4 ms·

> One main driver is that there's not being built enough new housing. I recently entertained the idea of building a new house. Not terribly surprising, but wor

> One main driver is that there's not being built enough new housing. I recently entertained the idea of building a new house. Not terribly surprising, but worth mentioning that the time and materials to put up the structure was going cost even more than buying a used house. If nobody can afford to buy a less expensive used house then naturally nobody is going to build the much more expensive new house either. Therein lies the bottleneck.

WarmWash 4mo ago
For builders, they will buy a block of land and build many houses on it. The unit cost of a home drops dramatically when you are building 50 of them at once. The real killer for them is interest rates, as they finance the whole thing and then can pay it off when all the homes are sold. High rates make the finances much more challenging to work.
- win311fwg 4mo ago
  For what it is worth, said home entertained was a manufactured home, so it is already pushing economies of scale. I'd hate to see a quote for a custom home. We have not truly figured out how to make housing scale very well, though. Even our most efficient methods are very primitive as compared to virtually all other manufacturing we do. Solve that problem and the price of all homes will plummet.
stefanfisk 4mo ago
I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately. I live in an apartment in Stockholm but I also own an old forest cabin. It’s perfectly legal for me to live in said cabin permanently, but it would be strictly illegal for me to build a new house to the same simple standard. The building codes are basically making it illegal to be poor. Similar patterns exist for student housing. The old style of student corridors with small rooms are no longer being built. Instead we are basically getting full apartments with individual huge bathrooms because the building codes mandate that everything is wheelchair accessible even when it’s practically temporary housing and they could get by with making 1/10 apartments accessible. And that’s not even getting into how NIMBYism is enabled by laws that basically guarantee stagnation anywhere housing is in demand. Shit’s fucked.
- Ekaros 4mo ago
  And then when you end up with actually accessible version of those it is different again. Which I had for a few years as student. No under sink cabinets. Even more massive bathroom. The bathroom was nearly the size of those small bedrooms.
- dlubarov 4mo ago
  A lot of the stricter codes have very real safety benefits though - modern electrical is much safer, fire sprinklers add significant cost but really do help contain fires, etc. (Not that it's all good, e.g. I don't like Washington's WAC 51-11R which just seems way overcomplicated.)
  - cucumber3732842 4mo ago
    >A lot of the stricter codes have very real safety benefits though And it comes at a cost of slowly destroying our society and turning everyone into landless peasants. Is that worth it? Nevermind that a lot the IBC is ghost written by industry to the benefit of industry. A lot of local addendums are the same but for local interests. A lot of the permitting process is hack garbage to obfuscate how bad it all really is.
- epistasis 4mo ago
  > The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread. A bunch of houses in the mountains around me burned down a few years ago. It's one of the most populated "wildland-urban interface" areas of the world, because building more housing inside of the urban areas has been banned for half a century, so the wilderness was sacrifice to housing, as there was less regulation in the mountains. However, regulations have caught up a bit, and people that lived in houses valued >$1M before burning down, now have to do things like install proper septic systems that cost $50k or $70k, instead of their sewage leaking into the abundant waterways that used to be habitats of salmon and the like. These people are very aggrieved at their position of being previously house-rich, cash-poor, and apparently underinsured. I'm not sure what the right solution is other than legalizing housing in the urban core again. Which results in even bigger fights.
epistasis 4mo ago
New things do tend to cost more than old things, that's pretty much always the case! Where I live, people are blocking the construction of new apartments because the cost of the new ones is a bit higher, 10%-50%, than the average existing apartment. The idea behind blocking the new apartments is that "new expensive apartments don't help anybody" and people get very upset that the new housing is going to the type of person that can afford to pay slightly more for the newer apartment. Rather they would prefer that new housing is only built if it's cheaper than existing housing. So when housing does get blocked, the existing landlords demand the higher new rents that those wealthier people pay, driving up the overall costs on old apartments. The poorer people get displaced, the wealthier people have housing but worse housing, and the only people who are better off are the landlords of the older apartments.
- win311fwg 4mo ago
  > the type of person that can afford to pay slightly more for the newer apartment. Relying on that is the root problem. I could technically afford the new house, but in the end I couldn't find a good reason to tie up that much capital for something that does the same thing as what I've already got, only shinier. If the price were more reasonable then I'd make the move and then someone else could move into my much cheaper used house. But, as things sit, I occupy the cheap house instead, leaving the next guy out in the cold. Trouble is that just because I can afford it doesn't mean I am willing to be a buyer. The price still has to make sense. I am not alone in this. It has been well reported that people are now staying in their "starter homes" instead of upgrading like past generations used to.
  - ghaff 4mo ago
    There is a lot of cost and effort associated with moving into (or building) a new house. Honestly, where I live isn't huge but it's probably a bit more than I need at this point. But, absent a real shift such as buying an urban condo, it makes more sense to just hold onto the paid-off exurban house for the time being.
  - epistasis 4mo ago
    And yet, the new "too expensive" housing is 98% occupied, so there are slightly wealthier people who are actually paying to alleviate the housing shortage crisis with their higher rents. Yet the same people lobbying to block the building of these new apartments are still saying that "nobody lives there" because it doesn't fit their mental model of the world.

WarmWash 4mo ago

For builders, they will buy a block of land and build many houses on it. The unit cost of a home drops dramatically when you are building 50 of them at once. The real killer for them is interest rates, as they finance the whole thing and then can pay it off when all the homes are sold. High rates make the finances much more challenging to work.

win311fwg 4mo ago
For what it is worth, said home entertained was a manufactured home, so it is already pushing economies of scale. I'd hate to see a quote for a custom home. We have not truly figured out how to make housing scale very well, though. Even our most efficient methods are very primitive as compared to virtually all other manufacturing we do. Solve that problem and the price of all homes will plummet.

stefanfisk 4mo ago

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately. I live in an apartment in Stockholm but I also own an old forest cabin. It’s perfectly legal for me to live in said cabin permanently, but it would be strictly illegal for me to build a new house to the same simple standard. The building codes are basically making it illegal to be poor. Similar patterns exist for student housing. The old style of student corridors with small rooms are no longer being built. Instead we are basically getting full apartments with individual huge bathrooms because the building codes mandate that everything is wheelchair accessible even when it’s practically temporary housing and they could get by with making 1/10 apartments accessible. And that’s not even getting into how NIMBYism is enabled by laws that basically guarantee stagnation anywhere housing is in demand. Shit’s fucked.

Ekaros 4mo ago
And then when you end up with actually accessible version of those it is different again. Which I had for a few years as student. No under sink cabinets. Even more massive bathroom. The bathroom was nearly the size of those small bedrooms.
dlubarov 4mo ago
A lot of the stricter codes have very real safety benefits though - modern electrical is much safer, fire sprinklers add significant cost but really do help contain fires, etc. (Not that it's all good, e.g. I don't like Washington's WAC 51-11R which just seems way overcomplicated.)
- cucumber3732842 4mo ago
  >A lot of the stricter codes have very real safety benefits though And it comes at a cost of slowly destroying our society and turning everyone into landless peasants. Is that worth it? Nevermind that a lot the IBC is ghost written by industry to the benefit of industry. A lot of local addendums are the same but for local interests. A lot of the permitting process is hack garbage to obfuscate how bad it all really is.
epistasis 4mo ago
> The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread. A bunch of houses in the mountains around me burned down a few years ago. It's one of the most populated "wildland-urban interface" areas of the world, because building more housing inside of the urban areas has been banned for half a century, so the wilderness was sacrifice to housing, as there was less regulation in the mountains. However, regulations have caught up a bit, and people that lived in houses valued >$1M before burning down, now have to do things like install proper septic systems that cost $50k or $70k, instead of their sewage leaking into the abundant waterways that used to be habitats of salmon and the like. These people are very aggrieved at their position of being previously house-rich, cash-poor, and apparently underinsured. I'm not sure what the right solution is other than legalizing housing in the urban core again. Which results in even bigger fights.

epistasis 4mo ago

New things do tend to cost more than old things, that's pretty much always the case! Where I live, people are blocking the construction of new apartments because the cost of the new ones is a bit higher, 10%-50%, than the average existing apartment. The idea behind blocking the new apartments is that "new expensive apartments don't help anybody" and people get very upset that the new housing is going to the type of person that can afford to pay slightly more for the newer apartment. Rather they would prefer that new housing is only built if it's cheaper than existing housing. So when housing does get blocked, the existing landlords demand the higher new rents that those wealthier people pay, driving up the overall costs on old apartments. The poorer people get displaced, the wealthier people have housing but worse housing, and the only people who are better off are the landlords of the older apartments.

win311fwg 4mo ago
> the type of person that can afford to pay slightly more for the newer apartment. Relying on that is the root problem. I could technically afford the new house, but in the end I couldn't find a good reason to tie up that much capital for something that does the same thing as what I've already got, only shinier. If the price were more reasonable then I'd make the move and then someone else could move into my much cheaper used house. But, as things sit, I occupy the cheap house instead, leaving the next guy out in the cold. Trouble is that just because I can afford it doesn't mean I am willing to be a buyer. The price still has to make sense. I am not alone in this. It has been well reported that people are now staying in their "starter homes" instead of upgrading like past generations used to.
- ghaff 4mo ago
  There is a lot of cost and effort associated with moving into (or building) a new house. Honestly, where I live isn't huge but it's probably a bit more than I need at this point. But, absent a real shift such as buying an urban condo, it makes more sense to just hold onto the paid-off exurban house for the time being.
- epistasis 4mo ago
  And yet, the new "too expensive" housing is 98% occupied, so there are slightly wealthier people who are actually paying to alleviate the housing shortage crisis with their higher rents. Yet the same people lobbying to block the building of these new apartments are still saying that "nobody lives there" because it doesn't fit their mental model of the world.