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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?

#101

Post by cyberax »

epistasis wrote: post #98
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.

Where do these nonsense beliefs come from? There's no data to support them. No examples. Nothing? It's so odd to see such undying certainty without any evidence, and without any clear path to political indoctrination. Or perhaps this sort of political indoctrination was present before mt times? Its just mystifying to see comments like this stated as if people would agree of believe these views by sheer force of will.

> Where do these nonsense beliefs come from? There's no data to support them. No examples. Nothing?

Have you actually tried to look at the data? Hint: no city in the US managed to lower prices by building new housing within the last 25 years. Not a single one.

Even pro-density pushers are admitting it: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-might...

Here's a nice overview of the literature: https://furmancenter.org/files/Supply_Skepticism_-_Final.pdf

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

#102

Post by cyberax »

zozbot234 wrote: post #34
cyberax wrote: post #23

[flagged]

If your dense housing leads to higher housing costs that's actually great news; it means that your city is enabling higher-productivity arrangements that boost local incomes, and all the concern about "lowering property values" was 100% bunk. That's the pattern you see in places like Manhattan. Wouldn't it be nice if most people in the U.S. had a bunch of Manhattan-level cities in their state that they could easily m…

> If your dense housing leads to higher housing costs that's actually great news;

No, it's not. Density leads to quantifiably worse life: longer commutes, smaller living spaces.

> Want big houses and cars? Bring good jobs to smaller cities, that still have little need for density.

Except that this is impossible unless density is regulated.

> But the really high incomes will most likely still come from the very densest places

Right now, the highest incomes come from people living in suburbs (according to the IRS stats).

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

#103

Post by epistasis »

o11c wrote: post #13
crooked-v wrote: post #4

There's no big secret here. Dump restrictive zoning requirements, remove subjective approval processes, and make the permitting process a "shall approve" instead of "may approve", and you'll see a lot of new housing get built very quickly. All the slowdowns and immense extra expenses are self-inflicted by city residents who either don't care, don't want cheaper housing, or have been infected by the terminally brainle…

The problem with "shall approve" is that sometimes the best answer really is "no". A lot of ecological disasters are averted by processes that seem long and drawn out, but which actually are just companies not understanding that "no, we don't want you to burn down the planet around us". Residential is obviously somewhat different, but not entirely.

The environmental cost of saying "no" to denser housing on land that is already developed is extremely high, and leads to development on green fields where there is nobody to oppose the development.

There should be an automatic "yes" to any mixed use housing and small retail development that is infill, from an environmental perspective.

There should be an automatic "no" to any greenfield development, additional parking, or freeways. And to get over that "no" there should be strong environmental studies that show benefit, not just neutrality.

Our existing built environment is unsustainable and needs to change drastically. Keeping it in the current state is untenable. We should be radically reshaping it as fast as possible with the fewest brakes if we care about the environment.

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

#104

Post by cyberax »

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…

It's like induced demand doesn't exist. As we all know, adding a new lane to a freeway can't lead to more congestion. It's simply against all logic that adding new road space could result in it!

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

#105

Post by m0llusk »

crooked-v wrote: post #4

There's no big secret here. Dump restrictive zoning requirements, remove subjective approval processes, and make the permitting process a "shall approve" instead of "may approve", and you'll see a lot of new housing get built very quickly. All the slowdowns and immense extra expenses are self-inflicted by city residents who either don't care, don't want cheaper housing, or have been infected by the terminally brainle…

That is overly dismissive. Back in the post war era there was a huge problem with slum lords and corrupt builders constructing terrible residential units that were unlivable and began to fall apart as soon as tenants moved in. In response layers of requirements were added and regulators who had benign intentions went way too far. That all these rules would crash residential construction in the 1970s such that it would never recover was not foreseen at all.

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

#106

Post by apsurd »

always2slow wrote: post #84
apsurd wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with every one of your points. I mean to say "people want to be close to one another" as a philosophy along a spectrum. People crave belonging, connection, intimacy, stimulus, novelty. In a grand sense we really do choose to congregate.

That said, yes for sure there's much suck about the filth, obliviousness, and inconsideration of "other people". I like people, but I do not live on top of people. I want the ability to walk or bike to my stimulus. And then retreat back to solitude.

Completely get you! In simple terms, I just think it has to occur silly to people, that 8 billion humans are gonna have their 2 acres of land and that that is somehow _actually_ ideal beyond "I want what I want the way I want it". Quite literally the concept of Civilization is honoring a WE more than an I.

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

#107

Post by cyberax »

throwaway5959 wrote: post #86
cyberax wrote: post #23

[flagged]

gestures broadly at large European cities that have cheaper rents than US cities

I don't have datasets for European rents. Can you provide an example of a sufficiently large European city where new density led to a _decrease_ in rents _and_ sale prices?

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

#108

Post by m0llusk »

ldoughty wrote: post #78
striking wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are dozens of building code (not just zoning code) requirements that add cost and complexity to housing projects in cities like LA. Street trees, front setbacks, off-street parking, roof decks, façade articulation — these are nice to haves, yet LA requires these features in many cases. > Without these goodies, some ED1 buildings will be ugly. Some will be poorly designed. Just about all of them, by definition…

I think it depends what permits they are waiving as part of this plan... Will we see a bunch of leaning buildings like Santos Brazil after their big tower boom? I imagine they are keeping most of the safety ones.. but it wasn't well highlighted in the article

Because of the earthquakes LA has tight regulations on foundations which make leaning towers extremely unlikely. The leaning tower in SF is a fluke that was brought about by a corrupt builder choosing a bad foundation option, getting that approved, and then building a much heaver construction than originally proposed.

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

#110

Post by cyberax »

ZoomerCretin wrote: post #57
stavros wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to detract from your point, but 2-bedroom apartments in Tokyo are 60 sqm or something.

That's 646 square feet. That's 25'5"x25'5". For an urban area, that's plenty of space. That doesn't mean literally every apartment is that small, just that small and cheap apartments are available for those who want them, and American-sized apartments with American prices are also available for those who want to pay for them. That's one of the main reasons why housing is so expensive in the United States. We paternal…

> That's 646 square feet. That's 25'5"x25'5". For an urban area, that's plenty of space.

It's not. And this is the total space, including the bathroom and the kitchen.

> That doesn't mean literally every apartment is that small

You are right, some are even smaller: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/business/tiny-apartments-...

And all while just a hundred miles away, beautiful historical houses can be bought for literally nothing. And that's with a rapidly declining population.

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