One key thing to keep in mind is that, even if the population's stagnant, young people want to move out (and live in an apartment, later upgrading to a house when they have kids) while their parents and grandparents want to age in place in their existing home (occupancy goes from say 3-4 to 2). This is why housing production actually has to outpace population growth just to keep prices stable.
The U.S. Needs More Housing Than Almost Anyone Can Imagine
21–30 of 43 posts
Re: The U.S. Needs More Housing Than Almost Anyone Can Imagine
#22Not just the USA The housing situation in the UK is beyond critical.
It's absolutely ridiculous now. It was also in the news today that net migration was 504,000 this year. I absolutely think it was the right thing to do (mostly refugees from Ukraine and Hong Kong) but if you're going to have these migration policies and you've got a housing supply and affordability crisis, you've absolutely got to implement mass house building policies at the same time. This government is an absolute…
But where will you go? Housing is ridiculous everywhere (except maybe Japan).
Re: The U.S. Needs More Housing Than Almost Anyone Can Imagine
#23> The best evidence for how much housing we need to build lies in the prices that people pay today.
No. The best evidence is the total number of households in the US compared with the total number of residences. How has that been tracking?
Demand for housing has been going up. This demand is not always for a primary residence (or even for properties intended to be rented out as a primary residence).
Ireland learnt the hard way that rising demand (as evidenced by rising prices) does not mean a shortage of residences that people could live in. Their shortage quickly turned to a surplus when the GFC hit (though they've somehow managed to engineer another accommodation crisis in Dublin since).
Re: The U.S. Needs More Housing Than Almost Anyone Can Imagine
#24The full picture gets worse the more you look into it. The largest home builders in the nation aren’t building homes at budgets that most can afford. So you’d say to yourself, well clearly they’re targeting the affluent then. Except there are only so many high income Americans you can sell to, and not all of them want expensive homes. So what do these builders do? They build-to-rent! Yep. Those single-family homes yo…
>So you’d say to yourself, well clearly they’re targeting the affluent then. Except there are only so many high income Americans you can sell to They're targeting high net worth individuals looking for a store of value (or, in some cases, a foothold/bolthole from their repressive government). High income Americans are to these flats what jewellery/smartphones are to gold - the underlying use value that, combined with…
I don’t know anyone buying new development housing as an alternative to marketable securities.
Re: The U.S. Needs More Housing Than Almost Anyone Can Imagine
#25Not just the USA The housing situation in the UK is beyond critical.
The UK's problems are about distribution not supply. We subsidise OAPs to sit alone in 4 bed houses in areas that need workers, then there is no space or money left for working families...
> ...distribution not supply
This is true in more than just the UK. It's also not simply old people living in oversized houses. Think holiday homes, AirBnB, second homes, land-banked properties, etc.
Any government that truly wanted to address it's accommodation crisis should start by conducting a thorough survey of residences and determine how many are actually being used as a primary residence.
Re: The U.S. Needs More Housing Than Almost Anyone Can Imagine
#26Not just the USA The housing situation in the UK is beyond critical.
It's absolutely ridiculous now. It was also in the news today that net migration was 504,000 this year. I absolutely think it was the right thing to do (mostly refugees from Ukraine and Hong Kong) but if you're going to have these migration policies and you've got a housing supply and affordability crisis, you've absolutely got to implement mass house building policies at the same time. This government is an absolute…
A better way to look at it is how much is immigration of wealthy people propping up the UK economy? If you look at the number of new £1m+ apartments in London (which even if you are a couple of well paid engineers you probably could not get a mortgage for), then it paints a pretty stark picture.
Re: The U.S. Needs More Housing Than Almost Anyone Can Imagine
#27There's no situation in which the NYC subway can accommodate a 50% increase in riders. Just building housing isn't enough. I do think this article is right about a lot of things, but I think that if we could magically increase housing, we would find what NYC found building highways: building them actually created traffic, and they could never catch it. If a city's infrastructure can't dramatically increase, the city'…
Show your work.
Re: The U.S. Needs More Housing Than Almost Anyone Can Imagine
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're the property owner it should be easy for you to build whatever level of residential density you want and think the market will make profitable. Why is it illegal for me to build townhouses on my land? I'm in an area where it takes, on average, 1.8 acres per single family home. The next town over would put 18 single family homes in that same space. Zoning is restrictive even for single-family homes.
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Modded down by developer shills and clueless Bernie bros who lash out at facts they don't like... for whatever reason. Maybe they lack the confidence or gumption to believe that they'll ever succeed, so why should anyone else enjoy what he worked decades for?
GIMME GIMME GIMME. Up yours. Get a job.
Re: The U.S. Needs More Housing Than Almost Anyone Can Imagine
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Denser cities use less water.. Biggest consumer of water is agriculture. There are natural places to increase density as traffic increases. So think of a main road, along that main road and some of the nearer side streets can be densified. You see a lot of this along El Camino for example in the Bay area. Take a bunch of these 1950s and earlier small 2bdrm houses and build multifamily housing.
Like I said: You want to live in density, move to the dense urban centers. But covering 100% of the land with concrete and giant edifices is unsustainable and inexcusable.
"Main roads" are main roads for their original levels of population. They quickly become impassable if you exceed their design capacity; in fact, a great many of them are already there.
And... no. Why destroy houses and yards with concrete blocks, while giant already-concrete edifices sit empty? You totally ignored that.
Re: The U.S. Needs More Housing Than Almost Anyone Can Imagine
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zoning for who? America has no issue with single family zoning. I’m assuming you’re speaking about middle and high density zoning. Since the issues you're describing are extremely common for those zoning projects.
If you're the property owner it should be easy for you to build whatever level of residential density you want and think the market will make profitable. Why is it illegal for me to build townhouses on my land? I'm in an area where it takes, on average, 1.8 acres per single family home. The next town over would put 18 single family homes in that same space. Zoning is restrictive even for single-family homes.
> If you're the property owner it should be easy for you to build whatever level of residential density you want and think the market will make profitable. Why is it illegal for me to build townhouses on my land?
Isn't the entire concept of externalities in economics that things aren't that simple? Presumably you agree that your neighbor shouldn't be able to build a sewage treatment plant next to your house.