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Lately I've been thinking that perhaps the solution to the housing shortage is a technology that makes it easy, cheap, and extremely fast to build housing that
by zachthewf 4y ago
Lately I've been thinking that perhaps the solution to the housing shortage is a technology that makes it easy, cheap, and extremely fast to build housing that is both attractive and illegal.
Uber and Airbnb were both pretty much illegal from the get go, but ultimately worked because they were incredibly popular. They forced the laws to change to accommodate what people actually wanted.
Similarly, living in tents and RVs on city streets is illegal but common because RVs and tents are so easy to set up.
No one builds an illegal fourplex because it takes a year and a million dollars. It's too expensive to shoulder the shutdown risk. But what if it took a day and $100k?
- czbond 4y agoInteresting thought - you expanded my thinking here....
- nemothekid 4y agoThis is a technical solution to a political problem. The cost of building housing isn't the problem. As the article complains, the problem is housing is an investment and as other commenters have pointed out, our government has pretty much protected this asset class and all of America has the expectation that pricing will continue to go up. If you flood the market with competitive homes you will destroy housing at an asset class; people understand this so they will block any technological improvement that would make housing cheaper.
- zachthewf 4y agoIn some sense I agree with you, and it would all be much simpler if the laws could be changed. But I think this is pretty unlikely at least in the next 30 years or so. But sufficiently cheap/fast technology is very difficult to block. Not sure if there's any actual way housing could get there (would have to be some sort of modular assembled-on-site sort of thing).
- Drunk_Engineer 4y agoIn San Francisco (and other big metros) landlords build illegal/unpermitted units all the time.
- zachthewf 4y agoThat is a good point that I hadn't thought of. I lived in an illegal unit in San Francisco—a buddy and I got permission from our landlord to put up a wall subdividing our bedroom in Bernal Heights into two smaller bedrooms. Some of my favorite years ever... What about illegal additions or illegal buildings? This seems less common to me.
- Drunk_Engineer 4y agoUnpermitted additions are extremely common, as are "illegal" backyard cottages.