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>The last thing the world needs is more housing construction, especially with the insane CO2 footprint of anything involving concrete. That self imposed limit

>The last thing the world needs is more housing construction, especially with the insane CO2 footprint of anything involving concrete. That self imposed limit is exactly what keeps prices high. Every city has some run down areas that serve no purpose but are wasted space and could be turned into housing. Also, as some others already said it, living in urban areas reduces your footprint versus living far away in the countryside so the CO2 released from dense urban building makes up for it from the scale of people living together compared to low density rural areas which cost more in maintenance, transportation, etc. >There are millions of units vacant everywhere, be it the US [1] or Germany [2]. It doesn't help anyone if those vacant units are not where the jobs and education is, especially that 100% WFH is not even remotely(ha!) mainstream, but return to office has being normalized again in Germany, at best into hybrid arrangements so everyone still needs to live close to the office anyway. I can't carry that cheap rural house with me into the city where my job is. >We need to invest into rural areas again. Germany and other countries could bring life back to rural areas if it mandated employers allow 100% WFH whoever possible as that would get a lot of people moving back to their hometown closer to their family especially if their family could help out with raising kids. It could also cause a surge in birthrates and formation of new families. Instead we normalized living with roomates in your 30's, to work for some corporation who needs you in an expensive city with scarce real-estate, just to do stuff you can do from your laptop from anywhere. We had a good thing going for a while in the pandemic(not the virus, deaths, social distancing, and all that) but the lack of car trips, lack of air and noise pollution, people taking their remote jobs back to live with their families, reduced immigration causing rents to plummet, touristic areas finally livable again, etc. But our dear leaders and their business overlords saw that and said "this is affecting our profits and GDP, we can't have that, we must go back to the way it was before!".

LeanderK 3y ago
I wouldn't return to more rural areas if 100% WFH is possible. Some left it for a reason and not to get better internet. And, at least in germany, many rural areas are not so unattractive. I know plenty rural villages with great internet. Especially in BW public transport is solid, the next bigger population center is close by and there are many jobs. It's just conservative, culturally boring, inflexible and really set in their old ways.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Nobody said all rural areas are attractive places to live. And yes, part of the problem nobody wants to go back isn't jus the "vibe" and lack of "hip culture, art scene and hipster cafes", but that basic infrastructure like good schools, teachers, hospitals, doctors offices and specialists, have been left to rot and they also moved out of the city(the younger generation) or just retired and died along with the town, so bringing all that back to life is nearly impossible as now it's a catch-22, nobody wants to move there because there are no good doctors and teachers, and there are no good doctors and teachers because there's nothing there. >It's just conservative, culturally boring, inflexible and really set in their old ways. But then we can't complain that the hip and open minded urban areas are too expensive when everyone runs away from the rural areas to the same handful of hip cities. Maybe it's our duty as well to try and push for the change we want in those places, instead of always packing our bags and leaving for the cities that are livable on paper because they already share our mentality but in the process crowding them to the point where the stress around housing makes them unlivable in practice unless you're super wealthy.
  - LeanderK 3y ago
    this is not true across the bank. Of course if you're really deep into depopulated rural areas then there is really a lack of basic social services. But it's not that there's only high-density cities and deserted landscapes, there are still rural areas with schools and doctors. Rural areas that are doing comparatively well, somewhat maintain their population. Also, many cities with a lot of population growth also struggle to provide those services as there are not enough doctors or teachers for all, so you might be able find comparatively better schooling in the right rural areas. In some rural areas there's a really conservative, tight-knit mindset. A deep resentment for somebody different and a very specific world-view really dominating the area. This is not about hipster-cafes, but about some basic progress in society some parts just try to not be part of. Rural is also more isolated and there's just strictly less to do. Fine if you want to spend most of your time inside your family circle or the same two people you grew up with. But some just can't cope with that.
    - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Kretinsky 3y ago
While we could have more housing, construction is a problem, as, and especially in the US lately, it takes the form of faceless suburbs with an extensive sprawl destroying natural and agricultural lands. It also promotes a car-centric and consumerist lifestyle, where shopping happens in malls, taking even more space. A better use of the current space would be much better than throwing more supply at the problem.
RobotToaster 3y ago
> It doesn't help anyone if those vacant units are not where the jobs and education is Why not move the jobs and education?
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  Build a university in a village with 20 inhabitants? Build a factory in a municipality with 360 inhabitants, where only ~30 are of working age (we have one of those in my country). And even if you built it, all 6 empty houses would get rented out, there wouldn't be any more places for people to stay and housing prices would go up a lot.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  It's a catch-22. Companies move where the existing skilled labor pool already is. I've seen cases where international companies invested in small collage towns here in Europe with big dreams of expansion, but it didn't work their way because they had trouble recruiting enough candidates to move there, as all the skilled candidates wanted to live in big metro areas with multiple competing companies in the same domain, not limit themselves to a single employer in the area. Then the company tried training a lot of their staff by taking in skilled people willing to do a career change, and guess what, after 1-2 years, those trained employees left to the big city to work for a competing company for more money. So the company just packed its bags and left because if it has to pay big-city money anyway, it might as well just move directly to the big city in the first palce and not bother with the hassle of expanding in small towns. Our present day capitalist system doesn't reward investments in small towns and small players because the big players and big cities end up skimming the cream off the smaller ones so it's all go big or go home, so all the investments booth from the private sector and the public sector are happening in the capital city which is now causing the masiv housing issue.
giantg2 3y ago
Cities also have vacant office space. It's likely more economical and greener to convert the existing building vs building new construction in the "wasted space". I like the idea of what you describe for remote work. I'm not sure how effective that would be in the US. It seems many people want very specific amenities or locations. Or like one friend, they wouldn't move back just because of "all the druggies". I think at best, it would just slow the population decline in those areas. It would be better if the old rust belt cities had business and industry return physically. Not everyone can be a knowledge worker on a laptop - there needs to be some physical jobs too.
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  Office space is not good for apartments, because the floor plans are usually huge. WTC towers were (iirc) 63x63 meters large, if the rooms are 5x5 meters, you can only build usable rooms in the outer strip of the building, while the internal 53x53 square is usable only for storage, toilets and hallways, which don't require windows... and that's a huge waste of space
  - giantg2 3y ago
    Well, what else are you going to do with the vacant building? Seems like it's a bigger waste not to. I guess we'll see how it turns out in NYC since they're proposing it right now.
    - ajsnigrutin 3y ago
      Use it as commercial realestate, even if at cheaper price per square meter? I've seen enough louis rossmann videos to see the prices there, and bringing them down wouldn't be that bad.
    - dagw 3y ago
      This weeks 99% Invisible podcast is on this exact topic. The bottom line is that while it is technically possible, it is really expensive and only makes financial sense if you create luxury apartments that can charge the very highest levels of rent. Also the legal and regulation red tape is a massive problem making many projects impossible to do, even if on paper they might be viable. In most cases the most practical solution, after taking financial and regulatory considerations into account, is simply to leave the building empty and hope for a future upswing in commercial real estate.
rft 3y ago
> Germany and other countries could bring life back to rural areas if it mandated employers allow 100% WFH whoever possible as that would get a lot of people moving back to their hometown closer to their family especially if their family could help out with raising kids. tl;dr: Germany needs to heavily improve its rural/suburbs/general internet connectivity to encourage WFH. It can be insanely frustrating getting anything resembling modern internet in some places. Speaking on the German situation as I recently experienced that (100% WFH moving out of the city center). I was looking for a flat in a radius of 100km around a city and was very flexible with where I ended up. I had two must-haves: dedicated office (as in, a spare room) plus reasonably fast and stable internet. For (my) remote work anything >= 50Mbit VDSL (roughly 50 down/10 up) is workable. 250/40 was my minimum when searching. I narrowed it down to two solid choices I wanted to check out: 1) rural village of about 20-50 houses and 2) suburbs/300m from city border of a smallish (~50k people) city. It turned out 1) did not connect the fiber connection they could get (quite literally "I don't understand this and never needed it."). This combined with some other less than ideal things led me to discard 1). When checking out 2) I found out they didn't connect the cable internet marked as available online ("It sits somewhere in the garden, we don't want to drill the house walls." Drilling the walls for the PV they put up before I moved in was fine...). But they had 250/40 VDSL available and I confirmed then and there that you get at least 100Mbit download. I signed for 2) based on 100MBit+ VDSL plus liking the overall package (location, neighbors, landlord, flat). I could order 250/40, but two weeks later got a call that they could only offer me 16/1 (not a typo) due to "no available lines". I took that offer, because mobile network is either very expensive (Telekom 5G unlimited is 85€) or very unreliable (Telefonica 4G unlimited is 30€, but went down to 2MBit/s in some areas with full reception) and I needed at least some fallback connectivity. As a data point: Google meet can manage about 1 or 2 incoming video streams and spotty outgoing video at 16/1. I setup a multipath setup to combine Telefonica and the 16/1 land line. It took me a better part of a month to finally convince support to send a technician out to address the problem that I was marked as offline in their system despite being connected. It turned out someone is blocking "my" line since about 3 years after moving out so I somehow can get a slow speed fallback, but nothing more. The technician belled out the line to the DSLAM, overrode the assignment and assigned the line "officially" to me. When we got talking he mentioned that he had to do the same "fix" the last time someone moved in and that he just expanded the DSLAM VDSL capacity. I had to wait about 30min for him to document that in the system and then order a faster connection before someone else snatches up that line. Which surprisingly worked out to a 250/40 landline finally. In conclusion: it took me, a quite technical person who depends on the connection for work, about 2 months to get a workable landline after doing all possible due diligence before signing my lease. If I had not haunted support or got a less motivated technician, I would still be sitting here with blurry Google Meets. This is not how you motivate people to move back to rural areas. Based on my experience with 1) there are also problems the state can not tackle. If the landlords don't see the value in even letting a fiber provider lay a dark fiber in the basement, there is nothing the billions of digital infrastructure funding can do. P.S. Beaming internet down from frigging space via Starlink costs less than Telekom 5G unlimited... P.P.S. I know this is just a single data point, but the amount of locations I had to reject because of not even theoretical fast landlines was insane EDIT to add: I am not even talking about 1GBit everywhere, just a floor of maybe 50/10 or even 100/20 (reliable!) so you can realistically WFH.

LeanderK 3y ago

I wouldn't return to more rural areas if 100% WFH is possible. Some left it for a reason and not to get better internet. And, at least in germany, many rural areas are not so unattractive. I know plenty rural villages with great internet. Especially in BW public transport is solid, the next bigger population center is close by and there are many jobs. It's just conservative, culturally boring, inflexible and really set in their old ways.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Nobody said all rural areas are attractive places to live. And yes, part of the problem nobody wants to go back isn't jus the "vibe" and lack of "hip culture, art scene and hipster cafes", but that basic infrastructure like good schools, teachers, hospitals, doctors offices and specialists, have been left to rot and they also moved out of the city(the younger generation) or just retired and died along with the town, so bringing all that back to life is nearly impossible as now it's a catch-22, nobody wants to move there because there are no good doctors and teachers, and there are no good doctors and teachers because there's nothing there. >It's just conservative, culturally boring, inflexible and really set in their old ways. But then we can't complain that the hip and open minded urban areas are too expensive when everyone runs away from the rural areas to the same handful of hip cities. Maybe it's our duty as well to try and push for the change we want in those places, instead of always packing our bags and leaving for the cities that are livable on paper because they already share our mentality but in the process crowding them to the point where the stress around housing makes them unlivable in practice unless you're super wealthy.
- LeanderK 3y ago
  this is not true across the bank. Of course if you're really deep into depopulated rural areas then there is really a lack of basic social services. But it's not that there's only high-density cities and deserted landscapes, there are still rural areas with schools and doctors. Rural areas that are doing comparatively well, somewhat maintain their population. Also, many cities with a lot of population growth also struggle to provide those services as there are not enough doctors or teachers for all, so you might be able find comparatively better schooling in the right rural areas. In some rural areas there's a really conservative, tight-knit mindset. A deep resentment for somebody different and a very specific world-view really dominating the area. This is not about hipster-cafes, but about some basic progress in society some parts just try to not be part of. Rural is also more isolated and there's just strictly less to do. Fine if you want to spend most of your time inside your family circle or the same two people you grew up with. But some just can't cope with that.
  - 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Kretinsky 3y ago

While we could have more housing, construction is a problem, as, and especially in the US lately, it takes the form of faceless suburbs with an extensive sprawl destroying natural and agricultural lands. It also promotes a car-centric and consumerist lifestyle, where shopping happens in malls, taking even more space. A better use of the current space would be much better than throwing more supply at the problem.

RobotToaster 3y ago

> It doesn't help anyone if those vacant units are not where the jobs and education is Why not move the jobs and education?

ajsnigrutin 3y ago
Build a university in a village with 20 inhabitants? Build a factory in a municipality with 360 inhabitants, where only ~30 are of working age (we have one of those in my country). And even if you built it, all 6 empty houses would get rented out, there wouldn't be any more places for people to stay and housing prices would go up a lot.
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
It's a catch-22. Companies move where the existing skilled labor pool already is. I've seen cases where international companies invested in small collage towns here in Europe with big dreams of expansion, but it didn't work their way because they had trouble recruiting enough candidates to move there, as all the skilled candidates wanted to live in big metro areas with multiple competing companies in the same domain, not limit themselves to a single employer in the area. Then the company tried training a lot of their staff by taking in skilled people willing to do a career change, and guess what, after 1-2 years, those trained employees left to the big city to work for a competing company for more money. So the company just packed its bags and left because if it has to pay big-city money anyway, it might as well just move directly to the big city in the first palce and not bother with the hassle of expanding in small towns. Our present day capitalist system doesn't reward investments in small towns and small players because the big players and big cities end up skimming the cream off the smaller ones so it's all go big or go home, so all the investments booth from the private sector and the public sector are happening in the capital city which is now causing the masiv housing issue.

giantg2 3y ago

Cities also have vacant office space. It's likely more economical and greener to convert the existing building vs building new construction in the "wasted space". I like the idea of what you describe for remote work. I'm not sure how effective that would be in the US. It seems many people want very specific amenities or locations. Or like one friend, they wouldn't move back just because of "all the druggies". I think at best, it would just slow the population decline in those areas. It would be better if the old rust belt cities had business and industry return physically. Not everyone can be a knowledge worker on a laptop - there needs to be some physical jobs too.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago
Office space is not good for apartments, because the floor plans are usually huge. WTC towers were (iirc) 63x63 meters large, if the rooms are 5x5 meters, you can only build usable rooms in the outer strip of the building, while the internal 53x53 square is usable only for storage, toilets and hallways, which don't require windows... and that's a huge waste of space
- giantg2 3y ago
  Well, what else are you going to do with the vacant building? Seems like it's a bigger waste not to. I guess we'll see how it turns out in NYC since they're proposing it right now.
  - ajsnigrutin 3y ago
    Use it as commercial realestate, even if at cheaper price per square meter? I've seen enough louis rossmann videos to see the prices there, and bringing them down wouldn't be that bad.
  - dagw 3y ago
    This weeks 99% Invisible podcast is on this exact topic. The bottom line is that while it is technically possible, it is really expensive and only makes financial sense if you create luxury apartments that can charge the very highest levels of rent. Also the legal and regulation red tape is a massive problem making many projects impossible to do, even if on paper they might be viable. In most cases the most practical solution, after taking financial and regulatory considerations into account, is simply to leave the building empty and hope for a future upswing in commercial real estate.

rft 3y ago

> Germany and other countries could bring life back to rural areas if it mandated employers allow 100% WFH whoever possible as that would get a lot of people moving back to their hometown closer to their family especially if their family could help out with raising kids. tl;dr: Germany needs to heavily improve its rural/suburbs/general internet connectivity to encourage WFH. It can be insanely frustrating getting anything resembling modern internet in some places. Speaking on the German situation as I recently experienced that (100% WFH moving out of the city center). I was looking for a flat in a radius of 100km around a city and was very flexible with where I ended up. I had two must-haves: dedicated office (as in, a spare room) plus reasonably fast and stable internet. For (my) remote work anything >= 50Mbit VDSL (roughly 50 down/10 up) is workable. 250/40 was my minimum when searching. I narrowed it down to two solid choices I wanted to check out: 1) rural village of about 20-50 houses and 2) suburbs/300m from city border of a smallish (~50k people) city. It turned out 1) did not connect the fiber connection they could get (quite literally "I don't understand this and never needed it."). This combined with some other less than ideal things led me to discard 1). When checking out 2) I found out they didn't connect the cable internet marked as available online ("It sits somewhere in the garden, we don't want to drill the house walls." Drilling the walls for the PV they put up before I moved in was fine...). But they had 250/40 VDSL available and I confirmed then and there that you get at least 100Mbit download. I signed for 2) based on 100MBit+ VDSL plus liking the overall package (location, neighbors, landlord, flat). I could order 250/40, but two weeks later got a call that they could only offer me 16/1 (not a typo) due to "no available lines". I took that offer, because mobile network is either very expensive (Telekom 5G unlimited is 85€) or very unreliable (Telefonica 4G unlimited is 30€, but went down to 2MBit/s in some areas with full reception) and I needed at least some fallback connectivity. As a data point: Google meet can manage about 1 or 2 incoming video streams and spotty outgoing video at 16/1. I setup a multipath setup to combine Telefonica and the 16/1 land line. It took me a better part of a month to finally convince support to send a technician out to address the problem that I was marked as offline in their system despite being connected. It turned out someone is blocking "my" line since about 3 years after moving out so I somehow can get a slow speed fallback, but nothing more. The technician belled out the line to the DSLAM, overrode the assignment and assigned the line "officially" to me. When we got talking he mentioned that he had to do the same "fix" the last time someone moved in and that he just expanded the DSLAM VDSL capacity. I had to wait about 30min for him to document that in the system and then order a faster connection before someone else snatches up that line. Which surprisingly worked out to a 250/40 landline finally. In conclusion: it took me, a quite technical person who depends on the connection for work, about 2 months to get a workable landline after doing all possible due diligence before signing my lease. If I had not haunted support or got a less motivated technician, I would still be sitting here with blurry Google Meets. This is not how you motivate people to move back to rural areas. Based on my experience with 1) there are also problems the state can not tackle. If the landlords don't see the value in even letting a fiber provider lay a dark fiber in the basement, there is nothing the billions of digital infrastructure funding can do. P.S. Beaming internet down from frigging space via Starlink costs less than Telekom 5G unlimited... P.P.S. I know this is just a single data point, but the amount of locations I had to reject because of not even theoretical fast landlines was insane EDIT to add: I am not even talking about 1GBit everywhere, just a floor of maybe 50/10 or even 100/20 (reliable!) so you can realistically WFH.