4 ms·

Housing might be neither. There we have artificially constrained supply, driving up prices and price volatility.

steveBK123 4y ago
How would you drive down cost in housing? Automate building prefabricated homes of a simple common designs. Use smaller lots of land. Build smaller units. Build higher to put more units on the same land. Build multi-family/apartment style to reduce single family home costs (siding/roofing/boiler/yard/etc). Basically all the things government tends to ban and populace tends to frown upon. Most stats have shown we haven't really made much labor efficiencies on housing construction. No one wants to live in a prefabricated / factory built home, which is what would drive down the labor costs dramatically. That said I'm kind of a weirdo and like to browse the container home websites frequently, lol. Further, modern homes are bigger (and nicer) than our parents or their parents generation lived in. Couple that with the land component being basically inflationary due to natural scarcity PLUS government zoning rules restricting lot sizes to be artificially high, banning multi-family construction, etc. You have a lot (basically all) tipping the needle towards higher cost.
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  You drive down housing costs by building more housing, full stop. Housing is expensive because the supply is extremely limited, and the supply is limited because it's too hard to actually build housing, because governments and NIMBYs seemingly don't want more housing.
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    Yes I think we agree here.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    There is tons of cheap, prefab housing available, they're called trailer parks. They're everywhere except where you want to be. The anti-NIMBY argument basically boils down to "If I can't have that house, no one should have it. Let's invoke the unfairness of life and have it torn down, or else build a vertical trailer park next to it."
    - steveBK123 4y ago
      I think the NIMBY argument is - no you can’t build stuff on your land because I don’t like it. See it works both ways. YIMBY argument is largely that government and neighbors shouldn’t have such a front ability to restrict development.
    - frosted-flakes 4y ago
      The YIMBY crowd basically boils down to "do whatever you want, I don't care, just don't stop me doing what I want". More basically, "government regulation bad, capitalism good". which happens to be one of the Republican party's main platform points (in theory, but only when it suits their own goals). The YIMBY crowd doesn't want to tear down your house, it wants to let YOU tear down your house and build something more profitable in its place.
      - noduerme 4y ago
        Activists recently prevailed on my city's government to rewrite the zoning ordinance, making my block of single family homes eligible to be torn down and turned into 4-plexes. I personally don't have a huge problem with it - from a libertarian point of view - because in theory, that means exactly what you said. I can sell my property for more money or develop it and make more from it. The aspect of it that irritates me is that those weren't the conditions under which I bought the house, and the reasoning behind the change was a foolish sop toward social justice, and clearly comes from a place of sheer hatred born of jealousy toward anyone living in a single family dwelling. I wouldn't have bought the house to live in if I'd known that ten years later it would be surrounded by apartment buildings. And so that plus the castigation of people trying to maintain their space as "NIMBY" leaves me mainly with the attitude that they can have it, I'll take the profit and move somewhere they can't afford and have less leverage to screw up. Again, trailer parks have been a thing for 70 years now. The innovation here has been rewriting zoning rules without actually rezoning, to bring the trailer park to people who can afford to live somewhere better. The funny thing about class warfare, though, is that people take their lack of class with them and end up making slums wherever they go, and other people manage to make a buck and stay ahead of them.
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    Generally the government problem is government subsidizes demand for housing without subsidizing supply. More dollars chasing fixed goods.
- zbrozek 4y ago
  Given that the same house costs vastly different amounts in different places, it seems reasonable that those places drive the costs to be different. Maybe in rural Nebraska the actual cost of building materials and the technology of construction is relevant. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area the twin forces of NIMBYism and Big Government have made it difficult and uneconomical to build anything. The NIMBYs have enacted extremely restrictive zoning laws almost everywhere that prevents you from entitling projects on the front end, and well-intentioned over-regulation has driven up the cost actually building anything on the back end. After you spend years in public hearings placating bored and angry old people, you then need to hire more professional services, pay higher impact fees, pay higher permitting fees, etc than practically anywhere else in the country. It'll cost me more to knock down my house here than it would cost to build the same plans somewhere else.
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    Yes, the land & zoning compliance costs in HCOL areas crowd out any of the actual building materials (and some of) the labor component. My parents live on a 1 acre lot in a non-HCOL area, which costs 1/2 of what a parking spot in Manhattan sells for. Their 1 acre lot comes with a 2000 sq ft home.

How would you drive down cost in housing? Automate building prefabricated homes of a simple common designs. Use smaller lots of land. Build smaller units. Build higher to put more units on the same land. Build multi-family/apartment style to reduce single family home costs (siding/roofing/boiler/yard/etc). Basically all the things government tends to ban and populace tends to frown upon. Most stats have shown we haven't really made much labor efficiencies on housing construction. No one wants to live in a prefabricated / factory built home, which is what would drive down the labor costs dramatically. That said I'm kind of a weirdo and like to browse the container home websites frequently, lol. Further, modern homes are bigger (and nicer) than our parents or their parents generation lived in. Couple that with the land component being basically inflationary due to natural scarcity PLUS government zoning rules restricting lot sizes to be artificially high, banning multi-family construction, etc. You have a lot (basically all) tipping the needle towards higher cost.

frosted-flakes 4y ago
You drive down housing costs by building more housing, full stop. Housing is expensive because the supply is extremely limited, and the supply is limited because it's too hard to actually build housing, because governments and NIMBYs seemingly don't want more housing.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  Yes I think we agree here.
- noduerme 4y ago
  There is tons of cheap, prefab housing available, they're called trailer parks. They're everywhere except where you want to be. The anti-NIMBY argument basically boils down to "If I can't have that house, no one should have it. Let's invoke the unfairness of life and have it torn down, or else build a vertical trailer park next to it."
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    I think the NIMBY argument is - no you can’t build stuff on your land because I don’t like it. See it works both ways. YIMBY argument is largely that government and neighbors shouldn’t have such a front ability to restrict development.
  - frosted-flakes 4y ago
    The YIMBY crowd basically boils down to "do whatever you want, I don't care, just don't stop me doing what I want". More basically, "government regulation bad, capitalism good". which happens to be one of the Republican party's main platform points (in theory, but only when it suits their own goals). The YIMBY crowd doesn't want to tear down your house, it wants to let YOU tear down your house and build something more profitable in its place.
    - noduerme 4y ago
      Activists recently prevailed on my city's government to rewrite the zoning ordinance, making my block of single family homes eligible to be torn down and turned into 4-plexes. I personally don't have a huge problem with it - from a libertarian point of view - because in theory, that means exactly what you said. I can sell my property for more money or develop it and make more from it. The aspect of it that irritates me is that those weren't the conditions under which I bought the house, and the reasoning behind the change was a foolish sop toward social justice, and clearly comes from a place of sheer hatred born of jealousy toward anyone living in a single family dwelling. I wouldn't have bought the house to live in if I'd known that ten years later it would be surrounded by apartment buildings. And so that plus the castigation of people trying to maintain their space as "NIMBY" leaves me mainly with the attitude that they can have it, I'll take the profit and move somewhere they can't afford and have less leverage to screw up. Again, trailer parks have been a thing for 70 years now. The innovation here has been rewriting zoning rules without actually rezoning, to bring the trailer park to people who can afford to live somewhere better. The funny thing about class warfare, though, is that people take their lack of class with them and end up making slums wherever they go, and other people manage to make a buck and stay ahead of them.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  Generally the government problem is government subsidizes demand for housing without subsidizing supply. More dollars chasing fixed goods.
zbrozek 4y ago
Given that the same house costs vastly different amounts in different places, it seems reasonable that those places drive the costs to be different. Maybe in rural Nebraska the actual cost of building materials and the technology of construction is relevant. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area the twin forces of NIMBYism and Big Government have made it difficult and uneconomical to build anything. The NIMBYs have enacted extremely restrictive zoning laws almost everywhere that prevents you from entitling projects on the front end, and well-intentioned over-regulation has driven up the cost actually building anything on the back end. After you spend years in public hearings placating bored and angry old people, you then need to hire more professional services, pay higher impact fees, pay higher permitting fees, etc than practically anywhere else in the country. It'll cost me more to knock down my house here than it would cost to build the same plans somewhere else.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  Yes, the land & zoning compliance costs in HCOL areas crowd out any of the actual building materials (and some of) the labor component. My parents live on a 1 acre lot in a non-HCOL area, which costs 1/2 of what a parking spot in Manhattan sells for. Their 1 acre lot comes with a 2000 sq ft home.