8 ms·

Positive Steps to Encourage Housing

54 points by jseliger 7y ago

wallace_f 7y ago
Last decade was terrible for housing construction: https://reason.com/2019/12/23/the-2010s-were-a-terrible-decade-for-housing-construction/ https://reason.com/2019/12/23/the-2010s-were-a-terrible-deca...
- ghaff 7y ago
  Interesting graph. Some of it is that there was a big drop in any construction after about 2008. So any ramp in the 2010s was starting from a very low level. But the rate of the recovery, while ramping upwards, hasn't ramped up at a particularly fast pace.
- kube-system 7y ago
  Wonder how/if this correlates with current trends of newer generations preferring to move from suburbs back to cities. Maybe it is becoming more advantageous to renovate an older home in the city than to build new in a suburb?
  - owyn 7y ago
    I think it's also because if you're a company that wants to make money doing real estate related activity, it's easier and more profitable to just buy existing buildings and sit on them than build new ones. This is a recent trend, and home building companies do still exist but... "Between 2011 and 2017, some of the world’s largest private-equity groups and hedge funds ... spent a combined $36 billion on more than 200,000 homes in ailing markets across the country. In one Atlanta zip code, they bought almost 90 percent of the 7,500 homes sold between January 2011 and June 2012; today, institutional investors own at least one in five single-family rentals in some parts of the metro area" https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/single-family-landlords-wall-street/582394/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/singl...
davidw 7y ago
Odd that Oregon's HB 2001 is not mentioned, as it's a big step.
- legitster 7y ago
  It was de-fanged a bit by being paired with a rent-control bill. Still a great step.
  - davidw 7y ago
    The rent control thing is fairly loose in some ways. Article doesn't mention Minneapolis' reforms vis a vis exclusionary zoning either. Seems like another big omission.
- downerending 7y ago
  It's a symptom as much as a cure. Oregon has immense amounts of available land to build housing on, but it also has BA-like restrictions that remove most of that from possible housing expansion. This law won't do much if that isn't fixed. (The law allows for duplexes to be built in single-family areas without rezoning.)
  - davidw 7y ago
    Oregon's UGB allows cities to grow, just in a controlled way. Absent that, and maintaining subsidies for driving, you get Houston or Phoenix like sprawl. HB 2001 allows up to 4-plexes in many cities. You could actually get a lot of housing out of that kind of development, it turns out: https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/add-housing-by-allowing-one-triplex-per-city-block/ https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/add-housing-by-allowing... Which makes sense, as most places in Europe are way more land-constrained than the US and manage to house people by growing up and in, rather than only out.
    - downerending 7y ago
      I'd argue that Phoenix compares quite favorably to the BA or Portland. It has an efficient transportation structure, and more importantly, interleaved levels of housing that make it relatively easy to live near (within walking distance even) to one's work, regardless of economic class. Except for the rich, that's essentially impossible in the BA, and pretty near for Portland.
linuxftw 7y ago
There's plenty of affordable housing in America. It's all just in places people don't want to live, like Cleveland. People don't want to live there because there isn't any economic opportunity. There isn't any economic opportunity because we shipped the jobs overseas. Then, when the system finally imploded and people could no longer make their mortgage payments, the taxpayers bailed out the banks that were making money hand over fist.
- OnlineGladiator 7y ago
  > Then, when the system finally imploded and people could no longer make their mortgage payments, the taxpayers bailed out the banks that were making money hand over fist. I'm not happy about what happened either, but what do you think would have happened if none of the banks had been bailed out?
  - larrik 7y ago
    Not OP, but at the time what I personally wanted to happen was the government to bail out the customers, but not the banks themselves. Basically let the institutions implode but not let depositors foot the bill. Clearly a pipedream, though.
  - linuxftw 7y ago
    Property prices would have deflated back to affordability. People with lots of debt would have been crushed, people with little debt would have made a killing. We finally could have clawed back the economy from the banking class with widespread bankruptcies. Could you imagine if 30% or more people had a bankruptcy recently? It would totally wreck the credit bureaus too.
  - jdkee 7y ago
    In exchange for the bailout, the bankers should not have received bonuses and the equity stakes should have been wiped out. And stronger regulation put into place.
- sien 7y ago
  There's plenty of affordable housing in America where people do want to live as well: "According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, lightly-regulated Houston has seen its civilian labor force grow by 20 percent in the last decade, compared to the San Francisco metro area's 16 percent. Some 21 Fortune 500 companies have their headquarters in Houston. What's more, for every job the Houston metro area has added, it's also permitted another unit of housing. As a result, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $841, and home prices are below the national average." From here : https://reason.com/2019/11/05/bernie-sanders-blames-apple-for-silicon-valleys-government-created-housing-crisis/ https://reason.com/2019/11/05/bernie-sanders-blames-apple-fo... It's not rocket science. If you want affordable housing make it easy for people to build and increase supply. It's remarkable how Silicon Valley is all about solving big problems for the world but demonstrates with Bay Area housing that some problems don't need technology, they just need reasonable government and if you don't have that, well, things don't work. To be fair, this problem is global. Many places that are doing well that haven't allowed enough construction like London, Sydney, Stockholm, Melbourne, Paris and other places demonstrate the same failure to enable enough housing construction.
thatfrenchguy 7y ago
> In areas where land is cheap, lowering the cost of homebuilding is paramount—as Georgians can attest. In Bryan County, for instance, new homes must include brick or “hardi-plank” siding, and facades must be limited to two materials. In Marietta, northwest of Atlanta, all walls must include brick, stone, stucco, or fiber-cement, while in Brookhaven, the walls must be brick-clad. These localities also ban cheaper materials, like vinyl siding. Such restrictive regulations drive up the cost of building and owning homes. As a French person, what makes most of the US's subburbs ugly is the fact that home owners have too much choice in how they build they house, and towns end up being a mix match of stuff that's pretty ugly on average.
- logicprog 7y ago
  Do we want affordable, plentiful housing, or arbitrary beauty, though?
  - jdkee 7y ago
    Those two are not mutually exclusive. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverside,_Illinois https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverside,_Illinois https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Forest,_Illinois https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Forest,_Illinois https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Park,_Illinois https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Park,_Illinois
    - baddox 7y ago
      The median home value in Riverside is $400,000. The US median home value is $250,000.
      - akiselev 7y ago
        Unless Riverside, IL sprang into existence within the last few years, I don't think their contemporary real estate prices are relevant here. It's just as (if not more) likely that their home values are a result of the unified architecture. You would have to look at land, material, and labor costs at the time the majority of the homes were built.
Pfhreak 7y ago
We should be getting rid of the notion of housing as a commodity. Pricing/rewarding building housing based on how well it houses people, unifying the tax credits for housing (that disproportionately go to the wealthy), building and maintaining public housing (without requiring it to be revenue neutral), rent control, increased tenant protects, and right of first refusal for tenants/tenant coops when a property sells.
- gibsonf1 7y ago
  It is not an accident that locations with rent control have the worst housing crises. Rent control immediately discourages new construction and therefore the starting rents go up as fewer units are available with growing populations. New York and San Francisco are classic examples of the destructive force that rent control has on affordable rents.
  - likpok 7y ago
    SF rent control does not apply to new construction. The argument that rent control causes this is a little more convoluted: renters would support more development if they were not shielded from the impact of not building. SF has its own way of discouraging development via long discretionary review processes.
    - aeternum 7y ago
      Rent control can still limit development even though it does not apply to new construction. 2004 is an arbitrary date that will likely be bumped up in the future. This is a looming risk for anyone looking to purchase rental properly and therefore developers. You're right though that the review process and other regulations such as the requirement for some percentage of affordable housing units is also quite significant.
      - onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
        As a R/E investor, one of the things I'm most cautious of is buying a building that might end up in rent control. It's the difference in making a good investment and losing a ton of money. I like to consider myself a good person, but I have zero interest in renting housing to people at a loss. I know people can use some help, but I'm not that rich and life is too short.
elihu 7y ago
> An older Arizona law might offer a template for other states looking to balance private property rights with local public interests. Rather than chipping away at specific local restrictions, the state passed the Property Ownership Fairness Act in 2006, reframing the question of regulation in terms of eminent domain. If a local regulation diminishes the value of land by imposing new limitations on the use of the property— such as increasing the minimum lot size or changing the zoning to lower-value uses—the jurisdiction must compensate the property owner for his loss. Arizona’s approach helps achieve a middle ground, where neither the city government’s mandate nor the landowner’s property right is absolute. I'm not so sure that's a good idea. On one hand, I like the general principle of fairness at work and that a person shouldn't have to absorb the loss of the value of a major asset simply because of an arbitrary rule change. On the other hand, I don't think governments should have to pay costs associated with fixing bad rules or addressing an injustice. Also, if government has to pay for rule changes that reduce the value of a property, should they also receive payments from property owners when a rule change increases the value of a property?
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  > Also, if government has to pay for rule changes that reduce the value of a property, should they also receive payments from property owners when a rule change increases the value of a property? Don't they already through increased property taxes? In fact, if some rule reduces the value of their property, perhaps the best compensation would be a property tax reduction or even rebate?
  - munk-a 7y ago
    By that same logic don't they already pay for property value reduction via a reduction in property taxes? I think the long term shift of revenue from property taxes alone have been observed to be insufficient to properly influence the market behavior - that makes a fair bit of sense since mayoral terms are almost never twice the mandatory reassessment window and sometimes don't even exceed the standard length between reassessments.
  - jbay808 7y ago
joe_the_user 7y ago
"In areas where land is cheap, lowering the cost of homebuilding is paramount" I live in a rural area and the city and county put up huge road blocks to building legally while a tremendous number of trailers and shacks are spread about the landscape. But, BUT!, if someone is looking at find a way OUT of America's horrible housing conundrum, more cheap housing on cheap land is terrible, horrible, a nightmare. I mean, the reason that my county scams new builders for $30-50K just to start is that the county's infrastructure bill has become unsustainable, like America in general has become unsustainable. The American love affair with low-density development is going to leave this country drowned in a pool of opioid induced vomit if things turn don't around in the next 10-20 years. Effectively, the history of settlement of this country and government policy result in a freeway-subdivision-strip-mall model of development that is unsustainable on a practical, literal level. That is; outer-ring development involves investments fated to evaporate into nothing. The capital of America's once glorious middle class has become smoke from this effect. The only path to things not imploding worse than they already have is to create high density urban development and the infrastructure needed to support it. A lot will have to change for that to happen. But as Margaret Thatcher said, "There is no alternative".
korethr 7y ago
I'm all for getting rid silly regulations, like one mentioned in the article stating all houses must be faced in brick. But I hope attempts to rollback needless regulations don't additionally throw away things like building codes. When I was slightly younger, I might have grumbled that things like the International Residential Code or the National Electric Code were a bunch of stupid rules getting in the way of the eminently reasonable thing I wanted to do, rules made by otherwise useless busybodies with nothing better to do with their time. That is not my attitude today. As I've been pulled into various wiring or handyman projects by family & friends, had a chance to actually read some of the bits of the IRC or NEC, and even lost my home to an apartment fire, I understand now that a lot of what I might have previously decried as stupid rules actually make sense from an engineering or safety perspective. These rules are informed by experience. And while violating some of the rules or recommendations can result in only minor annoyances, other violations can be dangerous, costing lives in an emergency and even making emergencies more likely. There's a saying that I've heard from pilots, "The FAR[1] is written in blood". More generally that is, the rules are the way they are because not doing it that way resulted in people dying. And I think the same holds true for a not-insignificant portion of building code today. I'm not saying we shouldn't be willing to question and criticize building code to make sure it isn't being needlessly restrictive, and that it's living up to its goal of making for safe, effective home design. But I think we should also be willing to concede that some of the rules in building codes are a Good Thing, even if it means that some of the ways we've achieved housing density in the past can't be done as cheaply anymore, or at all. 1. Federal Aviation Regulations
jelliclesfarm 7y ago
I have always felt that housing in Singapore is sensible Altho I don’t think it would work here 99 year leaseholds until recently..now Singapore citizens can purchase these public Housing flats. Everyone is housed according to their means. 78.7% of the population is housed in public housing at various home plans and sizes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore

54 points by jseliger 7y ago

Last decade was terrible for housing construction: https://reason.com/2019/12/23/the-2010s-were-a-terrible-decade-for-housing-construction/ https://reason.com/2019/12/23/the-2010s-were-a-terrible-deca...

ghaff 7y ago
Interesting graph. Some of it is that there was a big drop in any construction after about 2008. So any ramp in the 2010s was starting from a very low level. But the rate of the recovery, while ramping upwards, hasn't ramped up at a particularly fast pace.
kube-system 7y ago
Wonder how/if this correlates with current trends of newer generations preferring to move from suburbs back to cities. Maybe it is becoming more advantageous to renovate an older home in the city than to build new in a suburb?
- owyn 7y ago
  I think it's also because if you're a company that wants to make money doing real estate related activity, it's easier and more profitable to just buy existing buildings and sit on them than build new ones. This is a recent trend, and home building companies do still exist but... "Between 2011 and 2017, some of the world’s largest private-equity groups and hedge funds ... spent a combined $36 billion on more than 200,000 homes in ailing markets across the country. In one Atlanta zip code, they bought almost 90 percent of the 7,500 homes sold between January 2011 and June 2012; today, institutional investors own at least one in five single-family rentals in some parts of the metro area" https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/single-family-landlords-wall-street/582394/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/singl...

davidw 7y ago

Odd that Oregon's HB 2001 is not mentioned, as it's a big step.

legitster 7y ago
It was de-fanged a bit by being paired with a rent-control bill. Still a great step.
- davidw 7y ago
  The rent control thing is fairly loose in some ways. Article doesn't mention Minneapolis' reforms vis a vis exclusionary zoning either. Seems like another big omission.
downerending 7y ago
It's a symptom as much as a cure. Oregon has immense amounts of available land to build housing on, but it also has BA-like restrictions that remove most of that from possible housing expansion. This law won't do much if that isn't fixed. (The law allows for duplexes to be built in single-family areas without rezoning.)
- davidw 7y ago
  Oregon's UGB allows cities to grow, just in a controlled way. Absent that, and maintaining subsidies for driving, you get Houston or Phoenix like sprawl. HB 2001 allows up to 4-plexes in many cities. You could actually get a lot of housing out of that kind of development, it turns out: https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/add-housing-by-allowing-one-triplex-per-city-block/ https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/add-housing-by-allowing... Which makes sense, as most places in Europe are way more land-constrained than the US and manage to house people by growing up and in, rather than only out.
  - downerending 7y ago
    I'd argue that Phoenix compares quite favorably to the BA or Portland. It has an efficient transportation structure, and more importantly, interleaved levels of housing that make it relatively easy to live near (within walking distance even) to one's work, regardless of economic class. Except for the rich, that's essentially impossible in the BA, and pretty near for Portland.

linuxftw 7y ago

There's plenty of affordable housing in America. It's all just in places people don't want to live, like Cleveland. People don't want to live there because there isn't any economic opportunity. There isn't any economic opportunity because we shipped the jobs overseas. Then, when the system finally imploded and people could no longer make their mortgage payments, the taxpayers bailed out the banks that were making money hand over fist.

OnlineGladiator 7y ago
> Then, when the system finally imploded and people could no longer make their mortgage payments, the taxpayers bailed out the banks that were making money hand over fist. I'm not happy about what happened either, but what do you think would have happened if none of the banks had been bailed out?
- larrik 7y ago
  Not OP, but at the time what I personally wanted to happen was the government to bail out the customers, but not the banks themselves. Basically let the institutions implode but not let depositors foot the bill. Clearly a pipedream, though.
- linuxftw 7y ago
  Property prices would have deflated back to affordability. People with lots of debt would have been crushed, people with little debt would have made a killing. We finally could have clawed back the economy from the banking class with widespread bankruptcies. Could you imagine if 30% or more people had a bankruptcy recently? It would totally wreck the credit bureaus too.
- jdkee 7y ago
  In exchange for the bailout, the bankers should not have received bonuses and the equity stakes should have been wiped out. And stronger regulation put into place.
sien 7y ago
There's plenty of affordable housing in America where people do want to live as well: "According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, lightly-regulated Houston has seen its civilian labor force grow by 20 percent in the last decade, compared to the San Francisco metro area's 16 percent. Some 21 Fortune 500 companies have their headquarters in Houston. What's more, for every job the Houston metro area has added, it's also permitted another unit of housing. As a result, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $841, and home prices are below the national average." From here : https://reason.com/2019/11/05/bernie-sanders-blames-apple-for-silicon-valleys-government-created-housing-crisis/ https://reason.com/2019/11/05/bernie-sanders-blames-apple-fo... It's not rocket science. If you want affordable housing make it easy for people to build and increase supply. It's remarkable how Silicon Valley is all about solving big problems for the world but demonstrates with Bay Area housing that some problems don't need technology, they just need reasonable government and if you don't have that, well, things don't work. To be fair, this problem is global. Many places that are doing well that haven't allowed enough construction like London, Sydney, Stockholm, Melbourne, Paris and other places demonstrate the same failure to enable enough housing construction.

thatfrenchguy 7y ago

> In areas where land is cheap, lowering the cost of homebuilding is paramount—as Georgians can attest. In Bryan County, for instance, new homes must include brick or “hardi-plank” siding, and facades must be limited to two materials. In Marietta, northwest of Atlanta, all walls must include brick, stone, stucco, or fiber-cement, while in Brookhaven, the walls must be brick-clad. These localities also ban cheaper materials, like vinyl siding. Such restrictive regulations drive up the cost of building and owning homes. As a French person, what makes most of the US's subburbs ugly is the fact that home owners have too much choice in how they build they house, and towns end up being a mix match of stuff that's pretty ugly on average.

logicprog 7y ago
Do we want affordable, plentiful housing, or arbitrary beauty, though?
- jdkee 7y ago
  Those two are not mutually exclusive. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverside,_Illinois https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverside,_Illinois https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Forest,_Illinois https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Forest,_Illinois https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Park,_Illinois https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Park,_Illinois
  - baddox 7y ago
    The median home value in Riverside is $400,000. The US median home value is $250,000.
    - akiselev 7y ago
      Unless Riverside, IL sprang into existence within the last few years, I don't think their contemporary real estate prices are relevant here. It's just as (if not more) likely that their home values are a result of the unified architecture. You would have to look at land, material, and labor costs at the time the majority of the homes were built.

Pfhreak 7y ago

We should be getting rid of the notion of housing as a commodity. Pricing/rewarding building housing based on how well it houses people, unifying the tax credits for housing (that disproportionately go to the wealthy), building and maintaining public housing (without requiring it to be revenue neutral), rent control, increased tenant protects, and right of first refusal for tenants/tenant coops when a property sells.

gibsonf1 7y ago
It is not an accident that locations with rent control have the worst housing crises. Rent control immediately discourages new construction and therefore the starting rents go up as fewer units are available with growing populations. New York and San Francisco are classic examples of the destructive force that rent control has on affordable rents.
- likpok 7y ago
  SF rent control does not apply to new construction. The argument that rent control causes this is a little more convoluted: renters would support more development if they were not shielded from the impact of not building. SF has its own way of discouraging development via long discretionary review processes.
  - aeternum 7y ago
    Rent control can still limit development even though it does not apply to new construction. 2004 is an arbitrary date that will likely be bumped up in the future. This is a looming risk for anyone looking to purchase rental properly and therefore developers. You're right though that the review process and other regulations such as the requirement for some percentage of affordable housing units is also quite significant.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
      As a R/E investor, one of the things I'm most cautious of is buying a building that might end up in rent control. It's the difference in making a good investment and losing a ton of money. I like to consider myself a good person, but I have zero interest in renting housing to people at a loss. I know people can use some help, but I'm not that rich and life is too short.

elihu 7y ago

> An older Arizona law might offer a template for other states looking to balance private property rights with local public interests. Rather than chipping away at specific local restrictions, the state passed the Property Ownership Fairness Act in 2006, reframing the question of regulation in terms of eminent domain. If a local regulation diminishes the value of land by imposing new limitations on the use of the property— such as increasing the minimum lot size or changing the zoning to lower-value uses—the jurisdiction must compensate the property owner for his loss. Arizona’s approach helps achieve a middle ground, where neither the city government’s mandate nor the landowner’s property right is absolute. I'm not so sure that's a good idea. On one hand, I like the general principle of fairness at work and that a person shouldn't have to absorb the loss of the value of a major asset simply because of an arbitrary rule change. On the other hand, I don't think governments should have to pay costs associated with fixing bad rules or addressing an injustice. Also, if government has to pay for rule changes that reduce the value of a property, should they also receive payments from property owners when a rule change increases the value of a property?

seanmcdirmid 7y ago
> Also, if government has to pay for rule changes that reduce the value of a property, should they also receive payments from property owners when a rule change increases the value of a property? Don't they already through increased property taxes? In fact, if some rule reduces the value of their property, perhaps the best compensation would be a property tax reduction or even rebate?
- munk-a 7y ago
  By that same logic don't they already pay for property value reduction via a reduction in property taxes? I think the long term shift of revenue from property taxes alone have been observed to be insufficient to properly influence the market behavior - that makes a fair bit of sense since mayoral terms are almost never twice the mandatory reassessment window and sometimes don't even exceed the standard length between reassessments.
- jbay808 7y ago

joe_the_user 7y ago

"In areas where land is cheap, lowering the cost of homebuilding is paramount" I live in a rural area and the city and county put up huge road blocks to building legally while a tremendous number of trailers and shacks are spread about the landscape. But, BUT!, if someone is looking at find a way OUT of America's horrible housing conundrum, more cheap housing on cheap land is terrible, horrible, a nightmare. I mean, the reason that my county scams new builders for $30-50K just to start is that the county's infrastructure bill has become unsustainable, like America in general has become unsustainable. The American love affair with low-density development is going to leave this country drowned in a pool of opioid induced vomit if things turn don't around in the next 10-20 years. Effectively, the history of settlement of this country and government policy result in a freeway-subdivision-strip-mall model of development that is unsustainable on a practical, literal level. That is; outer-ring development involves investments fated to evaporate into nothing. The capital of America's once glorious middle class has become smoke from this effect. The only path to things not imploding worse than they already have is to create high density urban development and the infrastructure needed to support it. A lot will have to change for that to happen. But as Margaret Thatcher said, "There is no alternative".

korethr 7y ago

I'm all for getting rid silly regulations, like one mentioned in the article stating all houses must be faced in brick. But I hope attempts to rollback needless regulations don't additionally throw away things like building codes. When I was slightly younger, I might have grumbled that things like the International Residential Code or the National Electric Code were a bunch of stupid rules getting in the way of the eminently reasonable thing I wanted to do, rules made by otherwise useless busybodies with nothing better to do with their time. That is not my attitude today. As I've been pulled into various wiring or handyman projects by family & friends, had a chance to actually read some of the bits of the IRC or NEC, and even lost my home to an apartment fire, I understand now that a lot of what I might have previously decried as stupid rules actually make sense from an engineering or safety perspective. These rules are informed by experience. And while violating some of the rules or recommendations can result in only minor annoyances, other violations can be dangerous, costing lives in an emergency and even making emergencies more likely. There's a saying that I've heard from pilots, "The FAR[1] is written in blood". More generally that is, the rules are the way they are because not doing it that way resulted in people dying. And I think the same holds true for a not-insignificant portion of building code today. I'm not saying we shouldn't be willing to question and criticize building code to make sure it isn't being needlessly restrictive, and that it's living up to its goal of making for safe, effective home design. But I think we should also be willing to concede that some of the rules in building codes are a Good Thing, even if it means that some of the ways we've achieved housing density in the past can't be done as cheaply anymore, or at all. 1. Federal Aviation Regulations

jelliclesfarm 7y ago

I have always felt that housing in Singapore is sensible Altho I don’t think it would work here 99 year leaseholds until recently..now Singapore citizens can purchase these public Housing flats. Everyone is housed according to their means. 78.7% of the population is housed in public housing at various home plans and sizes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore