exhausting the rich you build smaller and more affordable but still net only slightly less revenue per square foot.

lazyasciiart 8y ago

This isn't true, unless you're silently inserting caveats like "given that we all know that we can't build enough to meet demand" which turn it into a vacuous tautology. Consider: if the amount of housing available within Seattle city limits was multiplied by 10 tomorrow, would prices go down?

debatem1 8y ago
Yes, I was speaking to the actual situation in Seattle with all the caveats that implies. Most important among those is that HALA is an actual policy that describes what will be rezoned, how, and when. It notably will not permit 10x growth in Wallingford.
- lazyasciiart 8y ago
  Ok, so what you actually meant to say was "the Seattle housing market is totally responsive to supply and demand, but we are consciously limiting supply". Since we both agree that 10x the current number of houses would bring prices down, then there's a far more useful investigation to be done into what the lowest number of houses that needs to be built in order to reduce prices. That discussion is the one that needs to be actually had in order for policies like HALA to come from an informed and rational plan. Claiming "nothing will ever lower prices!!!!!1" is the opposite of that discussion. edit: wait, you're not even the poster I responded to. What the hell?
  - debatem1 8y ago
    Frankly, I don't think starting out with spherical cows and a neoclassical economics textbook is a rational approach to the housing problem. If you want to engage in it that's cool and you do you, but it's a bit like expecting everyone to start speaking Esperanto just because you happen to think it's a good idea. In my view, any successful policy is going to have to be both incremental and carefully balanced to take everyone along for the ride. That will piss off lots of people who think the other side is trying to destroy or deny them the things they love, but it's pretty much the only way forward.

chrischen 8y ago

Even if that were true, that's not an argument to not build. People need houses, the pricing is reflecting a shortage, denying house is denying people housing and there's no way to spin that reality.

iamcasen 8y ago
I agree with you, building must commence. But it will not help lower income people or make things more affordable. It might lower the price from astronomical to, very, very high, but really what it will do is create more housing stock for more upper middle class people to move into the city. So what you'll be left with is even more wealthy folks coming in, and never anything affordable for the blue collar folks.

zanny 8y ago

So for one there is no such thing as "infinite demand". We can talk about Seattle having an unmeetable housing demand when the whole city is hundred story condo buildings and the population density is twice that of Tokyo. Of course in the short term, wherever you lift the crippling shroud of insane zoning policy, new housing will still be very expensive. It is pent up demand. But by building density you exhaust said demand. And on top of that, the denser and larger you build, the most scale you apply, the cheaper it gets per unit to house people. Economies of scale plus a bunch of other scaling effects on construction. One thing the first bastions of reasonable zoning policy will probably fail to do, though, is remove some fairly insane mandatory minimum square footage requirements, which puts a kink in any reasonable approach to housing - developers need profit, and the smaller you can make units the larger your market can be because you can fit more people into the same building footprint and thus afford to charge less per unit, and thus enabling poorer people to live there. Without that you do just end up with the luxury 2000 sqft condos that are only better than the status quo because they reduce pollution and traffic. They also dramatically help the local economy by enabling high income earners to live there in greater numbers. But to actually help the poor, you need to unrestrict not just the outside building size but the inside as well.

iamcasen 8y ago
Yeah spot on. I think the square footage thing, and the various zoning laws and requirements for permits are probably one of the biggest reasons housing is not affordable. As it is now, if you build more housing, more wealthy people will move in to fill that housing, and more and more, and on and on until you hit a plateau. That plateau will never be affordable for a blue collar worker unfortunately. My point is that building more houses is not the answer all by itself. Drastic changes to our understanding of property rights and landlording are required as well.
- zanny 8y ago
  My whole point is that the plateau is only for the luxury first-wave large family condo type housing (at the highest denstiy, at least - if you aren't there yet, you need more density until you get there, then you move on to phase 2) and that if you let builders build housing smaller you can avoid such plateaus because after exhausting the rich you build smaller and more affordable but still net only slightly less revenue per square foot.