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To ease the housing crunch, more places end single-family zoning

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Re: To ease the housing crunch, more places end single-family zoning

#161

Post by resonantjacket5 »

osigurdson wrote: post #156
Gigachad wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can be solved with subdivision, sure grandmas land is now worth 3M. But we will build a mid rise apartment building on it that regular people can afford.

Why do we need to lower our expectations now? Single family homes are what most people want. Why jam people into apartments if they don’t want to live in them? All houses should be cheap imo - it is just a few cheap sticks and some plastic after all. Some cities obviously have no room to expand so the only option is higher density. Where that is not the case, build single family homes en mass until anyone can afford…

To clarify the issue isn't really shortage of single family homes by itself but single family homes nearby amenities (jobs etc...) Which while one can build massive freeways (Los Angeles, Atlanta etc...) eventually you'll run out of land a circular radius or end up having to build ever larger freeways to reach those suburbs.

Re: To ease the housing crunch, more places end single-family zoning

#162

Post by Retric »

osigurdson wrote: post #156
Gigachad wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can be solved with subdivision, sure grandmas land is now worth 3M. But we will build a mid rise apartment building on it that regular people can afford.

Why do we need to lower our expectations now? Single family homes are what most people want. Why jam people into apartments if they don’t want to live in them? All houses should be cheap imo - it is just a few cheap sticks and some plastic after all. Some cities obviously have no room to expand so the only option is higher density. Where that is not the case, build single family homes en mass until anyone can afford…

Many people don’t actually want single family homes. In my 20’s I was regularly on the lookout for efficiencies but I could rarely find them. It wasn’t about cost I just liked the layout more.

Re: To ease the housing crunch, more places end single-family zoning

#163

Post by tormeh »

hibikir wrote: post #103
jmathai wrote: post #8

Feels like it will perpetuate the trend of young adults not being able to afford to purchase a home. Duplexes and more apartments mean more renters. No matter your view on home ownership, there’s a lot to be said of the ability to stabilize your budget’s largest line item via fixed rate mortgages. This helps but is just a band aid.

Let me tell you about Spain. It appears to be a relatively low density country, but if you look at where people live, an extremely high percentage of the population lives in an apartment. Your average Spaniard lives in a square km that is about as dense as NY's upper east side. Therefore, based on your argument, you'd expect a lot of renters, right? As it happens, While about a third of Americans rent, only about a f…

This is a good post, but it's really wasted on the audience.

Re: To ease the housing crunch, more places end single-family zoning

#164

Post by osigurdson »

antasvara wrote: post #121
osigurdson wrote: post #35

I used to think that if average income cannot afford the average home, the market must necessarily correct. I’m wrong about this obviously but I still cannot understand why. I understand that wealthier people have vacation homes, but the only reason for a wealthy person to purchase an additional non-vacation home is to rent it out to someone less wealthy. Since the less wealthy person couldn’t cover the mortgage to b…

Covering a mortgage payment each month is much more feasible than purchasing a house for most. The real issue is saving for the down payment and having good enough credit to get approved for a loan. There's a considerable difference between the loan payment with a big down payment and good credit versus bad credit and a low down payment. That difference can essentially turn an unaffordable home purchase into an "affo…

Your thesis is a large number of people are right at the inflection point between being able to afford mortgage payments but cannot qualify for a mortgage. I don’t mean to sound harsh but this seems like a highly unlikely explanation.

Re: To ease the housing crunch, more places end single-family zoning

#165

Post by thomas_ma »

an_account wrote: post #21
imglorp wrote: post #7

It needs to be affordable as well as multi unit. There is a massive influx in many burbs of "luxury apartments" with rents $2500+ and I'm not talking downtown NYC. That's more than most mortgages.

“Luxury” is often a marketing term used for very much not luxury apartments. There’s nothing “luxury” about a 900 sqft apartment that happens to have decent stainless steel appliances and a modern look. New apartments (like new cars) are always priced higher than older buildings, but give it a few years and prices drop.

This is very true. I’ve been in a bunch of “luxury” apartments in the Boston area…the finishes are modern maybe but rarely luxury. Vinyl flooring, cheap (albeit stainless steel) appliances, small bathrooms, etc.

Re: To ease the housing crunch, more places end single-family zoning

#166

Post by bdw5204 »

Sebguer wrote: post #49
ericd wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, just needs to be more building. New luxury apartments will make the old stock cheaper. The fight over the number of affordable units in every single new development slows things down and exacerbates the affordability problem. Remove as many of the barriers to development as possible, and the problem will be solved.

This ignores the possibility of housing stock consolidating, and price-fixing, which can keep rents artificially inflated by just keeping capacity off the markets. Example: https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r...

One of the ways to address that is to tax vacant housing units. For example, you could double the property taxes for any house that is vacant for more than x days out of a year and the x could be surprisingly high. For multi-unit properties, the property taxes could be multiplied by 1.y where y is the percentage of vacant units or by 2 if all properties are vacant. The revenues from the tax can then go towards a good cause like funding homeless shelters.

If there's a need to not only put capacity on the market but fill it, the market will drive rent prices down because it is better to get something for your vacant unit than pay double the property taxes. If that doesn't work and there's still tons of vacant housing stock that is being held off the market to drive up rent, you can always keep raising the vacant housing tax until it works.

Re: To ease the housing crunch, more places end single-family zoning

#167

Post by runarberg »

ericd wrote: post #155
runarberg wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a mistake to ignore the power imbalance between landlords and tenants, especially when the landlord is a business. Sure you can argue that the market is out of equilibrium which causes this inflation in rent, but to say that is the only reason is a blatant oversimplification. Rich landlords will keep overcharging for rent as long as they are able. And more buildings just gives them more opportunities to exploit…

If developers build at a faster rate than new renters want to move in, the rent will decrease, because it will again become a competition between landlords to try to reduce their vacancy rate, for the same reason they're currently increasing rent - revenue maximization. Vacancies represent a lot of lost revenue. Please, don't agitate for more rent control, it's such a bad idea.

Like I said, this ignores the power imbalance. A business has far less to loose by letting an apartment go vacant for a while, then a renter has by living on the street for even a week.

This becomes even more true as the business has a larger portfolio and more assets to devalue. It is in the common interest of all landlords to keep the rent high, so if they are able to sink the cost of keeping an apartment vacant, they will do it if it means that that cost will be realized as profit in their non-vacant units.

Tell me, why do you think rent control is a bad idea? For me it seems only bad if you are a landlord.

Re: To ease the housing crunch, more places end single-family zoning

#168

Post by flextheruler »

hibikir wrote: post #103
jmathai wrote: post #8

Feels like it will perpetuate the trend of young adults not being able to afford to purchase a home. Duplexes and more apartments mean more renters. No matter your view on home ownership, there’s a lot to be said of the ability to stabilize your budget’s largest line item via fixed rate mortgages. This helps but is just a band aid.

Let me tell you about Spain. It appears to be a relatively low density country, but if you look at where people live, an extremely high percentage of the population lives in an apartment. Your average Spaniard lives in a square km that is about as dense as NY's upper east side. Therefore, based on your argument, you'd expect a lot of renters, right? As it happens, While about a third of Americans rent, only about a f…

Anecdote but dated a Spanish person who claimed that housing is very static for them and that the idea of young people moving out and buying their own place is extremely uncommon

Re: To ease the housing crunch, more places end single-family zoning

#169

Post by CPLX »

ticviking wrote: post #15
rayiner wrote: post #2

> We don't have the space to incorporate a city, or urbanized living, within this small village of a community that we have," says Julie Lee, president of a neighborhood civic association and founding member of Arlingtonians for Upzoning Transparency, a group fighting the plan. Comments to these zoning fights are full of gems like this. Arlington is about the size of Buffalo NY and 50% denser. It hasn’t been anything…

An interesting question to ask is why do we always seem to grow by increasing density rather than establishing new small towns? Leon Krier's Drawing For Architecture contrasts over-expansion both with excessive density and excessive sprawl and by duplication. It seems to me that if it were legal to do so there are plenty of tiny towns that could grow to the size of a small city like Arlington or Buffalo.

> why do we always seem to grow by increasing density rather than establishing new small towns

When we grow population we increase density. The two concepts have a direct linear relationship there’s no other thing that can possibly happen.

The only relevant question is where the density increases. A new small town in a rural area is an increase in density for that area.

Your argument thus reduces, entirely, to “why don’t people go somewhere else instead of where I live?”

Re: To ease the housing crunch, more places end single-family zoning

#170

Post by nostrebored »

javanissen wrote: post #160
hayst4ck wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing can not be both an investment and affordable. This might sound like a complex or intricate statement, but it is deceptively simple. If you graph housing price over time, is the graph increasing or decreasing? If it is increasing then housing is a good investment and therefore becoming less affordable, if it's decreasing then housing is not a good investment because it is becoming cheaper and therefore more af…

> Housing can not be both an investment and affordable. Mathematically this isn’t true, as housing (even owner-occupied housing) pays a dividend [0]. So a house whose price tracks inflation (0% real price return) that pays a 4% dividend in net operating income still has a respectable 4% real return. Juice that return way up with a fixed-rate mortgage and you still have a great investment without home prices racing pa…

This is something that only makes sense in the lunacy of housing-based-investment.

Your house might pay a dividend, but it has immense maintenance cost.

If the dividend from your house, on average, is enough to pay this cost, we’re in this hellscape.

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