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Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

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Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

#281

Post by majormajor »

scoofy wrote: post #273
foxyv wrote: post #177

It takes significantly less materials to build a multi-dwelling apartment/condo/townhouse structure than a single family home. In addition, the required square footage per person drops by huge amounts when people can walk to nearby community centers, restaurants, kitchens, theaters, and bars. We are building massive 3-4k sq. ft. homes for families of four because all of their food, entertainment, and social needs are…

I find it amusing that many folks here are ready to clap back at this comment about how "but people want single family homes" as if that weren't why we are in a housing crisis. Yes... people want single family homes, it's just not feasible to put 3M people into single family homes in a metro area without absorbing an unsustainable amount of costs. Here we are talking literally the cost of construction, but there is a…

You can easily get housing affordability crises even without single family homes, as is plainly evident right now in non-North-American cities.

It's a bit of a red herring. You end up sitting in traffic for an hour instead of standing on a bus or train for an hour for your commute, and other knock-on differences like that, which can be debated for various other reasons like ecological impact, but you still end up running into the same issues around ability to do new, denser constrution, desire of new, denser construction, and political issues and resistance to change regardless of if your urban area is full of SFH or 5-story buildings.

Is "make today's cities larger and denser forever" really the solution? Or can we figure out ways to disperse and decentralize things instead of just feeding more money back into the hands of those who own and control the current cities?

Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

#282

Post by VHRanger »

xyzelement wrote: post #98
rybosworld wrote: post #57

Every single major population center that has distorted (high) housing costs relative to income, also has very strong protections for the existing home owners (NIMBY). "There are no coincidences..." The solution is terrifyingly simple: don't allow existing residents to block new housing developments. If they don't like it, they can move. This will probably never happen in the U.S., because the government no longer fu…

You seem to be coming from the perspective that people who don't live in a place should have more say over the nature of that place than those who do live there. To put it in your terms, why does it make more sense to tell existing residents "your place has to change and you can move if you don't like it" vs channel the new residents to other places where more housing is available and is available cheaper.

New residents don't just include immigrants: it's also all future inhabitants of the place.

Your perspective amounts to existing residents extracting all the economic value in a location simply because they bought land there first.

That's ridiculously inefficient and toxic at a national scale. Or even at a local scale, over 40-50years.

One important paper on the topic calculated 50% GDP losses in the US because of large metro areas being too expensive to move into [1]

1. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w21154/w211...

Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

#283

Post by BytesAndGears »

sandworm101 wrote: post #229
foxyv wrote: post #177

It takes significantly less materials to build a multi-dwelling apartment/condo/townhouse structure than a single family home. In addition, the required square footage per person drops by huge amounts when people can walk to nearby community centers, restaurants, kitchens, theaters, and bars. We are building massive 3-4k sq. ft. homes for families of four because all of their food, entertainment, and social needs are…

>> Everyone has their own bar, restaurant, theatre, and community center. As opposed to all the "urban lifestyle" people who readily offload their basic needs onto others. Some people are happy cooking their own basic foods. Others want them to be prepared, and their dished cleaned, by a team. Some people are happy with a beer fridge. Others want to go to a bar and pay a young person to smile and flirt while concocti…

What a weird straw-man.

I live in a 600sq ft 2-bedroom apartment with my wife, and we cook nearly every meal at home, we rarely go out to bars, or spend much money in the city.

But we have 6-7 cute cafes within a 5 minute walk, so we stop in for a coffee now and then. We have a big park that we can picnic in, three blocks away. There are a ton of fun things to do for cheap or free nearby.

We don’t need a ton of space at home because our city provides us a lot of happiness.

If you can walk to handle all of your basic needs, then you don’t need to have so much at home, is the point that the GP was making.

For example, we keep much less food at home in Europe than we used to in the US, because I can just drop by the veggie stand or mini-grocery on my walk/bike home from work and get a fresh version of whatever I want to cook that night.

We don’t need a beer fridge because there is a beer store selling cold beer cans within a block of us, and with way more selection.

Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

#284

Post by geodel »

rootusrootus wrote: post #143
sydbarrett74 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada and the UK have woeful housing shortages. They're not doing much, if any, better than the US is.

I'd guess that is the point of the comment. In the US we can blame zoning, NIMBYs, and car-centric society for housing problems. But what about those other countries? What's the reason there? I suspect important drivers of home pricing are: - Young people not getting married and starting a family right out of school, making average household size drop considerably - Increased standards for construction and rental qua…

Agree with all of it. I will give an example of place where in practice there is no NIMBYism, one can build more or less any shape or size of building depending on lot size. Apartments are priced as much as $200-250K which adjusted to purchasing power parity would be like 2 million dollar condo/home in US. Now they are suffering huge water shortage due to over exploitation of resources.

This is leading to people running away from the city[1]

1. https://www.deccanherald.com/india/karnataka/bengaluru/techi...

Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

#285

Post by foxyv »

WheatMillington wrote: post #271
foxyv wrote: post #177

It takes significantly less materials to build a multi-dwelling apartment/condo/townhouse structure than a single family home. In addition, the required square footage per person drops by huge amounts when people can walk to nearby community centers, restaurants, kitchens, theaters, and bars. We are building massive 3-4k sq. ft. homes for families of four because all of their food, entertainment, and social needs are…

What a dystopic vision, living in 50sqm pods and having our basic needs attended to by market participants, eschewing all self-reliance.

I do not know how you arrived at these odd conclusions, but I would recommend reading a few books on urbanism to understand exactly what I'm proposing.

The High Cost of Free Parking - https://a.co/d/7NIZHp9

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity - https://a.co/d/19DDeTU

Walkable City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places - https://a.co/d/8F0cWzl

Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

#286

Post by walthamstow »

stronglikedan wrote: post #207
shortsunblack wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which is fine, if they are willing to pay the full cost of it. suburbia is massively subsidized.

> suburbia is massively subsidized That's a common argument that no one has been able to sufficiently prove.

US suburbia's externalities are not properly priced in. Gasoline tax is 18c a gallon and hasn't changed since 1993.

Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

#287

Post by pchristensen »

dragonwriter wrote: post #233
ihaveajob wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

San Francisco, the densest city in the state, is 3/4 suburbia. There's no reason why it couldn't host 4 times the population without resorting to Hong Kong style urbanism (which would be great IMO, but that's a separate story). The infrastructure argument would make sense if homes in remote areas didn't also need that infrastructure, while suffering from lower efficiency in all measures.

[deleted] No more fever posting

I’d love to hear how you came up with that.

Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

#288

Post by robocat »

tptacek wrote: post #174
PheonixPharts wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NIMBYs worry that the mere existence of nearby multifamily will decrease their home value. In rare and unsympathetic cases ... that may be true. It's not rare. I've known multiple people, myself included, who have decided not to make an offer on a single family home because it neighbors a gross apartment building. The vast majority of home buyers want single family homes . I don't know where HN obsession with verti…

You're allowed to have preferences! You don't have to live next to a "gross apartment building". You can achieve your preferences by (a) paying more or (b) accepting a larger commute from the nearest urban center. Property values don't scale with your particular preference. Among many things, they're a function of: * (Probably foremost, in IL at least) the perceived quality of the school districts * The property tax…

Your list of drivers of property values is missing the single most important factor:

• how much can one borrow?

Mortgages drive house prices so long as demand outstrips supply: which it always does in desirable places. Demand can always increase in a healthy city - I want to have multiple houses in different parts of the city and I could even AirBnB them out to defray costs or make a profit.

I live in Christchurch, where we had a lot of houses selling at below ½-price for a while because the bank rules forbade giving mortgages on those houses. This was after our 2010 earthquake and banks would not lend on uninsurable houses. The houses were often safe and liveable but uninsurable due to fine print (e.g. require even floors Christchurch zoning rules were relaxed for a while plus our government was committed to more housing so Christchurch now has many more houses than a decade ago. House prices are going up even though you can effectively only get variable mortgages in New Zealand at 7%. We have more house supply but demand is outpacing that because we also have high immigration (30% of NZ population was born overseas and we still encourage immigration).

As an individual buying a house the market dynamic is visible - I borrowed as much as I possibly could to buy the best place I could afford for my home. Bank lending rules drove my pricing. The "market" price for the house did not set my price (low competition blind deadline bid - I could not know what others bid and a price could not be accurately calculated for my property). Market price is set by competition between buyers - most buyers are borrowing as much as they can.

The economically worst part is that it is a zero-sum game with everybody competing for how much money they can give to banks for interest payments. We all lose.

The graph of sold house prices in a city looks strange - a severe cut-off just below the median price. Investigate the underlying cause for that and everything will be revealed?

Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

#289

Post by SheepSlapper »

ejb999 wrote: post #124
throwitaway222 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll tell you what's unserious - people wanting to actually solve the housing crisis. Every solution is 100% idiotic. The way we currently operate is to build more housing, they are building a dramatic amount of housing, and the price of a house is still $400k medium. It is telling me they are not selling to families but instead to corporations, bnbers, rentals, foreign governments. https://tradingeconomics.com/unite…

Maybe they still cost $400K, because the purchase of the land, the labor and the materials and the interest to finance the project eat up most of that $400K, not to mention some places charge you building permits that cost ten's of thousands of dollars - if not more. Nobody is going to build houses and sell them at a loss or at break-even price, they need to cover their costs and make some profit as well to keep the…

Coming from a construction background, I can confirm all of this. Permits are out of control, material prices are nuts (not COVID nuts, but still at least 300% higher than the good old days), and subcontractors are both hard to find and more expensive. It's not crazy to build a decent 3-4 bedroom house and have it cost $400k all said and done, even in my small-big-ish town.

A lot of people in here arguing, bet there are very few of us that have actually built houses before :)

Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

#290

Post by [deleted] »

foxyv wrote: post #177

It takes significantly less materials to build a multi-dwelling apartment/condo/townhouse structure than a single family home. In addition, the required square footage per person drops by huge amounts when people can walk to nearby community centers, restaurants, kitchens, theaters, and bars. We are building massive 3-4k sq. ft. homes for families of four because all of their food, entertainment, and social needs are…

[deleted]
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