6 ms·

Are there any moonshot ideas that could dramatically (say 50%+) decrease the cost of rent? Including ideas that are probably-illegal but could see mass consume

Are there any moonshot ideas that could dramatically (say 50%+) decrease the cost of rent? Including ideas that are probably-illegal but could see mass consumer adoption before they could be stopped (like Uber)?

calvinmorrison 4y ago
yes, allow for tenement housing. Works great for college dorms, reduces cost significantly.
- zachthewf 4y ago
  How could this be implemented without a political breakthrough (which I think is probably impossible)?
QuercusMax 4y ago
The answer is building more housing. That's all. No magic pill or silver bullet. Just build housing. Near where people work, ideally.
- zachthewf 4y ago
  I agree with you but the political/legal hurdles to doing this legally are substantial (it's basically impossible, or at least relatively uncontrollable). How might you do this without a legal breakthrough?
- hardtke 4y ago
  I honestly think this is no longer correct. Construction costs exceed the future value of the rental income stream for multifamily developments in most markets. Apparently the only projects that pencil out now are massive developments, which are hard to build in places where people work as they are already somewhat dense and don't have many empty fields. The cost of materials are going back to normal (with some exceptions) but the labor costs are increasing due to a shortage of workers. Construction costs could be slightly lowered by reducing the required quality of construction, but not by much.
  - supertrope 4y ago
    Land is the elephant in the room. I would be very surprised if building MDUs costs more than the equivalent number of single family detached houses. But in the majority of urban lots it is illegal to building anything but a single family detached house.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  > The answer is building more housing. That's all. No magic pill or silver bullet. Just build housing. Near where people work, ideally. You mean near where people want to live or want to work? We have plenty of housing, just not in the boom towns that are growing rapidly.
notch656c 4y ago
Yeah. No zoning or building codes or very weak enforcement. I walked through Asuncion, Paraguay. People just build shacks and steal power from the lines. It's not the safest or most sanitary but it does the trick.
- Beaver117 4y ago
  Almost everywhere this discussion takes place, for years now, seem to agree zoning is the cause and solution. But I've yet to see a single city or county do anything about it. Just repeating this line will not do anything, and clearly voting wasn't able to solve it. So what will happen?
  - notch656c 4y ago
    If peace and democracy fails then generally there is violence or accepting of the suffering.
- wahern 4y ago
  This is how it works in rural areas of the U.S. Rural areas have far fewer options for government subsidized housing than in or around cities, but lax or absent habitability enforcement means there's a broader spectrum of options available before you're forced to sleep rough. You'll also see people building make-shift electrical and plumbing hookups, albeit buried so less visible than the iconic aerials in, for example, Latin American barrios. This is part of the reason sleeping rough is relatively uncommon in rural areas. OTOH, this is also how you get the sad but true stereotype of rural people living in roach and rat infested trailers, sometimes barely standing or already caving in. (Hollywood depictions of rural poverty tend to be more charitable if condescending--what they depict as squalor is usually just old, not unsafe or unhealthy, which I guess is similar to most depictions of barrios, now that I think about it.) But those situations aren't the majority.
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    Urban areas used to have this in the form of SRO buildings (aka "roach hotels"). But they were gentrified out of most cities.
Beaver117 4y ago
Wait for boomers to die off
nostromo 4y ago
> Including ideas that are probably-illegal Many locales don't require building permits for mobile structures (like cars and trailers). I've wondered if someone could buy some parking lots and just park nice mobile homes on them and rent them out. It'd be sneaky way of creating housing.
- harambae 4y ago
  If you've ever seen El Camino near Stanford, there are people one step ahead of you. It's technically illegal since they're supposed to move their RV's every 72 hours on the street, but as far as I can tell a bunch of them don't. I've never linked to Google Street View, but I'll try... https://goo.gl/maps/d6DvdC9gmhumQRB17 https://goo.gl/maps/d6DvdC9gmhumQRB17 Of if you look up "860 Betty Meltzer Memorial Hwy, Palo Alto, CA" you'll see what I mean.
- zachthewf 4y ago
  Yea, this seems like the right type of solution.
- muttled 4y ago
  I was curious about this before, assuming that it must be a far cheaper way to live. Turned out that after lot rental fees and the fact that mobile homes depreciate in value rather than appreciate, the economics just don't seem to work out unless your largest requirement is to be in a physically separate building than your neighbors vs being in an apartment.
  - notch656c 4y ago
    Apartment and home owners also collude to exclude renters with bad credit and criminal histories, artificially creating a captive market for those people to rent on the constrained supply of trailer lots. Without such pressures I doubt their rents could be so high.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  Seattle was into organizing a parking lot for derelict RVs to park in. With services, the costs came to about $8k per spot...per month. Not cheap, competitive with a tiny house in a tiny house village.
LatteLazy 4y ago
Tax overconsumption of housing: if you're alone or a couple in a 6 bedroom house, you pay. Doubly so in areas with shortages. Doubly so for people in areas where there are jobs and the people are not employed. Right now, people overconsume because they own the underlying property. If they had to pay cash rent for the same property, they would move. And if they didn't then various taxes would be due on that income. Instead they freeride and externalise the cost of the consumption. Another alternative is a mass, semi local infrastructure program. One of the reason prices and rents are so high in some places is because there are a very limited number of places you can live and access the city centre within 1h. So we should build a tonne of light rail lines around these cities linking empty areas to them. This is how cities are meant to grow, but it requires government involvement beyond the US political model (investments that take more than 1 election cycle to pay off, reductions in property prices, municipal and rural (and state and federal) governments working together. The same is true here in the UK with London.
lapcat 4y ago
> Are there any moonshot ideas that could dramatically (say 50%+) decrease the cost of rent? Sure. The government could build and subsidize housing. When you talk about a "moonshot" idea, the Moon landing itself was subsidized with a massive amount of government funding. But it appears that we'd rather put a man on the Moon than take a man off the streets. It's just a matter of priorities.
- mythhouse 4y ago
  build where though? govt doesnt own property that ppl want to live at.
- STM32F030R8 4y ago
  We already have a good number of government subsidized housing in this country and I’ve never met someone that would move there willingly. How would more help?
  - lapcat 4y ago
    > I’ve never met someone that would move there willingly. What is this supposed to mean? Are the buildings empty? Or is it just a comment about the company you keep?
    - mythhouse 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes
      - lapcat 4y ago
        > At first, the housing was integrated and many residents held jobs. This changed in the years after World War II, when the nearby factories that provided the neighborhood's economic base closed and thousands were laid off. At the same time, the cash-strapped city began withdrawing crucial services like police patrols, transit services, and routine building maintenance. > Lawns were paved over to save on maintenance, failed lights were left for months, and apartments damaged by fire were simply boarded up instead of rehabilitated and reoccupied. Later phases of public housing development (such as the Green Homes, the newest of the Cabrini–Green buildings) were built on extremely tight budgets and suffered from maintenance problems due to the low quality of construction.
mythhouse 4y ago
easy. defang nimbys and current homeowners from voting in local housing policy and permits.
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  Yeah, I love the way it works in Tokyo If you want to block a nearby condo from being built, you have to go to the equivalent of Washington DC and beg your congressman for help. As you might imagine, they don't give a shit, so nothing gets blocked. End result is that you can work downtown as a janitor part time and afford to live in a nice apartment in the suburb 20 minutes away by train.
supertrope 4y ago
Legalize apartment buildings.

calvinmorrison 4y ago

yes, allow for tenement housing. Works great for college dorms, reduces cost significantly.

zachthewf 4y ago
How could this be implemented without a political breakthrough (which I think is probably impossible)?

QuercusMax 4y ago

The answer is building more housing. That's all. No magic pill or silver bullet. Just build housing. Near where people work, ideally.

zachthewf 4y ago
I agree with you but the political/legal hurdles to doing this legally are substantial (it's basically impossible, or at least relatively uncontrollable). How might you do this without a legal breakthrough?
hardtke 4y ago
I honestly think this is no longer correct. Construction costs exceed the future value of the rental income stream for multifamily developments in most markets. Apparently the only projects that pencil out now are massive developments, which are hard to build in places where people work as they are already somewhat dense and don't have many empty fields. The cost of materials are going back to normal (with some exceptions) but the labor costs are increasing due to a shortage of workers. Construction costs could be slightly lowered by reducing the required quality of construction, but not by much.
- supertrope 4y ago
  Land is the elephant in the room. I would be very surprised if building MDUs costs more than the equivalent number of single family detached houses. But in the majority of urban lots it is illegal to building anything but a single family detached house.
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
> The answer is building more housing. That's all. No magic pill or silver bullet. Just build housing. Near where people work, ideally. You mean near where people want to live or want to work? We have plenty of housing, just not in the boom towns that are growing rapidly.

notch656c 4y ago

Yeah. No zoning or building codes or very weak enforcement. I walked through Asuncion, Paraguay. People just build shacks and steal power from the lines. It's not the safest or most sanitary but it does the trick.

Beaver117 4y ago
Almost everywhere this discussion takes place, for years now, seem to agree zoning is the cause and solution. But I've yet to see a single city or county do anything about it. Just repeating this line will not do anything, and clearly voting wasn't able to solve it. So what will happen?
- notch656c 4y ago
  If peace and democracy fails then generally there is violence or accepting of the suffering.
wahern 4y ago
This is how it works in rural areas of the U.S. Rural areas have far fewer options for government subsidized housing than in or around cities, but lax or absent habitability enforcement means there's a broader spectrum of options available before you're forced to sleep rough. You'll also see people building make-shift electrical and plumbing hookups, albeit buried so less visible than the iconic aerials in, for example, Latin American barrios. This is part of the reason sleeping rough is relatively uncommon in rural areas. OTOH, this is also how you get the sad but true stereotype of rural people living in roach and rat infested trailers, sometimes barely standing or already caving in. (Hollywood depictions of rural poverty tend to be more charitable if condescending--what they depict as squalor is usually just old, not unsafe or unhealthy, which I guess is similar to most depictions of barrios, now that I think about it.) But those situations aren't the majority.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  Urban areas used to have this in the form of SRO buildings (aka "roach hotels"). But they were gentrified out of most cities.

Beaver117 4y ago

Wait for boomers to die off

nostromo 4y ago

> Including ideas that are probably-illegal Many locales don't require building permits for mobile structures (like cars and trailers). I've wondered if someone could buy some parking lots and just park nice mobile homes on them and rent them out. It'd be sneaky way of creating housing.

harambae 4y ago
If you've ever seen El Camino near Stanford, there are people one step ahead of you. It's technically illegal since they're supposed to move their RV's every 72 hours on the street, but as far as I can tell a bunch of them don't. I've never linked to Google Street View, but I'll try... https://goo.gl/maps/d6DvdC9gmhumQRB17 https://goo.gl/maps/d6DvdC9gmhumQRB17 Of if you look up "860 Betty Meltzer Memorial Hwy, Palo Alto, CA" you'll see what I mean.
zachthewf 4y ago
Yea, this seems like the right type of solution.
muttled 4y ago
I was curious about this before, assuming that it must be a far cheaper way to live. Turned out that after lot rental fees and the fact that mobile homes depreciate in value rather than appreciate, the economics just don't seem to work out unless your largest requirement is to be in a physically separate building than your neighbors vs being in an apartment.
- notch656c 4y ago
  Apartment and home owners also collude to exclude renters with bad credit and criminal histories, artificially creating a captive market for those people to rent on the constrained supply of trailer lots. Without such pressures I doubt their rents could be so high.
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
Seattle was into organizing a parking lot for derelict RVs to park in. With services, the costs came to about $8k per spot...per month. Not cheap, competitive with a tiny house in a tiny house village.

LatteLazy 4y ago

Tax overconsumption of housing: if you're alone or a couple in a 6 bedroom house, you pay. Doubly so in areas with shortages. Doubly so for people in areas where there are jobs and the people are not employed. Right now, people overconsume because they own the underlying property. If they had to pay cash rent for the same property, they would move. And if they didn't then various taxes would be due on that income. Instead they freeride and externalise the cost of the consumption. Another alternative is a mass, semi local infrastructure program. One of the reason prices and rents are so high in some places is because there are a very limited number of places you can live and access the city centre within 1h. So we should build a tonne of light rail lines around these cities linking empty areas to them. This is how cities are meant to grow, but it requires government involvement beyond the US political model (investments that take more than 1 election cycle to pay off, reductions in property prices, municipal and rural (and state and federal) governments working together. The same is true here in the UK with London.

lapcat 4y ago

> Are there any moonshot ideas that could dramatically (say 50%+) decrease the cost of rent? Sure. The government could build and subsidize housing. When you talk about a "moonshot" idea, the Moon landing itself was subsidized with a massive amount of government funding. But it appears that we'd rather put a man on the Moon than take a man off the streets. It's just a matter of priorities.

mythhouse 4y ago
build where though? govt doesnt own property that ppl want to live at.
STM32F030R8 4y ago
We already have a good number of government subsidized housing in this country and I’ve never met someone that would move there willingly. How would more help?
- lapcat 4y ago
  > I’ve never met someone that would move there willingly. What is this supposed to mean? Are the buildings empty? Or is it just a comment about the company you keep?
  - mythhouse 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes
    - lapcat 4y ago
      > At first, the housing was integrated and many residents held jobs. This changed in the years after World War II, when the nearby factories that provided the neighborhood's economic base closed and thousands were laid off. At the same time, the cash-strapped city began withdrawing crucial services like police patrols, transit services, and routine building maintenance. > Lawns were paved over to save on maintenance, failed lights were left for months, and apartments damaged by fire were simply boarded up instead of rehabilitated and reoccupied. Later phases of public housing development (such as the Green Homes, the newest of the Cabrini–Green buildings) were built on extremely tight budgets and suffered from maintenance problems due to the low quality of construction.

mythhouse 4y ago

easy. defang nimbys and current homeowners from voting in local housing policy and permits.

Firmwarrior 4y ago
Yeah, I love the way it works in Tokyo If you want to block a nearby condo from being built, you have to go to the equivalent of Washington DC and beg your congressman for help. As you might imagine, they don't give a shit, so nothing gets blocked. End result is that you can work downtown as a janitor part time and afford to live in a nice apartment in the suburb 20 minutes away by train.

supertrope 4y ago

Legalize apartment buildings.