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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?

#131

Post by laurencerowe »

cyberax wrote: post #93
tomtheelder wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither the article nor the comment you are referring to were talking about government housing. And you’re entitled to not want to live in a dense urban environment, but you might need to open your mind to the idea that not everyone feels the way you do.

> And you’re entitled to not want to live in a dense urban environment, but you might need to open your mind to the idea that not everyone feels the way you do. You're entitled to move away from a toxic river that catches fire. But you might need to open your mind to the idea that not everyone feels the way you do. Perhaps some people like to work at the factory that produces the toxic slime. Urban density is polluti…

> Urban density is pollution. Its effects are not limited to cities.

This is simply not the case. People living in dense walkable urban areas produce far less pollution than those living in the suburbs who need to drive much more and require far more infrastructure per household.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/its-not-just-cities-subur...

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

#132

Post by axpy »

vinay427 wrote: post #95
throwaway5959 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There’s more to it than housing density (see below). For instance, there are also differences in public transport to spread the area of viable housing. Anecdotally, high rent cities such as New York or London tend to not do a great job at providing reasonably priced and efficient transport to nearby commuter towns or suburban areas compared to many in central Europe, for instance. On densities, cities like New York,…

I think you are mixing units here (km2 vs square mile). According to wikipedia NY density is 11313/km2 which would ranked 18th city in Europe. SF would be 29th with 7194/km2. I would argue that NY public transit is absolutely doing a fine job (cleanliness appart) and it's moving 7.5 million peoples on a weekday (was higher pre-pandemic)

Density is needed for proper public transit and locally accessible services to flourish.

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

#133

Post by flopriore »

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; it means that your city is enabling higher-productivity arrangements that boost local incomes

Take Milan as a counterexample. A single room in a shared flat costs around €700/month, a single-room studio €1200/month. Yet, people on average earn €30,000 a year, which means €24000 after taxes, or around €1800 per month. That's not what I would say increased salaries and productivity.

In Italy, there are serious problems with stagnating productivity and national, collective bargaining. Nevertheless, that doesn't mean rents do not skyrocket in big cities

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

#134

Post by oliwarner »

twelvechairs wrote: post #16

Good to see this happening. That said I strongly dislike when there's a conflation of "affordable housing" (lower-case, the general concept of providing for people on lower incomes) with specific schemes you have to qualify for (often "Afffordable Housing" upper-case) - in this case it seems to be deed restrictions on income that are required in exchange for floorspace bonuses and building code relaxations? There's a…

One major restriction has to be a covenant that you can only ever buy one of these if you meet the means-test they were initially sold under. That limits the market and the mortgages available therefore caps the price.

That or generational (eg 35y) leaseholds. In the UK apartments are almost always leasehold anyway, but a long-but-not-too-long lease would mean it always returns to the state without being resold or sublet indefinitely.

I agree, defining "means" in a means-tested transaction can be tricky but also, it's just data. If you can't or won't show enough history (even homelessness leaves a trail), it's not hard to find someone else who meets the criteria with a better history.

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

#135

Post by oliwarner »

crooked-v wrote: post #32
cyberax wrote: post #23

[flagged]

> higher housing costs The basic reason for skyrocketing housing costs in major California cities is that there aren't enough housing units for the number of people living there. The solution to that is... ... ... denser housing.

One solution.

Another is breaking apart the reasons want to live somewhere. Every conurbation wants all the jobs but it's so self-destructive.

Federally limit where multinationals can set up shop (so they can't use state-level tax incentives to play states off one another).

Connect cities and states together better. High speed rail services so that it's actually viable to live away from work. I know people who try to justify 4h daily commutes. It's not fair to shovel 4M people into a space to work where only 1.6M people can live.

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

#136

Post by cyberax »

Aloisius wrote: post #129
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that natural population growth has basically flatlined, I’m not sure what to take from that challenge. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/u-s-population-growth-has... If we look at the growth from 2000-2020, it basically went from 1% to .12%, so I guess we could use a step method to integrate (or just take population delta from 2024 to 1999 and subtract immigrants?). I don’t think we’ve grown that much, and gro…

Population growth since 2000 doesn't really affect the housing market today. Most of those people aren't old enough to be in the housing market. We're facing shortages caused by 40 years of building below the level of population growth.

Wrong. We have more housing units per capita than in 80-s. It's just that the demand is forced into several large population centers.

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

#137

Post by dang »

cyberax wrote: post #23

[flagged]

Ok, but please don't post in the flamewar style and please do make your substantive points without fulminating. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39331110.

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

#138

Post by dxbydt »

robomartin wrote: post #28

Making things affordable in LA will be easy. Almost everyone I know is either in the process of leaving CA or planning on leaving. This includes everything from middle-class individuals to high-net-worth families, soon-to-retire and retired. Everyone is sick of the financially abusive environment in CA, at every level. And, of course, other issues. My wife and I are so sick of it that it has become an almost weekly c…

I have long followed your work, on and off hn, for a couple years now. Huge respect. Before you consider Spain etc., please give the midwest a chance. Idealogically and workwise, you will find that Indiana, Ohio, Michigan strongly align with your values. You can pick any flagship university here and draw a circle with 20 mile radius. You will find plenty of manufacturing capital, cheap land, and a rooted workforce looking for stable jobs in the industrial sector(rather than 150k swes). State funding & support for R&D, tons of expertise in aerospace/robotics/cad/mech/… purdue for example is a top-10 in several of these, with several hundred oncampus professors and over 50k students, most of who are midwest natives who prefer to stay put rather than catch the first flight to llm valley. After a very long stint in CA, I made the move to the midwest and couldn’t be happier. Life is short. A certain amount of friction is fine, but if you are swimming against the tide every single damned day of your life, it quickly drains you. I find the midwest much more supportive of my values and politics.

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

#139

Post by nradov »

losteric wrote: post #49
thisgoesnowhere wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The restrictive zoning practices, long approval processes ridiculous permitting costs etc are in place because most people's entire net worth is held up in housing and they vote for laws that keep the price high for that reason. It's completely backwards to think that the reason why housing is expensive is because of those symptoms when the root cause is more than half the population wants mega high housing costs.

If height limits were raised with zoning for multi family housing, those investments would sky rocket faster than under NIMBY

Despite the uniformed nonsense you might read here, the most active NIMBYs aren't primarily motivated by property values. If you actually talk to them you'll find that they have no wish to ever sell and are worried (sometimes irrationally) about quality of life issues: noise, parking, traffic, crime, privacy, etc.

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

#140

Post by solumunus »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #124
twelvechairs wrote: post #16

Good to see this happening. That said I strongly dislike when there's a conflation of "affordable housing" (lower-case, the general concept of providing for people on lower incomes) with specific schemes you have to qualify for (often "Afffordable Housing" upper-case) - in this case it seems to be deed restrictions on income that are required in exchange for floorspace bonuses and building code relaxations? There's a…

Ya, I don’t see any of these schemes being sustainable until they are somehow universal (eg an option even for the rich, but not one they can somehow monopolize). Like Singapore’s public housing, which isn’t gated by income, but rationed in other ways (marriage, have a family, must be a resident).

I think the only answer is that housing as an investment needs to be banned, it’s just too damaging. Not only is it making people poorer by the decade, eventually leading to a dead economy, it’s completely unproductive. Imagine if all that money were to be invested in business instead.
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