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There's a great reddit thread exploring much the same issues at https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_ar... Turns out, requiring little houses for cars be added on to every house for people gets expensive.
Quality of life is expensive, doesn't mean it's not worth it. Not that there shouldn't be some allowances for denser apartment buildings.
There's a great reddit thread exploring much the same issues at https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_ar... Turns out, requiring little houses for cars be added on to every house for people gets expensive.
Ugh, I remember that one. Painful to read. For an extra level of irony, where do wealthy Angelenos go for vacation? Paris, for its great, walkable neighborhoods that allow exactly what their city rabidly bans.
why don't more people act as their own architect / build more of their housing themselves? I'm coming from an attitude of "a house is a home , a machine to make the lives of my family easier and more comfortable", not "houses are an investment with incidental utility as shelter." Is it that many don't care about their house as a home?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re forcing private businesses to take on contracts that they may not want. Totally unreasonable. The only way to do this is to zone things certain ways. For instance, pass a law that says any building in a certain area needs to be a certain height and contain n% affordable units.
> You’re forcing private businesses to take on contracts that they may not want. Totally unreasonable. Regardless of how you feel about this, it can and does happen all the time. New residential highrises in Manhattan don't get approved unless they have a percentage of low-income units.
Are new residential high-rises getting built in Manhattan at a rate which is commensurate with demand and keeping prices stable? According to Redfin[0], housing prices there are up 12.9% YoY, exceeding general inflation and showing that the rate of construction is too low.
In CA, we've added additional burdens onto affordable housing which makes them more expensive than market rate housing. A report from UC Berkeley[1] says that regulatory constraints make 'affordable' units 7% more expensive to build than market-rate units. And of course CA has also made market-rate units more expensive to construct, further exacerbating the crisis[2].
This is unsustainable. On our current trajectory we will either needlessly sprawl our way into occupying all unincorporated land (because there's no Planning Department) in the entire country or we'll have tens of millions of people living in tents and camper vans.
[0] - https://www.redfin.com/city/35948/NY/Manhattan/housing-marke...
[1] - https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/research-and-policy/the-co...
[2] - https://www.builderonline.com/land/local-markets/californias...
why don't more people act as their own architect / build more of their housing themselves? I'm coming from an attitude of "a house is a home , a machine to make the lives of my family easier and more comfortable", not "houses are an investment with incidental utility as shelter." Is it that many don't care about their house as a home?
Most people who own homes either A) have most of their net worth tied up in it or B) have a levered position in its value via mortgage. And many people who don't own homes, especially younger people, have pretty much given up hope on being able to own their own home within their lifetimes. The rapid rise in housing prices and rents over the past couple decades means a lot of people are moving - their rents go up and…
Isn’t that the rule ? Wasn’t there a huge shift to the US west in search of opportunities?
People move all the time to find a better life for themselves
You can sit around and wait for your cities laws to revert the market and offer walkable cities, mass public transit, solve homelessness… or move
Let's say I'm a developer and there's unmet demand at all price points. Obviously I build the highest-margin product until I've satisfied that demand. Then I move on to the second-highest-margin product until I've satisfied that demand. Anywhere that demand across the spectrum dramatically outstrips production capacity (e.g., anywhere in the Bay Area, where NIMBYism has made it nigh-impossible to build anything) what…
In the book The Affordable City [0], this is illustrated with a really powerful analogy: Every year in the United States, the Toyota motor company sells about 2 million regular Toyota cars and 300,000 expensive luxury Lexus cars. Suppose that we introduced a law that each motor company can only sell 300,000 cars a year. Which cars would Toyota continue to make? [0] https://islandpress.org/books/affordable-city [1] ht…
You actually want it more complicated than that, maybe something like for every dollar of affordability you sell (under $X), you earn the right to sell $0.10 worth of luxury.
Let's say I'm a developer and there's unmet demand at all price points. Obviously I build the highest-margin product until I've satisfied that demand. Then I move on to the second-highest-margin product until I've satisfied that demand. Anywhere that demand across the spectrum dramatically outstrips production capacity (e.g., anywhere in the Bay Area, where NIMBYism has made it nigh-impossible to build anything) what…
It'd be perfectly reasonable to mandate that for one high value luxury house, a developer has to build a certain number of affordable homes. I guess it'd be the nimbys that would try and prohibit such legislation.
Or we could invest in better high density housing and more mass transit and get rid of the lottery nonsense.
There's a great reddit thread exploring much the same issues at https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_ar... Turns out, requiring little houses for cars be added on to every house for people gets expensive.
Ugh, I remember that one. Painful to read. For an extra level of irony, where do wealthy Angelenos go for vacation? Paris, for its great, walkable neighborhoods that allow exactly what their city rabidly bans.
Zoning laws seem like the easiest single lever here. Government can change one thing and get out of the way (yes I'm naive here..) The cities of the world that don't feel like they're enveloped in a housing crisis have opposite zoning restrictions to those that do - namely they restrict single-family homes and high rises, and permit that middle-sized building and also for existing single family homes to be converted…