4 ms·

I'm reading Jane Jacobs right now- she's excellent broadly, but one specific thing she argues for that I found really surprising is a diversity in the age of bu

I'm reading Jane Jacobs right now- she's excellent broadly, but one specific thing she argues for that I found really surprising is a diversity in the age of buildings. It's one way to make possible the diversity of uses and financial needs that are an aspect of vibrant neighbourhoods. In her analysis, older buildings tend to have paid off their capital costs.

bombcar 3y ago
This is across-the-board important - because you can rarely "build new" what poorer people need. For example, nobody can "build used cars" - you need a vibrant car market that has used cars available at price points that others can afford. Same thing applies to houses; you can't "build cheap housing" directly - you build new housing and the older housing decreases in price. Which is why I have no problem with a brand new apartment building being built and having a luxury bent, even though it might be built on top of a walmart or something; the people living there free up space elsewhere.
- xnx 3y ago
  Seconding this. Affordable housing mandates are counterproductive. Let developers put property to "the highest and best use". Those who are rich/gullible enough to buy new "luxury" units will benefit by getting the luxury properties from 20 years ago.
  - dtech 3y ago
    If the mandate is to built 5 moderately sized appartements instead of 3 large units they increase supply.
    - xnx 3y ago
      That seems mathematically true, but doesn't tell the whole story. Imagine a common scenario in my city where the prospective buyer/renter of one of those new apartments is considering tearing down and older multi-unit structure to build a single-family home. In that situation, the availability of an larger unit could result in more total housing units. Because they have financial incentive, developers are often the ones in the position to best understand what the market wants.
      - sandworm101 3y ago
        >> developers are often the ones in the position to best understand what the market wants. Correct. Developers build to what the market wants. But that doesn't mean they build to what people want. If given total freedom, developers often chase the upscale market, rich people wanting high-priced units. That is where profit is to be made. That is what the market wants. But that is not necessarily what a city actually needs.
        hedora 3y ago
        Ignoring what the market wants doesn't work. If you maximize the return on investment of building more housing, then more people will build houses. If you make housing construction unprofitable, then fewer people will build houses. Also, people act like a glut of luxury housing would be a problem. It absolutely wouldn't. It would displace and therefore depress prices for midrange units. If the developers end up losing money selling their new luxury housing at a loss, then they've effectively just subsidized the US housing supply. That's much less expensive for taxpayers than having the government subsidize + force people to build housing that sells for less than construction costs.
        sandworm101 3y ago
        Well, history has not shown that. There are countless situations where large houses have been surrounded by legions of the working poor unable to afford living spaces. Or where vacation homes sit empty, owned by people living far away, while cities struggle to find local accommodation for working people.
        hedora 3y ago
        Neither of those issues have anything to do with housing supply, and they're either be unaffected or exacerbated by affordable housing mandates. The one large house + not enough houses problem is due to income inequality. Making houses scarce increases the price of houses for everyone, so it exacerbates income inequality (it is hard to increase your income and educate your kids while living in a tent). Worse, most affordable housing projects that are currently being proposed deed-restrict the housing (otherwise, unless the initial purchaser is an idiot, they'd immediately sell at a large profit). That prevents poor people from profiting off of the appreciation of property in their neighborhood that and therefore increases long-term income inequality. You also get situations where the low income housing owner can't afford to use local amenities, or maintain their house (which they bought for far less than the cost of initial construction). The second issue (hoarding of vacant houses) can be solved with a vacancy tax. History supports both those arguments. Can you name an example of a city where supply has exceeded demand (measured in months of housing inventory on the market) for an extended period of time (multiple years, so longer than the 2008 crisis), and that also has a housing affordability and homeless crisis? Similarly, can you cite an example of a market where housing has been freely built and sold at a profit over the long term, and that also has a housing supply problem?
    - epistasis 3y ago
      Except such mandates never exist, the only mandates on unit sizes are minimums, not maximums. Though I do propose such changes as part of my "urban planning is 100% wrong, simply replace the direction of every single cap and you will get a better result plan", this has not caught on with anybody but me. Also, rich people still get around maximums by joining together adjacent units. For example, SF board of supervisors (think city council) member Aaron Peskin did this with two units so that he could have a bigger more luxurious living space, even though nobody else is allowed to bend the permitting rules that way. (SF has permitting rules that disallow making two units into one, but it does not have any limits on maximum unit size, as far as I can tell.)
  - snapplebobapple 3y ago
    This is the right answer, but it's only the right answer in the face of sane zoning that ensures it's usually cheaper to upgrade lower to much higher density rather than knock down/renovate old high density to create new luxury high density. If you have the north american situation of the vast majority of residential being zoned single family then you will never get cheap high density for long because it will always make sense to upgrade or demolish and rebuild high density luxury on that scarce high density zoned land. My personal opinion is we need to get rid of the split zoning and instead have the higher density residential zones include the allowed uses/buildings from the lower density and then get rid of single family altogether and have the lowest density zoning be something like a 4 story town house (while allowing someone to buy that land and build a single family home if they want). We also need to make the split much less harsh between that zoning and much higher density zoning so there's always an excess of land zoned for higher density but occupied by lower density, older buildings so that every time we tear down something old and cheap to rent we end up with more luxury units that will transition into more old and cheap to rent units over time.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      You need something like "ratcheting zoning" - if someone wants to redevelop a single-family plot into a duplex; by default it should be allowed; encouraged. If they want redevelop a 4plex into a single-family home; that requires more investigation and a variance.
      - snapplebobapple 3y ago
        I don't agree. If someone wants to do that they should be allowed to without extra government interference because if they are doing that because it's profit maximizing then we screwed up in our zoning already. Our problem isn't the one off (probably rich people) going against the profit maximizing trend on development (probably because it's their own home and they are willing to forgo profit for other benefits like a bigger yard). Our problem is that we have a cascading scarcity of dense land zoning so at every level above single family it almost always make sense to renovate or tear down to be able to charge luxury prices instead of doing basic maintenance to maintain habitability while charging lower and lower rent as the building degrades over several decades before finally being renovated or rebuilt decades later than they are now. So what you need is for the city to ensure there's always a decent supply of excess land zoned for each density level owned broadly enough that oligopoly BS doesn't come into play so that the profit maximizing choice is to always buy a plot of land with less density or with an actually uninhabitable building on it and build more density and they need to do this at every density level in their code. That's the big picture problem with North American cities. There are sub problems to this (like how we are providing parking wrong, suboptimal public service design, especially transport infrastructure) but the above is the big picture biggest problem
- vel0city 3y ago
  I see this comment all around me. The cheap apartments around me are the fancy apartments from the 80s. The midrange apartments are the fancy apartments from the 90s and 00s.
  - epistasis 3y ago
    Ah, you live in an area there they were still building in the past thirty years, I see. In no-growth parts of California, the cheap apartments from the 80s are sky high in prices, while the decrepit apartments from the 60s and 70s are merely very expensive.
    - vel0city 3y ago
      > In no-growth parts of California The answer is obvious. Don't live in those no-growth places.
      - epistasis 3y ago
        When the economic opportunity is so high, that is in no way an obvious answer. The obvious answer is to change the environmentally and humanitarian disaster of no-growth politics of low-slung suburbs.
  - ido 3y ago
    And yet the fanciest apartments are the fancy apartments of the 1920s and earlier
- xyzelement 3y ago
  This is exactly right. Like most things, looking at topics as "supply and demand" enables the right understanding. New luxury construction takes demand (and thus dollars) from the next-best-thing so it becomes less expensive. That enables the people who previously could not afford it to seek it, which makes the next-next-best thing less expensive in turn. The flip side of this is when demand outstrips supply, so you have people paying several thousands per month for a studio in a walkup in Hell's Kitchen. But to be very clear, it would cost even more if not for the new high-rises within that square mile.
  - rickydroll 3y ago
    that's true you don't think that housing is subject to induced demand. I think more housing built in an area will increase the demand for housing in that area. It'll never stop. another way to look at is why should someone drop the price on the property if adding new housing doesn't decrease demand. one could make the case that building new luxury housing will free up the expensive housing for people that still can't afford it.
    - xyzelement 3y ago
      If demand is really infinite then your logic applies but I see no reason to think that it's the case. How does building new buildings increase demand? Only by making housing move available and thus dropping the price. In other words, I am either in the market for a $5M apartment on Park Ave or I am not. If a new building gets built, it doesn't make me go "well hmm, I never thought about living in NYC, but now that there are 50 more apartments available, I think I will". What DOES happen is that ~50 people who were previously competing for the same handful of pre-war buildings now just bought into this new place because it's nicer. All of a sudden there's less buying pressure on the existing inventory so the seller has to drop the price (ie, if ppl aren't buying my apartment because the same $5M can get them new construction, maybe I gotta drop it to 4.7M)
- pchristensen 3y ago
  One difference between now and Jane Jacobs' time is that you can build housing that poor people need, by allowing the construction of smaller, lower amenity housing. While you can't build affordable 4 bedroom single family houses at 5 per acre, you can build affordable 700-1000sf 3-4 bedroom apartments at 40-60 per acre. In the case of Culdesac, they removed roads, parking, garages, and lawns. For people that want and can afford those things, there are plenty of options already.
  - adolph 3y ago
    > allowing the construction of smaller, lower amenity housing Never heard of restrictions on minimum house size and amenities. Is this a widespread thing? Would an expression of “smaller, lower amenity housing” be the standard mobile home neighborhood?
    - pchristensen 3y ago
      Basically everywhere in the USA (and I believe most of the world) has restrictions on minimum house size, maximum building coverage on the lot, height limits, setbacks from property lines, room sizes, etc, etc, etc. Mobile home parks are one way to have lower cost housing, but far from the only one. They are much less common than in the past, as they are being regulated and bought out of existence.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      The restrictions are ones of practicality. There's a "minimum code" house you can build (that has the minimums required wherever possible) and it will be a certain price. But things like utilities, etc will be a "per unit" cost not a "per square foot" cost, but selling the unit is pretty close to "per square foot" so the temptation is to inflate that as best you can to make the per unit costs as minimal as possible. Mobile homes parks are a way to bypass certain slumlord laws; because the slumlord only rents the "land" and the mobile home is owned by the tenant, and lots of slumlord laws don't apply to your own home.
      - adolph 3y ago
- epistasis 3y ago
  Just ran across an expert looking at recent data and being shocked at how fast this is happening right now, today: https://x.com/jayparsons/status/1712110658601255211?s=46 https://x.com/jayparsons/status/1712110658601255211?s=46 Short summary, mid-range apartments (grade B, not new but not decrepit), are seeing the biggest decrease in rents when there's a ton of building going on.
epistasis 3y ago
If you try to make this argument today as a reason we should build more housing now, it will be dismissed as "trickle down housing" ala Reagonomics. This has been one of my great frustrations when trying to get more affordable housing built.

bombcar 3y ago

This is across-the-board important - because you can rarely "build new" what poorer people need. For example, nobody can "build used cars" - you need a vibrant car market that has used cars available at price points that others can afford. Same thing applies to houses; you can't "build cheap housing" directly - you build new housing and the older housing decreases in price. Which is why I have no problem with a brand new apartment building being built and having a luxury bent, even though it might be built on top of a walmart or something; the people living there free up space elsewhere.

xnx 3y ago
Seconding this. Affordable housing mandates are counterproductive. Let developers put property to "the highest and best use". Those who are rich/gullible enough to buy new "luxury" units will benefit by getting the luxury properties from 20 years ago.
- dtech 3y ago
  If the mandate is to built 5 moderately sized appartements instead of 3 large units they increase supply.
  - xnx 3y ago
    That seems mathematically true, but doesn't tell the whole story. Imagine a common scenario in my city where the prospective buyer/renter of one of those new apartments is considering tearing down and older multi-unit structure to build a single-family home. In that situation, the availability of an larger unit could result in more total housing units. Because they have financial incentive, developers are often the ones in the position to best understand what the market wants.
    - sandworm101 3y ago
      >> developers are often the ones in the position to best understand what the market wants. Correct. Developers build to what the market wants. But that doesn't mean they build to what people want. If given total freedom, developers often chase the upscale market, rich people wanting high-priced units. That is where profit is to be made. That is what the market wants. But that is not necessarily what a city actually needs.
      - hedora 3y ago
        Ignoring what the market wants doesn't work. If you maximize the return on investment of building more housing, then more people will build houses. If you make housing construction unprofitable, then fewer people will build houses. Also, people act like a glut of luxury housing would be a problem. It absolutely wouldn't. It would displace and therefore depress prices for midrange units. If the developers end up losing money selling their new luxury housing at a loss, then they've effectively just subsidized the US housing supply. That's much less expensive for taxpayers than having the government subsidize + force people to build housing that sells for less than construction costs.
        sandworm101 3y ago
        Well, history has not shown that. There are countless situations where large houses have been surrounded by legions of the working poor unable to afford living spaces. Or where vacation homes sit empty, owned by people living far away, while cities struggle to find local accommodation for working people.
        hedora 3y ago
        Neither of those issues have anything to do with housing supply, and they're either be unaffected or exacerbated by affordable housing mandates. The one large house + not enough houses problem is due to income inequality. Making houses scarce increases the price of houses for everyone, so it exacerbates income inequality (it is hard to increase your income and educate your kids while living in a tent). Worse, most affordable housing projects that are currently being proposed deed-restrict the housing (otherwise, unless the initial purchaser is an idiot, they'd immediately sell at a large profit). That prevents poor people from profiting off of the appreciation of property in their neighborhood that and therefore increases long-term income inequality. You also get situations where the low income housing owner can't afford to use local amenities, or maintain their house (which they bought for far less than the cost of initial construction). The second issue (hoarding of vacant houses) can be solved with a vacancy tax. History supports both those arguments. Can you name an example of a city where supply has exceeded demand (measured in months of housing inventory on the market) for an extended period of time (multiple years, so longer than the 2008 crisis), and that also has a housing affordability and homeless crisis? Similarly, can you cite an example of a market where housing has been freely built and sold at a profit over the long term, and that also has a housing supply problem?
  - epistasis 3y ago
    Except such mandates never exist, the only mandates on unit sizes are minimums, not maximums. Though I do propose such changes as part of my "urban planning is 100% wrong, simply replace the direction of every single cap and you will get a better result plan", this has not caught on with anybody but me. Also, rich people still get around maximums by joining together adjacent units. For example, SF board of supervisors (think city council) member Aaron Peskin did this with two units so that he could have a bigger more luxurious living space, even though nobody else is allowed to bend the permitting rules that way. (SF has permitting rules that disallow making two units into one, but it does not have any limits on maximum unit size, as far as I can tell.)
- snapplebobapple 3y ago
  This is the right answer, but it's only the right answer in the face of sane zoning that ensures it's usually cheaper to upgrade lower to much higher density rather than knock down/renovate old high density to create new luxury high density. If you have the north american situation of the vast majority of residential being zoned single family then you will never get cheap high density for long because it will always make sense to upgrade or demolish and rebuild high density luxury on that scarce high density zoned land. My personal opinion is we need to get rid of the split zoning and instead have the higher density residential zones include the allowed uses/buildings from the lower density and then get rid of single family altogether and have the lowest density zoning be something like a 4 story town house (while allowing someone to buy that land and build a single family home if they want). We also need to make the split much less harsh between that zoning and much higher density zoning so there's always an excess of land zoned for higher density but occupied by lower density, older buildings so that every time we tear down something old and cheap to rent we end up with more luxury units that will transition into more old and cheap to rent units over time.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    You need something like "ratcheting zoning" - if someone wants to redevelop a single-family plot into a duplex; by default it should be allowed; encouraged. If they want redevelop a 4plex into a single-family home; that requires more investigation and a variance.
    - snapplebobapple 3y ago
      I don't agree. If someone wants to do that they should be allowed to without extra government interference because if they are doing that because it's profit maximizing then we screwed up in our zoning already. Our problem isn't the one off (probably rich people) going against the profit maximizing trend on development (probably because it's their own home and they are willing to forgo profit for other benefits like a bigger yard). Our problem is that we have a cascading scarcity of dense land zoning so at every level above single family it almost always make sense to renovate or tear down to be able to charge luxury prices instead of doing basic maintenance to maintain habitability while charging lower and lower rent as the building degrades over several decades before finally being renovated or rebuilt decades later than they are now. So what you need is for the city to ensure there's always a decent supply of excess land zoned for each density level owned broadly enough that oligopoly BS doesn't come into play so that the profit maximizing choice is to always buy a plot of land with less density or with an actually uninhabitable building on it and build more density and they need to do this at every density level in their code. That's the big picture problem with North American cities. There are sub problems to this (like how we are providing parking wrong, suboptimal public service design, especially transport infrastructure) but the above is the big picture biggest problem
vel0city 3y ago
I see this comment all around me. The cheap apartments around me are the fancy apartments from the 80s. The midrange apartments are the fancy apartments from the 90s and 00s.
- epistasis 3y ago
  Ah, you live in an area there they were still building in the past thirty years, I see. In no-growth parts of California, the cheap apartments from the 80s are sky high in prices, while the decrepit apartments from the 60s and 70s are merely very expensive.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    > In no-growth parts of California The answer is obvious. Don't live in those no-growth places.
    - epistasis 3y ago
      When the economic opportunity is so high, that is in no way an obvious answer. The obvious answer is to change the environmentally and humanitarian disaster of no-growth politics of low-slung suburbs.
- ido 3y ago
  And yet the fanciest apartments are the fancy apartments of the 1920s and earlier
xyzelement 3y ago
This is exactly right. Like most things, looking at topics as "supply and demand" enables the right understanding. New luxury construction takes demand (and thus dollars) from the next-best-thing so it becomes less expensive. That enables the people who previously could not afford it to seek it, which makes the next-next-best thing less expensive in turn. The flip side of this is when demand outstrips supply, so you have people paying several thousands per month for a studio in a walkup in Hell's Kitchen. But to be very clear, it would cost even more if not for the new high-rises within that square mile.
- rickydroll 3y ago
  that's true you don't think that housing is subject to induced demand. I think more housing built in an area will increase the demand for housing in that area. It'll never stop. another way to look at is why should someone drop the price on the property if adding new housing doesn't decrease demand. one could make the case that building new luxury housing will free up the expensive housing for people that still can't afford it.
  - xyzelement 3y ago
    If demand is really infinite then your logic applies but I see no reason to think that it's the case. How does building new buildings increase demand? Only by making housing move available and thus dropping the price. In other words, I am either in the market for a $5M apartment on Park Ave or I am not. If a new building gets built, it doesn't make me go "well hmm, I never thought about living in NYC, but now that there are 50 more apartments available, I think I will". What DOES happen is that ~50 people who were previously competing for the same handful of pre-war buildings now just bought into this new place because it's nicer. All of a sudden there's less buying pressure on the existing inventory so the seller has to drop the price (ie, if ppl aren't buying my apartment because the same $5M can get them new construction, maybe I gotta drop it to 4.7M)
pchristensen 3y ago
One difference between now and Jane Jacobs' time is that you can build housing that poor people need, by allowing the construction of smaller, lower amenity housing. While you can't build affordable 4 bedroom single family houses at 5 per acre, you can build affordable 700-1000sf 3-4 bedroom apartments at 40-60 per acre. In the case of Culdesac, they removed roads, parking, garages, and lawns. For people that want and can afford those things, there are plenty of options already.
- adolph 3y ago
  > allowing the construction of smaller, lower amenity housing Never heard of restrictions on minimum house size and amenities. Is this a widespread thing? Would an expression of “smaller, lower amenity housing” be the standard mobile home neighborhood?
  - pchristensen 3y ago
    Basically everywhere in the USA (and I believe most of the world) has restrictions on minimum house size, maximum building coverage on the lot, height limits, setbacks from property lines, room sizes, etc, etc, etc. Mobile home parks are one way to have lower cost housing, but far from the only one. They are much less common than in the past, as they are being regulated and bought out of existence.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    The restrictions are ones of practicality. There's a "minimum code" house you can build (that has the minimums required wherever possible) and it will be a certain price. But things like utilities, etc will be a "per unit" cost not a "per square foot" cost, but selling the unit is pretty close to "per square foot" so the temptation is to inflate that as best you can to make the per unit costs as minimal as possible. Mobile homes parks are a way to bypass certain slumlord laws; because the slumlord only rents the "land" and the mobile home is owned by the tenant, and lots of slumlord laws don't apply to your own home.
    - adolph 3y ago
epistasis 3y ago
Just ran across an expert looking at recent data and being shocked at how fast this is happening right now, today: https://x.com/jayparsons/status/1712110658601255211?s=46 https://x.com/jayparsons/status/1712110658601255211?s=46 Short summary, mid-range apartments (grade B, not new but not decrepit), are seeing the biggest decrease in rents when there's a ton of building going on.

epistasis 3y ago

If you try to make this argument today as a reason we should build more housing now, it will be dismissed as "trickle down housing" ala Reagonomics. This has been one of my great frustrations when trying to get more affordable housing built.