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This is a fantastic article. Burdensome regulations on housing construction have caused costs to skyrocket. Minimum lot sizes, setback requirements, square foo
by adameasterling 3y ago
This is a fantastic article.
Burdensome regulations on housing construction have caused costs to skyrocket. Minimum lot sizes, setback requirements, square footage minimums, floor-area ratio restrictions, overzealous height restrictions, parking requirements, abuse of environmental reviews, historic designations, community reviews, overzealous MFH requirements (like double-stair), below-market mandates, all have worked together to constrain supply, leading to skyrocketing costs.
It's the single most important economic issue for me. We need a nationwide effort to ease these restrictions, or we're just going to continue to see rents eat up more and more of young people's earnings.
- twiddling 3y agoDon't forget about street widths being determined by the ability to turn around fire equipment.
- bombcar 3y agoIf it makes you feel any better the oldest streets around here are wider than newer ones, because they had to be able to turn a wagon with a team of horses.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoThat sounds like what they did in Salt Lake City.
- trgn 3y agoThis was the seed that destroyed the American city. Roads were humongous 100 years before car was invented. It was fine, a buffer for the smoke and filth of the industrial city, but still multipurpose, accessible. Once cars started driving on these huge expanses, it turned every city street in a highway; dangerous, polluted, noisy, pushing out other uses, ...
- actionfromafar 3y agoHm.. couldn't a fire engine be driven in reverse? It could have an emergency driver's wheel in the back. I have seen crane trucks driven with a joystick from outside the vehicle, so it doesn't seem impossible.
- alistairSH 3y agoOr it could just be smaller like in the rest of the world.
- elliotto 3y agoHaving streets unable to be accessible by fire response vehicles doesn't seem like a good idea. What would be the alternative here? (genuine question, I'm not from the US)
- akavi 3y agoSmaller fire trucks.
- Paul-Craft 3y agoHow do you plan to make the fires smaller as well?
- beejiu 3y agoCopy paste from Europe, where they are about half the size?
- neuronexmachina 3y agoSome possible reasons for why American fire trucks tend to be larger: * more frequently sent to rural homes, where there might not be an available hydrant, so they need to transport all the water they're likely to need * same for wildfires * American homes more likely to be wood+drywall
- keenmaster 3y agoWe can make them turn 360 degrees like the electric G-Wagon. If upgrading the fleet of firefighting trucks to do so costs less than the value brought by tighter spacing of homes, it’s worth it.
- eru 3y agoWell, you can learn from other parts of the world, instead of coming up with solutions from scratch. (But yes, if nothing else your solution would probably work.) If you time your upgrade to the fire engines with when you naturally would want to renew them anyway, then it doesn't really cost much extra.
- m463 3y agolooks like building heights haven't been held back...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gamepsys 3y agoJust curious, are there any regulations on housing you agree with? There tends to be belief that housing regulations exist to limit supply. Let's not forget that many of these encourage safety and are cost effective ways to increase the quality of life of the residents. If we take deregulation and cheap housing to the extreme we end up with shanty towns.
- mperham 3y agoNone of the things he mentioned have anything to do with safety.
- gamepsys 3y agoEnvironmental review, community review, and MFH standards all have something to do with safety. It's not like root comment is arguing against fire hydrants or carbon monoxide detectors. I'm just arguing not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
- loeg 3y agoSetbacks, parking minimums and floor area ratios have nothing to do with safety. Community reviews have absolutely nothing to do with safety.
- gamepsys 3y ago> Community review Any feedback brought up in a community review is on official record. I have witnessed safety concerns being brought up in community review multiple times that caused changes to the building plan. In one situation it was a very serious concern about blocking fire truck access to an elementary school.
- bluGill 3y agowhy didn't the code catch that?
- hammock 3y agoHow is double stair MFH overzealous? I can’t control if my neighbor blocks the stairwell with a couch that gets stuck while he’s moving in and now I have no egress if my other neighbor starts a fire. I’m in favor of greater freedoms, and the freedom to choose a single stair MFH if I want. But I don’t want.
- kspacewalk2 3y agoA couch and a fire and that couch can't be pushed over or jumped over... That's quite a contrived scenario. I suspect that most of the improvements in the fire safety record of apartment buildings have to do with other factors like materials used, fireproof stair doors, etc etc. The reason I think the two stairs don't do much is that first world countries exist outside North America, they don't have this rule, and their fire safety is just as good or better than ours. Same reason I'm extremely skeptical that our fire trucks need to be so grotesquely large, despite what the fire departments claim. If there were no countries with a good fire safety record outside North America, like sure, okay, maybe. But they're just as good or better at fighting fires in Europe, and manage to go this with human sized trucks that don't require extremely wide streets, wide turn radiuses, and aren't nearly as deadly for pedestrians as a result. Thanks for existing, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan etc! One day we'll accept that you to cities, building and engineering better and just copy you.
- u801e 3y ago> A couch and a fire and that couch can't be pushed over or jumped over. Not everyone is young and in shape to push couches or jump over them.
- jojobas 3y agoYet people keep flocking to them dreadful single-family-home-majority cities, happy to pay rent and all.
- ksplicer 3y agoI don't know anyone starting a family happy with the situation. Most people I know are moving to suburbs only because they can't get 3 bedroom apartments in cities. If MFH's became broadly available I think many new families would flock there.
- wolverine876 3y ago> Burdensome regulations on housing construction have caused costs to skyrocket. How much have costs increased, and what tells us that it's regulations, not many other causes? Also, which regulations? Some are more valuable, some less, and inevitably some will misfire. I'm not just going to trust real estate developers, who have their own interests, to meet other needs. > below-market mandates I'm not sure we need more high-end development - those tenants have plenty of options. > community reviews In cities, new buildings can impact a community for a century. They should have a say, not just a developer from another city.
- cheriot 3y ago> Also, which regulations? The entire article is on the prohibition of single stair multi-family residential. > I'm not sure we need more high-end development - those tenants have plenty of options. This is silly. When car makers couldn't make enough cars in 2021 and the price went up, was the solution to ban making new cars? Should we have prohibited making cars with fancy trim? Having enough housing for everyone is the only way to make sure affordable housing exists.
- wolverine876 3y agoCities have seen plenty of high-end housing built (afaik), and yet there is still a lack of affordable housing. Building more expensive homes doesn't seem to increase availability of affordable ones. The idea that it would seems to be another 'trickle-down economics' theory, the one from the 1980s that if we help the wealthy get wealthier, the benefits will 'trickle-down' (turns out, only the first step worked). Reasonably, wealthy people don't see poor housing as an option, though there is gentrification. > When car makers couldn't make enough cars in 2021 and the price went up, was the solution to ban making new cars? Should we have prohibited making cars with fancy trim? Making expensive cars wouldn't seem to result in many more affordable ones. > This is silly. An aggressive assertion that you aren't thinking, and aren't willing to.
- akanet 3y agoYou are mistaken, modern housing construction in major cities is far below historical numbers
- willis936 3y agoA lot of these zoning changes lower the already low barrier for multinationals to build, but does nothing for actual families. I'm presently surrounded by hundreds of empty units priced out of reach because these companies are illegally colluding to fix the price. They may claim ignorance and try to launder responsibility through a series of tech products, but at the end of the day the rent is high where I am because of price fixing.
- robertlagrant 3y agoSorry I don't understand - why would they be selling units, but also deliberately pricing them too high?
- yccs27 3y agoTo get more money? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_fixing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_fixing
- robertlagrant 3y agoBut they're standing empty. If they're empty, they're not getting any money.
- willis936 3y agoThey're maximizing revenue by operating at a lower quantity and higher cost. This is microeconomics 101. People get driven out of urban areas where there are good paying jobs. In an ideal market this should be undercut by competition. In reality all available housing in urban areas are owned by large corporations all using the same price-setting backend. This is an illegal trust supercharged by the internet and globalization. It's an international Pottersville rapidly sprung from nowhere. So no, big corporations don't need more government handouts to do more of the same. Incentives for not-profit-driven entities (such as humans seeking secure housing) should be given. https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-backs-tenants-price-fixing-case-big-landlords-real-estate-tech https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-backs-tenants-price-f...