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There seems to be a general lack of political will for big projects in the west. Looking at Asia now is like what the west used to be like. I am unsure about

There seems to be a general lack of political will for big projects in the west. Looking at Asia now is like what the west used to be like. I am unsure about the cause but I suspect that a lot of it is that people seem a lot more worried about consultation with locals and such. In the past the government might just decide “we are building a highway here” or “we are building all this infrastructure for houses there” and there seemed to be a lot less consideration for how people affected would feel about it. Media has gotten more pervasive, so we might imagine that politicians are more concerned about things flaring up there, but Asia has plenty of media access too, so that doesn’t really explain it.

ams92 4y ago
It's NIMBYism. Most people in a state like California will agree that more affordable housing needs to be built, but no one wants it in their back yard.
RestlessMind 4y ago
Decades ago when the West was developed, there was very little value placed on the existing stuff. Five people died constructing the Empire State building. Do you imagine the uproar if that happens today? I bet human life was valued much less back then. Similarly, lots of neighborhoods were erased to make way for highways, railroads and industrial plants. Nowadays, try constructing an industrial plant in a major city center and you will discover that people care a lot of their clean air and clear water. There is also a related but separate aspect where environmental activists erected barriers to slow down any development. You still feel its effects today where CEQA is weaponized to slow down a small apartment housing.
- themitigating 4y ago
  Of course all cities should strive to be like Houston, a city surrounded and intersected by highways. The lower part of Manhattan would have had a highway through it but instead it'sa cultural epicenter (https://untappedcities.com/2013/09/11/nyc-that-never-was-robert-moses-lower-manhattan-expressway-lomex/ https://untappedcities.com/2013/09/11/nyc-that-never-was-rob...)
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    If the highway were there the cultural epicenter would just be elsewhere. It doesn’t really matter where your infrastructure is. You need X infrastructure for Y people and development will naturally happen to take advantage of it. In Boston they did the reverse of your example. They took a subway and moved it in to fill the void where a highway was supposed to go before it got cancelled. If they hadn’t cancelled the highway that subway would still be where it used to be. As an aside, the people who cancelled it really have a lot of blood on their hands because a bunch of major surface streets got developed into main thoroughfares as a result and we all know how good it is to have a highway speed road that isn’t grade separated from cross streets, pedestrians and cyclists…
  - asdff 4y ago
    To be fair with both the lower and mid manhattan expressway plans, they were at one point planning for buildings being built above and below the elevated grades. It wasn't just going to be dead space.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- oasisbob 4y ago
  > Five people died constructing the Empire State building. Do you imagine the uproar if that happens today? People still die on construction projects all the time, on relatively uninteresting things even. eg, in 2019 four people died when a crane working above a Google office building in Seattle collapsed. It was local news for a few weeks, but I'm not sure it had any other effects, regulatory or otherwise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_crane_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_crane_collapse
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
> Looking at Asia now is like what the west used to be like. There is a huge property bubble in China, so I'm not sure if that is good example for us to follow. Japan is a better model, where a declining population and weariness of a huge real estate bubble that popped in the late 80s has made investing property not very feasible.
- dionidium 4y ago
  Property "bubbles" only matter when housing is scarce and therefore treated as an investment. We all understand why the recent run-up in used car prices was bad for most people, even if it meant that the people who owned a car enjoyed a sudden spike in the value of that "asset." We don't want the things we buy to be more expensive. We want them to be less expensive. Falling prices are good.
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    I lived in Beijing for 9 years and literally could look through unfinished peepholes of apartments (which would be called condos in the states) and see that they weren't even renovated yet. The building would be sold out years ago, but only 25% of the apartments were being lived in. And you really need to look at rents: if a 8 million RMB apartment that is on the market is also renting for 5000 RMB/month...ya, something is wrong. It never made sense for me to buy property in China (which I was eligible to do after being there for 6 years), since rent prices were so cheap in comparison.
  - Psychoshy_bc1q 4y ago
    bitcoin fixes this
- Auracle 4y ago
  I’ve gotten downvoted for mentioning this on HN before but I’ll say it again - all we would need to do to largely stabilize housing prices would be to secure our borders. Our population growth is largely due to immigration, and right now we’re letting in over a million immigrants a year who will statistically have more children than the people that are already here.
dionidium 4y ago
> There seems to be a general lack of political will for big projects in the west. The spectacular thing about the housing crisis is that you don't even need any big government projects. It just needs to be legal for private actors to build housing. On most plots of land today it is not legal to build anything but a single-family home, so cities are no longer able to naturally densify over time (just like every single modern city did 100 years ago, so that they could become the cities they are today).
- rich_sasha 4y ago
  My impression from the UK, which seems to have a similar housing shortage and restrictive zoning laws, is that there is another piece to this jigsaw, namely infrastructure. There are a fair few housing developments in the UK which provide the quantity and density needed, but eg don't have sufficient roads to support the increased traffic, causing gridlocks. Similar story for schools or shops.
- llampx 4y ago
  I want to believe this, but my personal experience shows the opposite. I live in Berlin, and there's a severe housing shortage, even though Berlin is very big geographically, and 5 story buildings are the norm, many even as mixed-use. Why is this? Because there's a strong inflow from all over the world and not enough building. Meanwhile prices are going up without regard to incomes, and it is incredibly hard to get even a viewing, let alone be offered an apartment. On top of that, most of the stock is old and not modernized at all. Even for private owners, it is better to not build and let scarcity drive the price of their investments higher, than to take the risk of building and potentially see rents or prices fall.
QIYGT 4y ago
> There seems to be a general lack of political will for big projects in the west. We don't need big projects. If popular US cities like Seattle and San Francisco simply allowed people to build 5-story apartment buildings in all the space that's currently set aside for single-family detached homes, you'd see people building millions of small projects to easily meet the demand.
- bboygravity 4y ago
  And also the city would turn into a horrible place to live with tons of pollution and congestion. Similar to large Asian cities where you can barely breathe, the noise is unbearable and it's a mission to get from one part of the city to another. Nevermind issues like "can our sewage pipes handle it?".
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    On the contrary. Those densities would make for excellent public transport opportunities so not everyone would need a car. I live in Barcelona that's mostly 5 or so levels and I haven't driven a car in 4 years and I love it.
  - Terretta 4y ago
    Like the entirely 5 story multi-family residential-over-retail filled Paris, France? In the US, these manifest as so-called 5-over-1 and it's entirely possible to build the same model of work-life balanced neighborhoods using that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1
    - mancerayder 4y ago
      Paris is definitely not a place where you can point to an example of abundant, affordable housing. Are you kidding me? Adjusted for wages, Paris purchase prices are more unaffordable than London or New York.
      - throwaway_paris 4y ago
steele 4y ago
"West" and "Asia" is an overgeneralization. Just say the countries you have in mind to not seem ignorant.
jackcosgrove 4y ago
While I don't think it was due to foresight as compared to, say, nimbyism, those parts of the world that are putting the brakes on development may be making the right choice. World population will peak later this century, and it has already peaked locally in many places. Some infrastructure will become a white elephant going forward once the population it was built for declines. I feel bad for those who are stuck without adequate or inexpensive housing in the meantime, but in the aggregate it may be wise to not overbuild now. The problem in a place like the US is mostly the distribution of jobs. There are places with abundant housing that also lack for jobs.
user-extended 4y ago
>Looking at Asia now is like what the west used to be like. Housing sure is cheap in Korea, China, and Hong Kong! https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/4/28/south-koreans-struggle-to-climb-property-ladder-as-prices-soar https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/4/28/south-koreans-st...
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >Housing sure is cheap in Korea, China, and Hong Kong! Just to clarify, that was sarcasm for everyone who thought your statement was serious and didn't open your link.
netheril96 4y ago
> Looking at Asia now is like what the west used to be like. China has the political will for big projects. China also gets them done, and done fast. Yet China also has a housing problem, much greater than the West. In China's case, the government deliberately creates a shortage of supply by restricting the usage of land. They also printed money directly into the housing market in 2015 when the housing bubble looked likely to burst. It is not a lack of ability to control housing prices. Instead, they have the ability and does control housing prices, by controlling them upwards.
scrappyjoe 4y ago
A lot of late 20th century legislation has focused on eliminating corruption and taking all affected parties into consideration. The practical effect has been the establishment of very complex supply chain management systems in all levels of government. The outcome has been a dramatic increase in the cost(monetary and bureaucratic) of doing business for government.
Tiktaalik 4y ago
You picked a very good anecdote because it was precisely the era of governments razing entire neighbourhoods to arbitrarily build highways without the support of the locals who lived there that induced the backlash in the 70s against top down government planning. Basically government poisoned the well itself and has still yet to really deal with the consequences. Now things have gone too far, what was once local activism has been taken over by established wealth interests, and development is paralyzed.

ams92 4y ago

It's NIMBYism. Most people in a state like California will agree that more affordable housing needs to be built, but no one wants it in their back yard.

RestlessMind 4y ago

Decades ago when the West was developed, there was very little value placed on the existing stuff. Five people died constructing the Empire State building. Do you imagine the uproar if that happens today? I bet human life was valued much less back then. Similarly, lots of neighborhoods were erased to make way for highways, railroads and industrial plants. Nowadays, try constructing an industrial plant in a major city center and you will discover that people care a lot of their clean air and clear water. There is also a related but separate aspect where environmental activists erected barriers to slow down any development. You still feel its effects today where CEQA is weaponized to slow down a small apartment housing.

themitigating 4y ago
Of course all cities should strive to be like Houston, a city surrounded and intersected by highways. The lower part of Manhattan would have had a highway through it but instead it'sa cultural epicenter (https://untappedcities.com/2013/09/11/nyc-that-never-was-robert-moses-lower-manhattan-expressway-lomex/ https://untappedcities.com/2013/09/11/nyc-that-never-was-rob...)
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  If the highway were there the cultural epicenter would just be elsewhere. It doesn’t really matter where your infrastructure is. You need X infrastructure for Y people and development will naturally happen to take advantage of it. In Boston they did the reverse of your example. They took a subway and moved it in to fill the void where a highway was supposed to go before it got cancelled. If they hadn’t cancelled the highway that subway would still be where it used to be. As an aside, the people who cancelled it really have a lot of blood on their hands because a bunch of major surface streets got developed into main thoroughfares as a result and we all know how good it is to have a highway speed road that isn’t grade separated from cross streets, pedestrians and cyclists…
- asdff 4y ago
  To be fair with both the lower and mid manhattan expressway plans, they were at one point planning for buildings being built above and below the elevated grades. It wasn't just going to be dead space.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
oasisbob 4y ago
> Five people died constructing the Empire State building. Do you imagine the uproar if that happens today? People still die on construction projects all the time, on relatively uninteresting things even. eg, in 2019 four people died when a crane working above a Google office building in Seattle collapsed. It was local news for a few weeks, but I'm not sure it had any other effects, regulatory or otherwise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_crane_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_crane_collapse

seanmcdirmid 4y ago

> Looking at Asia now is like what the west used to be like. There is a huge property bubble in China, so I'm not sure if that is good example for us to follow. Japan is a better model, where a declining population and weariness of a huge real estate bubble that popped in the late 80s has made investing property not very feasible.

dionidium 4y ago
Property "bubbles" only matter when housing is scarce and therefore treated as an investment. We all understand why the recent run-up in used car prices was bad for most people, even if it meant that the people who owned a car enjoyed a sudden spike in the value of that "asset." We don't want the things we buy to be more expensive. We want them to be less expensive. Falling prices are good.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  I lived in Beijing for 9 years and literally could look through unfinished peepholes of apartments (which would be called condos in the states) and see that they weren't even renovated yet. The building would be sold out years ago, but only 25% of the apartments were being lived in. And you really need to look at rents: if a 8 million RMB apartment that is on the market is also renting for 5000 RMB/month...ya, something is wrong. It never made sense for me to buy property in China (which I was eligible to do after being there for 6 years), since rent prices were so cheap in comparison.
- Psychoshy_bc1q 4y ago
  bitcoin fixes this
Auracle 4y ago
I’ve gotten downvoted for mentioning this on HN before but I’ll say it again - all we would need to do to largely stabilize housing prices would be to secure our borders. Our population growth is largely due to immigration, and right now we’re letting in over a million immigrants a year who will statistically have more children than the people that are already here.

dionidium 4y ago

> There seems to be a general lack of political will for big projects in the west. The spectacular thing about the housing crisis is that you don't even need any big government projects. It just needs to be legal for private actors to build housing. On most plots of land today it is not legal to build anything but a single-family home, so cities are no longer able to naturally densify over time (just like every single modern city did 100 years ago, so that they could become the cities they are today).

rich_sasha 4y ago
My impression from the UK, which seems to have a similar housing shortage and restrictive zoning laws, is that there is another piece to this jigsaw, namely infrastructure. There are a fair few housing developments in the UK which provide the quantity and density needed, but eg don't have sufficient roads to support the increased traffic, causing gridlocks. Similar story for schools or shops.
llampx 4y ago
I want to believe this, but my personal experience shows the opposite. I live in Berlin, and there's a severe housing shortage, even though Berlin is very big geographically, and 5 story buildings are the norm, many even as mixed-use. Why is this? Because there's a strong inflow from all over the world and not enough building. Meanwhile prices are going up without regard to incomes, and it is incredibly hard to get even a viewing, let alone be offered an apartment. On top of that, most of the stock is old and not modernized at all. Even for private owners, it is better to not build and let scarcity drive the price of their investments higher, than to take the risk of building and potentially see rents or prices fall.

QIYGT 4y ago

> There seems to be a general lack of political will for big projects in the west. We don't need big projects. If popular US cities like Seattle and San Francisco simply allowed people to build 5-story apartment buildings in all the space that's currently set aside for single-family detached homes, you'd see people building millions of small projects to easily meet the demand.

bboygravity 4y ago
And also the city would turn into a horrible place to live with tons of pollution and congestion. Similar to large Asian cities where you can barely breathe, the noise is unbearable and it's a mission to get from one part of the city to another. Nevermind issues like "can our sewage pipes handle it?".
- wkat4242 4y ago
  On the contrary. Those densities would make for excellent public transport opportunities so not everyone would need a car. I live in Barcelona that's mostly 5 or so levels and I haven't driven a car in 4 years and I love it.
- Terretta 4y ago
  Like the entirely 5 story multi-family residential-over-retail filled Paris, France? In the US, these manifest as so-called 5-over-1 and it's entirely possible to build the same model of work-life balanced neighborhoods using that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1
  - mancerayder 4y ago
    Paris is definitely not a place where you can point to an example of abundant, affordable housing. Are you kidding me? Adjusted for wages, Paris purchase prices are more unaffordable than London or New York.
    - throwaway_paris 4y ago

steele 4y ago

"West" and "Asia" is an overgeneralization. Just say the countries you have in mind to not seem ignorant.

jackcosgrove 4y ago

While I don't think it was due to foresight as compared to, say, nimbyism, those parts of the world that are putting the brakes on development may be making the right choice. World population will peak later this century, and it has already peaked locally in many places. Some infrastructure will become a white elephant going forward once the population it was built for declines. I feel bad for those who are stuck without adequate or inexpensive housing in the meantime, but in the aggregate it may be wise to not overbuild now. The problem in a place like the US is mostly the distribution of jobs. There are places with abundant housing that also lack for jobs.

user-extended 4y ago

>Looking at Asia now is like what the west used to be like. Housing sure is cheap in Korea, China, and Hong Kong! https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/4/28/south-koreans-struggle-to-climb-property-ladder-as-prices-soar https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/4/28/south-koreans-st...

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>Housing sure is cheap in Korea, China, and Hong Kong! Just to clarify, that was sarcasm for everyone who thought your statement was serious and didn't open your link.

netheril96 4y ago

> Looking at Asia now is like what the west used to be like. China has the political will for big projects. China also gets them done, and done fast. Yet China also has a housing problem, much greater than the West. In China's case, the government deliberately creates a shortage of supply by restricting the usage of land. They also printed money directly into the housing market in 2015 when the housing bubble looked likely to burst. It is not a lack of ability to control housing prices. Instead, they have the ability and does control housing prices, by controlling them upwards.

scrappyjoe 4y ago

A lot of late 20th century legislation has focused on eliminating corruption and taking all affected parties into consideration. The practical effect has been the establishment of very complex supply chain management systems in all levels of government. The outcome has been a dramatic increase in the cost(monetary and bureaucratic) of doing business for government.

Tiktaalik 4y ago

You picked a very good anecdote because it was precisely the era of governments razing entire neighbourhoods to arbitrarily build highways without the support of the locals who lived there that induced the backlash in the 70s against top down government planning. Basically government poisoned the well itself and has still yet to really deal with the consequences. Now things have gone too far, what was once local activism has been taken over by established wealth interests, and development is paralyzed.