5 ms·

> You can't ever build enough housing in dense cities. It will ALWAYS be expensive. Interesting, Tokyo hasn't seen house prices increase since 1995 in either n

> You can't ever build enough housing in dense cities. It will ALWAYS be expensive. Interesting, Tokyo hasn't seen house prices increase since 1995 in either nominal or real-dollar terms. One of the most affordable major metros in the US is Houston. One thing they have in common is no real constraints on zoning. > The US has more than enough housing, and very cheap at that. You can buy a house for $1 in some places. The problem is supply and demand have to be co-located. You can't commute from Iowa or Detroit to the Bay Area or Manhattan for work. Studies show the US is short about 5-6M homes thanks to a decade of under-building. [1] > However, toxic policies lead to over-concentration of housing in a small number of cities. This drives up prices in a never-ending spiral. Concentration of housing is good, actually. It's far more efficient in every way, it's environmentally friendly and gives us access to all sorts of services and social groups. Concentration of talent makes the Bay Area the Bay Area. [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/u-s-has-a-shortfall-of-6-5-million-single-family-homes-due-to-a-decade-of-under-building-report-says-2fb86d08 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/u-s-has-a-shortfall-of-6-5...

quickthrower2 3y ago
Yeah the existence of a cheap house doesn’t make housing cheap, or even scalable at that cheap price, since things are priced at the margins, if suddenly a few people flocked to cheap town it’s prices will go up fast.
- cyberax 3y ago
  A $100000 house going up to $105000 is not the same as a $1000000 house going up to $1050000. Moreover, land cost outside of big cities is pretty much nothing. It's cheap to build new housing as needed.
  - acdha 3y ago
    > Moreover, land cost outside of big cities is pretty much nothing. It's cheap to build new housing as needed. This is far too sweeping a claim. It’s comically untrue unless you’re defining “outside” as multiple hours of driving, and “big cities” as anywhere over, say, 50k people. It’s also obviously untrue once you learn that people leave their houses. Yes, you can build new housing cheaply in a rural area but for people to live there you also need stores, schools, jobs, etc. and that means things like roads. Now your cheap house involves buying a car for each resident, paying for a lot of gas and tires, paying for road construction and maintenance, and not having anything you’d prefer to be doing other than spending all of those extra hours driving (don’t forget the increased health care costs). Things like utilities, roads, snow plowing, etc. all cost most on average because that low density means more infrastructure but the costs are spread over fewer people. You can save money that way but it’s nowhere near as much as portrayed.
    - cyberax 3y ago
      > This is far too sweeping a claim. It’s comically untrue unless you’re defining “outside” as multiple hours of driving, and “big cities” as anywhere over, say, 50k people. I haven't looked at _every_ city, of course, but it's generally true in many areas. For example, the same-sized plot of land will be 20 times less just 1 hour away near Seattle. > It’s also obviously untrue once you learn that people leave their houses. Yes, you can build new housing cheaply in a rural area but for people to live there you also need stores, schools, jobs, etc. and that means things like roads. Schools, stores, and roads are, in general, either cheaper (roads) or cost insignificantly more (school), or about the same (stores). I did the math. The city efficiency peaks around 200k population, and then it starts to go down. Mostly because you need extra layers of bureaucracy and/or fall down the rabbit hole of mass transit. And then the denser the city, the more money it needs to maintain itself. And new infrastructure quickly becomes overwhelmingly expensive. Think about this: one mile of Manhattan subway costs about the same as 1000 miles of a modern new 6-lane freeway. > You can save money that way but it’s nowhere near as much as portrayed. By not forcing the densification, you WILL save money and make peoples' lives better. The main issue is job availability. We need to make sure remote jobs and distributed offices have more advantage, via cap-and-trade or taxes.
cyberax 3y ago
> Interesting, Tokyo hasn't seen house prices increase since 1995 in either nominal or real-dollar terms. It's interesting that Tokyo is used by people all the time after just quick googling. Probably because it's an "exotic" location. Tokyo real estate prices are growing: https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/surging-tokyo-property-prices-squeeze-out-young-professionals-2023-10-04/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/surging-tokyo-property-... If anything, Tokyo is a fucking horror show. It shows the result of failed "urbanist" policies. They managed to force people to jam-pack into "microapartments" where you can sit on a toilet, while cooking food _at_ _the_ _same_ _time_. All while a couple of hours away, beautiful traditional houses are falling down. And the punchline: this is all while the overall population is dropping. > One of the most affordable major metros in the US is Houston. Yes. Guess why? You have three guesses. > The problem is supply and demand have to be co-located. You can't commute from Iowa or Detroit to the Bay Area or Manhattan for work. Yes, that's why we must stop new offices from opening in Manhattan. Tax the office space, or do a cap-and-trade based on the city area. > Studies show the US is short about 5-6M homes thanks to a decade of under-building. [1] No. The US has around the historical number of housing units per capita: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=j9kH https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=j9kH > Concentration of housing is good, actually. It's far more efficient in every way No. And no. It's not good, it's absolutely terrible. It's inhumane to force people to live in human anthills. And it's not even that efficient: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1091142107308302 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1091142107308302 Oh, and wait until you hear about new public transit infrastructure cost!
- Scramblejams 3y ago
  > It's interesting that Tokyo is used by people all the time after just quick googling. Probably because it's an "exotic" location. Also, if GP wants to make a point that housing prices can be stable somewhere, they probably shouldn’t pick a spot in a nation with a legendarily stagnant economy. 23Q3 even showed a contraction.
  - arcticbull 3y ago
    > Also, if GP wants to make a point that housing prices can be stable somewhere, they probably shouldn’t pick a spot in a nation with a legendarily stagnant economy. 23Q3 even showed a contraction. I disagree. The argument that I was pushing back on is that it's somehow impossible to balance supply and demand in a major city in such a way that housing prices are stable. This is false by counterexample.

quickthrower2 3y ago

Yeah the existence of a cheap house doesn’t make housing cheap, or even scalable at that cheap price, since things are priced at the margins, if suddenly a few people flocked to cheap town it’s prices will go up fast.

cyberax 3y ago
A $100000 house going up to $105000 is not the same as a $1000000 house going up to $1050000. Moreover, land cost outside of big cities is pretty much nothing. It's cheap to build new housing as needed.
- acdha 3y ago
  > Moreover, land cost outside of big cities is pretty much nothing. It's cheap to build new housing as needed. This is far too sweeping a claim. It’s comically untrue unless you’re defining “outside” as multiple hours of driving, and “big cities” as anywhere over, say, 50k people. It’s also obviously untrue once you learn that people leave their houses. Yes, you can build new housing cheaply in a rural area but for people to live there you also need stores, schools, jobs, etc. and that means things like roads. Now your cheap house involves buying a car for each resident, paying for a lot of gas and tires, paying for road construction and maintenance, and not having anything you’d prefer to be doing other than spending all of those extra hours driving (don’t forget the increased health care costs). Things like utilities, roads, snow plowing, etc. all cost most on average because that low density means more infrastructure but the costs are spread over fewer people. You can save money that way but it’s nowhere near as much as portrayed.
  - cyberax 3y ago
    > This is far too sweeping a claim. It’s comically untrue unless you’re defining “outside” as multiple hours of driving, and “big cities” as anywhere over, say, 50k people. I haven't looked at _every_ city, of course, but it's generally true in many areas. For example, the same-sized plot of land will be 20 times less just 1 hour away near Seattle. > It’s also obviously untrue once you learn that people leave their houses. Yes, you can build new housing cheaply in a rural area but for people to live there you also need stores, schools, jobs, etc. and that means things like roads. Schools, stores, and roads are, in general, either cheaper (roads) or cost insignificantly more (school), or about the same (stores). I did the math. The city efficiency peaks around 200k population, and then it starts to go down. Mostly because you need extra layers of bureaucracy and/or fall down the rabbit hole of mass transit. And then the denser the city, the more money it needs to maintain itself. And new infrastructure quickly becomes overwhelmingly expensive. Think about this: one mile of Manhattan subway costs about the same as 1000 miles of a modern new 6-lane freeway. > You can save money that way but it’s nowhere near as much as portrayed. By not forcing the densification, you WILL save money and make peoples' lives better. The main issue is job availability. We need to make sure remote jobs and distributed offices have more advantage, via cap-and-trade or taxes.

cyberax 3y ago

> Interesting, Tokyo hasn't seen house prices increase since 1995 in either nominal or real-dollar terms. It's interesting that Tokyo is used by people all the time after just quick googling. Probably because it's an "exotic" location. Tokyo real estate prices are growing: https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/surging-tokyo-property-prices-squeeze-out-young-professionals-2023-10-04/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/surging-tokyo-property-... If anything, Tokyo is a fucking horror show. It shows the result of failed "urbanist" policies. They managed to force people to jam-pack into "microapartments" where you can sit on a toilet, while cooking food _at_ _the_ _same_ _time_. All while a couple of hours away, beautiful traditional houses are falling down. And the punchline: this is all while the overall population is dropping. > One of the most affordable major metros in the US is Houston. Yes. Guess why? You have three guesses. > The problem is supply and demand have to be co-located. You can't commute from Iowa or Detroit to the Bay Area or Manhattan for work. Yes, that's why we must stop new offices from opening in Manhattan. Tax the office space, or do a cap-and-trade based on the city area. > Studies show the US is short about 5-6M homes thanks to a decade of under-building. [1] No. The US has around the historical number of housing units per capita: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=j9kH https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=j9kH > Concentration of housing is good, actually. It's far more efficient in every way No. And no. It's not good, it's absolutely terrible. It's inhumane to force people to live in human anthills. And it's not even that efficient: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1091142107308302 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1091142107308302 Oh, and wait until you hear about new public transit infrastructure cost!

Scramblejams 3y ago
> It's interesting that Tokyo is used by people all the time after just quick googling. Probably because it's an "exotic" location. Also, if GP wants to make a point that housing prices can be stable somewhere, they probably shouldn’t pick a spot in a nation with a legendarily stagnant economy. 23Q3 even showed a contraction.
- arcticbull 3y ago
  > Also, if GP wants to make a point that housing prices can be stable somewhere, they probably shouldn’t pick a spot in a nation with a legendarily stagnant economy. 23Q3 even showed a contraction. I disagree. The argument that I was pushing back on is that it's somehow impossible to balance supply and demand in a major city in such a way that housing prices are stable. This is false by counterexample.