5 ms·
I think the problem is that people want to buy 3 bedroom homes with a 3 stall garage on 2 acres of land. In my market, there are tons of affordable homes, but t
by alar44 5y ago
I think the problem is that people want to buy 3 bedroom homes with a 3 stall garage on 2 acres of land. In my market, there are tons of affordable homes, but they aren't brand new, huge, with a ton of land. People are going to have to pay for that. It's a matter of keeping up with the Joneses from my perspective. People just don't want an average size home built in the 60s. They need a brand new 3k SQ ft home and bitch that's it's not affordable. They can't all be.
- fizzizist1 5y agoI live in Toronto, and there is no way that I could buy a small (not even average size) home built in the 60s for less than a million dollars, unless it's in a really bad neighborhood or needs so much work that I will end up spending that much anyway
- alar44 5y agoThat's true, but it's generally people from LA, Toronto, and NYC that really have a problem. They are massive metropolises. Extremely high demand and very little undeveloped land. Supply and demand. For everywhere else that isn't adjacent to a megalopolis, I think the housing "crisis" is massively overstated.
- freeone3000 5y agoYes, for the minority of people who live outside of a major city, they likely aren't seeing huge increases. But for most people, affordable housing is an issue.
- alar44 5y agoNo, most people do not live within a market that has these problems. Yes, something like 80% live in a metro area, but this isn't applicable to all metro areas. In the US, maybe the top 5ish cities. Even Chicago, for example, has tons of undeveloped, or underdeveloped land. It's not even close to Toronto or NYC. For most people, moving a little farther from work is what they need. A Chicago suburb commute isn't even close to the same thing as LA or NYC.
- freeone3000 5y agoMoving farther from work and increasing sprawl and traffic is its own problem.
- alar44 5y agoFair, but packing more people into a small space is only going to drive up land and rent value. Not everyone can live in Manhattan or downtown Chicago.
- wizee 5y agoI Ontario at least, houses in the middle of nowhere are still absurdly expensive. Getting permission to build anything anywhere is hard.
- dcolkitt 5y agoThe issue is that building new “non-luxury” homes is either explicitly prohibited or not economically viable because of the overhead cost of just breaking ground. At least in my area, developers spend over half of the expense of the home on land (including the legal/political costs of getting it up zoned) and “horizontal development” (utilities, impact fees, permit costs, roads, environmental mitigation, drainage, etc.) If just breaking ground costs you $400k per lot, then it doesn’t make a ton of sense to build 1500 square foot starter homes that will sell for $600k instead of 3500 square foot McMansions that will go for $1.2mn