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Has LA cracked the code for building affordable housing?

benjaminschneider.substack.com

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

#81

Post by epistasis »

zozbot234 wrote: post #72
jeffbee wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but it's also Oakland - not really the most desirable place in the neighborhood. That's actually the kind of place where prices would be most likely to drop if you just increase density across the board. (Which is not a bad thing if you're overly worried about the detrimental effects of gentrification!)

Plenty of places with far worse reputations than Oakland are not dropping in prices, because they didn't build.

Any place will drop in prices if you keep on building in advance of demand.

Gentrification is more likely to come from lack of building than building. That's the story all throughout California and every other wealthy area in the US: extreme gentrification through lack of new housing. Its not the new housing that drives up prices, it's the lack of it.

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

#82

Post by epistasis »

yterdy wrote: post #52
simonw wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Devil's advocate: induced demand. Density increases interactions which are the economic point of cities, and why cities are wealthier than suburbs/rural areas (when suburbs/rural areas aren't juiced by subsidies and loans). Wealthier cities attract migration, migration increases demand for units. That said, my personal belief is that prices are completely decoupled from demand and are more reflective of a desperation…

(Keeping in mind that you are playing devils advocate, and that none of this is directed at you personally)

Induced demand for highways: sure. Well proven. Happens every single time.

Induced demand for housing? Gonna need to see some hard evidence on the time scales, etc.

Housing is very different from highways. People can go from using zero freeway miles to 50 freeway miles a day, if there's slightly cheaper housing further out. It's this drop in pricing that drives demand.

For housing, the increase in demand comes from having, presumable, more amenities, making the dense living more desirable. The change in time for amenities to develop is on the order of years, however. It takes a long time for businesses to develop, build customer bases, etc. And in that time, it's possible to build more housing. Housing scales far far far better than freeways. It's easy to double, triple, quintuple, and even 10x or more the density from single detached units. Freeways don't scale like that.

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

#83

Post by LoganDark »

ZoomerCretin wrote: post #71
cyberax wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is “affordable housing”? It's one of two things: 1. A polite way to say "housing project" or "subsidized housing" to not scare people. 2. A buzzword to force more housing density and/or promote social engineering agendas. When used in this sense, it isn't actually linked to affordability.

You are referring to building apartments in the second most populous city in the United States as promoting a social engineering agenda?

No, just the term "affordable housing" in general.

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

#84

Post by always2slow »

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…

This is anecdotal I guess but I know I'm not alone.. as someone who has been forced to live in more dense housing with each move the older I get.. (grew up in a house,shared walls, more shared walls, and now an apartment with shared walls and people above me). Misery vastly increases with density, at least for me. People are loud, inconsiderate and fucking gross. There's trash and broken shit everywhere, people idle their cars and cause noise pollution from the exhaust reverberating on the buildings or their stereos, no one owns the communal areas so they get trashed because nobody gives a shit. Common areas smell horrible, or are overpoweringly scented with air freshener. Living in dense housing as driven me absolutely mad, and I have more buying power than I've ever enjoyed in my life it's ridiculous so it's not like I'm forced to live in dense housing and poverty. So when I read shit like 'people like people - we WANT to be close to one another' I get triggered as fuck, I'm not sure I know any adult that would prefer to live in a house over an apartment. Also... There's almost zero cultural tolerance, people silo into their cultural bubbles and refuse to integrate.

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

#85

Post by cyberax »

ZoomerCretin wrote: post #71
cyberax wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is “affordable housing”? It's one of two things: 1. A polite way to say "housing project" or "subsidized housing" to not scare people. 2. A buzzword to force more housing density and/or promote social engineering agendas. When used in this sense, it isn't actually linked to affordability.

You are referring to building apartments in the second most populous city in the United States as promoting a social engineering agenda?

Yes. That as well.

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

#87

Post by cyberax »

BadCookie wrote: post #30
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.

Tokyo manages to remain affordable somehow. “Two full-time workers earning Tokyo’s minimum wage can comfortably afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in six of the city’s 23 wards.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/editorials/tokyo-...

> Tokyo manages to remain affordable somehow.

Bullshit. Tokyo's average unit costs $1m now. They managed to create a bona-fide property bubble in the middle of declining population: https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/surging-tokyo-property-...

The NYT article is (of course) a one-sided social engineering story, full of half-truths and outright lies.

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

#88

Post by throwaway5959 »

SR2Z wrote: post #54
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 is insane - rural birthrates are higher, but birthrates are falling across the developed world in both urban and rural contexts. It's not because of density - it's because people with options other than raising children tend to pick them since kids require a lot of effort. SF and LA could easily be several times more dense than they currently are; that kind of increase would see the capacity of the entire state…

For us it wasn’t about not being able to raise kids, it was seeing how garbage parents are with their massive consumption and a whole generation of iPad pacifier kids. This planet is fucked in a hundred years and I’m not bringing kids into that world.

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

#90

Post by cyberax »

apsurd wrote: post #29
cyberax wrote: post #23

[flagged]

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?

"Supply skepticism" is a good overview: https://furmancenter.org/research/publication/supply-skeptic...

And it's written from the viewpoint of pro-density. Read the linked papers there, the best results of density increases are either extremely indirect ("migration chains") or insignificant (no sale price decreases, and single-digit percentage one-time decreases in rent).

I'm writing an analysis of all densifications in the US and Canada. So far, I have not found a _single_ example of density increases leading to even slowing down of sale prices. Never mind their reduction.

On the other hand, they ALWAYS lead to worsening commutes and shrinking square footage per capita.

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