7 ms·

Where does one build 3.5 million houses? The housing needs to be where jobs / etc, are. It should also be where resources are. A good deal of the state has w

Where does one build 3.5 million houses? The housing needs to be where jobs / etc, are. It should also be where resources are. A good deal of the state has water issues regularly; additional part of the state can't keep the power on due to - heat waves, fires, over use, winds, cats farting. The rural county I live in has open jobs, but a sizeable chunk of the work force is either seasonal (logging, etc) then coast on unemployment for the off season or don't actually want to work. Those that do, are flaky as all get go. (My partner and I own a small business in the county). What does this have to do with housing? Covid and growth of a near by metro area (about an hour away) have pushed people to buying up what was previously cheap (yet affordable) housing. Small cabins that would be going for ~75k or a bit more 7 years ago are pushing over $200k now. The local community college as well as natural disasters further puts pressure on the housing situation. How about building more? Well, insuring housing when large fires have come through? Hard to come by. Building costs have also gone through the roof. Housing is needed in this particular county (and surrounding) but isn't being built. Where does housing for 3.5 million get built?

dragonwriter 4y ago
> Where does one build 3.5 million houses? One doesn't. One builds 3.5 million homes, mostly apartments.
- yucky 4y ago
  Exactly. Soviet style apartment cities are on the menu. Highly efficient and affordable.
  - jmspring 4y ago
    Doesn’t answer the question about infrastructure which California is well known to be lacking.
    - vaidhy 4y ago
      So, there can be no solution? Why would you not assume that as density increases, the amenities would also get better? I find this lack of optimism very dissonant and just divisive.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > Doesn’t answer the question about infrastructure which California is well known to be lacking What infrastructure do you imagine California to be lacking that would be relevant here?
      - jmspring 4y ago
        Water for one. Multiple towns in both northern and southern CA had drought / water issues. Mendocino in the north, multiple places in the south.
        jeffbee 4y ago
        I don't think anyone is proposing to installed another 8 million people in Mendocino. Places like San Francisco and the East Bay have tons of water rights because they were originally outfitted for tens of millions of residents before being suddenly down-zoned around 1970. The East Bay Municipal Utilities District currently serves less demand for water than it did in 1980 because of systemic efficiency improvements, despite the fact that the served population increased 50% since then. Also, there is the small fact that apartment dwellers use a tiny fraction of the water of people who live in detached houses. In short, there is plenty of water in various major metropolitan areas.
  - crooked-v 4y ago
    Just replacing a lot of old urban single-family homes with triplexes would be enough to get significantly ahead of housing issues in many major US cities, including in California. Unfortunately, the sheer regulatory expense of new housing is such that it's not worth it for anyone to try any project short of big apartment/condo buildings.
    - wwweston 4y ago
      The demand for new housing in California is high enough to absorb pretty significant costs and I'd be willing to bet regulatory expense is not even in the top 3 factors driving building costs (and definitely not the top 2), so saying it's "not worth it" seems like it ignores the top of the market (which tends to be the market migrating in to CA) that's willing to pay a premium for what they want where they want. With some of the recent changes to building policies I think we're going to find out that NIMBY local policy and regulation aren't the fundamental problem, but we're up against the limits of how capital naturally engages with building projects: chasing demand towards the high end of the market and staying well back from diminishing marginal returns.
      - zbrozek 4y ago
        Regulatory expense is the single largest line item for building a home, with places like Fremont pushing just the permit fees alone north of $140k. https://citiesassociation.org/documents/constraints-survey-data-summary-2022/ https://citiesassociation.org/documents/constraints-survey-d...
        wwweston 4y ago
        When I look at the link, it seems to contain a spreadsheet with no information, but let's say $150k is true. Market prices of homes in places like Freemont tend to run from the high 6 figures through the low 7. Knock off $150k and we have maybe a 20% price reduction (probably closer to 15%). Nice to have but hard to figure out how that represents the largest portion of anything. Land homes sit on costs more than $150k, maybe north of twice as much in Freemont-like areas (unless the lot is weird, inaccessible, or otherwise has issues that make it difficult to build on). I'm not sure how one is going to get total materials and labor to come in less than $150k for most single family homes in CA. Maybe with small square footage and a good deal of luck with labor and materials? You tell me how to build for less than $120/sqft and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's all ears. Seems to me to get regulatory expense to be the single largest item for building a home, we'd have ignore land, then play the game of lumping together all such expenses while splitting out building and labor, and even then I'm still not sure how it actually adds up.
jeffbee 4y ago
I'm not sure what place you are describing but a place like Chico could easily double their population, and should do so. There are a string of silly towns that are squatting on ideal locations (Chico is one). The state should use its budget to incentivize growth in those places. A town like Chico, or Lodi, or Stockton, or even Sacramento should get slathered in cash if it builds housing in a smart way. The state should pick up the tab for things like pipes and roads and utility undergrounding in smart growth cities.
- wwweston 4y ago
  Aren't most of these towns smack dab in the middle of 100 year floodplain problems?
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    No. Established cities tend to be not in flood plains due to survivor effect. Chico, Lodi, Sacramento, and even Stockton are above 100-year floor areas for the most part. Typically the most flood-prone areas are the oldest parts of old downtowns and the newest sprawl where they are gobbling up marginal land. https://gis.bam.water.ca.gov/bam/ https://gis.bam.water.ca.gov/bam/
epicureanideal 4y ago
> Where does one build 3.5 million houses? The housing needs to be where jobs / etc, are. With the resources of an entire state government, or a lot of private equity, this is very solvable. Take a place like Sunol, CA or Livermore, CA, either one about an hour east of San Francisco and trivial to connect to public transit. https://www.google.com/maps/@37.5871047,-121.8716321,3a,75y,271.95h,91.18t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sxBhiQtd4bddwnMYAEaLLuA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.5871047,-121.8716321,3a,75y,... (California has nowhere to build they say... see above link.) Build several hundred high-rise apartments with several thousand of residents each. There you go. Housing for a million people in the space of not even a square mile probably. Add in generous amounts of entertainment venues, coffee shops, live music, some parks, and a bunch of office buildings. Done. Solved. But they don't do it. Why?
- rsj_hn 4y ago
  > Done. Solved. But they don't do it. Why? This is called the Napkin Fallacy. When you write down some solution to a long standing social problem on a napkin in a coffee shop, and then instead of asking "What is wrong with my solution, that it hasn't been adopted?" you ask "What is wrong with the world, that it hasn't adopted my solution?" The world needs a lot more people asking the first question rather than the second. Virtually no one should be asking the second question. As the saying goes "For every problem, there is a solution that is clear, simple, and wrong." That's usually the napkin solution. When you stop to really think about what is wrong with the napkin solution, you start down the path of solving real problems. It is highly unlikely that long standing social problems have napkin solutions. As a slightly toxic corollary to the Napkin Fallacy is the Virtue Fallacy, which tries to answer the second question with "It is because the world is run by bad people" This is bad not only because it is an easy way to avoid the difficult work of understanding why the napkin solution doesn't work, but also because it caricatures one's opponents, and it is close to self-deification. While the saying "Let God be true, but every man a liar" is sound, the saying "Let me be true but every man a liar" is unsound. There is generally nothing about any of us that makes us better than others. Do not assume the world is run by people worse than you.
  - 4y ago

dragonwriter 4y ago

> Where does one build 3.5 million houses? One doesn't. One builds 3.5 million homes, mostly apartments.

yucky 4y ago
Exactly. Soviet style apartment cities are on the menu. Highly efficient and affordable.
- jmspring 4y ago
  Doesn’t answer the question about infrastructure which California is well known to be lacking.
  - vaidhy 4y ago
    So, there can be no solution? Why would you not assume that as density increases, the amenities would also get better? I find this lack of optimism very dissonant and just divisive.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Doesn’t answer the question about infrastructure which California is well known to be lacking What infrastructure do you imagine California to be lacking that would be relevant here?
    - jmspring 4y ago
      Water for one. Multiple towns in both northern and southern CA had drought / water issues. Mendocino in the north, multiple places in the south.
      - jeffbee 4y ago
        I don't think anyone is proposing to installed another 8 million people in Mendocino. Places like San Francisco and the East Bay have tons of water rights because they were originally outfitted for tens of millions of residents before being suddenly down-zoned around 1970. The East Bay Municipal Utilities District currently serves less demand for water than it did in 1980 because of systemic efficiency improvements, despite the fact that the served population increased 50% since then. Also, there is the small fact that apartment dwellers use a tiny fraction of the water of people who live in detached houses. In short, there is plenty of water in various major metropolitan areas.
- crooked-v 4y ago
  Just replacing a lot of old urban single-family homes with triplexes would be enough to get significantly ahead of housing issues in many major US cities, including in California. Unfortunately, the sheer regulatory expense of new housing is such that it's not worth it for anyone to try any project short of big apartment/condo buildings.
  - wwweston 4y ago
    The demand for new housing in California is high enough to absorb pretty significant costs and I'd be willing to bet regulatory expense is not even in the top 3 factors driving building costs (and definitely not the top 2), so saying it's "not worth it" seems like it ignores the top of the market (which tends to be the market migrating in to CA) that's willing to pay a premium for what they want where they want. With some of the recent changes to building policies I think we're going to find out that NIMBY local policy and regulation aren't the fundamental problem, but we're up against the limits of how capital naturally engages with building projects: chasing demand towards the high end of the market and staying well back from diminishing marginal returns.
    - zbrozek 4y ago
      Regulatory expense is the single largest line item for building a home, with places like Fremont pushing just the permit fees alone north of $140k. https://citiesassociation.org/documents/constraints-survey-data-summary-2022/ https://citiesassociation.org/documents/constraints-survey-d...
      - wwweston 4y ago
        When I look at the link, it seems to contain a spreadsheet with no information, but let's say $150k is true. Market prices of homes in places like Freemont tend to run from the high 6 figures through the low 7. Knock off $150k and we have maybe a 20% price reduction (probably closer to 15%). Nice to have but hard to figure out how that represents the largest portion of anything. Land homes sit on costs more than $150k, maybe north of twice as much in Freemont-like areas (unless the lot is weird, inaccessible, or otherwise has issues that make it difficult to build on). I'm not sure how one is going to get total materials and labor to come in less than $150k for most single family homes in CA. Maybe with small square footage and a good deal of luck with labor and materials? You tell me how to build for less than $120/sqft and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's all ears. Seems to me to get regulatory expense to be the single largest item for building a home, we'd have ignore land, then play the game of lumping together all such expenses while splitting out building and labor, and even then I'm still not sure how it actually adds up.

jeffbee 4y ago

I'm not sure what place you are describing but a place like Chico could easily double their population, and should do so. There are a string of silly towns that are squatting on ideal locations (Chico is one). The state should use its budget to incentivize growth in those places. A town like Chico, or Lodi, or Stockton, or even Sacramento should get slathered in cash if it builds housing in a smart way. The state should pick up the tab for things like pipes and roads and utility undergrounding in smart growth cities.

wwweston 4y ago
Aren't most of these towns smack dab in the middle of 100 year floodplain problems?
- jeffbee 4y ago
  No. Established cities tend to be not in flood plains due to survivor effect. Chico, Lodi, Sacramento, and even Stockton are above 100-year floor areas for the most part. Typically the most flood-prone areas are the oldest parts of old downtowns and the newest sprawl where they are gobbling up marginal land. https://gis.bam.water.ca.gov/bam/ https://gis.bam.water.ca.gov/bam/

epicureanideal 4y ago

> Where does one build 3.5 million houses? The housing needs to be where jobs / etc, are. With the resources of an entire state government, or a lot of private equity, this is very solvable. Take a place like Sunol, CA or Livermore, CA, either one about an hour east of San Francisco and trivial to connect to public transit. https://www.google.com/maps/@37.5871047,-121.8716321,3a,75y,271.95h,91.18t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sxBhiQtd4bddwnMYAEaLLuA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.5871047,-121.8716321,3a,75y,... (California has nowhere to build they say... see above link.) Build several hundred high-rise apartments with several thousand of residents each. There you go. Housing for a million people in the space of not even a square mile probably. Add in generous amounts of entertainment venues, coffee shops, live music, some parks, and a bunch of office buildings. Done. Solved. But they don't do it. Why?

rsj_hn 4y ago
> Done. Solved. But they don't do it. Why? This is called the Napkin Fallacy. When you write down some solution to a long standing social problem on a napkin in a coffee shop, and then instead of asking "What is wrong with my solution, that it hasn't been adopted?" you ask "What is wrong with the world, that it hasn't adopted my solution?" The world needs a lot more people asking the first question rather than the second. Virtually no one should be asking the second question. As the saying goes "For every problem, there is a solution that is clear, simple, and wrong." That's usually the napkin solution. When you stop to really think about what is wrong with the napkin solution, you start down the path of solving real problems. It is highly unlikely that long standing social problems have napkin solutions. As a slightly toxic corollary to the Napkin Fallacy is the Virtue Fallacy, which tries to answer the second question with "It is because the world is run by bad people" This is bad not only because it is an easy way to avoid the difficult work of understanding why the napkin solution doesn't work, but also because it caricatures one's opponents, and it is close to self-deification. While the saying "Let God be true, but every man a liar" is sound, the saying "Let me be true but every man a liar" is unsound. There is generally nothing about any of us that makes us better than others. Do not assume the world is run by people worse than you.
- 4y ago