6 ms·

You say that the underlying problem is a limited supply but why stop there? Why is there a limited supply? How long will looser regulations help until we're ba

You say that the underlying problem is a limited supply but why stop there? Why is there a limited supply? How long will looser regulations help until we're back to the same problem? Perhaps we should dig deeper. Why have we organized our society in a way that encourages and almost enforces high population density? The fact is that our current way of living is unsustainable. The housing situation is just one symptom of that.

NegativeLatency 4y ago
Carbon emissions from a city resident are much lower than those from a suburb or rural resident. Unless your proposed plan is like living off grid or something, making it easy for people to move to cities seems logical.
- Silverback_VII 4y ago
  This is something I do not get. In my opinion renting a flat should be a more efficient form of living than owning a house and yet economically(&long-term) renting is often the worse option.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    If you fully account for everything, renting doesn’t always lose - it’s just we’ve had absurd appreciation for so long. Once you account for maintenance items owning becomes decently more expensive than a simple “mortgage + utilities + insurance + taxes” calculation shows. A $10k furnace every 25 years adds something like $40 a month and that’s only one of the many wear items there are. There are other non-tangible benefits to ownership, of course.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      There's (mostly) a distinction between single family homes and condos (though high-end condos can have significant costs even if shared as well in addition to condo fees). But, yes, something on the order of hundreds of dollars per month should probably be budgeted to keep a single family house in steady state over a significant period of time.
    - jjav 4y ago
      > A $10k furnace every 25 years adds something like $40 a month and that’s only one of the many wear items there are. Right, but remember that if you are a renter, the landlord is passing those $40 to you bundled in the rent (along with all other future maintenance projections). There's no free ride, the renter is paying for all of it plus profit margin to the landlord. You can sometimes get lucky as a renter by finding a small-time incompetent landlord who doesn't price these future maintanence costs into the rent, but that's not the norm.
      - hackerfromthefu 4y ago
        The reality is in many cases the 'profit' margin is negative! There's many many stories of owners that quit the situation in disgust and fear of how bad it is financially, due to running costs. A bad year of maintenance, a bad tenant, can cause big losses in a business where margins are usually slim for the first decade of ownership. If an investment house was a business, it often takes a decade to see substantial returns, sometimes after many years of hard slog and even losses. Would you accept that from the businesses that hacker news dreams of?
        bombcar 4y ago
        Yeah, it's fun to hate on landlords but often they're not making much outside of appreciation - or they're basing their profit on renting a house today purchased ten or twenty years ago (which would be better to sell and do something else with the money, often). I think the fundamental issue is that the whole renting market is buying long and selling short (buy a dwelling for a long period, rent it for short periods) and that causes issues on one or another direction (either you rent for what appears "too much" because you need to build reserves, or you rent for what appears "fair" and the first major expense kills the landlord).
  - DangitBobby 4y ago
    I don't really understand how renting could ever be more efficient. Landlords wouldn't rent out houses as a profession if they couldn't make money doing it. That money comes from renters paying more than the cost of home ownership by definition.
    - Silverback_VII 4y ago
      it's more efficient in a physical sense, in other words, construction and heating.
mixmastamyk 4y ago
Density is better for the environment as others mentioned. It is the opposite of enforced, currently mostly prevented. Answering your question with another question. Why stop there? What you are ultimately arguing for is population-growth control. Turns out very few people are interested in the government deciding how many children they can have.
- pixl97 4y ago
  The US population that has lived here 3 generations or more is shrinking, and thus trend also applies to Europe and Japan. Even China is looking at a future population decrease. Turns out these forced population decreases are not necessary.
  - xboxnolifes 4y ago
    > The US population that has lived here 3 generations or more is shrinking What do you mean here, and how does it relate to total population levels?
- CorrectHorseBat 4y ago
  Population growth control is also utterly pointless, it turns out that having babies is a lot of work and if given the opportunity most people don't have 6 of them. Rich countries that don't have a shrinking population do only so because of immigration.
maxerickson 4y ago
Most cities with severe housing shortages are pretty much plainly anti-density.
wizofaus 4y ago
There's plenty of supply - I don't doubt even the state of CA has more actual housing available than strictly necessary for all those currently living there, but it's natural for people to want to live in areas that are a) close to family and friends b) provide access to employment and c) have necessary infrastructure/ services/retail options readily available. All those factors contribute to making densely populated areas desirable - unless you can provide transportation infrastructure that enables millions of people to efficiently transit long distances - and just about the only countries that have achieved that are those with very high population densities anyway! But there are definitely other factors that exacerbate cost-of-housing issues - income disparities that are further magnified by the degree to which banks are prepared to lend money being one that's rarely discussed. If someone earning $200k a year is able to afford to spend up to 5 times more on a house - and by extension the land it's on - than someone earning half that (and quite possibly 10 times more than someone earning 50k), then how can that not have a serious impact on housing affordability, which trickles down to rental affordability, as enough rent needs to be charged to help offset mortgage costs for landlords.

NegativeLatency 4y ago

Carbon emissions from a city resident are much lower than those from a suburb or rural resident. Unless your proposed plan is like living off grid or something, making it easy for people to move to cities seems logical.

Silverback_VII 4y ago
This is something I do not get. In my opinion renting a flat should be a more efficient form of living than owning a house and yet economically(&long-term) renting is often the worse option.
- bombcar 4y ago
  If you fully account for everything, renting doesn’t always lose - it’s just we’ve had absurd appreciation for so long. Once you account for maintenance items owning becomes decently more expensive than a simple “mortgage + utilities + insurance + taxes” calculation shows. A $10k furnace every 25 years adds something like $40 a month and that’s only one of the many wear items there are. There are other non-tangible benefits to ownership, of course.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    There's (mostly) a distinction between single family homes and condos (though high-end condos can have significant costs even if shared as well in addition to condo fees). But, yes, something on the order of hundreds of dollars per month should probably be budgeted to keep a single family house in steady state over a significant period of time.
  - jjav 4y ago
    > A $10k furnace every 25 years adds something like $40 a month and that’s only one of the many wear items there are. Right, but remember that if you are a renter, the landlord is passing those $40 to you bundled in the rent (along with all other future maintenance projections). There's no free ride, the renter is paying for all of it plus profit margin to the landlord. You can sometimes get lucky as a renter by finding a small-time incompetent landlord who doesn't price these future maintanence costs into the rent, but that's not the norm.
    - hackerfromthefu 4y ago
      The reality is in many cases the 'profit' margin is negative! There's many many stories of owners that quit the situation in disgust and fear of how bad it is financially, due to running costs. A bad year of maintenance, a bad tenant, can cause big losses in a business where margins are usually slim for the first decade of ownership. If an investment house was a business, it often takes a decade to see substantial returns, sometimes after many years of hard slog and even losses. Would you accept that from the businesses that hacker news dreams of?
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Yeah, it's fun to hate on landlords but often they're not making much outside of appreciation - or they're basing their profit on renting a house today purchased ten or twenty years ago (which would be better to sell and do something else with the money, often). I think the fundamental issue is that the whole renting market is buying long and selling short (buy a dwelling for a long period, rent it for short periods) and that causes issues on one or another direction (either you rent for what appears "too much" because you need to build reserves, or you rent for what appears "fair" and the first major expense kills the landlord).
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  I don't really understand how renting could ever be more efficient. Landlords wouldn't rent out houses as a profession if they couldn't make money doing it. That money comes from renters paying more than the cost of home ownership by definition.
  - Silverback_VII 4y ago
    it's more efficient in a physical sense, in other words, construction and heating.

mixmastamyk 4y ago

Density is better for the environment as others mentioned. It is the opposite of enforced, currently mostly prevented. Answering your question with another question. Why stop there? What you are ultimately arguing for is population-growth control. Turns out very few people are interested in the government deciding how many children they can have.

pixl97 4y ago
The US population that has lived here 3 generations or more is shrinking, and thus trend also applies to Europe and Japan. Even China is looking at a future population decrease. Turns out these forced population decreases are not necessary.
- xboxnolifes 4y ago
  > The US population that has lived here 3 generations or more is shrinking What do you mean here, and how does it relate to total population levels?
CorrectHorseBat 4y ago
Population growth control is also utterly pointless, it turns out that having babies is a lot of work and if given the opportunity most people don't have 6 of them. Rich countries that don't have a shrinking population do only so because of immigration.

maxerickson 4y ago

Most cities with severe housing shortages are pretty much plainly anti-density.

wizofaus 4y ago

There's plenty of supply - I don't doubt even the state of CA has more actual housing available than strictly necessary for all those currently living there, but it's natural for people to want to live in areas that are a) close to family and friends b) provide access to employment and c) have necessary infrastructure/ services/retail options readily available. All those factors contribute to making densely populated areas desirable - unless you can provide transportation infrastructure that enables millions of people to efficiently transit long distances - and just about the only countries that have achieved that are those with very high population densities anyway! But there are definitely other factors that exacerbate cost-of-housing issues - income disparities that are further magnified by the degree to which banks are prepared to lend money being one that's rarely discussed. If someone earning $200k a year is able to afford to spend up to 5 times more on a house - and by extension the land it's on - than someone earning half that (and quite possibly 10 times more than someone earning 50k), then how can that not have a serious impact on housing affordability, which trickles down to rental affordability, as enough rent needs to be charged to help offset mortgage costs for landlords.