5 ms·

we need social housing programs like vienna, austria. aided by federal money, but facilitated and owned by local communities. we missed a decade of low interes

we need social housing programs like vienna, austria. aided by federal money, but facilitated and owned by local communities. we missed a decade of low interest rates to build, even in places with lax zoning regulations. obviously the zoning regulations are a problem and need to change, but that didn't keep developers from underbuilding in areas with lax zoning during the low interest rate environment. there's no fucking way the free market will solve this now that the cost to borrow + costs of materials + labor etc are so high (because that just makes the cost of housing higher). it will take both government investment and private enterprise.

energybored11 2y ago
No more subsidies please.
- greenie_beans 2y ago
  what is your solution?
  - johngladtj 2y ago
    Getting out of the way would help.
    - greenie_beans 2y ago
      snark is not a helpful solution.
      - bequanna 2y ago
        That's not snark. Government permitting is now a huge percentage of the cost of building a house in many US metros. CA is maybe the worst offender. It's not just NIMBY. State and local governments have gotten exceedingly greedy over the past several years.
        zbrozek 2y ago
        Over $100k per door impact fees! Years of entitlement hearings! Years of wrangling for building permits! Any project is a decade and costs a large multiple of its materials.
        greenie_beans 2y ago
        i'm the op that everybody is being snarky towards. thanks to a project that i worked on, a lot more people are aware of this fact. notably i played a very insignificant part, but you are preaching to the choir!
        ericd 2y ago
        Yep, going to any Bay Area city council meeting makes it very clear why it’s hard to develop - it’s an incredibly long process to get permission to build. You see the same developers again and again, making tweaks to their plans and seeing if that will appease the council. It seems to takes years. I’m currently building something in a much more lax area, but even here, the few parts that require permits/inspection are by far the largest hurdles, because they impose a rigid sequential order of operations that have to happen before I can move on, and require a licensed master tradesman to pull the permit, whereas most other things can generally proceed as materials/equipment/people become available. On your point about local government getting greedy, I went to the state of the county address in our area recently, and the county executive gave a long laundry list of how many millions he was splashing out to x and y, to fanfare for each spending figure, as if the goal was to spend more, rather than get the maximal impact for the dollars. I guess most of the audience were people from those departments receiving the additional money, but as a non-government worker, it was a bit sickening.
        frumper 2y ago
        I hired an electric company to put in a car charger. In order to participate in the EV pricing program it needed a 2nd meter, which needed a permit. The actual installation was a few hours. The permitting process went back and forth between city inspectors starting in September and didn’t get approved late January. The company didn’t fight anything, always did what they recommended and it still kept coming back with more “issues” and adjustments. The company said they’d never take a charger install job again in the city. It was ridiculous.
    - nordstreem 2y ago
      [flagged]
  - chaostheory 2y ago
    Mixed use zoning and anything that can’t weaken NIMBY legislation. It’s all about increasing supply. The ADU legislation is a step in the right direction.
    - greenie_beans 2y ago
      yep, regulations are only one piece of the puzzle to increase supply. my proposed solution would need that, and would also help increase supply. increasing supply is the the entire point of my idea.
kjkjadksj 2y ago
Did you have anywhere in mind that had developers underbuild relative to the zoning? Seems like most urban areas in California at least are already near the limits of their zoned capacity. A lot of the times when you see a highrise standing out on a block its not because the rest of the block is zoned for that same height and is underbuilt, but often because of some special variances permitting that project to exceed what its zoned for on that lot.
- greenie_beans 2y ago
  good question. birmingham, alabama didn't build enough to match demand, and that area's zoning isn't very strict compared to big cities. i'm curious to know about the zoning laws in nashville and atlanta, but from my tiny bit of knowledge, those places have seen the supply/demand imbalance like everywhere else. this data point groups together disparate zoning areas like san francisco and minneapolis so it's hard to parse out where exactly it all happened: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST this is not my expertise, just something i'm interested in and learned about when i worked on a big project about california's housing. curious to learn more from folks here/find ways i'm wrong.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    Birmingham is way off its peak population. It’s under 200k now (still falling) and was 340k in the 1960s. There is probably a lot of hesitancy to build in a place where the population is shrinking.
    - greenie_beans 2y ago
      birmingham is one city in a bigger metro area. when i speak of "birmingham" i speak of the entire metro area, which has grown in population since the 60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_metropolitan_area,_Alabama#Cities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_metropolitan_area,_... that stat you grabbed doesn't exist in a vacuum. that stat matches the same time as the white flight demographic shifts that happened in all metro areas in the south. now do huntsville.

energybored11 2y ago

No more subsidies please.

greenie_beans 2y ago
what is your solution?
- johngladtj 2y ago
  Getting out of the way would help.
  - greenie_beans 2y ago
    snark is not a helpful solution.
    - bequanna 2y ago
      That's not snark. Government permitting is now a huge percentage of the cost of building a house in many US metros. CA is maybe the worst offender. It's not just NIMBY. State and local governments have gotten exceedingly greedy over the past several years.
      - zbrozek 2y ago
        Over $100k per door impact fees! Years of entitlement hearings! Years of wrangling for building permits! Any project is a decade and costs a large multiple of its materials.
        greenie_beans 2y ago
        i'm the op that everybody is being snarky towards. thanks to a project that i worked on, a lot more people are aware of this fact. notably i played a very insignificant part, but you are preaching to the choir!
      - ericd 2y ago
        Yep, going to any Bay Area city council meeting makes it very clear why it’s hard to develop - it’s an incredibly long process to get permission to build. You see the same developers again and again, making tweaks to their plans and seeing if that will appease the council. It seems to takes years. I’m currently building something in a much more lax area, but even here, the few parts that require permits/inspection are by far the largest hurdles, because they impose a rigid sequential order of operations that have to happen before I can move on, and require a licensed master tradesman to pull the permit, whereas most other things can generally proceed as materials/equipment/people become available. On your point about local government getting greedy, I went to the state of the county address in our area recently, and the county executive gave a long laundry list of how many millions he was splashing out to x and y, to fanfare for each spending figure, as if the goal was to spend more, rather than get the maximal impact for the dollars. I guess most of the audience were people from those departments receiving the additional money, but as a non-government worker, it was a bit sickening.
        frumper 2y ago
        I hired an electric company to put in a car charger. In order to participate in the EV pricing program it needed a 2nd meter, which needed a permit. The actual installation was a few hours. The permitting process went back and forth between city inspectors starting in September and didn’t get approved late January. The company didn’t fight anything, always did what they recommended and it still kept coming back with more “issues” and adjustments. The company said they’d never take a charger install job again in the city. It was ridiculous.
  - nordstreem 2y ago
    [flagged]
- chaostheory 2y ago
  Mixed use zoning and anything that can’t weaken NIMBY legislation. It’s all about increasing supply. The ADU legislation is a step in the right direction.
  - greenie_beans 2y ago
    yep, regulations are only one piece of the puzzle to increase supply. my proposed solution would need that, and would also help increase supply. increasing supply is the the entire point of my idea.

kjkjadksj 2y ago

Did you have anywhere in mind that had developers underbuild relative to the zoning? Seems like most urban areas in California at least are already near the limits of their zoned capacity. A lot of the times when you see a highrise standing out on a block its not because the rest of the block is zoned for that same height and is underbuilt, but often because of some special variances permitting that project to exceed what its zoned for on that lot.

greenie_beans 2y ago
good question. birmingham, alabama didn't build enough to match demand, and that area's zoning isn't very strict compared to big cities. i'm curious to know about the zoning laws in nashville and atlanta, but from my tiny bit of knowledge, those places have seen the supply/demand imbalance like everywhere else. this data point groups together disparate zoning areas like san francisco and minneapolis so it's hard to parse out where exactly it all happened: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST this is not my expertise, just something i'm interested in and learned about when i worked on a big project about california's housing. curious to learn more from folks here/find ways i'm wrong.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  Birmingham is way off its peak population. It’s under 200k now (still falling) and was 340k in the 1960s. There is probably a lot of hesitancy to build in a place where the population is shrinking.
  - greenie_beans 2y ago
    birmingham is one city in a bigger metro area. when i speak of "birmingham" i speak of the entire metro area, which has grown in population since the 60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_metropolitan_area,_Alabama#Cities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_metropolitan_area,_... that stat you grabbed doesn't exist in a vacuum. that stat matches the same time as the white flight demographic shifts that happened in all metro areas in the south. now do huntsville.