Has LA cracked the code for building affordable housing? • Hacker News Board

Re: Has LA cracked the code for building affordable housing?

#61

Post by Aloisius » Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 11:47 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #10

Or, seeing as how it's kind of important, we could subsidize building more housing.

Or we could stop making it so painfully expensive and risky to try and build housing.

NIMBY policies have broken the traditional boom and bust cycles of housing in California that used to ensure there was enough housing for everyone.

It used to be that when demand was outrageously high, it'd start a housing boom where builders would start reinvesting profits from building higher-end places into building more and more until they'd overbuilt. Wealthier people would move to newer places freeing up stock for everyone else. During the bust, you'd have even more people upgrading as prices reset.

LA seems to be experimenting with suspending some of the anti-building policies which is certainly good, but they're still stuck on this idea that it should only be for below market-rate housing - as if the laws of supply and demand don't exist.

Re: Has LA cracked the code for building affordable housing?

#62

Post by jeffbee » Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 11:47 PM UTC

cyberax wrote: post #17

I'll save you a click: no. Here's the thing: housing in dense cities will NEVER be affordable. Never. What happened recently (and is happening in other cities like Seattle) is companies pivoting from building "luxury" crappy condos to sweet state-subsdizied housing. These kinds of projects are great for them, they don't need to care about the market demand.

This is literally the opposite of everything the article is saying. These are not state-subsidized. They are just vanilla buildings. The city got rid of impact fees, "prevailing wage" union giveaways, and approved projects in 60 days or less, and because this reduced the costs of building by a large amount, it becomes profitable for builders to just do their thing without subsidies.

Re: Has LA cracked the code for building affordable housing?

#63

Post by ZoomerCretin » Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 11:48 PM UTC

skeptrune wrote: post #22

My main takeaway from this is that the free market may have already lowered housing costs if bureaucracy would just get out of the way. I mean it seems like there is something to the bit of regulation that forces them to keep rent low, but broadly this suggests to me that the bulk of spend should be on somehow making the bureaucratic part of the system run more smoothly or be easier to navigate so more projects get a…

Canada is seeing housing prices skyrocket like mad because they refuse to understand this. They recently passed a federal spending bill to help fund city planners, because a huge bottleneck in housing construction is the cities requiring a city planner to check boxes on a ton of things that were never important to begin with.

City planning is one of the most destructive professions in the United States. In terms of death, lost years of life to commuting, health issues, and social ills, it has no peer. We live shorter lives, with more health issues, and are lonelier than our rich peers in other countries because of our centrally-planned built environment. We built cities the same way for thousands of years: for humans on foot; and are only now coming to realize that our great auto-centric suburban experiment was an enormous and historic blunder.

Re: Has LA cracked the code for building affordable housing?

#64

Post by kiba » Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 11:49 PM UTC

apsurd wrote: post #46

vuln wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is plenty of history showing the long term effects and outcome of dense housing run by the Government. Dense housing ran by private companies will always be a race to capture the most amount of profit. While Government ran dense housing will be affected by an ever decreasing budget and ever increasing cost. OP is right. We need to invest in “fly over” states. There is an abundance of land and opportunity to ach…

Thanks, so it's specifically govt run affordable housing. I read OP as the more general "dense cities = BAD" but seems like it's more specifically "govt run plans for dense housing". I can understand that. Also, yes also agree about more jobs and opportunities more distributed across the land. That sounds good. I think about my position as favoring walkable dense metros in the more organic manner - people like people…

Government planned housing being bad is just a feature of your specific local context, not an inevitability to all government subsidized/built housing.

Governments are human organizations, and it's not a surprise that some organizations are better ran than other.

Re: Has LA cracked the code for building affordable housing?

#65

Post by jeffbee » Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 11:49 PM UTC

jmyeet wrote: post #43

Credit has to be given to the governor Gavin Newsom here. He's made some questionable policy choices, particularly with seemingly random vetoes (which the legislature could override but they haven't done in decades because that would take up time in the next legislative session). Prop 13 was about the absolute worst thing to ever happen to California housing. Rising property prices make people feel like they're riche…

You did not ever seem to get around to the part where we have to give credit to Newsom. He hasn't shown leadership on this issue. State housing reform has come from Weiner and Skinner, enforcement from AG Rob Bonta, and these local Los Angeles improvements are executive orders of their mayor.

Re: Has LA cracked the code for building affordable housing?

#66

Post by michaelmrose » Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 11:49 PM UTC

popularonion wrote: post #48

apsurd wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the person that wants more dense and walkable cities, so I'm really curious to learn more about why that will ALWAYS lead to more misery down the road. Honest question, do you have any stuff I can read or terms I can search on?

Fertility rates in cities are far below replacement and falling every year. In every country, religious or secular, liberal or conservative, socialized healthcare/education or no. So they are proving simply not capable of sustaining human life. This only works as long as rural people keep having lots of kids to feed into the city, but that isn’t really happening anymore either.

Modern Societies as a whole are below replacement for our own consider

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6745a9.htm https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2017/08/rural-america...

Based on actual data urban individuals (80% of the pop) aren't dependent upon rurals (20% of the pop) having babies because by the numbers most of the native born sons and daughters are born in urban and suburban areas. In fact both are dependent upon immigration to maintain the same level of population.

Re: Has LA cracked the code for building affordable housing?

#67

Post by Retric » Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 11:50 PM UTC

vuln wrote: post #41

apsurd wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the person that wants more dense and walkable cities, so I'm really curious to learn more about why that will ALWAYS lead to more misery down the road. Honest question, do you have any stuff I can read or terms I can search on?

There is plenty of history showing the long term effects and outcome of dense housing run by the Government. Dense housing ran by private companies will always be a race to capture the most amount of profit. While Government ran dense housing will be affected by an ever decreasing budget and ever increasing cost. OP is right. We need to invest in “fly over” states. There is an abundance of land and opportunity to ach…

Many examples of dense government built/run housing work fine. The common problems are not a function of housing but the people living in that housing. In cities where the government owns over half of all housing stock tenants end up representing the general population well and the system works fine with generally low prices and overhead.

The temptation is to only build government housing for the poor, but that’s a well known recipe for failure. The US has instead shifted to government spreading out poor population via subsidies but that’s doesn’t fix any of the core issues.

Re: Has LA cracked the code for building affordable housing?

#68

Post by jeffbee » Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 11:52 PM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #45

simonw wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does building dense housing lead to higher housing costs? That seems unintuitive to me.

This kind of anti-logic usually goes along with arguments like "well, they keep building lots of units and prices haven't gone down, so obviously it's useless to do anything but enact rent control for current residents and give the middle finger to anyone else who ever wants to live in that place", while ignoring that prices can't go down until we catch up on the literally decades of underbuilding in most US metro ar…

Prices do go down though. A new building in Oakland just got written down by the joint venture REIT that built it, in their filing they blame "historically high levels of new housing on the market". Rents in Oakland are down about 25% in real dollars from their peak in 2019.

Re: Has LA cracked the code for building affordable housing?

#69

Post by jmyeet » Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 11:52 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #65

jmyeet wrote: post #43

Credit has to be given to the governor Gavin Newsom here. He's made some questionable policy choices, particularly with seemingly random vetoes (which the legislature could override but they haven't done in decades because that would take up time in the next legislative session). Prop 13 was about the absolute worst thing to ever happen to California housing. Rising property prices make people feel like they're riche…

You did not ever seem to get around to the part where we have to give credit to Newsom. He hasn't shown leadership on this issue. State housing reform has come from Weiner and Skinner, enforcement from AG Rob Bonta, and these local Los Angeles improvements are executive orders of their mayor.

Capitulating to the depp pockets of NIMBYs and real estate developers would mean Newsom could easily kill all this with a few vetoes. He's not a passive actor here.

Re: Has LA cracked the code for building affordable housing?

#70

Post by fbdab103 » Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 11:52 PM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #56

popularonion wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fertility rates in cities are far below replacement and falling every year. In every country, religious or secular, liberal or conservative, socialized healthcare/education or no. So they are proving simply not capable of sustaining human life. This only works as long as rural people keep having lots of kids to feed into the city, but that isn’t really happening anymore either.

This isn't the 1800s. A clear majority of the population of the modern US lives in "the city".

In fact, if I am reading this 2020 Census report correctly[0], 40% of the US population lives in the 806 cities with a population >= 50,000.

[0] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/popest/2...