6 ms·

> Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods At least the poor would have the choice between the barely livable pod in do

by sampo 7y ago

> Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods At least the poor would have the choice between the barely livable pod in downtown, or a house 2 hours commute away. Currently they can only choose the latter.

treis 7y ago
You don't really save all that much money by building a barely livable pod vs an actual apartment. The big cost items are kitchens and bathrooms. Those are mostly fixed costs, i.e. it costs the same to plumb a toilet, shower, and sink in a 50 sq foot bathroom as a 100 sq foot one. Only when you get to stupid high real estate cost does a ~300 sq foot pod start making sense over ~600 ft 1 bed or ~1000 sq ft 2 beds. It's a bit counter intuitive, but the best way to lower the cost of housing for the poor is to build more housing for the upper middle class and up. They will trade up houses which will increase the supply of used houses driving down their price. It's essentially impossible to build something new that will be cost competitive with something that already exists.
- slg 7y ago
  >It's a bit counter intuitive, but the best way to lower the cost of housing for the poor is to build more housing for the upper middle class and up. They will trade up houses which will increase the supply of used houses driving down their price The problem is that housing in any location is not a closed system with fixed demand. It is an open system in which increased supply can generate increased demand. When you build that housing for upper middle class and up, they vacate their homes, the price of their old homes goes down, then upper middle class and up people who previously decided to live in a cheaper area over paying the extreme rent costs move in, the population grows, and the price break never fully flows down market to the poor people in the city. This is why the market approach to building more housing isn't going to solve the whole problem. You need to build new homes at every pricing level and the market generally doesn't do that without the government incentivizing them.
  - amanaplanacanal 7y ago
    If you keep building, eventually you will meet the pent up demand. Your scenario might match the first batch of new housing, but it can't continue indefinitely. Eventually you have more houses than people. There is a ton of pent-up demand in the bay area, because this has been going on for a long time. People who own houses there are going to fight you the whole way.
    - slg 7y ago
      You are of course right in theory. There is some point in which things will stablize and demand is fully satisfied. However that is where your second paragraph comes into play too. It isn't just people who own the homes that are disincentivized from allowing that to happen, real estate developers also don't want housing to get to that point either. And who is the one deciding what gets built with a market approach to the problem? Developers. In a market approach, developers inherently want built up demand and therefore they will never build to a point in which demand is saturated. Once again, you need government intervention.
      - sagarm 7y ago
        AFAIK developers have not formed a cabal that is trying to manipulate local real estate pricing. Developers will build as long as it seems profitable to do so. Presumably this means that when the prices do go down, a few projects will end up in the red when they're done.
  - treis 7y ago
    >upper middle class and up people who previously decided to live further away over paying the extreme rent costs move in, the population grows, and the price break never trickles down to the poor people in the city It does because the poor people move into the housing that the upper middle class vacated. Population growth is an independent confounding factor. In other words, housing cost can still go up due to population growth but they would go up less if the new luxury housing is built. > You need to build new homes at every pricing level But you can't. You have high fixed costs like land, hook ups to the city utilities, architect work, plumbing, electrical, permits, and HVAC. These are pretty much the same regardless of how big of a house you build. The stuff that varies directly with size like dry wall, paint, framing, flooring, etc. doesn't cost that much. And even then the more you do at one time the cheaper it gets. In other words, hanging the last section of drywall costs a lot less than hanging the first one because you incur all of the over head to hang that first sheet. The end result is that you can't build a new house that a poor person can afford. They probably can't even afford the fixed costs. Even if you could, it wouldn't be economically viable. You're way better off spending the ~10% more to get a upper middle class house that you can sell for 50-100% more. It's still good for affordability because you've increase supply. Everybody takes one step up the ladder and the benefit will trickle down to the poor.
- umanwizard 7y ago
  In most urban areas the cost of an apartment has more to do with the value of the land under it than the cost of actually building and furnishing the place.
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  A lot of older apartments don‘t have full kitchens, but that isn‘t a bad thing. Some people just don‘t need full kitchens, and you can get by with a hot plate and a rice cooker.
  - treis 7y ago
    A full appliance package can be bought for under 2 grand retail. You can save a little bit of labor/material by eliminating the need for a couple circuits, but not that much. Not much extra work to pull additional wires if you already have to do one. So the savings just aren't there to meaningfully impact the housing cost.
    - telchar 7y ago
      You're talking out of both sides of your mouth here. You say that kitchens and bathrooms are the "big cost items" yet here you say that omitting or scaling them back doesn't save much. How can both things be true?
      - Kalium 7y ago
        Appliances are cheap-ish. The structure and space for extra bathrooms or a full kitchen are much more expensive than a full appliance package. So you can save money - but not much - by not having full appliances. You can save a lot more by not building a full kitchen and a second bathroom.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  > The big cost items are kitchens and bathrooms Why does a pod need a kitchen and bathroom? If it had those it'd be called a studio apartment. A pod is essentially anything from a dorm room styled apartment to a half-height room big enough to have a bed to sleep in and a shelf for a few items (like the Japanese have). In any of those cases you'd have communal kitchens and bathrooms. This would actually also be good socially because as we become more digitally immersed it provides a public area to meet new people, just like how it was in college.
  - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
    Doesn't this already exist in communal living places like Ollie in NYC?
    - hanniabu 7y ago
      Not quite. Ollie provides kitchens, along with other luxury amenities, which makes their price point still pretty high with the cheapest apartment being ~$2800/month.
  - fortran77 7y ago
    Years ago, they had what were called "SRO" (Single-Room Occupancy) apartments. These often had shared baths or showers on each floor. These all went away by the late 60s in New York. They wouldn't be legal now. For one thing, buildings, or floors, were restricted to either men or women. And they didn't allow children, or more than one person/room. But they allowed people just getting started--working clearing tables, or washing dishes, etc--to be able to live near where they worked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
    - bradlys 7y ago
      > "Neighborhood groups in Seattle have criticized new micro apartment SRO units, arguing that they "harmed community character and provided ... inhumane living conditions; due to these concerns, the city passed regulations that outlawed micro apartment/SRO construction." Annoying. I lived in a SRO (I just called it a studio apartment with a shared bathroom) for 3.5 years that was run by a co-op apartment building. This was in Seattle. Having a shared bathroom was an annoyance (shared between 4 men - never more than a sentence said to two of them) but I was more than happy to put up with it versus having to deal with roommates. It was also cheaper than having roommates in a variety of houses that I looked at. I had more space than all those rooms for rent I looked at. I often wish I could've kept that kind of housing when I moved to the bay area because everything here is so outlandishly expensive just to get your own bit of space and that housing was so cheap for me.
- zhoujianfu 7y ago
  Yeah, I think it’s silly when people complain about developers not building affordable housing. Nobody expects car manufacturers to build new run-down clunkers they sell for $200... they build new cars and people who can’t afford them generally buy cheap used ones!
  - mywittyname 7y ago
    People complain about the lack of cheap new cars too. They also ignore the fact that a nicer used vehicle is a better value than a new cheap one. Houses are the same way. A nice house built in the 80s is going to be way better than a cheap house built today. Outdated looking quality construction > modern looking cheap crap.
- themaninthedark 7y ago
  I think that maybe a lot of little, it doesn't cost much to add things ends up costing a lot. Think about bathrooms; my childhood home and my grandparent's home both only had 1 bathroom. My grandparent's was on the second floor with enough room for a sink with a toilet on one side and bathtub on the other. Mine was toilet, sink and single standing shower. Newer homes started having a guest toilet. Then guest/second bath and master bath. Now newer constructions seem to have 1 bathroom per bedroom as well a guest. All while increasing the size of the bathroom. And increasing the size of the bedroom. And the size of the closets. And so on. I bought a 3 br 2 ba ranch. Currently my 2 sons are 1 and 6, I don't need the second bathroom. It's nice when we have guests but when we don't it just sits there. I see many new constructions but not any that are even close in size or price to what I have. I also see the older lots being bought and redeveloped.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  >> At least the poor would have the choice between the barely livable pod in downtown, or a house 2 hours commute away. > You don't really save all that much money by building a barely livable pod vs an actual apartment. Okay, so build normal size apartments then. Even if it's the same price as a house 2-3 hours away, you're removing 3-6 hours of commute time. The important part is splitting land costs over tens of units instead of just one or two, not exactly how many tens.
- clairity 7y ago
  a pod would be more like 50-75 sq ft, just enough for a bed and maybe a side table (with communal bathrooms; shared kitchen optional). 300 sq ft is a quite livable studio apartment, with enough room for a bathroom and (compact) kitchen. with that said, yes, any additional housing is better than none.
asdff 7y ago
You forgot the third choice: Fit the whole extended family into the 1br unit. I've seen a craigslist ad in LA for barracks style bunk beds for rent near downtown in a shitty looking room, 500/mo.

by sampo 7y ago

treis 7y ago

You don't really save all that much money by building a barely livable pod vs an actual apartment. The big cost items are kitchens and bathrooms. Those are mostly fixed costs, i.e. it costs the same to plumb a toilet, shower, and sink in a 50 sq foot bathroom as a 100 sq foot one. Only when you get to stupid high real estate cost does a ~300 sq foot pod start making sense over ~600 ft 1 bed or ~1000 sq ft 2 beds. It's a bit counter intuitive, but the best way to lower the cost of housing for the poor is to build more housing for the upper middle class and up. They will trade up houses which will increase the supply of used houses driving down their price. It's essentially impossible to build something new that will be cost competitive with something that already exists.

slg 7y ago
>It's a bit counter intuitive, but the best way to lower the cost of housing for the poor is to build more housing for the upper middle class and up. They will trade up houses which will increase the supply of used houses driving down their price The problem is that housing in any location is not a closed system with fixed demand. It is an open system in which increased supply can generate increased demand. When you build that housing for upper middle class and up, they vacate their homes, the price of their old homes goes down, then upper middle class and up people who previously decided to live in a cheaper area over paying the extreme rent costs move in, the population grows, and the price break never fully flows down market to the poor people in the city. This is why the market approach to building more housing isn't going to solve the whole problem. You need to build new homes at every pricing level and the market generally doesn't do that without the government incentivizing them.
- amanaplanacanal 7y ago
  If you keep building, eventually you will meet the pent up demand. Your scenario might match the first batch of new housing, but it can't continue indefinitely. Eventually you have more houses than people. There is a ton of pent-up demand in the bay area, because this has been going on for a long time. People who own houses there are going to fight you the whole way.
  - slg 7y ago
    You are of course right in theory. There is some point in which things will stablize and demand is fully satisfied. However that is where your second paragraph comes into play too. It isn't just people who own the homes that are disincentivized from allowing that to happen, real estate developers also don't want housing to get to that point either. And who is the one deciding what gets built with a market approach to the problem? Developers. In a market approach, developers inherently want built up demand and therefore they will never build to a point in which demand is saturated. Once again, you need government intervention.
    - sagarm 7y ago
      AFAIK developers have not formed a cabal that is trying to manipulate local real estate pricing. Developers will build as long as it seems profitable to do so. Presumably this means that when the prices do go down, a few projects will end up in the red when they're done.
- treis 7y ago
  >upper middle class and up people who previously decided to live further away over paying the extreme rent costs move in, the population grows, and the price break never trickles down to the poor people in the city It does because the poor people move into the housing that the upper middle class vacated. Population growth is an independent confounding factor. In other words, housing cost can still go up due to population growth but they would go up less if the new luxury housing is built. > You need to build new homes at every pricing level But you can't. You have high fixed costs like land, hook ups to the city utilities, architect work, plumbing, electrical, permits, and HVAC. These are pretty much the same regardless of how big of a house you build. The stuff that varies directly with size like dry wall, paint, framing, flooring, etc. doesn't cost that much. And even then the more you do at one time the cheaper it gets. In other words, hanging the last section of drywall costs a lot less than hanging the first one because you incur all of the over head to hang that first sheet. The end result is that you can't build a new house that a poor person can afford. They probably can't even afford the fixed costs. Even if you could, it wouldn't be economically viable. You're way better off spending the ~10% more to get a upper middle class house that you can sell for 50-100% more. It's still good for affordability because you've increase supply. Everybody takes one step up the ladder and the benefit will trickle down to the poor.
umanwizard 7y ago
In most urban areas the cost of an apartment has more to do with the value of the land under it than the cost of actually building and furnishing the place.
bobthepanda 7y ago
A lot of older apartments don‘t have full kitchens, but that isn‘t a bad thing. Some people just don‘t need full kitchens, and you can get by with a hot plate and a rice cooker.
- treis 7y ago
  A full appliance package can be bought for under 2 grand retail. You can save a little bit of labor/material by eliminating the need for a couple circuits, but not that much. Not much extra work to pull additional wires if you already have to do one. So the savings just aren't there to meaningfully impact the housing cost.
  - telchar 7y ago
    You're talking out of both sides of your mouth here. You say that kitchens and bathrooms are the "big cost items" yet here you say that omitting or scaling them back doesn't save much. How can both things be true?
    - Kalium 7y ago
      Appliances are cheap-ish. The structure and space for extra bathrooms or a full kitchen are much more expensive than a full appliance package. So you can save money - but not much - by not having full appliances. You can save a lot more by not building a full kitchen and a second bathroom.
hanniabu 7y ago
> The big cost items are kitchens and bathrooms Why does a pod need a kitchen and bathroom? If it had those it'd be called a studio apartment. A pod is essentially anything from a dorm room styled apartment to a half-height room big enough to have a bed to sleep in and a shelf for a few items (like the Japanese have). In any of those cases you'd have communal kitchens and bathrooms. This would actually also be good socially because as we become more digitally immersed it provides a public area to meet new people, just like how it was in college.
- SolaceQuantum 7y ago
  Doesn't this already exist in communal living places like Ollie in NYC?
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    Not quite. Ollie provides kitchens, along with other luxury amenities, which makes their price point still pretty high with the cheapest apartment being ~$2800/month.
- fortran77 7y ago
  Years ago, they had what were called "SRO" (Single-Room Occupancy) apartments. These often had shared baths or showers on each floor. These all went away by the late 60s in New York. They wouldn't be legal now. For one thing, buildings, or floors, were restricted to either men or women. And they didn't allow children, or more than one person/room. But they allowed people just getting started--working clearing tables, or washing dishes, etc--to be able to live near where they worked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
  - bradlys 7y ago
    > "Neighborhood groups in Seattle have criticized new micro apartment SRO units, arguing that they "harmed community character and provided ... inhumane living conditions; due to these concerns, the city passed regulations that outlawed micro apartment/SRO construction." Annoying. I lived in a SRO (I just called it a studio apartment with a shared bathroom) for 3.5 years that was run by a co-op apartment building. This was in Seattle. Having a shared bathroom was an annoyance (shared between 4 men - never more than a sentence said to two of them) but I was more than happy to put up with it versus having to deal with roommates. It was also cheaper than having roommates in a variety of houses that I looked at. I had more space than all those rooms for rent I looked at. I often wish I could've kept that kind of housing when I moved to the bay area because everything here is so outlandishly expensive just to get your own bit of space and that housing was so cheap for me.
zhoujianfu 7y ago
Yeah, I think it’s silly when people complain about developers not building affordable housing. Nobody expects car manufacturers to build new run-down clunkers they sell for $200... they build new cars and people who can’t afford them generally buy cheap used ones!
- mywittyname 7y ago
  People complain about the lack of cheap new cars too. They also ignore the fact that a nicer used vehicle is a better value than a new cheap one. Houses are the same way. A nice house built in the 80s is going to be way better than a cheap house built today. Outdated looking quality construction > modern looking cheap crap.
themaninthedark 7y ago
I think that maybe a lot of little, it doesn't cost much to add things ends up costing a lot. Think about bathrooms; my childhood home and my grandparent's home both only had 1 bathroom. My grandparent's was on the second floor with enough room for a sink with a toilet on one side and bathtub on the other. Mine was toilet, sink and single standing shower. Newer homes started having a guest toilet. Then guest/second bath and master bath. Now newer constructions seem to have 1 bathroom per bedroom as well a guest. All while increasing the size of the bathroom. And increasing the size of the bedroom. And the size of the closets. And so on. I bought a 3 br 2 ba ranch. Currently my 2 sons are 1 and 6, I don't need the second bathroom. It's nice when we have guests but when we don't it just sits there. I see many new constructions but not any that are even close in size or price to what I have. I also see the older lots being bought and redeveloped.
Dylan16807 7y ago
>> At least the poor would have the choice between the barely livable pod in downtown, or a house 2 hours commute away. > You don't really save all that much money by building a barely livable pod vs an actual apartment. Okay, so build normal size apartments then. Even if it's the same price as a house 2-3 hours away, you're removing 3-6 hours of commute time. The important part is splitting land costs over tens of units instead of just one or two, not exactly how many tens.
clairity 7y ago
a pod would be more like 50-75 sq ft, just enough for a bed and maybe a side table (with communal bathrooms; shared kitchen optional). 300 sq ft is a quite livable studio apartment, with enough room for a bathroom and (compact) kitchen. with that said, yes, any additional housing is better than none.

asdff 7y ago

You forgot the third choice: Fit the whole extended family into the 1br unit. I've seen a craigslist ad in LA for barracks style bunk beds for rent near downtown in a shitty looking room, 500/mo.