13 ms·

Has LA cracked the code for building affordable housing?

84 points by vwoolf 3y ago

inglor_cz 3y ago
"The housing crisis of the middle class is largely self-inflicted. " Yeah. With current technology, you can build an incredible amount of housing in a year or so. The most prominent obstacle is legal, and that's mostly NIMBY activity. You can sink anything into decades of quagmire by weaponizing all sorts of environmental laws and bylaws.
_8j50 3y ago
HUD and state/local counterparts should invest in real estate with the sole purpose of lowering housing costs. They should aim to break-even on their investments. They should also directly build and sell houses for profit to compete against commercial entities and drive down new housing cost.
dsgnr 3y ago
[dead]
lasericus 3y ago
[flagged]
sigsegv420 3y ago
Cracking the code is about as easy as reversing a rot-13 cipher. Apparently "build more housing where people want to be" faces more... political difficulties than purely technical ones.
crooked-v 3y ago
There's no big secret here. Dump restrictive zoning requirements, remove subjective approval processes, and make the permitting process a "shall approve" instead of "may approve", and you'll see a lot of new housing get built very quickly. All the slowdowns and immense extra expenses are self-inflicted by city residents who either don't care, don't want cheaper housing, or have been infected by the terminally brainless anti-housing pseudo-left.
- o11c 3y ago
  The problem with "shall approve" is that sometimes the best answer really is "no". A lot of ecological disasters are averted by processes that seem long and drawn out, but which actually are just companies not understanding that "no, we don't want you to burn down the planet around us". Residential is obviously somewhat different, but not entirely.
  - crooked-v 3y ago
    "Ecological disasters" is covered by putting in objective instead of subjective rules. The point is to make objections like "doesn't fit neighborhood character" / "blocks the view" / "would replace this extremely historic run-down laundromat" hold no weight in the process.
  - epistasis 3y ago
    The environmental cost of saying "no" to denser housing on land that is already developed is extremely high, and leads to development on green fields where there is nobody to oppose the development. There should be an automatic "yes" to any mixed use housing and small retail development that is infill, from an environmental perspective. There should be an automatic "no" to any greenfield development, additional parking, or freeways. And to get over that "no" there should be strong environmental studies that show benefit, not just neutrality. Our existing built environment is unsustainable and needs to change drastically. Keeping it in the current state is untenable. We should be radically reshaping it as fast as possible with the fewest brakes if we care about the environment.
- thisgoesnowhere 3y ago
  The restrictive zoning practices, long approval processes ridiculous permitting costs etc are in place because most people's entire net worth is held up in housing and they vote for laws that keep the price high for that reason. It's completely backwards to think that the reason why housing is expensive is because of those symptoms when the root cause is more than half the population wants mega high housing costs.
  - 3y ago
pas 3y ago
> approving more units through this program in the last 13 months than all affordable housing approved in previous three years combined — without dedicating any additional subsidy. oh, so it was NIMBYs all along!? pikatchu face
- readthenotes1 3y ago
  That's not what I read from the article. Instead it seemed to be fairly arbitrary government regulations such as required shrubbery and facade articulation that make the cost of building prohibitively expensive. Now, you may be saying it's NIMBY for the LA government to require unnecessary (or mildly necessary) stuff to keep the neighborhoods beautiful, but it's I'd guess it's probably more "just because I can means I do" typical petite bureaucratic power flexing.
  - h0l0cube 3y ago
    > required shrubbery and facade articulation Isn't that appeasing to the NIMBYs who don't want their property values to drop?
    - echelon 3y ago
      This is decades of regulation set by people who may no longer be alive. These archaic rules were crafted for a different era and are products of that time and thinking. Their desires and pressures were different than the ones we face today. We need to garbage collect the rules and streamline for today's needs. Some regulations, such as fire safety, remain important. Many others are simply an unnecessary impediment that hold us back from meeting demand.
      - kiba 3y ago
        Their desire and pressures probably impedes the time they're in. It's just not immediately obvious, and even today it's not completely obvious. Typically, the response to ever increasing traffic congestion is to invest in wider highway, but the consequence remain the same, yet people continues to push for highway expansion.
jimbob45 3y ago
What is “affordable housing”? All housing becomes affordable once you build enough of it. Is it just the politically correct way of saying “low-quality housing”?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- losteric 3y ago
  Subsidized housing, through vouchers or rent control. At least in my city.
- ec109685 3y ago
  This housing is deed restricted to certain income levels.
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    there are documented cases of small groups of investors immediately buying new housing stock just to flip it for a profit on some small time scale. rinse and repeat
- striking 3y ago
  > There are dozens of building code (not just zoning code) requirements that add cost and complexity to housing projects in cities like LA. Street trees, front setbacks, off-street parking, roof decks, façade articulation — these are nice to haves, yet LA requires these features in many cases. > Without these goodies, some ED1 buildings will be ugly. Some will be poorly designed. Just about all of them, by definition, will be “out of scale” with their surroundings. (LA housing activist Joe Cohen has a great thread of renderings of ED1 projects.) I personally think all of that is ok. A housing emergency is no time for aesthetic perfection. LA, like San Francisco, is finally acting like it. If "low quality" just means "ugly" then... Yes? But if "low quality" means "unlivable" then no.
  - ldoughty 3y ago
    I think it depends what permits they are waiving as part of this plan... Will we see a bunch of leaning buildings like Santos Brazil after their big tower boom? I imagine they are keeping most of the safety ones.. but it wasn't well highlighted in the article
fragmede 3y ago
Or, seeing as how it's kind of important, we could subsidize building more housing.
- readthenotes1 3y ago
  Or seeing as how it's kinda important, we could stop regulatory capture for housing. (There is an article here on hackers news not too long ago that said that while most industries had had huge productivity gains in the last 30 years, construction had been flat or decreasing - mostly because of increased regulation)
  - SheepSlapper 3y ago
    Coming from a construction family, this is THE problem with building right now. Material costs going up by an order of magnitude during COVID times (and not really recovering) was rough, but it doesn't hold a candle to the dumpster fire that is regulation. Permits for everything (some permits are good, some are SO bad), mandates for things that increase cost for marginal/no gains in the finished product, and a ton of red tape/money going to people not involved in the actual work or the quality of the end product. If I, as a builder, have to go through all that bullshit for each house I build, the sane response is that I'm only building expensive houses that take more time but end up being similar $/hr for me, because I end up saving money and time dealing with the regulators.
    - readthenotes1 3y ago
      I have a friend who builds temporary structures for events. He was telling me that a fire marshal insisted there be a sprinkler insistence installed in the tent over the swimming pool...
- Veedrac 3y ago
  You don't solve the problem of having more demand than supply by subsidizing demand. You solve it by making it legal to build housing. There is already plenty of monetary reward in building houses in places where housing is expensive; that's what it means for housing to be expensive.
ijhuygft776 3y ago
Affordable is easy in Cali... you just have to charge 200% of what is reasonable.
twelvechairs 3y ago
Good to see this happening. That said I strongly dislike when there's a conflation of "affordable housing" (lower-case, the general concept of providing for people on lower incomes) with specific schemes you have to qualify for (often "Afffordable Housing" upper-case) - in this case it seems to be deed restrictions on income that are required in exchange for floorspace bonuses and building code relaxations? There's a big problem for me in the latter building inefficient bureaucratic systems and being able to be gamed (e.g. If I'm rich maybe I can still buy a lower income unit for my children or perhaps my wife or mother and then rent it out. I could lower my income for one year just to qualify etc.)
- laylower 3y ago
  I agree, this is a bit like shareholder's ownership in the UK and the antiquated leaseholder setting. Just no. The solution isn't to make home ownership an even more complicated topic but to increase the stock, within the parameters of building regulations.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Ya, I don’t see any of these schemes being sustainable until they are somehow universal (eg an option even for the rich, but not one they can somehow monopolize). Like Singapore’s public housing, which isn’t gated by income, but rationed in other ways (marriage, have a family, must be a resident).
  - solumunus 3y ago
    I think the only answer is that housing as an investment needs to be banned, it’s just too damaging. Not only is it making people poorer by the decade, eventually leading to a dead economy, it’s completely unproductive. Imagine if all that money were to be invested in business instead.
    - WeylandYutani 3y ago
      Or have the government build houses at cost. That is how post war Europe fixed the housing crisis. I don't blame investors not wanting to build for the poor- they would quite literally lose money.
cyberax 3y ago
I'll save you a click: no. Here's the thing: housing in dense cities will NEVER be affordable. Never. What happened recently (and is happening in other cities like Seattle) is companies pivoting from building "luxury" crappy condos to sweet state-subsdizied housing. These kinds of projects are great for them, they don't need to care about the market demand.
- skeptrune 3y ago
  That's not really what the article says was going on. Those "luxuries" were being mandated by the bureaucratic agencies. Builders seem to have never really wanted them in the first place. The developers are apparently happy to ditch all the niceities and offer affordable housing if allowed it seems. Not like I've done my own research, but the article was actually interesting.
- BadCookie 3y ago
  Tokyo manages to remain affordable somehow. “Two full-time workers earning Tokyo’s minimum wage can comfortably afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in six of the city’s 23 wards.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/editorials/tokyo-housing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/editorials/tokyo-...
  - stavros 3y ago
    Not to detract from your point, but 2-bedroom apartments in Tokyo are 60 sqm or something.
    - ZoomerCretin 3y ago
      That's 646 square feet. That's 25'5"x25'5". For an urban area, that's plenty of space. That doesn't mean literally every apartment is that small, just that small and cheap apartments are available for those who want them, and American-sized apartments with American prices are also available for those who want to pay for them. That's one of the main reasons why housing is so expensive in the United States. We paternalistically decide that 760 square feet is the absolute minimum amount of livable space for a one-bedroom apartment, and instead force people who can't afford that much space to split a 1200 square foot apartment with three people. Adults are more than capable of deciding for themselves how big of an apartment they would like to live in. Banning 60 square meter apartments doesn't help people who can't afford the legal mandated minimum.
cyberax 3y ago
[flagged]
- apsurd 3y ago
  I'm the person that wants more dense and walkable cities, so I'm really curious to learn more about why that will ALWAYS lead to more misery down the road. Honest question, do you have any stuff I can read or terms I can search on?
  - vuln 3y ago
    There is plenty of history showing the long term effects and outcome of dense housing run by the Government. Dense housing ran by private companies will always be a race to capture the most amount of profit. While Government ran dense housing will be affected by an ever decreasing budget and ever increasing cost. OP is right. We need to invest in “fly over” states. There is an abundance of land and opportunity to achieve the American dream. Humans living in a tiny cube and commuting in a tiny cylinder (bus, subway) to a tiny office cube ad nauseam is the worst.
    - apsurd 3y ago
      Thanks, so it's specifically govt run affordable housing. I read OP as the more general "dense cities = BAD" but seems like it's more specifically "govt run plans for dense housing". I can understand that. Also, yes also agree about more jobs and opportunities more distributed across the land. That sounds good. I think about my position as favoring walkable dense metros in the more organic manner - people like people - we WANT to be close to one another. And the infrastructure to make that possible, comfortable, affordable, and sustainable.. is great! The exchange of ideas and tolerance leading to innovation, is a function of dense metros. Is that not just fundamentally...true?
      - kiba 3y ago
        Government planned housing being bad is just a feature of your specific local context, not an inevitability to all government subsidized/built housing. Governments are human organizations, and it's not a surprise that some organizations are better ran than other.
skeptrune 3y ago
My main takeaway from this is that the free market may have already lowered housing costs if bureaucracy would just get out of the way. I mean it seems like there is something to the bit of regulation that forces them to keep rent low, but broadly this suggests to me that the bulk of spend should be on somehow making the bureaucratic part of the system run more smoothly or be easier to navigate so more projects get approved and built. The last bit about learning from Houston especially made me chuckle. Houston is cheap and big at the same time and likely because there are so little bureaucraticisms for zoning/roofdeck requirements. The cost is that the city is ugly and not "tier 1" but seems like a fine tradeoff.
- ipnon 3y ago
  How much of your rent is going to salaries at city hall? How much better would the city be to substitute these salaries for cheaper rent?
- ZoomerCretin 3y ago
  Canada is seeing housing prices skyrocket like mad because they refuse to understand this. They recently passed a federal spending bill to help fund city planners, because a huge bottleneck in housing construction is the cities requiring a city planner to check boxes on a ton of things that were never important to begin with. City planning is one of the most destructive professions in the United States. In terms of death, lost years of life to commuting, health issues, and social ills, it has no peer. We live shorter lives, with more health issues, and are lonelier than our rich peers in other countries because of our centrally-planned built environment. We built cities the same way for thousands of years: for humans on foot; and are only now coming to realize that our great auto-centric suburban experiment was an enormous and historic blunder.
robomartin 3y ago
Making things affordable in LA will be easy. Almost everyone I know is either in the process of leaving CA or planning on leaving. This includes everything from middle-class individuals to high-net-worth families, soon-to-retire and retired. Everyone is sick of the financially abusive environment in CA, at every level. And, of course, other issues. My wife and I are so sick of it that it has become an almost weekly conversation. She is actively investigating where to go. There are a range of options, from other places in the US to Europe. Today she was showing me her research on opportunities in Valencia, Spain. When we go, we will take three businesses and as many of the people working for us as possible out of CA. Logistically, it is far more likely that the move will happen within the US, of course. So yeah, keep going on this path and housing affordability will not be a problem at all. That's my take on it. Right or wrong.
- gottorf 3y ago
  > There are a range of options, from other places in the US > far more likely that the move will happen within the US I don't know what you value in a place to live in, but many Southern and Midwestern states have much better fiscal and regulatory climates[0] and are full of midsized cities with surprisingly charming and walkable downtown areas. About the only thing you will not find is the delicious Mediterranean climate found in much of California. [0]: https://www.freedominthe50states.org/ https://www.freedominthe50states.org/
  - robomartin 3y ago
    > I don't know what you value in a place to live in Sanity and reason would be a good starting point. California is like dating a beautiful supermodel who is an horrible person. Everyone sees the outside and thinks "How lucky". Nobody know she the person she is inside that exterior. It didn't use to be like this. There's only one reason it got this way, and that is the support of a putrid ideology that has, throughout history and across the world, destroyed everything it has touched. And here we are.
    - reverius42 3y ago
jmyeet 3y ago
Credit has to be given to the governor Gavin Newsom here. He's made some questionable policy choices, particularly with seemingly random vetoes (which the legislature could override but they haven't done in decades because that would take up time in the next legislative session). Prop 13 was about the absolute worst thing to ever happen to California housing. Rising property prices make people feel like they're richer but really they're not. You typically still own one housing unit of wealth in almost all cases. It's just the nominal value is higher. For this benefit, eye-wateringly massive subsidies have been given to Disney, institutional property holders and the very wealthy for absolutely no gain. But this goes to show how powerful NIMBYs are and the level of delusional self-interest people possess. For those unfamiliar, Prop 13 capped the annual property tax increases to 1-2%. Property tax rates are reset when the property is sold. Property held in LLCs is never reset because the LLC not the property is sold. This is why Disney's property tax rate was basically set in the 1960s and never been adjusted for current values. The net effect is that incumbent property owners from the 70s and 80s pay a tiny fraction of the assessable property tax on their properties and this has been a massive drain on state budgets. This was sold as not kicking seniors out of their houses. Texas handles this a lot better: property taxes can be deferred until death or the sale of the property. But it gets worse: this beneficial tax rate can be inherited. It's just locking in generational wealth. It's also not allowing people to move because they can't keep this beneficial tax rate. Recently, there was a very minor partial rollback on this known as Prop 19. What is it? It limits this beneficial property tax rate inheritance to only one property. That's right. If you owned 10 properties then your family could inherit all your tax rates prior to this. So this only affects people who bought multiple properties in the 20th century and sat on them. That's probably less than 1% of CAlifornians. Prop 13 passed with only 51% of the vote. 49% of voters rejected this very minor reform. That's how powerful the NIMBY brain rot is. Now against this force, which tends to overtake all local cities, towns, councils and planning boards, there have been a whole bunch of reforms: stopping the abuse of CEQA to block any development, increasing density without years-long planning approvals in certain cases (eg on major roads), all CA municpalities having to plan for how they're going to build more housing (aka the housing element) with real consequences for not complying (eg the builder's remedy) and so on. Passing any of these given the power of NIMBYism with voters is a major accomplishment and I think these are starting to have an effect.
lulznews 3y ago
So let’s see if I have this right … build a bunch of shitty project housing … pols and devs get sweet kickbacks … slumlords create another junkie dealer hellhole. Everybody high fives and declares mission accomplished!
ZoomerCretin 3y ago
> A single person making $70,000 would qualify for a one-bedroom for about $2,000 per month. A family of four making $100,000 would qualify for a three-bed for about $2,500. So not what most people would consider "affordable". It's "affordable" because it's currently affordable to people making below the area's median income and is deed restricted. It's nearly-market rate housing. And that's a good thing! We need more housing of all kinds for all people. >ED1 is not going to end homelessness in LA. (Though some non-profit developers — including the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which spends millions of dollars advocating against housing policies like ED1 — are using the law to build affordable housing for the formerly homeless.) The AIDS Healthcare Foundation is mentioned in a throwaway line, but it's truly one of the most bizarre parts of the housing discourse in California. It's a non-profit organization controlled by Michael Weinstein, who uses the organization as his personal slush fund to sue housing development that would block views from his office and his personal home, and sued to block any development in the city of Los Angeles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_Healthcare_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_Healthcare_Foundation
- LoganDark 3y ago
  > So not what most people would consider "affordable". Yeah, this is basically "slightly less unaffordable housing". The one-bedrooms are apparently even more expensive than the two-bedrooms here, which are already extortionary, about double the price they were less than a decade ago. I would know, as for our current place (two-bedroom) we started at under $1,000 per month and ended up here paying almost $2,000 per month instead. Our family of three makes $35,000 a year. It's a wonder we're not homeless.
from-nibly 3y ago
I think they need to revisit their definition of done. All I saw was a 3d render and some people who said "could I build this" and they've somehow cracked something. Eli goldrat would say you've solved nothing until people are living in those homes and producing in your society. (Customers' customers have received value)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
imgabe 3y ago
There is no code to crack. Just build more housing and it will become affordable. If it’s not affordable, you haven’t built enough yet. It’s crazy how these cities will try literally anything except building more housing.
- somewhereoutth 3y ago
  Not necessarily. The housing market is very complex, and there is such a thing as induced demand - for example building lots more apartments in SF would make it even more attractive for e.g. tech companies to locate, and so they would quickly be filled, without moving the price.
  - j7ake 3y ago
    Any data to support this hypothesis?
  - imgabe 3y ago
    Induced demand refers to highways. Do you know of any studies demonstrating induced demand for housing? As a counterpoint, look at all the empty cities China built in the middle of nowhere. According to the "induced demand" hypothesis, people should have materialized to occupy them, but that didn't happen. Cities currently prevent the market from meeting even the regular demand, let alone any induced demand. Housing isn't going to get cheaper by not building housing.
    - Alifatisk 3y ago
      Aren’t those empty houses in China prone to break down? I think I remember seeing a video of a guy visiting one of those buildings and managed to kick through the wall and floor pretty easily.
      - egberts1 3y ago
        Yes, amongst others. https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/4nkkq7/apartment_buildings_in_china/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/4nkkq7/apartment_buil...
snapplebobapple 3y ago
Given california's long record of utter failure on this issue, I am skeptical.I see proposed, how many are actually approved and in construction? Its a decent start if they are actually managing to gwt building started
willardsherrie 3y ago
[dead]

84 points by vwoolf 3y ago

"The housing crisis of the middle class is largely self-inflicted. " Yeah. With current technology, you can build an incredible amount of housing in a year or so. The most prominent obstacle is legal, and that's mostly NIMBY activity. You can sink anything into decades of quagmire by weaponizing all sorts of environmental laws and bylaws.

_8j50 3y ago

HUD and state/local counterparts should invest in real estate with the sole purpose of lowering housing costs. They should aim to break-even on their investments. They should also directly build and sell houses for profit to compete against commercial entities and drive down new housing cost.

dsgnr 3y ago

[dead]

lasericus 3y ago

[flagged]

sigsegv420 3y ago

Cracking the code is about as easy as reversing a rot-13 cipher. Apparently "build more housing where people want to be" faces more... political difficulties than purely technical ones.

crooked-v 3y ago

There's no big secret here. Dump restrictive zoning requirements, remove subjective approval processes, and make the permitting process a "shall approve" instead of "may approve", and you'll see a lot of new housing get built very quickly. All the slowdowns and immense extra expenses are self-inflicted by city residents who either don't care, don't want cheaper housing, or have been infected by the terminally brainless anti-housing pseudo-left.

o11c 3y ago
The problem with "shall approve" is that sometimes the best answer really is "no". A lot of ecological disasters are averted by processes that seem long and drawn out, but which actually are just companies not understanding that "no, we don't want you to burn down the planet around us". Residential is obviously somewhat different, but not entirely.
- crooked-v 3y ago
  "Ecological disasters" is covered by putting in objective instead of subjective rules. The point is to make objections like "doesn't fit neighborhood character" / "blocks the view" / "would replace this extremely historic run-down laundromat" hold no weight in the process.
- epistasis 3y ago
  The environmental cost of saying "no" to denser housing on land that is already developed is extremely high, and leads to development on green fields where there is nobody to oppose the development. There should be an automatic "yes" to any mixed use housing and small retail development that is infill, from an environmental perspective. There should be an automatic "no" to any greenfield development, additional parking, or freeways. And to get over that "no" there should be strong environmental studies that show benefit, not just neutrality. Our existing built environment is unsustainable and needs to change drastically. Keeping it in the current state is untenable. We should be radically reshaping it as fast as possible with the fewest brakes if we care about the environment.
thisgoesnowhere 3y ago
The restrictive zoning practices, long approval processes ridiculous permitting costs etc are in place because most people's entire net worth is held up in housing and they vote for laws that keep the price high for that reason. It's completely backwards to think that the reason why housing is expensive is because of those symptoms when the root cause is more than half the population wants mega high housing costs.
- 3y ago

pas 3y ago

> approving more units through this program in the last 13 months than all affordable housing approved in previous three years combined — without dedicating any additional subsidy. oh, so it was NIMBYs all along!? pikatchu face

readthenotes1 3y ago
That's not what I read from the article. Instead it seemed to be fairly arbitrary government regulations such as required shrubbery and facade articulation that make the cost of building prohibitively expensive. Now, you may be saying it's NIMBY for the LA government to require unnecessary (or mildly necessary) stuff to keep the neighborhoods beautiful, but it's I'd guess it's probably more "just because I can means I do" typical petite bureaucratic power flexing.
- h0l0cube 3y ago
  > required shrubbery and facade articulation Isn't that appeasing to the NIMBYs who don't want their property values to drop?
  - echelon 3y ago
    This is decades of regulation set by people who may no longer be alive. These archaic rules were crafted for a different era and are products of that time and thinking. Their desires and pressures were different than the ones we face today. We need to garbage collect the rules and streamline for today's needs. Some regulations, such as fire safety, remain important. Many others are simply an unnecessary impediment that hold us back from meeting demand.
    - kiba 3y ago
      Their desire and pressures probably impedes the time they're in. It's just not immediately obvious, and even today it's not completely obvious. Typically, the response to ever increasing traffic congestion is to invest in wider highway, but the consequence remain the same, yet people continues to push for highway expansion.

jimbob45 3y ago

What is “affordable housing”? All housing becomes affordable once you build enough of it. Is it just the politically correct way of saying “low-quality housing”?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
losteric 3y ago
Subsidized housing, through vouchers or rent control. At least in my city.
ec109685 3y ago
This housing is deed restricted to certain income levels.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  there are documented cases of small groups of investors immediately buying new housing stock just to flip it for a profit on some small time scale. rinse and repeat
striking 3y ago
> There are dozens of building code (not just zoning code) requirements that add cost and complexity to housing projects in cities like LA. Street trees, front setbacks, off-street parking, roof decks, façade articulation — these are nice to haves, yet LA requires these features in many cases. > Without these goodies, some ED1 buildings will be ugly. Some will be poorly designed. Just about all of them, by definition, will be “out of scale” with their surroundings. (LA housing activist Joe Cohen has a great thread of renderings of ED1 projects.) I personally think all of that is ok. A housing emergency is no time for aesthetic perfection. LA, like San Francisco, is finally acting like it. If "low quality" just means "ugly" then... Yes? But if "low quality" means "unlivable" then no.
- ldoughty 3y ago
  I think it depends what permits they are waiving as part of this plan... Will we see a bunch of leaning buildings like Santos Brazil after their big tower boom? I imagine they are keeping most of the safety ones.. but it wasn't well highlighted in the article

fragmede 3y ago

Or, seeing as how it's kind of important, we could subsidize building more housing.

readthenotes1 3y ago
Or seeing as how it's kinda important, we could stop regulatory capture for housing. (There is an article here on hackers news not too long ago that said that while most industries had had huge productivity gains in the last 30 years, construction had been flat or decreasing - mostly because of increased regulation)
- SheepSlapper 3y ago
  Coming from a construction family, this is THE problem with building right now. Material costs going up by an order of magnitude during COVID times (and not really recovering) was rough, but it doesn't hold a candle to the dumpster fire that is regulation. Permits for everything (some permits are good, some are SO bad), mandates for things that increase cost for marginal/no gains in the finished product, and a ton of red tape/money going to people not involved in the actual work or the quality of the end product. If I, as a builder, have to go through all that bullshit for each house I build, the sane response is that I'm only building expensive houses that take more time but end up being similar $/hr for me, because I end up saving money and time dealing with the regulators.
  - readthenotes1 3y ago
    I have a friend who builds temporary structures for events. He was telling me that a fire marshal insisted there be a sprinkler insistence installed in the tent over the swimming pool...
Veedrac 3y ago
You don't solve the problem of having more demand than supply by subsidizing demand. You solve it by making it legal to build housing. There is already plenty of monetary reward in building houses in places where housing is expensive; that's what it means for housing to be expensive.

ijhuygft776 3y ago

Affordable is easy in Cali... you just have to charge 200% of what is reasonable.

twelvechairs 3y ago

Good to see this happening. That said I strongly dislike when there's a conflation of "affordable housing" (lower-case, the general concept of providing for people on lower incomes) with specific schemes you have to qualify for (often "Afffordable Housing" upper-case) - in this case it seems to be deed restrictions on income that are required in exchange for floorspace bonuses and building code relaxations? There's a big problem for me in the latter building inefficient bureaucratic systems and being able to be gamed (e.g. If I'm rich maybe I can still buy a lower income unit for my children or perhaps my wife or mother and then rent it out. I could lower my income for one year just to qualify etc.)

laylower 3y ago
I agree, this is a bit like shareholder's ownership in the UK and the antiquated leaseholder setting. Just no. The solution isn't to make home ownership an even more complicated topic but to increase the stock, within the parameters of building regulations.
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
Ya, I don’t see any of these schemes being sustainable until they are somehow universal (eg an option even for the rich, but not one they can somehow monopolize). Like Singapore’s public housing, which isn’t gated by income, but rationed in other ways (marriage, have a family, must be a resident).
- solumunus 3y ago
  I think the only answer is that housing as an investment needs to be banned, it’s just too damaging. Not only is it making people poorer by the decade, eventually leading to a dead economy, it’s completely unproductive. Imagine if all that money were to be invested in business instead.
  - WeylandYutani 3y ago
    Or have the government build houses at cost. That is how post war Europe fixed the housing crisis. I don't blame investors not wanting to build for the poor- they would quite literally lose money.

cyberax 3y ago

I'll save you a click: no. Here's the thing: housing in dense cities will NEVER be affordable. Never. What happened recently (and is happening in other cities like Seattle) is companies pivoting from building "luxury" crappy condos to sweet state-subsdizied housing. These kinds of projects are great for them, they don't need to care about the market demand.

skeptrune 3y ago
That's not really what the article says was going on. Those "luxuries" were being mandated by the bureaucratic agencies. Builders seem to have never really wanted them in the first place. The developers are apparently happy to ditch all the niceities and offer affordable housing if allowed it seems. Not like I've done my own research, but the article was actually interesting.
BadCookie 3y ago
Tokyo manages to remain affordable somehow. “Two full-time workers earning Tokyo’s minimum wage can comfortably afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in six of the city’s 23 wards.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/editorials/tokyo-housing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/editorials/tokyo-...
- stavros 3y ago
  Not to detract from your point, but 2-bedroom apartments in Tokyo are 60 sqm or something.
  - ZoomerCretin 3y ago
    That's 646 square feet. That's 25'5"x25'5". For an urban area, that's plenty of space. That doesn't mean literally every apartment is that small, just that small and cheap apartments are available for those who want them, and American-sized apartments with American prices are also available for those who want to pay for them. That's one of the main reasons why housing is so expensive in the United States. We paternalistically decide that 760 square feet is the absolute minimum amount of livable space for a one-bedroom apartment, and instead force people who can't afford that much space to split a 1200 square foot apartment with three people. Adults are more than capable of deciding for themselves how big of an apartment they would like to live in. Banning 60 square meter apartments doesn't help people who can't afford the legal mandated minimum.

cyberax 3y ago

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apsurd 3y ago
I'm the person that wants more dense and walkable cities, so I'm really curious to learn more about why that will ALWAYS lead to more misery down the road. Honest question, do you have any stuff I can read or terms I can search on?
- vuln 3y ago
  There is plenty of history showing the long term effects and outcome of dense housing run by the Government. Dense housing ran by private companies will always be a race to capture the most amount of profit. While Government ran dense housing will be affected by an ever decreasing budget and ever increasing cost. OP is right. We need to invest in “fly over” states. There is an abundance of land and opportunity to achieve the American dream. Humans living in a tiny cube and commuting in a tiny cylinder (bus, subway) to a tiny office cube ad nauseam is the worst.
  - apsurd 3y ago
    Thanks, so it's specifically govt run affordable housing. I read OP as the more general "dense cities = BAD" but seems like it's more specifically "govt run plans for dense housing". I can understand that. Also, yes also agree about more jobs and opportunities more distributed across the land. That sounds good. I think about my position as favoring walkable dense metros in the more organic manner - people like people - we WANT to be close to one another. And the infrastructure to make that possible, comfortable, affordable, and sustainable.. is great! The exchange of ideas and tolerance leading to innovation, is a function of dense metros. Is that not just fundamentally...true?
    - kiba 3y ago
      Government planned housing being bad is just a feature of your specific local context, not an inevitability to all government subsidized/built housing. Governments are human organizations, and it's not a surprise that some organizations are better ran than other.

skeptrune 3y ago

My main takeaway from this is that the free market may have already lowered housing costs if bureaucracy would just get out of the way. I mean it seems like there is something to the bit of regulation that forces them to keep rent low, but broadly this suggests to me that the bulk of spend should be on somehow making the bureaucratic part of the system run more smoothly or be easier to navigate so more projects get approved and built. The last bit about learning from Houston especially made me chuckle. Houston is cheap and big at the same time and likely because there are so little bureaucraticisms for zoning/roofdeck requirements. The cost is that the city is ugly and not "tier 1" but seems like a fine tradeoff.

ipnon 3y ago
How much of your rent is going to salaries at city hall? How much better would the city be to substitute these salaries for cheaper rent?
ZoomerCretin 3y ago
Canada is seeing housing prices skyrocket like mad because they refuse to understand this. They recently passed a federal spending bill to help fund city planners, because a huge bottleneck in housing construction is the cities requiring a city planner to check boxes on a ton of things that were never important to begin with. City planning is one of the most destructive professions in the United States. In terms of death, lost years of life to commuting, health issues, and social ills, it has no peer. We live shorter lives, with more health issues, and are lonelier than our rich peers in other countries because of our centrally-planned built environment. We built cities the same way for thousands of years: for humans on foot; and are only now coming to realize that our great auto-centric suburban experiment was an enormous and historic blunder.

robomartin 3y ago

Making things affordable in LA will be easy. Almost everyone I know is either in the process of leaving CA or planning on leaving. This includes everything from middle-class individuals to high-net-worth families, soon-to-retire and retired. Everyone is sick of the financially abusive environment in CA, at every level. And, of course, other issues. My wife and I are so sick of it that it has become an almost weekly conversation. She is actively investigating where to go. There are a range of options, from other places in the US to Europe. Today she was showing me her research on opportunities in Valencia, Spain. When we go, we will take three businesses and as many of the people working for us as possible out of CA. Logistically, it is far more likely that the move will happen within the US, of course. So yeah, keep going on this path and housing affordability will not be a problem at all. That's my take on it. Right or wrong.

gottorf 3y ago
> There are a range of options, from other places in the US > far more likely that the move will happen within the US I don't know what you value in a place to live in, but many Southern and Midwestern states have much better fiscal and regulatory climates[0] and are full of midsized cities with surprisingly charming and walkable downtown areas. About the only thing you will not find is the delicious Mediterranean climate found in much of California. [0]: https://www.freedominthe50states.org/ https://www.freedominthe50states.org/
- robomartin 3y ago
  > I don't know what you value in a place to live in Sanity and reason would be a good starting point. California is like dating a beautiful supermodel who is an horrible person. Everyone sees the outside and thinks "How lucky". Nobody know she the person she is inside that exterior. It didn't use to be like this. There's only one reason it got this way, and that is the support of a putrid ideology that has, throughout history and across the world, destroyed everything it has touched. And here we are.
  - reverius42 3y ago

jmyeet 3y ago

Credit has to be given to the governor Gavin Newsom here. He's made some questionable policy choices, particularly with seemingly random vetoes (which the legislature could override but they haven't done in decades because that would take up time in the next legislative session). Prop 13 was about the absolute worst thing to ever happen to California housing. Rising property prices make people feel like they're richer but really they're not. You typically still own one housing unit of wealth in almost all cases. It's just the nominal value is higher. For this benefit, eye-wateringly massive subsidies have been given to Disney, institutional property holders and the very wealthy for absolutely no gain. But this goes to show how powerful NIMBYs are and the level of delusional self-interest people possess. For those unfamiliar, Prop 13 capped the annual property tax increases to 1-2%. Property tax rates are reset when the property is sold. Property held in LLCs is never reset because the LLC not the property is sold. This is why Disney's property tax rate was basically set in the 1960s and never been adjusted for current values. The net effect is that incumbent property owners from the 70s and 80s pay a tiny fraction of the assessable property tax on their properties and this has been a massive drain on state budgets. This was sold as not kicking seniors out of their houses. Texas handles this a lot better: property taxes can be deferred until death or the sale of the property. But it gets worse: this beneficial tax rate can be inherited. It's just locking in generational wealth. It's also not allowing people to move because they can't keep this beneficial tax rate. Recently, there was a very minor partial rollback on this known as Prop 19. What is it? It limits this beneficial property tax rate inheritance to only one property. That's right. If you owned 10 properties then your family could inherit all your tax rates prior to this. So this only affects people who bought multiple properties in the 20th century and sat on them. That's probably less than 1% of CAlifornians. Prop 13 passed with only 51% of the vote. 49% of voters rejected this very minor reform. That's how powerful the NIMBY brain rot is. Now against this force, which tends to overtake all local cities, towns, councils and planning boards, there have been a whole bunch of reforms: stopping the abuse of CEQA to block any development, increasing density without years-long planning approvals in certain cases (eg on major roads), all CA municpalities having to plan for how they're going to build more housing (aka the housing element) with real consequences for not complying (eg the builder's remedy) and so on. Passing any of these given the power of NIMBYism with voters is a major accomplishment and I think these are starting to have an effect.

lulznews 3y ago

So let’s see if I have this right … build a bunch of shitty project housing … pols and devs get sweet kickbacks … slumlords create another junkie dealer hellhole. Everybody high fives and declares mission accomplished!

ZoomerCretin 3y ago

> A single person making $70,000 would qualify for a one-bedroom for about $2,000 per month. A family of four making $100,000 would qualify for a three-bed for about $2,500. So not what most people would consider "affordable". It's "affordable" because it's currently affordable to people making below the area's median income and is deed restricted. It's nearly-market rate housing. And that's a good thing! We need more housing of all kinds for all people. >ED1 is not going to end homelessness in LA. (Though some non-profit developers — including the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which spends millions of dollars advocating against housing policies like ED1 — are using the law to build affordable housing for the formerly homeless.) The AIDS Healthcare Foundation is mentioned in a throwaway line, but it's truly one of the most bizarre parts of the housing discourse in California. It's a non-profit organization controlled by Michael Weinstein, who uses the organization as his personal slush fund to sue housing development that would block views from his office and his personal home, and sued to block any development in the city of Los Angeles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_Healthcare_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_Healthcare_Foundation

LoganDark 3y ago
> So not what most people would consider "affordable". Yeah, this is basically "slightly less unaffordable housing". The one-bedrooms are apparently even more expensive than the two-bedrooms here, which are already extortionary, about double the price they were less than a decade ago. I would know, as for our current place (two-bedroom) we started at under $1,000 per month and ended up here paying almost $2,000 per month instead. Our family of three makes $35,000 a year. It's a wonder we're not homeless.

from-nibly 3y ago

I think they need to revisit their definition of done. All I saw was a 3d render and some people who said "could I build this" and they've somehow cracked something. Eli goldrat would say you've solved nothing until people are living in those homes and producing in your society. (Customers' customers have received value)

deleted 3y ago

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imgabe 3y ago

There is no code to crack. Just build more housing and it will become affordable. If it’s not affordable, you haven’t built enough yet. It’s crazy how these cities will try literally anything except building more housing.

somewhereoutth 3y ago
Not necessarily. The housing market is very complex, and there is such a thing as induced demand - for example building lots more apartments in SF would make it even more attractive for e.g. tech companies to locate, and so they would quickly be filled, without moving the price.
- j7ake 3y ago
  Any data to support this hypothesis?
- imgabe 3y ago
  Induced demand refers to highways. Do you know of any studies demonstrating induced demand for housing? As a counterpoint, look at all the empty cities China built in the middle of nowhere. According to the "induced demand" hypothesis, people should have materialized to occupy them, but that didn't happen. Cities currently prevent the market from meeting even the regular demand, let alone any induced demand. Housing isn't going to get cheaper by not building housing.
  - Alifatisk 3y ago
    Aren’t those empty houses in China prone to break down? I think I remember seeing a video of a guy visiting one of those buildings and managed to kick through the wall and floor pretty easily.
    - egberts1 3y ago
      Yes, amongst others. https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/4nkkq7/apartment_buildings_in_china/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/4nkkq7/apartment_buil...

snapplebobapple 3y ago

Given california's long record of utter failure on this issue, I am skeptical.I see proposed, how many are actually approved and in construction? Its a decent start if they are actually managing to gwt building started

willardsherrie 3y ago

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