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Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

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Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#321

Post by nend »

CalRobert wrote: post #21

The planet boils because Americans are afraid of living in places as beautiful as the ones they vacation in. If you're an American who'd like to escape, check out the Dutch American Friendship Treaty, or Portugal's new visa for remote work. PT's NHR tax program makes it very popular for FIRE too. It's not Amsterdam but moving to Dublin from LA did wonders for my happiness. The next goal is living somewhere my kid can…

What an odd comment. You don't need to move out of the US in order to reduce how much you drive, or live somewhere your kids can walk to school (source: me). Expecting people to make such a drastic change for fairly minor lifestyle changes isn't realistic.

Also, I don't think it's fear that prevents Americans from moving across the world. I think it's more related to, they don't want to leave their family, friends, and life they've been building for the last 20-60 years.

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#322

Post by asoneth »

CalRobert wrote: post #21

The planet boils because Americans are afraid of living in places as beautiful as the ones they vacation in. If you're an American who'd like to escape, check out the Dutch American Friendship Treaty, or Portugal's new visa for remote work. PT's NHR tax program makes it very popular for FIRE too. It's not Amsterdam but moving to Dublin from LA did wonders for my happiness. The next goal is living somewhere my kid can…

I'm all for moving to nice places but my takeaway from the article is that if people primarily focus on moving to the current supply of nice places it'll just continue to make nice places a luxury good.

If, instead, we actually kept building nice places then the supply would be such that it doesn't need to be a luxury good anymore.

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#323

Post by throw0101a »

Pxtl wrote: post #278
nuerow wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The walkability comes at the cost of tiny housing though. You might have your correlation/causation things mixed up. Walkability means higher quality of life, which means higher demand thus higher prices. In turn, as real estate prices go up, real estate developers are pressured to provide more houses from a limited construction area, thus this means shrinking apartment sizes. Offering smaller apartments also has t…

Walkability demands density, and density intrinsically is encouraged by smaller units. Now, obviously the economic factor you describe can exacerbate this, but fundamentally dense walkable neighborhoods can't have the kind of sprawly mcmansions some people have grown comfortable with in suburbia.

> Walkability demands density, and density intrinsically is encouraged by smaller units.

You can have sizeable homes even in walkable neighbourhoods. Look at any suburb constructed pre-WW2:

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+...

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Westminster+Ave,+Toron...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

You still have a (back)yard and can have a garage attached to a laneway. Just up the street there are more modestly sized houses (3 bedrooms usually):

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O...

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#324

Post by refurb »

schnitzelstoat wrote: post #13

Everybody wants walkable cities, but nobody wants to live in tiny-ass flats. I'm a European and if you look at the size of housing here (perhaps excluding the few cities that have low population density) it's tiny in comparison to most of the USA (except for NYC). So as always there are pro's and con's - would you want to live in a city like NYC? Would you like to raise a family in those conditions?

Yup. I’ve lived in a few dense cities in Asia and when I told people I owned a house in the US with its own yard that cost less than their 50 m^2 apartment in a block of 150 units they were shocked.

Plus most of bought cars if they could, especially families.

Most of the compromises on size of housing were due to affordability, not choice.

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#325

Post by kritiko »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #295
null_object wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It would not really have been possible to build all this shopping in the city center, so there is the physical limitations. I think this is the main problem, that the cities outgrow themselves, and it is just so much cheaper and economical to build mega-malls instead of smaller centres for shopping and amenities. But this is a matter of chosen-lifestyle . This was really brought home to me talking to my mother-in-la…

There is unbelievable competition in Amsterdam right now for grocery delivery. The big markets all offer it, then there are specialized delivery apps like Picnic (cheap), Crisp (quality) and Peter Pot (all reusable packaging). Then, in the past year, the VC funded fast delivery apps showed up: Gorrilas, Flink, Zapp and Getir. Driving to buy groceries may be necessary today, but maybe not tomorrow.

If you look at the history of the Supermarket, the concept is only about 100 years old - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Kullen

From Ruth Cowan's More Work for Mother: "Butchers, greengrocers, coffee merchants, and bakers employed delivery boys to take order from and then carry purchases back to the homes of their more prosperous customers. Smoked, dried, and pickled fish, fruits and vegetables, second-hand clothing, and linens were routinely sold from pushcarts that lined the curbs and traveled the back alleys of poor neighborhoods."

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#326

Post by jollybean »

sokoloff wrote: post #116
torben-friis wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The main issue is that there is just nowhere near enough housing to keep up with population increases, seemingly anywhere in the Western world. Not sure about Sweden but at least here (Spain) housing being bought for investment is much more of a problem than physical unavailability. And I don't mean it as a store of value: People (and companies) buy houses to rent them and have the rent payments pay for the mortgage…

> Basic needs really shouldn't be investment material. Companies providing and selling food, energy, and consumer staples are investment materials. I don’t get why housing should be a special carve-out and don’t see a workable answer to how to provide food for everyone while banning all investment in companies that grow or sell food. These companies are invested in precisely because these are basic needs. The company…

"I don’t get why housing should be a special carve-out "

Capital and leverage.

Wealthy and access to capital can build, rent and make giant returns.

Students paying off debt cannot even get the minimum down payment.

If everyone rented, and, if transition costs were very simple i.e. you could 'jump homes with ease' - then this would be less of a problem.

Also I would add stability. A government job which can be had for life, they will get a mortgage. A private sector worker or freelancer, may have blips in income, a bad blip means no mortgage payment which is very bad.

The consistency required for 25 years of paying off something lends power to the entrenched kinds of workers.

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#327

Post by zchrykng »

jelly wrote: post #299
sokoloff wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A supermarket is in the business of buying food in bulk and then offering portions of food suitable for a shorter time period. A gas station buys 8000 gallons of gas from a tanker and offers it by the gallon at retail. Target/Walmart buy pallets of jeans and offer them individually to consumers. The supermarket didn’t grow the food, gas station refine the fuel, nor did Target manufacture the jeans. A landlord is in t…

Its an interesting way of describing landlords, but we have now worked our way back to GP's original criticism, just stated in a different/less-tangible way: For landlords, the simple act of buying housing (a basic need) allows them to extract a profit in the time dimension, and it shouldn't work like that.

Why not?

Seriously, what is your proposal for how it should work? Presumably the people renting the housing would have bought it themselves if they had the financial resources to do so (unless they just like having housing with no real downside investment risk).

So what would they do without a landlord? If the builders didn't have people to sell the property to, they wouldn't build them and the housing just wouldn't exist.

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#328

Post by refurb »

Sharlin wrote: post #46
schnitzelstoat wrote: post #13

Everybody wants walkable cities, but nobody wants to live in tiny-ass flats. I'm a European and if you look at the size of housing here (perhaps excluding the few cities that have low population density) it's tiny in comparison to most of the USA (except for NYC). So as always there are pro's and con's - would you want to live in a city like NYC? Would you like to raise a family in those conditions?

The US is not a good comparison because the house sizes are just ridiculous – and those huge houses are just as out of reach for most "common" people and are rapidly getting even more out of reach because they never were sustainable at all! But there’s a spectrum between 40m2 highrise flats and 800m2 single-family McMansions.

Not at all. Get outside the big cities and houses are very affordable. We’re talking 120m^2 homes for under $200k.

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#329

Post by dugmartin »

YmiYugy wrote: post #3

I don’t get why there are so few walkable places. The demand is there and willing to pay a premium, and the small lots and narrow streets should make it fairly inexpensive to build.

It is a little crazy. I live in a pretty little New England village that is very walkable and has a functioning two-block downtown (real grocery stores, banks, pharmacy, etc with 2nd and 3rd floor apartments).

The crazy thing is the current town zoning would not allow for most of the existing small lot residential and all of the downtown commercial properties to be built now due to minimum lot sizes and parking requirements.

We already have a hole in the middle of downtown due to a couple of local part time real estate investors buying the one eyesore and having to tear it down as it was literally falling down and then not being allowed to rebuild on the same footprint because of the need for 1 car parking space per bedroom for their upper floor apartments.

I see the need for some zoning but enacting laws that directly prevent the thing that everyone that lives here loves about the town is crazy.

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#330

Post by jbjbjbjb »

bogwog wrote: post #256
jbjbjbjb wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression was the whole article is basically just “why don’t people like what I like”. These houses are scarce but that doesn’t necessarily mean the mainstream market wants that. It’s a niche.

That's not what the article argued at all. It said that the reason these places are expensive is because they're rare (so demand > supply) and the reason they're rare is because people doing construction just assume that nice houses == expensive, so the average person won't be able to afford it. Except, if there were more of them, the prices would go down (supply >= demand), and more people would be able to afford th…

Yes more supply would make it cheaper for the people in the niche that wants that type of house. The writer hints at this but the penny doesn’t drop. It’s most likely that maybe he doesn’t understand the middle and working class market as well as the entire home building industry of America.

Regular people need schools, offices, shops etc which need a level of scale to operate efficiently. That is going to counter the type of atmosphere and lifestyle in the towns the writer talks about. In the UK where small houses and towns are abundant, the quaint shops go where the money is and the rest of sit in traffic to drive in and out of town to go to school and work.

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