4 ms·

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

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

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.