6 ms·

Affordable housing is little better than the drinking fountains for colored people from years past. You don't build affordable housing. You build housing and th

Affordable housing is little better than the drinking fountains for colored people from years past. You don't build affordable housing. You build housing and then prices decrease from the increase in supply. If you're feeling extra bold, you build dense housing to massively increase the supply.

cwkoss 4y ago
I think the idea is that the margins are better on luxury houses/apts/condos (less plumbing per sq ft, etc), so developers are incentivized to build at lower-density than is optimal for alleviating housing supply issues.
- hackerlight 4y ago
  The concept of a "luxury apartment" is an oxymoron. It's a rhetorical tool used by NIMBYs. Those apartments that get labelled this way are barely sufficient to fit a family and cost less than the median house, yet the median house would never be labelled a "luxury house".
  - noirbot 4y ago
    How does that not make sense? It's totally possible to have an apartment that's luxurious. Luxury doesn't mean "large" - look at luxury cars, or watches. Most other major luxury products are almost defined by how expensive they are and how they're not meant for families. Luxury is defined by it being more expensive and presumably nicer to be in than the average thing it's competing with. A luxury apartment isn't trying to be a house, any more than a luxury house is trying to be a hotel. That's not to say that most "luxury" apartments would actually qualify as "luxury" in the sense of most other luxury goods, but they are generally nicer than other apartments in the area, or at least newer.
    - hackerlight 4y ago
      > Luxury is defined by it being more expensive and presumably nicer to be in than the average thing it's competing with. It's an intentional decision (one often done with malice where the objective is rhetorical persuasion) to run this comparison only with other apartments and not with general housing stock which is the real comparison that should be made. NIMBYs, in a stroke of genius, have managed to brand apartments that can barely fit a family as "luxury", yet the median house which costs more is just the "modest family home" that is being oppressed by the ghastly shadows imposed by said luxury apartments filled with, presumably, the rich elite, because who other than the rich elite could afford to live in "luxurious" dwellings? It is rhetorical trickery top to bottom with the objective of worsening the housing crisis and therefore adding to the suffering in the world.
      - noirbot 4y ago
        That is ascribing a lot of collusion and malice to what seems to be a pretty simple situation. I lived in some "luxury" apartments, and they were, legitimately, nicer than the other ones I'd lived in, although not especially "luxurious". But they weren't called "luxury" by some local NIMBY group, it was literally in the name of the company I was writing checks to to pay my rent. It made them sound nicer and fancier than the less nice apartments across the street. It's trickery, but the banal trickery of marketing a product that you want to sell at a higher price. I doubt they were off sitting in some room laughing about how miserable they were making the world when they named my apartment building. I'm not a family, I don't have one, I don't want a house, I want a nice apartment. Is catering to what I'm looking for "causing suffering in the world"?
  - vel0city 4y ago
    I dunno. I lived in a "luxury apartment" for a bit. It had fancier appliances than the cheaper units I lived at. Quartz countertops. All the doors were inside with air conditioned hallways. Climate controlled storage was available on-site. A clubhouse with multiple billiard tables. Fancy pool area with multiple full outdoor kitchen setups. A golf simulator room. A private dog park. Free coffee in the clubhouse/lobby. A gym with nicer equipment than many places I've paid to have gym memberships. Dry cleaning drop off and pickup service on-site. Events put on by the building for poolside movie nights, poker nights in the clubhouse, etc. Other places had dog wash stations, car wash stations, and other amenities. Luxury apartments can absolutely be luxurious.
    - noirbot 4y ago
      Exactly. The fact that NIMBYs like to use "luxury apartments" as a rhetorical flourish doesn't mean they don't actually exist and people don't actually want to live in them.
- eapressoandcats 4y ago
  For the most part developers focus on luxury because they are limited in how much they can build and there is enough pent up demand willing to pay. Also they have rules like minimum sq ft in cities and minimum acreage in suburbs.
tehlike 4y ago
This is kind of true, but misses an important point. Builders won't increase the supply if unit price is close to unit cost as their profit would be narrowed. This is to say, if materials, labor etc is expensive, affordable housing may not be affordable either.
- eapressoandcats 4y ago
  Generally speaking, you’d expect newer housing to be on the higher end no matter what, because people with less money would tend to buy/rent older housing, in the same way that all but the cheapest new cars are mostly bought by the more well off.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > if materials, labor etc is expensive, affordable housing may not be affordable either San Francisco's problem is "a worker shortage, long waits for permits, restrictive zoning and high fees" [1]. Three out of four of those are direct results of planning rules. The first, related to the high cost of housing. Issue permits quickly, loosen zoning and make fees low and predictable and you'll see affordable housing. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-is-one-of-the-most-expensive-places-in-the-14888205.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-is-one-of-the...
- panny 4y ago
  >Builders won't increase the supply if unit price is close to unit cost as their profit would be narrowed. Sounds a lot like the reasoning behind farm subsidies, doesn't it?
noirbot 4y ago
I'm not sure this is exactly true though. There's plenty of (common) ways to build intentionally expensive housing, whether that's large minimum square footage or fancy shared amenities that up the cost of living there. There's certainly demand for those things, and it's probably more profitable to saturate the most expensive "high rent" portions of the market first, but it's worth having incentives to also build smaller 1-bedroom places, or complexes without a pool, or without hardwood or stone floors.
- eapressoandcats 4y ago
  The economics of this have been well observed in the car industry. Car makers prioritize luxury cars with higher margins when there is a restriction on how many cars they manufacture (due to supply or legal constraints), but if there is abundance, the lower end of the market is well served because there’s just more overall volume there.
  - noirbot 4y ago
    I agree - I'm not trying to imply that no cheaper housing would ever be built if we made it easier to build, but that, as you say with cars, it's more likely to happen later as the restrictions let up. For a community or country, however, there's value in trying to serve people of all economic levels, and not simply serve the needs of the richest first. This is especially true when you're talking about building a city or neighborhood where there's a finite amount of land near a train station on highway. If you wait for builders to "get around to" building cheaper houses, they'll be off in their own area instead of intermingled in the communities that they likely work and go to school in.

cwkoss 4y ago

I think the idea is that the margins are better on luxury houses/apts/condos (less plumbing per sq ft, etc), so developers are incentivized to build at lower-density than is optimal for alleviating housing supply issues.

hackerlight 4y ago
The concept of a "luxury apartment" is an oxymoron. It's a rhetorical tool used by NIMBYs. Those apartments that get labelled this way are barely sufficient to fit a family and cost less than the median house, yet the median house would never be labelled a "luxury house".
- noirbot 4y ago
  How does that not make sense? It's totally possible to have an apartment that's luxurious. Luxury doesn't mean "large" - look at luxury cars, or watches. Most other major luxury products are almost defined by how expensive they are and how they're not meant for families. Luxury is defined by it being more expensive and presumably nicer to be in than the average thing it's competing with. A luxury apartment isn't trying to be a house, any more than a luxury house is trying to be a hotel. That's not to say that most "luxury" apartments would actually qualify as "luxury" in the sense of most other luxury goods, but they are generally nicer than other apartments in the area, or at least newer.
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    > Luxury is defined by it being more expensive and presumably nicer to be in than the average thing it's competing with. It's an intentional decision (one often done with malice where the objective is rhetorical persuasion) to run this comparison only with other apartments and not with general housing stock which is the real comparison that should be made. NIMBYs, in a stroke of genius, have managed to brand apartments that can barely fit a family as "luxury", yet the median house which costs more is just the "modest family home" that is being oppressed by the ghastly shadows imposed by said luxury apartments filled with, presumably, the rich elite, because who other than the rich elite could afford to live in "luxurious" dwellings? It is rhetorical trickery top to bottom with the objective of worsening the housing crisis and therefore adding to the suffering in the world.
    - noirbot 4y ago
      That is ascribing a lot of collusion and malice to what seems to be a pretty simple situation. I lived in some "luxury" apartments, and they were, legitimately, nicer than the other ones I'd lived in, although not especially "luxurious". But they weren't called "luxury" by some local NIMBY group, it was literally in the name of the company I was writing checks to to pay my rent. It made them sound nicer and fancier than the less nice apartments across the street. It's trickery, but the banal trickery of marketing a product that you want to sell at a higher price. I doubt they were off sitting in some room laughing about how miserable they were making the world when they named my apartment building. I'm not a family, I don't have one, I don't want a house, I want a nice apartment. Is catering to what I'm looking for "causing suffering in the world"?
- vel0city 4y ago
  I dunno. I lived in a "luxury apartment" for a bit. It had fancier appliances than the cheaper units I lived at. Quartz countertops. All the doors were inside with air conditioned hallways. Climate controlled storage was available on-site. A clubhouse with multiple billiard tables. Fancy pool area with multiple full outdoor kitchen setups. A golf simulator room. A private dog park. Free coffee in the clubhouse/lobby. A gym with nicer equipment than many places I've paid to have gym memberships. Dry cleaning drop off and pickup service on-site. Events put on by the building for poolside movie nights, poker nights in the clubhouse, etc. Other places had dog wash stations, car wash stations, and other amenities. Luxury apartments can absolutely be luxurious.
  - noirbot 4y ago
    Exactly. The fact that NIMBYs like to use "luxury apartments" as a rhetorical flourish doesn't mean they don't actually exist and people don't actually want to live in them.
eapressoandcats 4y ago
For the most part developers focus on luxury because they are limited in how much they can build and there is enough pent up demand willing to pay. Also they have rules like minimum sq ft in cities and minimum acreage in suburbs.

tehlike 4y ago

This is kind of true, but misses an important point. Builders won't increase the supply if unit price is close to unit cost as their profit would be narrowed. This is to say, if materials, labor etc is expensive, affordable housing may not be affordable either.

eapressoandcats 4y ago
Generally speaking, you’d expect newer housing to be on the higher end no matter what, because people with less money would tend to buy/rent older housing, in the same way that all but the cheapest new cars are mostly bought by the more well off.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> if materials, labor etc is expensive, affordable housing may not be affordable either San Francisco's problem is "a worker shortage, long waits for permits, restrictive zoning and high fees" [1]. Three out of four of those are direct results of planning rules. The first, related to the high cost of housing. Issue permits quickly, loosen zoning and make fees low and predictable and you'll see affordable housing. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-is-one-of-the-most-expensive-places-in-the-14888205.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-is-one-of-the...
panny 4y ago
>Builders won't increase the supply if unit price is close to unit cost as their profit would be narrowed. Sounds a lot like the reasoning behind farm subsidies, doesn't it?

noirbot 4y ago

I'm not sure this is exactly true though. There's plenty of (common) ways to build intentionally expensive housing, whether that's large minimum square footage or fancy shared amenities that up the cost of living there. There's certainly demand for those things, and it's probably more profitable to saturate the most expensive "high rent" portions of the market first, but it's worth having incentives to also build smaller 1-bedroom places, or complexes without a pool, or without hardwood or stone floors.

eapressoandcats 4y ago
The economics of this have been well observed in the car industry. Car makers prioritize luxury cars with higher margins when there is a restriction on how many cars they manufacture (due to supply or legal constraints), but if there is abundance, the lower end of the market is well served because there’s just more overall volume there.
- noirbot 4y ago
  I agree - I'm not trying to imply that no cheaper housing would ever be built if we made it easier to build, but that, as you say with cars, it's more likely to happen later as the restrictions let up. For a community or country, however, there's value in trying to serve people of all economic levels, and not simply serve the needs of the richest first. This is especially true when you're talking about building a city or neighborhood where there's a finite amount of land near a train station on highway. If you wait for builders to "get around to" building cheaper houses, they'll be off in their own area instead of intermingled in the communities that they likely work and go to school in.