6 ms·

Of course timber won't fix the housing shortage. The housing shortage is artificial. There are plenty of empty units across the country. It's a distribution iss

Of course timber won't fix the housing shortage. The housing shortage is artificial. There are plenty of empty units across the country. It's a distribution issue of: owners holding vacant units, people wanting/needing to live in specific locations, and individual preferences for bigger, fancier, better school, sfh, etc attributes. With an almost stagnate population growth this isn't really a building issue even if it is a supply side issue.

throwitaway222 3y ago
Raise prop taxes for non-rented vacation units by 150% Raise prop taxes for rentals by %350. Raise prop taxes for airbnbs by %500. Everyone will own a home, and home prices will plummet as people try to unload extremely expensive property taxes. And if it doesn't work, double my percentages. Or just make it 100k per year. Those people crazy enough to keep holding them, will fund the creation of homeless housing. DV's are just landlords and other types of bottom feeders.
- louthy 3y ago
  Everybody will be paying more rent
  - throwitaway222 3y ago
    If that happens, just raise prop taxes to 100k per year (for rental units).
    - adam_arthur 3y ago
      Raising property taxes on rentals increases cost to renters. Raising taxes on vacant units is a good idea though (but perhaps hard to enforce). Remote work is solving the housing shortage already though, through opening up living to much wider geography (and locales that don't impede building, such as TX and FL). It will just take a decade or so to normalize. In-person work forced people to compete over limited housing in small areas
      - bobthepanda 3y ago
        I would say it is doing the opposite of solving the housing shortage right now. It is exporting it instead while also not doing much about the shortage at its origins. All those cute picturesque towns in the Mountain West don’t have a large supply of homes to begin with, so it only takes a few wealthy Californians to seriously upend the local market with wages paid much higher than what locals can get for their skills.
    - its_ethan 3y ago
      For what it's worth - you come across as completely unserious if your suggestion to fix housing shortages is genuinely to levy a $100k tax for property owners who aren't currently renting out their units.
      - throwitaway222 3y ago
        I'll tell you what's unserious - people wanting to actually solve the housing crisis. Every solution is 100% idiotic. The way we currently operate is to build more housing, they are building a dramatic amount of housing, and the price of a house is still $400k medium. It is telling me they are not selling to families but instead to corporations, bnbers, rentals, foreign governments. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/housing-starts https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/housing-starts
        ejb999 3y ago
        Maybe they still cost $400K, because the purchase of the land, the labor and the materials and the interest to finance the project eat up most of that $400K, not to mention some places charge you building permits that cost ten's of thousands of dollars - if not more. Nobody is going to build houses and sell them at a loss or at break-even price, they need to cover their costs and make some profit as well to keep the business alive.
        SheepSlapper 3y ago
        Coming from a construction background, I can confirm all of this. Permits are out of control, material prices are nuts (not COVID nuts, but still at least 300% higher than the good old days), and subcontractors are both hard to find and more expensive. It's not crazy to build a decent 3-4 bedroom house and have it cost $400k all said and done, even in my small-big-ish town. A lot of people in here arguing, bet there are very few of us that have actually built houses before :)
        travisb 3y ago
        I was speaking to my house builder in the middle of 2023 and he noted that it had become impossible to build a starter house (2/3 bedrooms, 1.5-2 bath) for less than $450k CAD (~$300k USD) -- excluding land, utility connection, and financing costs. He also mentioned that new requirements going into effect this year were going to add $10-15k per house. People tend to have a poor grasp on what building a new house actually costs. They cost a lot to build with no gouging whatsoever.
- jimbob45 3y ago
  Couldn't agree more. I'm tired of the HN crowd that espouses the benefits of building more supply, yet consider the AirBNB and rental-afflicted homes to be totally untouchable. Even worse are the ones that seem to strongly believe in environmentalism, yet have no problem tearing down forests to build more supply on them...for AirBNBs and rentals.
  - throwitaway222 3y ago
    There are so many people that think drugs or poor decisions are leading to the homeless tents all over the place. The drugs and poor decisions are things that come AFTER going homeless. The studies are showing that rising housing costs have directly caused the homeless crisis. WE neeed to do something fast.
  - smolder 3y ago
    Cutting down trees to build housing or furniture or whatever is a carbon sink. More trees can be planted.
    - jimbob45 3y ago
      On top of the house that took the space where trees previously were? There’s only so much space for trees. Seizing it for AirBNBs seems like a massive waste when we have hotels that use space much more efficiently.
- jrockway 3y ago
  I mean, landlords are going to pass on their costs directly to tenants. If you raise property taxes, then rents simply go up. None of these tax increases are going to magically make a 20% down payment appear in someone's bank account that they could use to purchase something outright. None of these tax increases are going to prevent people who legitimately want to rent from renting. (Some examples: apartments that are $30k a month for rich people that need to live in some city for 3 months of the year. $8k/month assisted living facilities for rich people that are now old and need access to care while still living alone.) Probably the most realistic thing to do is to simply implement rent control. "You can't legally collect more than $X/month in rent" fixes the problem of rent being too high. If that makes owning rental units unpopular, so be it.
  - throwitaway222 3y ago
    There is absolutely nothing wrong with allowing someone to rent a unit for $30k per month - even if there are thousands of them. If we're collecting 100k in property taxes earmarked for certain programs - that would effectively fund building an entire ADU on a property per year for that expensive rental to exist.
- survirtual 3y ago
  To add, - Make it illegal for corporations to own residential homes / any property in residentially zone locations - Generate policies to eliminate real estate parasites (illegal to have percentage profits off of sales, open data, low friction technological avenues to remove those jobs altogether) - Marginally increasing second / third / fourth property taxes on individuals (first home untaxed, second taxed at 20% market-rate valuation per year, third taxed at 50%, fourth at 100%, etc). - Create avenues to easily demolish HOAs when they go off the rails - Multi-unit housing can no longer be owned or managed by a for-profit entity (rent goes exclusively towards building upgrades and paying works for upkeep & administration, all transparently visible - Limit Big Lumber's ability to export Lumber outside of the US -- trees grown in the US should stay in it to house people. This would be a start to fixing the issue. The objective being, of course, to utterly collapse the housing market, and make houses homes again.
spankalee 3y ago
Owners holding vacant units is not a significant cause of the housing shortage. Overly restrictive zoning and subjective reviews exploited by NIMBYs explains almost all of it.
- throwitaway222 3y ago
  There are studies - there are more vacation units than homeless people in the United States - like double.
  - spankalee 3y ago
    Those studies are so often flawed will pieces. Houses begging sold or between tenants are counted as vacant. Vacancies in rural Pennsylvania and Kentucky don't matter much for the homeless in Oakland. What do you even do with that information? Ship the homeless around the country? Other studies should that the higher the vacancy rate the lower the homeless rate and the cheaper housing is. So we can just allow people to build where people want to live and solve both problems.
    - throwitaway222 3y ago
      If you do the right "step-up" programs and purchasable housing becomes extremely cheap around the country, it will solve itself. There are a lot of homeless people in Oakland that if found out they can buy a house in Kentucky and afford it with a restaurant dish-cleaning job, they would move. Stop treating the homeless as "shippable containers" they have agency.
      - willcipriano 3y ago
        The dish washer jobs pays less than minimum wage under the table, beacuse the government flew desperate people from the poorest part of the planet to town to compete with the existing dishwashers.
        2024throwaway 3y ago
pitaj 3y ago
Except we know it's a building issue. Housing starts are lower than they were in 2000 despite adding 50 million in population. Vacancy is good - higher vacancy is related to lower prices. Vacancy rates are the lowest they've been in decades. We just need to build.
- giantg2 3y ago
  "Except we know it's a building issue. Housing starts are lower than they were in 2000 despite adding 50 million in population." Check the timeline and distribution though. Housing starts dropped in 2008. Measure the population from that point. From 2008 on, you're looking at .5% population growth and it's dropping. Housing starts are still reasonable at about .5M-1M units. The problem is distribution. Population growth in certain cities has outpaced building in those cities. However, there are other cities where the inverse is true. "Vacancy is good - higher vacancy is related to lower prices. Vacancy rates are the lowest they've been in decades." Vacancy is only going to lead to lower prices if those vacant units are on the market. That's not necessarily the case with the corporate owners.
slothtrop 3y ago
> owners holding vacant units Check the vacancy rate in major cities. > people wanting/needing to live in specific locations Where the jobs are, yes. > individual preferences for bigger, fancier, better school, sfh, etc attributes Mixed density and smaller builds are almost nowhere to be found, and small developers have incredible difficulty securing loans from banks to build them. The large developers focus on expensive projects that have more overhead and checks, and even there they don't build that much because they are few in number. People would opt for mixed density were it actually available. Zoning and regs are actually among the factors that make certain projects riskier, so reform helps in this regard. Just see Minneapolis. Zoning reform works. It works so well that there is some push back from NIMBYs in those cities pissed off that their areas are changing fast.
- giantg2 3y ago
  "Where the jobs are, yes." "Check the vacancy rate in major cities." What are the vacancy rates in the smaller cities and rural areas? What are we doing to utilize the vacant units by bringing jobs to those areas? Is it really more effiecnt to build new housing rather than take advantage of the existing housing? Should we just concentrate everything in a few major cities and leave everyone else behind? Sure, reducing zoning will mean less rules and people can do more things, like build. The interesting thing is that building mfh was only a small part of the change - a change that CA also made state-wide but isnt seeing much benefit from. The change that made the real difference was increasing density for apartments and reducing parking requirements. The rents for apartments dropped, but sfh values have continued to climb as population declines. Bringing me back to the preferences and distribution part of my original comment -affordability is mostly driven by preferences and distribution.
  - slothtrop 3y ago
    > What are the vacancy rates in the smaller cities and rural areas? Also not amazing. Many have fled the cities to purchase properties in rural areas, which drives up the prices there too. This is particularly pronounced in Canada. > What are we doing to utilize the vacant units by bringing jobs to those areas? Bringing what jobs? You're going to move a company HQ to the middle of nowhere? You're going to move manufacturing there? Be serious. > Should we just concentrate everything in a few major cities and leave everyone else behind? "We"? These are municipalities with their own policies, and people go where they want. If they want to make a life in the middle of nowhere with few prospects, they are welcome to, but you cannot force people and their businesses there to satisfy some notion that it would make their lives "affordable".
pksebben 3y ago
I would love to see a "landlord tax" that squeezes owners to either live in, rent out, or sell.
- giantg2 3y ago
  I think you mean an empty unit tax.
  - pksebben 3y ago
    Or just a tax on nonprimary residential holdings. Couldn't hurt to take a couple bucks off the folks keeping multiple pie-de-terres or managing a ton of rental units. After all, they can definitely afford it.
    - giantg2 3y ago
      "After all, they can definitely afford it." But they won't. Landlords pass taxes on to the tenants.

throwitaway222 3y ago

Raise prop taxes for non-rented vacation units by 150% Raise prop taxes for rentals by %350. Raise prop taxes for airbnbs by %500. Everyone will own a home, and home prices will plummet as people try to unload extremely expensive property taxes. And if it doesn't work, double my percentages. Or just make it 100k per year. Those people crazy enough to keep holding them, will fund the creation of homeless housing. DV's are just landlords and other types of bottom feeders.

louthy 3y ago
Everybody will be paying more rent
- throwitaway222 3y ago
  If that happens, just raise prop taxes to 100k per year (for rental units).
  - adam_arthur 3y ago
    Raising property taxes on rentals increases cost to renters. Raising taxes on vacant units is a good idea though (but perhaps hard to enforce). Remote work is solving the housing shortage already though, through opening up living to much wider geography (and locales that don't impede building, such as TX and FL). It will just take a decade or so to normalize. In-person work forced people to compete over limited housing in small areas
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      I would say it is doing the opposite of solving the housing shortage right now. It is exporting it instead while also not doing much about the shortage at its origins. All those cute picturesque towns in the Mountain West don’t have a large supply of homes to begin with, so it only takes a few wealthy Californians to seriously upend the local market with wages paid much higher than what locals can get for their skills.
  - its_ethan 3y ago
    For what it's worth - you come across as completely unserious if your suggestion to fix housing shortages is genuinely to levy a $100k tax for property owners who aren't currently renting out their units.
    - throwitaway222 3y ago
      I'll tell you what's unserious - people wanting to actually solve the housing crisis. Every solution is 100% idiotic. The way we currently operate is to build more housing, they are building a dramatic amount of housing, and the price of a house is still $400k medium. It is telling me they are not selling to families but instead to corporations, bnbers, rentals, foreign governments. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/housing-starts https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/housing-starts
      - ejb999 3y ago
        Maybe they still cost $400K, because the purchase of the land, the labor and the materials and the interest to finance the project eat up most of that $400K, not to mention some places charge you building permits that cost ten's of thousands of dollars - if not more. Nobody is going to build houses and sell them at a loss or at break-even price, they need to cover their costs and make some profit as well to keep the business alive.
        SheepSlapper 3y ago
        Coming from a construction background, I can confirm all of this. Permits are out of control, material prices are nuts (not COVID nuts, but still at least 300% higher than the good old days), and subcontractors are both hard to find and more expensive. It's not crazy to build a decent 3-4 bedroom house and have it cost $400k all said and done, even in my small-big-ish town. A lot of people in here arguing, bet there are very few of us that have actually built houses before :)
        travisb 3y ago
        I was speaking to my house builder in the middle of 2023 and he noted that it had become impossible to build a starter house (2/3 bedrooms, 1.5-2 bath) for less than $450k CAD (~$300k USD) -- excluding land, utility connection, and financing costs. He also mentioned that new requirements going into effect this year were going to add $10-15k per house. People tend to have a poor grasp on what building a new house actually costs. They cost a lot to build with no gouging whatsoever.
jimbob45 3y ago
Couldn't agree more. I'm tired of the HN crowd that espouses the benefits of building more supply, yet consider the AirBNB and rental-afflicted homes to be totally untouchable. Even worse are the ones that seem to strongly believe in environmentalism, yet have no problem tearing down forests to build more supply on them...for AirBNBs and rentals.
- throwitaway222 3y ago
  There are so many people that think drugs or poor decisions are leading to the homeless tents all over the place. The drugs and poor decisions are things that come AFTER going homeless. The studies are showing that rising housing costs have directly caused the homeless crisis. WE neeed to do something fast.
- smolder 3y ago
  Cutting down trees to build housing or furniture or whatever is a carbon sink. More trees can be planted.
  - jimbob45 3y ago
    On top of the house that took the space where trees previously were? There’s only so much space for trees. Seizing it for AirBNBs seems like a massive waste when we have hotels that use space much more efficiently.
jrockway 3y ago
I mean, landlords are going to pass on their costs directly to tenants. If you raise property taxes, then rents simply go up. None of these tax increases are going to magically make a 20% down payment appear in someone's bank account that they could use to purchase something outright. None of these tax increases are going to prevent people who legitimately want to rent from renting. (Some examples: apartments that are $30k a month for rich people that need to live in some city for 3 months of the year. $8k/month assisted living facilities for rich people that are now old and need access to care while still living alone.) Probably the most realistic thing to do is to simply implement rent control. "You can't legally collect more than $X/month in rent" fixes the problem of rent being too high. If that makes owning rental units unpopular, so be it.
- throwitaway222 3y ago
  There is absolutely nothing wrong with allowing someone to rent a unit for $30k per month - even if there are thousands of them. If we're collecting 100k in property taxes earmarked for certain programs - that would effectively fund building an entire ADU on a property per year for that expensive rental to exist.
survirtual 3y ago
To add, - Make it illegal for corporations to own residential homes / any property in residentially zone locations - Generate policies to eliminate real estate parasites (illegal to have percentage profits off of sales, open data, low friction technological avenues to remove those jobs altogether) - Marginally increasing second / third / fourth property taxes on individuals (first home untaxed, second taxed at 20% market-rate valuation per year, third taxed at 50%, fourth at 100%, etc). - Create avenues to easily demolish HOAs when they go off the rails - Multi-unit housing can no longer be owned or managed by a for-profit entity (rent goes exclusively towards building upgrades and paying works for upkeep & administration, all transparently visible - Limit Big Lumber's ability to export Lumber outside of the US -- trees grown in the US should stay in it to house people. This would be a start to fixing the issue. The objective being, of course, to utterly collapse the housing market, and make houses homes again.

spankalee 3y ago

Owners holding vacant units is not a significant cause of the housing shortage. Overly restrictive zoning and subjective reviews exploited by NIMBYs explains almost all of it.

throwitaway222 3y ago
There are studies - there are more vacation units than homeless people in the United States - like double.
- spankalee 3y ago
  Those studies are so often flawed will pieces. Houses begging sold or between tenants are counted as vacant. Vacancies in rural Pennsylvania and Kentucky don't matter much for the homeless in Oakland. What do you even do with that information? Ship the homeless around the country? Other studies should that the higher the vacancy rate the lower the homeless rate and the cheaper housing is. So we can just allow people to build where people want to live and solve both problems.
  - throwitaway222 3y ago
    If you do the right "step-up" programs and purchasable housing becomes extremely cheap around the country, it will solve itself. There are a lot of homeless people in Oakland that if found out they can buy a house in Kentucky and afford it with a restaurant dish-cleaning job, they would move. Stop treating the homeless as "shippable containers" they have agency.
    - willcipriano 3y ago
      The dish washer jobs pays less than minimum wage under the table, beacuse the government flew desperate people from the poorest part of the planet to town to compete with the existing dishwashers.
      - 2024throwaway 3y ago

pitaj 3y ago

Except we know it's a building issue. Housing starts are lower than they were in 2000 despite adding 50 million in population. Vacancy is good - higher vacancy is related to lower prices. Vacancy rates are the lowest they've been in decades. We just need to build.

giantg2 3y ago
"Except we know it's a building issue. Housing starts are lower than they were in 2000 despite adding 50 million in population." Check the timeline and distribution though. Housing starts dropped in 2008. Measure the population from that point. From 2008 on, you're looking at .5% population growth and it's dropping. Housing starts are still reasonable at about .5M-1M units. The problem is distribution. Population growth in certain cities has outpaced building in those cities. However, there are other cities where the inverse is true. "Vacancy is good - higher vacancy is related to lower prices. Vacancy rates are the lowest they've been in decades." Vacancy is only going to lead to lower prices if those vacant units are on the market. That's not necessarily the case with the corporate owners.

slothtrop 3y ago

> owners holding vacant units Check the vacancy rate in major cities. > people wanting/needing to live in specific locations Where the jobs are, yes. > individual preferences for bigger, fancier, better school, sfh, etc attributes Mixed density and smaller builds are almost nowhere to be found, and small developers have incredible difficulty securing loans from banks to build them. The large developers focus on expensive projects that have more overhead and checks, and even there they don't build that much because they are few in number. People would opt for mixed density were it actually available. Zoning and regs are actually among the factors that make certain projects riskier, so reform helps in this regard. Just see Minneapolis. Zoning reform works. It works so well that there is some push back from NIMBYs in those cities pissed off that their areas are changing fast.

giantg2 3y ago
"Where the jobs are, yes." "Check the vacancy rate in major cities." What are the vacancy rates in the smaller cities and rural areas? What are we doing to utilize the vacant units by bringing jobs to those areas? Is it really more effiecnt to build new housing rather than take advantage of the existing housing? Should we just concentrate everything in a few major cities and leave everyone else behind? Sure, reducing zoning will mean less rules and people can do more things, like build. The interesting thing is that building mfh was only a small part of the change - a change that CA also made state-wide but isnt seeing much benefit from. The change that made the real difference was increasing density for apartments and reducing parking requirements. The rents for apartments dropped, but sfh values have continued to climb as population declines. Bringing me back to the preferences and distribution part of my original comment -affordability is mostly driven by preferences and distribution.
- slothtrop 3y ago
  > What are the vacancy rates in the smaller cities and rural areas? Also not amazing. Many have fled the cities to purchase properties in rural areas, which drives up the prices there too. This is particularly pronounced in Canada. > What are we doing to utilize the vacant units by bringing jobs to those areas? Bringing what jobs? You're going to move a company HQ to the middle of nowhere? You're going to move manufacturing there? Be serious. > Should we just concentrate everything in a few major cities and leave everyone else behind? "We"? These are municipalities with their own policies, and people go where they want. If they want to make a life in the middle of nowhere with few prospects, they are welcome to, but you cannot force people and their businesses there to satisfy some notion that it would make their lives "affordable".

pksebben 3y ago

I would love to see a "landlord tax" that squeezes owners to either live in, rent out, or sell.

giantg2 3y ago
I think you mean an empty unit tax.
- pksebben 3y ago
  Or just a tax on nonprimary residential holdings. Couldn't hurt to take a couple bucks off the folks keeping multiple pie-de-terres or managing a ton of rental units. After all, they can definitely afford it.
  - giantg2 3y ago
    "After all, they can definitely afford it." But they won't. Landlords pass taxes on to the tenants.