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Yet there is still a widespread housing shortage.
by hedora 7mo ago
Yet there is still a widespread housing shortage.
- nine_zeros 7mo ago[dead]
- LinuxAmbulance 7mo agoCommercial buildings can't be easily converted into housing - notably, plumbing is not designed for smaller units and can't be retrofitted.
- ZunarJ5 7mo agoSounds like a job for people who don't have one, and a roof for people without.
- MyHonestOpinon 7mo agoYeah, that is big one. Perhaps we need to rethink housing. Shared restrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens. Keep the same restrooms on every floor. A gym with individual showers and a food court on specific floors.
- AlotOfReading 7mo agoWhat will distinguish these structures from slums in 10 or 20 years?
- ipaddr 7mo agoMarketing
- red-iron-pine 7mo agounless you're an owner and control the means of production anywhere you live will be a slum in ~20 years
- blitzar 7mo agoThey have a roof that isnt a motorway.
- AlotOfReading 7mo agoThe context I'm referencing here is victorian flophouses and HK bedspace apartments, not American homeless encampments.
- supertrope 7mo agoColleges call these dorms.
- toomuchtodo 7mo agoWhy is public housing in Vienna not slums? https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=vienna%20housing&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- kube-system 7mo agoBecause they are designed to be residential housing?
- JumpCrisscross 7mo ago> What will distinguish these structures from slums in 10 or 20 years? The neighbourhood. When I moved to New York in my twenties, I had roommates. Everyone had roommates. That meant sharing a bathroom and kitchen. Not only did this breed camaraderie and teach me to not be a dick, it also freed up cash so I could enjoy the city and save.
- evklein 7mo agoExcept this goes against American individualism on every front. Americans really only fit one sort of mold in terms of what they want: single family home, owned outright (usually mortgaged though). You can extrapolate that out to cities as well: young urban professionals pine for polished condos or lofts with nice views and located in trendy neighborhoods, but their "unit" is still theirs totally, with no shared primary amenities (by that I mean kitchens and bathrooms, not features like pools or gyms). It just so happens that America is luckily predisposed to this kind of living, with an abundance of space to accommodate lots of people in their own non-shared living spaces. The problem with that though is that you limit the opportunities for business, because space is cheap, so you have to implement regulations and zoning to create opportunities for moneymaking and before you know it you can't actually build housing anymore, despite the abundance of space sitting right there.
- adjejmxbdjdn 7mo agoThis is historically incomplete. American cities were replete with dorm room style housing. These were especially popular with new migrants to the city. An incredibly large percentage of apartments in cities like NYC are used as multi family housing with several housemates sharing them to save on rent. The reality is that the reason such housing doesn’t exist/isn’t more widespread is because cities have passed laws eliminating them. Before the white flight to the suburbs, the attempt was to keep the poor out of cities where the rich lived by eliminating housing of this sort since the poor couldn’t afford single family housing. This led to a proliferation of laws that required bathrooms and kitchens in every unit, etc.
- mono442 7mo agoIsn't it also the fact the almost no one wants to live like that? The expectations has changed and there's probably little demand for such type of housing.
- triceratops 7mo agoPeople rent bedrooms in single-family homes all the time. The only difference between that and dorm-style housing is the size of the building.
- Sam713 7mo agoGenuine question, who would actually want to share an intimate space like a kitchen or bathroom with dozens of other strangers on a daily basis? This is obviously a common setup in college dorms or prison, but that is specifically because it’s a temporary (and extreme) cost saving measure, or because you’ve lost the right to participate in society (i.e. prison, which is viewed by some societies to be cruel and inhumane). I lived with housemates for many years to save money and afford housing, but I could at least choose the few housemates with whom I shared those spaces.
- MyHonestOpinon 7mo agoI honestly do not know hoping that someone smarter than me figures it out. I suppose it will depend on the execution. If it is comfortable, looks nice, if it creates community, amenities, price, location, etc.
- mothballed 7mo agoHaving lived in some midwestern cities with a bunch of extra "not easily converted" warehouses, I've seen lots of "illegal" art collective operations where they just put all the extra plumbing on the ground floor where it is easily retrofitted (you can even raise the floor with a false bottom for plumbing if no other option) and then everyone shares a big kitchen, then the upper floors where retro fitting is more difficult are for habitation. Maybe the HVAC unit is undersized or something, or some other safety factors are substandard due to these people not having the money to improve it further, who gives a shit it is better and safer than living on the streets. Obviously since it's illegal these aren't advertised but they're quite prevalent, and issues are rare enough that now decade past muh Ghost Ship Warehouse is the constant drum being beat by the brain dead building code worshippers who actually bought the line of bullshit that having people homeless and freezing and shitting in the streets was actually a 'written in blood' advantage.
- gopher_space 7mo agoCommercial buildings can't be easily converted into housing that provides the same return. Once the current owners have gone out of business it'll be profitable to turn them into flats. The arguments against conversion assume you care about the current owner's financial situation.
- LinuxAmbulance 7mo agoIt's not so much the owner's financial situation, but rather that it'd be cheaper to build new homes than to retrofit a ten floor+ building's plumbing. You'd also have to install a bunch of showers, which could be a significant problem on its own. And then there's the increased amount of sewage, which the building might not be able to handle - even the local sewers might not be equipped to handle the uh... Load a large commercial building would generate with 24/7 occupancy vs 8/5 occupancy. The reason you don't see folks converting commercial spaces into residential isn't because it's not wildly profitable, but because building new purpose-built residential buildings would be cheaper than a conversion for anything other than one or two floors.
- ReflectedImage 7mo agoOh no, I live in a flat in a converted commercial building. They have been going wild in the UK converting office space to residential.
- gopher_space 7mo ago> The reason you don't see folks converting commercial spaces into residential I do see this. That's my point. Your plumbing problem has been solved by not jamming a ton of people into the building.
- joquarky 7mo ago> the increased amount of sewage How is there more than an office full of people?
- quickthrowman 7mo ago
- _DeadFred_ 7mo agoWeren't the feds buying these to convert into very dense ICE detention housing? So they can support high density human habitation according to the Feds, but not normal housing according to who?
- JumpCrisscross 7mo ago> Commercial buildings can't be easily converted into housing - notably, plumbing is not designed for smaller units and can't be retrofitted I still haven't seen numbers that show this is a physics problem versus zoning problem. Worst case, make some things (e.g. washers and dryers, maybe even showers) communal.
- postalrat 7mo agoWidespread affordable housing shortage. There is an abundance of unaffordable housing. he proposed solution, brand new housing, will never solve this.
- mothballed 7mo agoI literally just built a house for ~$60k a couple years ago. A burned out trailer even in a rural shithole with no jobs in my state is about $100k+. An actual functional house, $250k+. This is counter-intuitive but it makes sense in context of the recent COVID 0 real interest mania. Meanwhile all the shithole land with no "dwelling" on it was never eligible for mortgages so people weren't able to bid it up to oblivion on debt that they locked in with 30 year mortgages so you get weird results like the cost of vacant land is way cheaper than the same piece of land with a house that can really only be bulldozed (latter would be cheaper in most times in history). End result is I built an entire house on property cheaper than a burned out uninhabitable trailer. Building on unmortgagable land is a way to bypass the fact houses are all locked up in 30 year loans at negative real interest rates. End result is it's far cheaper to build a house than buy even a shitty burned out one because to do the latter you have to buy someone out of their money printing machine of a negative real rate loan, which obviously they are only willing to do for a king's ransom. ------ re: location --------- I won't share my address but if you are looking to do this yourself: look up fishing canneries in Alaska, most of them are close enough to cheap plots you could do this on, often even without permits or property tax. These canneries are also usually desperate for workers and pay a livable wage to those with refrigeration technology certifications.
- AnimalMuppet 7mo agoIf I understood you correctly, land that has no building on it is not eligible for a mortgage, and is therefore cheaper to buy? With the downside that you have to pay cash, because you can't get a mortgage either?
- mothballed 7mo agoYes the land value is so insanely cheaper on un-mortgagable properties in my state, it's off the charts. I have developed land in my county so I'm familiar with the costs to develop, buy land, place utilities etc. (I did not become a land developer on purpose, only because I realized this absolutely crazy arbitrage) It would cost you about $200-$250k to buy a rural small acreage land with a manufactured home on it. If you pay cash for the land and drop the exact same manufactured home on it, it would only cost you about $150k, and you would get a brand new house instead of a "used" one. There is huge pent up demand for someone to just buy a huge swath of small acreage properties and just drop the cheapest manufactured home you could on it as the non-luxury starter home market is currently not being met. You could pretty much double your money. I'm not sure why this isn't being done en masse although a few private actors seem to be doing it and making a killing.