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People will do literally anything to address the housing crisis except for the one thing that works: build housing. If you want to ban AirBNB for nuisance or o

People will do literally anything to address the housing crisis except for the one thing that works: build housing. If you want to ban AirBNB for nuisance or other reasons, great. But don't pretend that this will create enough housing for people. It just removes one small sliver of demand, and acknowledges that the core problem is a supply/demand mismatch. If you want to deny people's needs, limit them, at least be explicit about that too. Housing is a basic necessity of life. Why limit it?

eo3x0 3y ago
this ignores the basic economics which is that it’s too expensive to build housing. Labor is expensive, materials are expensive, and permitting is expensive.
- epistasis 3y ago
  Are you seriously proposing that we do not have enough economic capacity to build the most basic life necessity of life, housing? As Keynes said: is we can do it, we can afford it. We can build more housing.
  - eo3x0 3y ago
    Then you should do it. The market will clearly reward you for it right?
    - epistasis 3y ago
      I don't know why you think the market would reward me for this. The market is the result of regulation, and the regulations right now do not permit more housing, but do allow the highest bidder clear the market. The market has been set up to only serve those with the most money, through a conscious choice of how the regulations were chosen.
  - eej71 3y ago
    I don't think that's what's being proposed. The thesis being offered - which you will likely disagree with - can be read as - the economic capacity certainly exists, but the regulatory regime prices it out of the market.
    - epistasis 3y ago
      Given that a regulatory change about AirBNB is under consideration, perhaps they should also consider changing the regime that has created the housing shortage and is actively putting working families on the street. Until they change this bad regulatory regime, and regulate to provide enough housing rather than regulate to keep existing conservative homeowners happy, then they will continue to put regular folks in Hawaii through a meat grinder of housing austerity.
      - eej71 3y ago
        We will likely disagree. My perspective is that you can only regulate things out of production. You can't regulate things into production. If that were true, politicians could have made us all rich by their wise words and actions. But they don't. Because they can't. That's not the source of wealth.
        epistasis 3y ago
        Where we do agree is that things can be regulated out of production. That's clearly what's happened in Hawaii, intentionally, to limit the number of people in Hawaii. That's the entire source of the permitting costs, high labor costs, etc. etc. etc. The prices were intentionally set high for new housing by regulation. That can be changed. Further, it's slightly more tricky to regulate things into production, but we do it all the time. Take for example, roads, or water treatment, or any other public service. That's entirely the product of regulation, not of the free market, and would not happen otherwise. Further, we can regulate non-publicly owned entities into production, and we do so frequently. For example financial products like a 30-year mortgage are entirely a creation of regulation, and would not exist without hearty regulation backing them. We can do similar things for construction loans, for training in the trades, for social housing, for pretty much anything. Housing is a very solvable problem. However we actively choose not to solve it, and in fact we actively choose to make it more expensive in order to benefit those who already have housing, and to benefit those who speculate on it. So if I have these views of housing, why am I not opposed to AirBNB? Because AirBNB is actually meeting some real need from real people, it's not pure speculation, or pure rent-seeking, like the regulatory regime that institutes housing austerity. There's real human gain from AirBNB, it's not merely an economic gain. And I'm not entirely in favor of AirBNB either, it's just that it really really grates me that this is being falsely sold as a solution to the housing crisis. It is not. It's barely related, but related in a way that shows the true underlying problem: supply versus demand for housing.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    In Hawaii already overpopulated, basic housing on vacant land isn't the answer.
    - kjkjadksj 3y ago
      You say its overpopulated, I see a state of mainly suburban small towns at least outside resort developments when I visited the place. There’s no shortage of space to meet demand if one builds up like is done in Japan or Hong Kong.
    - epistasis 3y ago
      If Hawaii were overpopulated, we would see people leaving for other areas because there are too many people. Instead we only see people leaving because it's too expensive. Agreed that housing on vacant land isn't the answer. The answer is to build up, in more socially-orinted ways.
- tomcar288 3y ago
  seriously, mankind has been able to do this for 10s of thousands of years and all the sudden now, we're so pathetic we can't build housing anymore. do people really believe this?
  - eo3x0 3y ago
    We can build housing very well. It’s a matter of cost. Labor is not cheap. Have you tried to price out construction recently? You don’t need to take it from a random comment on HN. Price the market and see what it tells you. If you happen upon a magical reserve of cheap labor though, please share with the group, as we’d love nothing more than to pitch in and make our housing problems melt away for everyone.
    - tomcar288 3y ago
      if you're saying labor is expensive and that building a house is too costly then we're not very good at building housing. if it takes 2000 days of your labor (exchanged for $ then purchase a house of course) but it only took 1000 days a century ago, that means we're getting worse at building housing, not better.
  - throwway120385 3y ago
    It's not that we can't build more housing, it's that all the economic output has become concentrated in a few very small areas. This means that if you want a high-paying job you have to live within those very small areas or find a niche in a rural area that pays well. The middle between those two extremes has been pretty well erased in our economy. You can no longer live in Podunk Michigan and go down the street and get a good paying job pushing a broom at the local factory. That work is done by a contractor who pockets the wage and gives a quarter of it to their employees. Or the factory closed because it was cheaper to build and ship widgets from somewhere else. So everyone has to either suffer the economic depression, drive for an hour or two to go to work, or move. This housing crisis is the end result of our economic policies of the last 40 or 50 years and the hollowing out of middle America and the consolidation of a lot of industries into two or three huge competitors slugging it out. If we can fix that system and give people outside of major metros a shot at making a decent living again then the housing crisis would disappear. There are plenty of cities across the entire US that are tearing down houses because nobody wants to live in them and otherwise they become animal nests. Meanwhile there's a housing crisis on the coasts. One thing I'd like to see is a federal payroll tax credit for remote workers. That would do a lot to reverse the "return to office" mandates of the last couple of years. If you disperse a bunch of bright and talented people into the middle of the country, at least some of them will find ventures locally that bloom into something big.
- YokoZar 3y ago
  Permitting is expensive because of choices we make. Some of those choices have the explicit intent of making housing more difficult to build. We can make different choices.
- eo3x0 3y ago
  Since this comment has been downvoted, I’ll add more math. Building housing takes anywhere from 3 to 4 years for any significant development that can make a dent. When the average investor can get 7% with minimal risk in the S&P500, you’re looking at rewarding investors a lot more than that in returns over this time period. People would rather invest elsewhere. Once you factor that in, you’re looking at a large % required return factoring risks like lawsuits, construction mishaps, etc. There is a reason every new development looks like luxury housing or luxury apartments. The economics don’t favor Levittown style massive buildouts anymore. The market will reward those who can bring efficiency to something that’s clearly an opportunity to be more efficient. That’s not where we are with housing right now.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    You can’t even run the experiment due to how restrictive the land use is in hawaii. 4% of land is residential and of that a good deal of it is bog standard post war suburban development. Why not just at least upzone the existing residential neighborhoods and attempt to let the market decide for itself if demand is sufficient to justify investing in development instead of making it an impossibility?
twiceaday 3y ago
Bad take. Do both. Nobody is pretending this will solve all issues. Its a step in the right direction. Both in terms of putting more units towards residents and discouraging people from speculating on the housing market by buying short-term rental properties.
- epistasis 3y ago
  Disagree heartily. Banning AirBNB is about saying "these people don't deserve to stay here" which is the same attitude that says "we can't build housing or the wrong sort of person might get some" which is the core problem in Hawaii and other NIMBY areas. The core land use conflict is: do only a tiny number of benighted souls get to the use the land, or does the land belong to all?
  - pempem 3y ago
    The core land use conflict is: do only a tiny number of -- rich people -- get to the use the land, or does the land belong to all Your comment honestly sounds like you personally feel attacked. Money has been shown to be moving a lot of hawaii's policy, purchases from the california .1% are well documented. The benighted souls are not who you suggest them to be.
    - epistasis 3y ago
      What is wealth, other than having something that lots of other people want? I don't feel personally attacked, but I do have strong priors that we should try to make society work for as many people as possible, and also that land was created by none, and must be mediated for the benefit of all. I did not suggest that any particular set of people are the benighted ones, and honestly I'm not sure who you think I thought they were.
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    > Banning AirBNB is about saying... ...whatever the lawmakers say it's about. I moved into our rental in 2021. At the time, rental ads got 400 applications per day. Many local families with money in the bank entered homelessness that year because there was nowhere to go. The ad for ours was up for 2 hours and had over 50 apps. We won out by offering 6mos up front. Two houses down is a short term rental. People are in it 3 weeks/yr. Any one of those homeless families would have rented it if they could. One more family having a home is an actual good. Keyboard jockeys can debate policy and believe they have the answer but the latest generation of homeless don't much care about theories. They just want a bedroom.
robertn702 3y ago
I think it's directly related to how easy it is to get support for specific policies. It's easy to rally the people around the idea that "it's AirBnB's fault". Compare that to the reality that in order to solve housing you need to build more houses, and to do that you have to simplify and speed up permitting, allow more multi-unit housing next to existing housing, existing home owner's properties may not go up in value indefinitely and many will decrease in value, etc. That's a much tougher sell. Also look a the politicians' incentives. Voters are more likely to understand and have an emotional response to AirBnB being banned than the permit process being sped up by 50%.
yieldcrv 3y ago
They’re islands
wy35 3y ago
You are correct, but it seems to be far easier to create new laws (e.g. to ban short-term Airbnbs) than to amend or retract current laws (e.g. strict zoning regulations).
gentleman11 3y ago
Take Banff for instance: it’s in a national park and is legally restricted from growing much more. You could approve more building, but then more people would move in until prices were high again. The area is so appealing that no matter how much housing there was, people would flood in until it became saturated again. Unless you ruined it, bulldozed the forests for 100km in every direction, covered the area in housing—that would do the trick. But who wants that? In a couple of cases, building more housing isn’t the ideal solution
- belligeront 3y ago
  >bulldozed the forests for 100km in every direction, covered the area in housing Luckily we invented the elevator so we don't have to bulldoze forests to build more housing if we don't need to
  - tivert 3y ago
    > Luckily we invented the elevator so we don't have to bulldoze forests to build more housing if we don't need to And then it becomes a massive ugly splinter of 20-story residential towers despoiling the middle of a national park. ...and still expensive.
    - gentleman11 3y ago
      And would killer a lot of birds too; in a national park no less
      - BobaFloutist 3y ago
        I'm pretty sure bird-safe windows are a solved technology at this point.
    - orwin 3y ago
      Limit it to 3 stories, at most 1/3 or 1/4. You can build really good looking midrises that integrate pretty well with the environment (and you do not need elevator for 3 to 4 stories midrises, it keeps the cost low. Also maybe the US should chill out on the staircase requirement too). One parking spot for every apartment max too, to keep the footprint light. I think my residence has one spot per two apartment and it seems enough, its never full, but here people bike more than they drive, so that helps.
brk 3y ago
More housing needs to be built, of course. But it is naive to think you can just ‘build housing’. If areas are not zoned for more housing that requires approvals. Often times those approvals can have a negative impact on existing housing in various ways. Ways that may negatively impact valuations and this would be a change that buyers of the existing inventory were not informed of or expecting. That has to be considered even if there was a magic way to somehow say ‘this new zoning will result in a net better world in the end’ Infrastructure also needs to be considered. Increased population density may not have been accounted for in roads, sewers, etc. Often a fixable issue, with lots of time and money. Schools and other public services may need to be increased as well. There are other things to, but I think you get the point. Meanwhile, converting short term rentals back to standard housing IS something that can be done quickly and with very few approvals relatively speaking. Things were obviously already zoned for this and buyers would have been expecting this anyway. Converting short terms rentals back is likely to cause some amount of property holds to dump (sell) these properties that were only bought to be Airbnbs, potentially lowering house prices, at least temporarily. Ultimately this decision likely is one of the most efficient ways to begin to address the immediate problem in the fastest and most practical way.
- ekanes 3y ago
  > Often times those approvals can have a negative impact on existing housing in various ways. Ways that may negatively impact valuations and this would be a change that buyers of the existing inventory were not informed of or expecting. This is the problem. We don't build houses because people worry it will affect them, so the problem is pushed elsewhere, with everyone advocating that someone else solve the problem.
- arcticbull 3y ago
  > If areas are not zoned for more housing that requires approvals. So zone it for housing. I will once again float that zoning should be federalized, and everyone should be able to build whatever they want on their land by-right. If you have a problem with what I want to put on my land, buy my land. I'm not responsible for your property value, you are. The federal government has the authority to invalidate local city council ordinances - for instance the FCC invalidated Chicago rules around satellite dishes. They also regulate housing in e.g. the Fair Housing Act. The housing market is interstate commerce. Houston has no zoning rules and is one of the most affordable major metros in the US. Who cares that some guy lives behind a rollercoaster? [1] > Infrastructure also needs to be considered. If only there was an entity that was responsible for infrastructure, some kind of city council :) the council should be required to develop infrastructure to meet the actual demand in the area. [edit] The whole concept of single-family zoning started in Berkeley as a way to keep minorities from owning homes in the area. By making them more expensive. It quickly spread throughout the US. The whole concept of zoning was meant to be exclusionary through pricing, and guess what, it works. [2] [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90766731/a-bold-case-against-zoning https://www.fastcompany.com/90766731/a-bold-case-against-zon... [2] https://www.sierraclub.org/san-francisco-bay/blog/2021/06/end-single-family-zoning-berkeley-forces-us-reflect-our-past https://www.sierraclub.org/san-francisco-bay/blog/2021/06/en...
carabiner 3y ago
Hawaii is a small group of islands. In many cases it's physically impossible to build new housing. This is why people seek to treat house rentals differently from car rentals or jet ski rentals in that it's dependent on land which is a finite supply.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Its only impossible because much of hawaii is zoned for single family homes. In terms of topology and those resulting challenges its no different than a lot of southeast asian or even south american cities that aren’t afraid to build vertically.
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    > Its only impossible because much of hawaii is zoned for single family homes. Few crisis exist for one reason, housing least of all. A more reasonable perspective might be that progress needs to be made on all fronts. I'm not making an expression of fairness here. I'm expressing the minimum perspective we need to make any progress at all.
    - kjkjadksj 3y ago
      Zoning is perhaps the easiest lever to pull. You could rezone hawaii tomorrow with a pen stroke and over time the local construction industry will grow and snowball now that more projects are possible, sustaining more labor and contractors and importers, etc.
standardUser 3y ago
Sure, but if you build a massive amount of new housing and it all gets bought up by investors who want to use them as rentals, what have you accomplished? And if your answer is "build even more" then you have to consider that at a certain point you run out of land, especially in these ultra-high-demand vacation destinations. If you have laws in place to limit misuse of housing stock, and then you build a massive amount of new housing, the problem can actually be ameliorated.
LeifCarrotson 3y ago
Housing is limited for two reasons: First, because it's expensive and slow to build new housing, second, because people make it slower and more expensive because they don't want more neighbors, and third, because society really doesn't want to evict people from their homes when they can't afford them anymore. Housing - especially sustainable, long-lasting, quality housing - is genuinely expensive. Not as expensive as the real estate market might make you think, but it is expensive. Especially when you're shipping materials from a different continent to the middle of the Pacific! There are limited lots in Hawaii. It's an island! Winter here in the northern continental US is a gray and terrible thing. I'd love to move to an identical 2-acre lot in Hawaii to what I have here, and have it within walking distance of my work and my son's school and shopping. But there are only so many 2-acre lots to build, and I've got one of the biggest in my neighborhood (most are half-acre), and lots of people want that. And most importantly, you're eventually asking an elderly native Hawaiian, living on a fixed income, who just wants to live in the house they inherited from their parents, to compete financially for ownership of a limited resource with an out-of-state engineer or business owner. Economics says that if the native who owns a house outright can't pay as much as a millionaire from the continent can, the millionaire should come to own it, and if a developer can turn that one lot into four sublots that are worth more to 4 someone (or make them duplexes, and split to 8, or make it an apartment complex) than the millionaire's valuation of the one lot with the SFH, it should be developed. But that's only the naive case.
- foobarian 3y ago
  There are places in this world that are just outstandingly amazing and desirable. Why is it anybody's duty to enable additional people to immigrate into such places? How many more people should they provision for? At the end of the day it is not the Hawaiian government's job to enable the whole world to come and live there. Being too hands off may lead to unfairness in some ways, i.e. gentrification, but at least discouraging investors seems a step in a direction of helping the less wealthy.
- axpy 3y ago
  2-acre lot in a walkable neighborhood? How on earth are you expecting to sustain commerces, schools and or anything with a density of 250 house/km2. Your dream hawaian neighborhood is another ridiculous american suburb where only a few chosen live close enough to walk to a car dependent commercial street with ungodly amount of wasted space on parking. If you want walkable neighborhood, you will have to accept to live way closer to your neighbors. As a comparison, I am about to build a house on a .15 acre plot close to a small village with walkable access to parks, public transit, school, nature preserves, ski station... You can't build that if your plots are 2 acres, you need to densify.
CPLX 3y ago
Vacation rental type housing is not actually a basic necessity. It's a business, one of the oldest categories of business that exist. People who are members of a society get to decide what businesses exist in their society and what rules they have to follow. People who are not members of that society, who live somewhere else entirely, and who come for vacation or to visit for whatever reason, are not consuming "housing" they're consuming a different resource, which is usually called a "hotel" as shorthand, regardless of the fine details. Building enough housing for members of your society, including the inevitable growth of the long term population via in-migration or birth, is extremely important and something many places need to get better at. But it's got nothing to do with how many hotels you allow. Regardless of what you call them.
- epistasis 3y ago
  Fine, that's great! But let's not pretend that this will solve the housing crisis, which is the claim in the headline, and the claim that people use to justify the decision to ban AirBNB. They have every right to set their regulatory regime, but I also have a right to point out that their actions will not do what they are being represented to do.
  - CPLX 3y ago
    Since short term rentals are not housing (remember, they are “hotels” in our analysis) taking substantial numbers of them and converting them (back) into housing is conceptually identical to building housing.
lazide 3y ago
This is on a small island, with limited buildable space, and where the remaining space should be as untouched as possible due to it being literally a tropical paradise. That’s why.
- fragmede 3y ago
  invoking "tropical island paradise" doesn't explain why it should be protected though. does invoking the fact there's a huge meth problem mean it's not paradise and we can pave over it? it's sacred to the natives, but so was Manhattan (which is also an island), and look at what we've done there
  - lazide 3y ago
    Is your argument that the Hawaiian islands should be manhattan? Because I’m pretty cynical, but even I have limits.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      "should be"? I would very much like Hawaii to be the tropical paradise I visited forever, but the history of the world suggests that 300 years into the future, it won't be.
- rufus_foreman 3y ago
  >> the remaining space should be as untouched as possible due to it being literally a tropical paradise This is the argument against a land value tax (Hawaii used to have one, it is what Joni Mitchell was referring to when she sang, "They paved paradise / Put up a parking lot").
piafraus 3y ago
> Housing is a basic necessity of life. Is "housing in the location you want" a basic necessity of life?
- fragmede 3y ago
  where do you propose putting the housing instead?
  - infotainment 3y ago
    Not in their backyard, that’s for sure!
  - piafraus 3y ago
    I didn't provide an opinion, or any suggestions, I am just asking to clarify if it is implied or not.
ajhurliman 3y ago
I think you’re operating under the assumption that all people should live in big cities. I think it’s fine if cities get too expensive; people just need to wake up to the idea of “this place is too expensive for me”. There are lots of very affordable houses in the Midwest, but everyone seems to want to be a star in Hollywood or a financier in New York (no matter how delusional they are).
threecheese 3y ago
It truly is a “small sliver of demand” in the wider national market, but in high demand areas (tourism, urban) it is having a real impact on pricing, availability, quality of life, community etc. I have two minds about companies like Airbnb, Uber and others, in that it’s great that they disrupted markets that were captured by legacy regulation that wasn’t working anymore in the best interest of the public, but this opened up a “wound” that was aggressively attacked by capital, created new problems that we aren’t equipped to deal with, and now they’re entrenched in these markets just like the {hotels, taxis, delivery companies} were.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
What if the housing built is used for short-term rentals.

eo3x0 3y ago

this ignores the basic economics which is that it’s too expensive to build housing. Labor is expensive, materials are expensive, and permitting is expensive.

epistasis 3y ago
Are you seriously proposing that we do not have enough economic capacity to build the most basic life necessity of life, housing? As Keynes said: is we can do it, we can afford it. We can build more housing.
- eo3x0 3y ago
  Then you should do it. The market will clearly reward you for it right?
  - epistasis 3y ago
    I don't know why you think the market would reward me for this. The market is the result of regulation, and the regulations right now do not permit more housing, but do allow the highest bidder clear the market. The market has been set up to only serve those with the most money, through a conscious choice of how the regulations were chosen.
- eej71 3y ago
  I don't think that's what's being proposed. The thesis being offered - which you will likely disagree with - can be read as - the economic capacity certainly exists, but the regulatory regime prices it out of the market.
  - epistasis 3y ago
    Given that a regulatory change about AirBNB is under consideration, perhaps they should also consider changing the regime that has created the housing shortage and is actively putting working families on the street. Until they change this bad regulatory regime, and regulate to provide enough housing rather than regulate to keep existing conservative homeowners happy, then they will continue to put regular folks in Hawaii through a meat grinder of housing austerity.
    - eej71 3y ago
      We will likely disagree. My perspective is that you can only regulate things out of production. You can't regulate things into production. If that were true, politicians could have made us all rich by their wise words and actions. But they don't. Because they can't. That's not the source of wealth.
      - epistasis 3y ago
        Where we do agree is that things can be regulated out of production. That's clearly what's happened in Hawaii, intentionally, to limit the number of people in Hawaii. That's the entire source of the permitting costs, high labor costs, etc. etc. etc. The prices were intentionally set high for new housing by regulation. That can be changed. Further, it's slightly more tricky to regulate things into production, but we do it all the time. Take for example, roads, or water treatment, or any other public service. That's entirely the product of regulation, not of the free market, and would not happen otherwise. Further, we can regulate non-publicly owned entities into production, and we do so frequently. For example financial products like a 30-year mortgage are entirely a creation of regulation, and would not exist without hearty regulation backing them. We can do similar things for construction loans, for training in the trades, for social housing, for pretty much anything. Housing is a very solvable problem. However we actively choose not to solve it, and in fact we actively choose to make it more expensive in order to benefit those who already have housing, and to benefit those who speculate on it. So if I have these views of housing, why am I not opposed to AirBNB? Because AirBNB is actually meeting some real need from real people, it's not pure speculation, or pure rent-seeking, like the regulatory regime that institutes housing austerity. There's real human gain from AirBNB, it's not merely an economic gain. And I'm not entirely in favor of AirBNB either, it's just that it really really grates me that this is being falsely sold as a solution to the housing crisis. It is not. It's barely related, but related in a way that shows the true underlying problem: supply versus demand for housing.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  In Hawaii already overpopulated, basic housing on vacant land isn't the answer.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    You say its overpopulated, I see a state of mainly suburban small towns at least outside resort developments when I visited the place. There’s no shortage of space to meet demand if one builds up like is done in Japan or Hong Kong.
  - epistasis 3y ago
    If Hawaii were overpopulated, we would see people leaving for other areas because there are too many people. Instead we only see people leaving because it's too expensive. Agreed that housing on vacant land isn't the answer. The answer is to build up, in more socially-orinted ways.
tomcar288 3y ago
seriously, mankind has been able to do this for 10s of thousands of years and all the sudden now, we're so pathetic we can't build housing anymore. do people really believe this?
- eo3x0 3y ago
  We can build housing very well. It’s a matter of cost. Labor is not cheap. Have you tried to price out construction recently? You don’t need to take it from a random comment on HN. Price the market and see what it tells you. If you happen upon a magical reserve of cheap labor though, please share with the group, as we’d love nothing more than to pitch in and make our housing problems melt away for everyone.
  - tomcar288 3y ago
    if you're saying labor is expensive and that building a house is too costly then we're not very good at building housing. if it takes 2000 days of your labor (exchanged for $ then purchase a house of course) but it only took 1000 days a century ago, that means we're getting worse at building housing, not better.
- throwway120385 3y ago
  It's not that we can't build more housing, it's that all the economic output has become concentrated in a few very small areas. This means that if you want a high-paying job you have to live within those very small areas or find a niche in a rural area that pays well. The middle between those two extremes has been pretty well erased in our economy. You can no longer live in Podunk Michigan and go down the street and get a good paying job pushing a broom at the local factory. That work is done by a contractor who pockets the wage and gives a quarter of it to their employees. Or the factory closed because it was cheaper to build and ship widgets from somewhere else. So everyone has to either suffer the economic depression, drive for an hour or two to go to work, or move. This housing crisis is the end result of our economic policies of the last 40 or 50 years and the hollowing out of middle America and the consolidation of a lot of industries into two or three huge competitors slugging it out. If we can fix that system and give people outside of major metros a shot at making a decent living again then the housing crisis would disappear. There are plenty of cities across the entire US that are tearing down houses because nobody wants to live in them and otherwise they become animal nests. Meanwhile there's a housing crisis on the coasts. One thing I'd like to see is a federal payroll tax credit for remote workers. That would do a lot to reverse the "return to office" mandates of the last couple of years. If you disperse a bunch of bright and talented people into the middle of the country, at least some of them will find ventures locally that bloom into something big.
YokoZar 3y ago
Permitting is expensive because of choices we make. Some of those choices have the explicit intent of making housing more difficult to build. We can make different choices.
eo3x0 3y ago
Since this comment has been downvoted, I’ll add more math. Building housing takes anywhere from 3 to 4 years for any significant development that can make a dent. When the average investor can get 7% with minimal risk in the S&P500, you’re looking at rewarding investors a lot more than that in returns over this time period. People would rather invest elsewhere. Once you factor that in, you’re looking at a large % required return factoring risks like lawsuits, construction mishaps, etc. There is a reason every new development looks like luxury housing or luxury apartments. The economics don’t favor Levittown style massive buildouts anymore. The market will reward those who can bring efficiency to something that’s clearly an opportunity to be more efficient. That’s not where we are with housing right now.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  You can’t even run the experiment due to how restrictive the land use is in hawaii. 4% of land is residential and of that a good deal of it is bog standard post war suburban development. Why not just at least upzone the existing residential neighborhoods and attempt to let the market decide for itself if demand is sufficient to justify investing in development instead of making it an impossibility?

twiceaday 3y ago

Bad take. Do both. Nobody is pretending this will solve all issues. Its a step in the right direction. Both in terms of putting more units towards residents and discouraging people from speculating on the housing market by buying short-term rental properties.

epistasis 3y ago
Disagree heartily. Banning AirBNB is about saying "these people don't deserve to stay here" which is the same attitude that says "we can't build housing or the wrong sort of person might get some" which is the core problem in Hawaii and other NIMBY areas. The core land use conflict is: do only a tiny number of benighted souls get to the use the land, or does the land belong to all?
- pempem 3y ago
  The core land use conflict is: do only a tiny number of -- rich people -- get to the use the land, or does the land belong to all Your comment honestly sounds like you personally feel attacked. Money has been shown to be moving a lot of hawaii's policy, purchases from the california .1% are well documented. The benighted souls are not who you suggest them to be.
  - epistasis 3y ago
    What is wealth, other than having something that lots of other people want? I don't feel personally attacked, but I do have strong priors that we should try to make society work for as many people as possible, and also that land was created by none, and must be mediated for the benefit of all. I did not suggest that any particular set of people are the benighted ones, and honestly I'm not sure who you think I thought they were.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > Banning AirBNB is about saying... ...whatever the lawmakers say it's about. I moved into our rental in 2021. At the time, rental ads got 400 applications per day. Many local families with money in the bank entered homelessness that year because there was nowhere to go. The ad for ours was up for 2 hours and had over 50 apps. We won out by offering 6mos up front. Two houses down is a short term rental. People are in it 3 weeks/yr. Any one of those homeless families would have rented it if they could. One more family having a home is an actual good. Keyboard jockeys can debate policy and believe they have the answer but the latest generation of homeless don't much care about theories. They just want a bedroom.

robertn702 3y ago

I think it's directly related to how easy it is to get support for specific policies. It's easy to rally the people around the idea that "it's AirBnB's fault". Compare that to the reality that in order to solve housing you need to build more houses, and to do that you have to simplify and speed up permitting, allow more multi-unit housing next to existing housing, existing home owner's properties may not go up in value indefinitely and many will decrease in value, etc. That's a much tougher sell. Also look a the politicians' incentives. Voters are more likely to understand and have an emotional response to AirBnB being banned than the permit process being sped up by 50%.

yieldcrv 3y ago

They’re islands

wy35 3y ago

You are correct, but it seems to be far easier to create new laws (e.g. to ban short-term Airbnbs) than to amend or retract current laws (e.g. strict zoning regulations).

gentleman11 3y ago

Take Banff for instance: it’s in a national park and is legally restricted from growing much more. You could approve more building, but then more people would move in until prices were high again. The area is so appealing that no matter how much housing there was, people would flood in until it became saturated again. Unless you ruined it, bulldozed the forests for 100km in every direction, covered the area in housing—that would do the trick. But who wants that? In a couple of cases, building more housing isn’t the ideal solution

belligeront 3y ago
>bulldozed the forests for 100km in every direction, covered the area in housing Luckily we invented the elevator so we don't have to bulldoze forests to build more housing if we don't need to
- tivert 3y ago
  > Luckily we invented the elevator so we don't have to bulldoze forests to build more housing if we don't need to And then it becomes a massive ugly splinter of 20-story residential towers despoiling the middle of a national park. ...and still expensive.
  - gentleman11 3y ago
    And would killer a lot of birds too; in a national park no less
    - BobaFloutist 3y ago
      I'm pretty sure bird-safe windows are a solved technology at this point.
  - orwin 3y ago
    Limit it to 3 stories, at most 1/3 or 1/4. You can build really good looking midrises that integrate pretty well with the environment (and you do not need elevator for 3 to 4 stories midrises, it keeps the cost low. Also maybe the US should chill out on the staircase requirement too). One parking spot for every apartment max too, to keep the footprint light. I think my residence has one spot per two apartment and it seems enough, its never full, but here people bike more than they drive, so that helps.

brk 3y ago

More housing needs to be built, of course. But it is naive to think you can just ‘build housing’. If areas are not zoned for more housing that requires approvals. Often times those approvals can have a negative impact on existing housing in various ways. Ways that may negatively impact valuations and this would be a change that buyers of the existing inventory were not informed of or expecting. That has to be considered even if there was a magic way to somehow say ‘this new zoning will result in a net better world in the end’ Infrastructure also needs to be considered. Increased population density may not have been accounted for in roads, sewers, etc. Often a fixable issue, with lots of time and money. Schools and other public services may need to be increased as well. There are other things to, but I think you get the point. Meanwhile, converting short term rentals back to standard housing IS something that can be done quickly and with very few approvals relatively speaking. Things were obviously already zoned for this and buyers would have been expecting this anyway. Converting short terms rentals back is likely to cause some amount of property holds to dump (sell) these properties that were only bought to be Airbnbs, potentially lowering house prices, at least temporarily. Ultimately this decision likely is one of the most efficient ways to begin to address the immediate problem in the fastest and most practical way.

ekanes 3y ago
> Often times those approvals can have a negative impact on existing housing in various ways. Ways that may negatively impact valuations and this would be a change that buyers of the existing inventory were not informed of or expecting. This is the problem. We don't build houses because people worry it will affect them, so the problem is pushed elsewhere, with everyone advocating that someone else solve the problem.
arcticbull 3y ago
> If areas are not zoned for more housing that requires approvals. So zone it for housing. I will once again float that zoning should be federalized, and everyone should be able to build whatever they want on their land by-right. If you have a problem with what I want to put on my land, buy my land. I'm not responsible for your property value, you are. The federal government has the authority to invalidate local city council ordinances - for instance the FCC invalidated Chicago rules around satellite dishes. They also regulate housing in e.g. the Fair Housing Act. The housing market is interstate commerce. Houston has no zoning rules and is one of the most affordable major metros in the US. Who cares that some guy lives behind a rollercoaster? [1] > Infrastructure also needs to be considered. If only there was an entity that was responsible for infrastructure, some kind of city council :) the council should be required to develop infrastructure to meet the actual demand in the area. [edit] The whole concept of single-family zoning started in Berkeley as a way to keep minorities from owning homes in the area. By making them more expensive. It quickly spread throughout the US. The whole concept of zoning was meant to be exclusionary through pricing, and guess what, it works. [2] [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90766731/a-bold-case-against-zoning https://www.fastcompany.com/90766731/a-bold-case-against-zon... [2] https://www.sierraclub.org/san-francisco-bay/blog/2021/06/end-single-family-zoning-berkeley-forces-us-reflect-our-past https://www.sierraclub.org/san-francisco-bay/blog/2021/06/en...

carabiner 3y ago

Hawaii is a small group of islands. In many cases it's physically impossible to build new housing. This is why people seek to treat house rentals differently from car rentals or jet ski rentals in that it's dependent on land which is a finite supply.

kjkjadksj 3y ago
Its only impossible because much of hawaii is zoned for single family homes. In terms of topology and those resulting challenges its no different than a lot of southeast asian or even south american cities that aren’t afraid to build vertically.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > Its only impossible because much of hawaii is zoned for single family homes. Few crisis exist for one reason, housing least of all. A more reasonable perspective might be that progress needs to be made on all fronts. I'm not making an expression of fairness here. I'm expressing the minimum perspective we need to make any progress at all.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    Zoning is perhaps the easiest lever to pull. You could rezone hawaii tomorrow with a pen stroke and over time the local construction industry will grow and snowball now that more projects are possible, sustaining more labor and contractors and importers, etc.

standardUser 3y ago

Sure, but if you build a massive amount of new housing and it all gets bought up by investors who want to use them as rentals, what have you accomplished? And if your answer is "build even more" then you have to consider that at a certain point you run out of land, especially in these ultra-high-demand vacation destinations. If you have laws in place to limit misuse of housing stock, and then you build a massive amount of new housing, the problem can actually be ameliorated.

LeifCarrotson 3y ago

Housing is limited for two reasons: First, because it's expensive and slow to build new housing, second, because people make it slower and more expensive because they don't want more neighbors, and third, because society really doesn't want to evict people from their homes when they can't afford them anymore. Housing - especially sustainable, long-lasting, quality housing - is genuinely expensive. Not as expensive as the real estate market might make you think, but it is expensive. Especially when you're shipping materials from a different continent to the middle of the Pacific! There are limited lots in Hawaii. It's an island! Winter here in the northern continental US is a gray and terrible thing. I'd love to move to an identical 2-acre lot in Hawaii to what I have here, and have it within walking distance of my work and my son's school and shopping. But there are only so many 2-acre lots to build, and I've got one of the biggest in my neighborhood (most are half-acre), and lots of people want that. And most importantly, you're eventually asking an elderly native Hawaiian, living on a fixed income, who just wants to live in the house they inherited from their parents, to compete financially for ownership of a limited resource with an out-of-state engineer or business owner. Economics says that if the native who owns a house outright can't pay as much as a millionaire from the continent can, the millionaire should come to own it, and if a developer can turn that one lot into four sublots that are worth more to 4 someone (or make them duplexes, and split to 8, or make it an apartment complex) than the millionaire's valuation of the one lot with the SFH, it should be developed. But that's only the naive case.

foobarian 3y ago
There are places in this world that are just outstandingly amazing and desirable. Why is it anybody's duty to enable additional people to immigrate into such places? How many more people should they provision for? At the end of the day it is not the Hawaiian government's job to enable the whole world to come and live there. Being too hands off may lead to unfairness in some ways, i.e. gentrification, but at least discouraging investors seems a step in a direction of helping the less wealthy.
axpy 3y ago
2-acre lot in a walkable neighborhood? How on earth are you expecting to sustain commerces, schools and or anything with a density of 250 house/km2. Your dream hawaian neighborhood is another ridiculous american suburb where only a few chosen live close enough to walk to a car dependent commercial street with ungodly amount of wasted space on parking. If you want walkable neighborhood, you will have to accept to live way closer to your neighbors. As a comparison, I am about to build a house on a .15 acre plot close to a small village with walkable access to parks, public transit, school, nature preserves, ski station... You can't build that if your plots are 2 acres, you need to densify.

CPLX 3y ago

Vacation rental type housing is not actually a basic necessity. It's a business, one of the oldest categories of business that exist. People who are members of a society get to decide what businesses exist in their society and what rules they have to follow. People who are not members of that society, who live somewhere else entirely, and who come for vacation or to visit for whatever reason, are not consuming "housing" they're consuming a different resource, which is usually called a "hotel" as shorthand, regardless of the fine details. Building enough housing for members of your society, including the inevitable growth of the long term population via in-migration or birth, is extremely important and something many places need to get better at. But it's got nothing to do with how many hotels you allow. Regardless of what you call them.

epistasis 3y ago
Fine, that's great! But let's not pretend that this will solve the housing crisis, which is the claim in the headline, and the claim that people use to justify the decision to ban AirBNB. They have every right to set their regulatory regime, but I also have a right to point out that their actions will not do what they are being represented to do.
- CPLX 3y ago
  Since short term rentals are not housing (remember, they are “hotels” in our analysis) taking substantial numbers of them and converting them (back) into housing is conceptually identical to building housing.

lazide 3y ago

This is on a small island, with limited buildable space, and where the remaining space should be as untouched as possible due to it being literally a tropical paradise. That’s why.

fragmede 3y ago
invoking "tropical island paradise" doesn't explain why it should be protected though. does invoking the fact there's a huge meth problem mean it's not paradise and we can pave over it? it's sacred to the natives, but so was Manhattan (which is also an island), and look at what we've done there
- lazide 3y ago
  Is your argument that the Hawaiian islands should be manhattan? Because I’m pretty cynical, but even I have limits.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    "should be"? I would very much like Hawaii to be the tropical paradise I visited forever, but the history of the world suggests that 300 years into the future, it won't be.
rufus_foreman 3y ago
>> the remaining space should be as untouched as possible due to it being literally a tropical paradise This is the argument against a land value tax (Hawaii used to have one, it is what Joni Mitchell was referring to when she sang, "They paved paradise / Put up a parking lot").

piafraus 3y ago

> Housing is a basic necessity of life. Is "housing in the location you want" a basic necessity of life?

fragmede 3y ago
where do you propose putting the housing instead?
- infotainment 3y ago
  Not in their backyard, that’s for sure!
- piafraus 3y ago
  I didn't provide an opinion, or any suggestions, I am just asking to clarify if it is implied or not.

ajhurliman 3y ago

I think you’re operating under the assumption that all people should live in big cities. I think it’s fine if cities get too expensive; people just need to wake up to the idea of “this place is too expensive for me”. There are lots of very affordable houses in the Midwest, but everyone seems to want to be a star in Hollywood or a financier in New York (no matter how delusional they are).

threecheese 3y ago

It truly is a “small sliver of demand” in the wider national market, but in high demand areas (tourism, urban) it is having a real impact on pricing, availability, quality of life, community etc. I have two minds about companies like Airbnb, Uber and others, in that it’s great that they disrupted markets that were captured by legacy regulation that wasn’t working anymore in the best interest of the public, but this opened up a “wound” that was aggressively attacked by capital, created new problems that we aren’t equipped to deal with, and now they’re entrenched in these markets just like the {hotels, taxis, delivery companies} were.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

What if the housing built is used for short-term rentals.