8 ms·

> So what’s to be done in order to help mid-skilled and non-college workers live decent, middle-class lives? ... build lots more housing in cities, driving down

> So what’s to be done in order to help mid-skilled and non-college workers live decent, middle-class lives? ... build lots more housing in cities, driving down rents and making cities more livable for everyone. This is a nice idea in theory, but isn't this a temporary fix? For the first five years, housing prices will lower. But as more companies (demanding higher-educated individuals) realize more people are available, those companies will increase their staff or start new companies. So five years later, we are back to where it started.

i_cant_speel 8y ago
We wouldn't be back where we started. We would have fewer people struggling to get by because they were hired by these companies.
hirundo 8y ago
Except that more people have better housing than before. Isn't that a significant difference?
ajmurmann 8y ago
It's not like there is a infinite pool of people. Let's just build enough housing to move everyone where they are most productive. In large cities.
zanny 8y ago
So five years later you build more housing. We as a species are capable of building absurdly dense cities that are probably per-capita the cheapest place a person can live (since you cram so many into every skyscraper). We choose not to because "property values" and "my view from my window" and "I don't want those people living here".
- Eridrus 8y ago
  I agree that you need to keep building housing, but I also think it's important to not concede the point that it will have no effect on housing prices. The GP is flat out wrong in their assessment that prices will just return to what they were. Even if you build more housing, and then stop, the prices will be lower than if you hadn't built anything at all.
  - zanny 8y ago
    The per-unit costs will be lower. The value of redeveloped land only goes up when its bought out to build density. If you currently live a mile out of the urban core in some sprawl mcmansion your house is probably worth 5 million right now in a lot of cities. If the city proper dropped zoning requirements and let density happen the price of your house will vary between the "loss in desirability" from being closer to an expanding urban core and the potential value of redeveloping your house. Your lot could end up being worth an order of magnitude more if the demand is there to put a high rise on it. Some will win huge as major contractors want to replace your quarter acre sprawl development or row house with 10+ story urban and are offering absurd amounts of money for all the lots. Some will lose if nobody has the capital to redevelop their area and density goes up around it. But if you get the ball rolling there is so much pent up demand for urban migration and sustainable living that we could probably go decades of continuous development in most cities without the money drying up. Its an untapped gold mine of economic growth.
  - gizmo686 8y ago
    This is only true if an increase in the housing supply does not lead to an increase in the population. At a national level, this is probably true enough to assume. But, at the level of individual cities, it is not nessaserrily true. I can easily imagine scenarios where an increase in housing causes an increase in the local population greater than the increase in housing capacity.
    - Eridrus 8y ago
      For increase supply to have no effect on price, the demand curve has to be highly inelastic, but this just isn't true. People very much do make decisions about where to live based on the cost. At the margin, people may be more likely to move if you build more housing, but this would be because they can get a better deal on housing, not because there is some abstract idea of more housing. Without a reduction in price/increase in housing quality, there is no mechanism that would cause more people to show up. The main exception to this is if you have rent control capping prices, but this isn't really a big part of any market where this discussion is taking place.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- landryraccoon 8y ago
  This sort of reasoning is curious to me. Is growing food pointless too because people will just get hungry again and need more food? Is making smartphones pointless because they wear out or become obsolete and people need new ones? We are nowhere near the physical limit of how much housing can be built. Building more housing is just an ongoing need of the human race, just like growing food is. We’ll be building housing until we go extinct.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  The one thing that boggles me most about Disney World's Magic Kingdom theme park is that it is essentially one giant building, and the park guests and some vehicles all walk around on its roof. And that reminds me of the time when the entire city of Chicago was elevated, one building at a time, with jacks. And that reminds me of the Merchandise Mart, which was the largest building in the world by floor area when it was built (now surpassed by 40 or 50 buildings, often airport terminals), and at only 100m tall. And that reminds me that the Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower) has only 10% more floor area, but has to go more than 4 times taller to get that much. So that gives me the idea that one could make a single building with a footprint of one square mile, with its foundation at 0m, floors at 3.5m, 7m, 10.5m, 14m, and roof at 17.5m . That would be 3.5 times as large as the largest building by volume, five times as large as the largest building by footprint, and 7 times as large as the largest building by usable floor area. It could easily hold 50000 housing units, plus enough support infrastructure for 100000 residents. And one could still build additional floors above roof level. Nothing would be more than 2 miles away from anything else (by Manhattan distance). It could all be built for $6 billion. The reason why our cities aren't giant Borg cubes is because of all the individuality, and the capacity for one person's individual preferences to override another's. In most US cities, you currently can't build right up to the property line, and cantilever your third floor out over center of the street. Doing that, building by building, in a city that allows it, would solve any housing crisis in short order.
- sbov 8y ago
  I'm curious - are skyscrapers really the cheapest option per person? I tried to search but haven't been able to find any numbers. I ask because recently I was reading about the old housing projects in the USA. One thing the writer pointed out is that huge buildings are expensive to both build and maintain. You need to use steel and deep foundations driven to bedrock. You need complex mechanical systems to serve everyone - from water to sewage to garbage. You need to hire specialized crews to clean the exterior and perform other maintenance. They claimed, in comparison, a mid rise plain old timber building would have been much cheaper. You don't need all the complex mechanical systems a skyscraper needs. You don't need specialized maintenance crews. And so on.
  - zanny 8y ago
    In terms of material costs for the structure, no, high rises aren't the optimum of affordability. But when you factor in the infrastructure requirements on the scale of demand for "the city" you can easily find that building miles and miles of brownstones gets you the worst of both worlds - you need to maintain the infrastructure of high rises with public transit, cleaners, etc but you are only getting a fraction the density you could if you spent more on the building. You can think of it from the perspective of how cities grow - there is pressure inward to grow up the core and people will push from the outsides in. That push can result in low density sprawl or upsizing density, but they are pushing in to get closer to the actual city core where maximum interconnectedness and locality can happen. In the naive way most US cities have grown individual townships and developments manage themselves and protect their own to the detriment of the whole. Its how you get situations like what Strong Towns talks about all the time[1] where sprawling out has quadratic expenses. As metro areas grow, and certainly when you are in the tens of millions, you are looking at spending preposterous amounts of money on your suburban infrastructure that way eclipses the per-unit costs of building denser buildings in a smaller footprint. [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/9/18/more-math https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/9/18/more-math
- ip26 8y ago
  Or perhaps we choose not to because packing in more people is not the only variable in this optimization problem. Unfortunately, people don't particularly enjoy living like battery hens, so we need to balance quality of living against cost-per-capita and other factors. SFH's are probably not optimal. But IMO you're constructing strawmen. Gardens are a particularly weird topic. Longtime residents will object to new development that ruins the viability of their longtime garden. YIMBY's will scoff in indignation. But I swear some of these YIMBY's are the same ones boosting the organic & eat local movements. Speaking of gardens, people scoff that you have no right to sunlight for your garden, and no expectation it won't be blocked. Yet out of the other side of our mouths we issued the Solar Rights Act, to protect your right to sunlight for your solar panels.
ip26 8y ago
If only one city does this, I would agree. But, if cities around the country do this, and up-and-comers build as well & compete to get in the game as new employment hubs, that changes things, as demand for housing at a national level is not that elastic due to population size.

i_cant_speel 8y ago

We wouldn't be back where we started. We would have fewer people struggling to get by because they were hired by these companies.

hirundo 8y ago

Except that more people have better housing than before. Isn't that a significant difference?

ajmurmann 8y ago

It's not like there is a infinite pool of people. Let's just build enough housing to move everyone where they are most productive. In large cities.

zanny 8y ago

So five years later you build more housing. We as a species are capable of building absurdly dense cities that are probably per-capita the cheapest place a person can live (since you cram so many into every skyscraper). We choose not to because "property values" and "my view from my window" and "I don't want those people living here".

Eridrus 8y ago
I agree that you need to keep building housing, but I also think it's important to not concede the point that it will have no effect on housing prices. The GP is flat out wrong in their assessment that prices will just return to what they were. Even if you build more housing, and then stop, the prices will be lower than if you hadn't built anything at all.
- zanny 8y ago
  The per-unit costs will be lower. The value of redeveloped land only goes up when its bought out to build density. If you currently live a mile out of the urban core in some sprawl mcmansion your house is probably worth 5 million right now in a lot of cities. If the city proper dropped zoning requirements and let density happen the price of your house will vary between the "loss in desirability" from being closer to an expanding urban core and the potential value of redeveloping your house. Your lot could end up being worth an order of magnitude more if the demand is there to put a high rise on it. Some will win huge as major contractors want to replace your quarter acre sprawl development or row house with 10+ story urban and are offering absurd amounts of money for all the lots. Some will lose if nobody has the capital to redevelop their area and density goes up around it. But if you get the ball rolling there is so much pent up demand for urban migration and sustainable living that we could probably go decades of continuous development in most cities without the money drying up. Its an untapped gold mine of economic growth.
- gizmo686 8y ago
  This is only true if an increase in the housing supply does not lead to an increase in the population. At a national level, this is probably true enough to assume. But, at the level of individual cities, it is not nessaserrily true. I can easily imagine scenarios where an increase in housing causes an increase in the local population greater than the increase in housing capacity.
  - Eridrus 8y ago
    For increase supply to have no effect on price, the demand curve has to be highly inelastic, but this just isn't true. People very much do make decisions about where to live based on the cost. At the margin, people may be more likely to move if you build more housing, but this would be because they can get a better deal on housing, not because there is some abstract idea of more housing. Without a reduction in price/increase in housing quality, there is no mechanism that would cause more people to show up. The main exception to this is if you have rent control capping prices, but this isn't really a big part of any market where this discussion is taking place.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
landryraccoon 8y ago
This sort of reasoning is curious to me. Is growing food pointless too because people will just get hungry again and need more food? Is making smartphones pointless because they wear out or become obsolete and people need new ones? We are nowhere near the physical limit of how much housing can be built. Building more housing is just an ongoing need of the human race, just like growing food is. We’ll be building housing until we go extinct.
logfromblammo 8y ago
The one thing that boggles me most about Disney World's Magic Kingdom theme park is that it is essentially one giant building, and the park guests and some vehicles all walk around on its roof. And that reminds me of the time when the entire city of Chicago was elevated, one building at a time, with jacks. And that reminds me of the Merchandise Mart, which was the largest building in the world by floor area when it was built (now surpassed by 40 or 50 buildings, often airport terminals), and at only 100m tall. And that reminds me that the Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower) has only 10% more floor area, but has to go more than 4 times taller to get that much. So that gives me the idea that one could make a single building with a footprint of one square mile, with its foundation at 0m, floors at 3.5m, 7m, 10.5m, 14m, and roof at 17.5m . That would be 3.5 times as large as the largest building by volume, five times as large as the largest building by footprint, and 7 times as large as the largest building by usable floor area. It could easily hold 50000 housing units, plus enough support infrastructure for 100000 residents. And one could still build additional floors above roof level. Nothing would be more than 2 miles away from anything else (by Manhattan distance). It could all be built for $6 billion. The reason why our cities aren't giant Borg cubes is because of all the individuality, and the capacity for one person's individual preferences to override another's. In most US cities, you currently can't build right up to the property line, and cantilever your third floor out over center of the street. Doing that, building by building, in a city that allows it, would solve any housing crisis in short order.
sbov 8y ago
I'm curious - are skyscrapers really the cheapest option per person? I tried to search but haven't been able to find any numbers. I ask because recently I was reading about the old housing projects in the USA. One thing the writer pointed out is that huge buildings are expensive to both build and maintain. You need to use steel and deep foundations driven to bedrock. You need complex mechanical systems to serve everyone - from water to sewage to garbage. You need to hire specialized crews to clean the exterior and perform other maintenance. They claimed, in comparison, a mid rise plain old timber building would have been much cheaper. You don't need all the complex mechanical systems a skyscraper needs. You don't need specialized maintenance crews. And so on.
- zanny 8y ago
  In terms of material costs for the structure, no, high rises aren't the optimum of affordability. But when you factor in the infrastructure requirements on the scale of demand for "the city" you can easily find that building miles and miles of brownstones gets you the worst of both worlds - you need to maintain the infrastructure of high rises with public transit, cleaners, etc but you are only getting a fraction the density you could if you spent more on the building. You can think of it from the perspective of how cities grow - there is pressure inward to grow up the core and people will push from the outsides in. That push can result in low density sprawl or upsizing density, but they are pushing in to get closer to the actual city core where maximum interconnectedness and locality can happen. In the naive way most US cities have grown individual townships and developments manage themselves and protect their own to the detriment of the whole. Its how you get situations like what Strong Towns talks about all the time[1] where sprawling out has quadratic expenses. As metro areas grow, and certainly when you are in the tens of millions, you are looking at spending preposterous amounts of money on your suburban infrastructure that way eclipses the per-unit costs of building denser buildings in a smaller footprint. [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/9/18/more-math https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/9/18/more-math
ip26 8y ago
Or perhaps we choose not to because packing in more people is not the only variable in this optimization problem. Unfortunately, people don't particularly enjoy living like battery hens, so we need to balance quality of living against cost-per-capita and other factors. SFH's are probably not optimal. But IMO you're constructing strawmen. Gardens are a particularly weird topic. Longtime residents will object to new development that ruins the viability of their longtime garden. YIMBY's will scoff in indignation. But I swear some of these YIMBY's are the same ones boosting the organic & eat local movements. Speaking of gardens, people scoff that you have no right to sunlight for your garden, and no expectation it won't be blocked. Yet out of the other side of our mouths we issued the Solar Rights Act, to protect your right to sunlight for your solar panels.

ip26 8y ago

If only one city does this, I would agree. But, if cities around the country do this, and up-and-comers build as well & compete to get in the game as new employment hubs, that changes things, as demand for housing at a national level is not that elastic due to population size.