Household size and the housing stock • Hacker News Board

Re: Household size and the housing stock

#131

Post by throwaway14356 » Sat, Apr 20, 2024, 9:09 PM UTC

danielheath wrote: post #44

swatcoder wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You build the biggest thing you can within a parcel because there is plenty of demand at the top of the market. I know many people who have built many homes and I don't know a single one who thought that way or built a house that reflects it. While impacted by practical needs to a degree, preferred home size is just a fashion that changes over time and amounts to personal taste. The 3500sf McMansion of yesterday be…

"Who would want to heat all that" is very much dependent on the available energy subsidies.

I lived in a 3x2.5 meter room one time. There are obvious drawbacks but it had a surprising amount of advantages too. Using all available space leaves very little air to heat. Where would you get oxygen in a normal house? It's not like my heater can keep up if I open the windows.

Re: Household size and the housing stock

#132

Post by OJFord » Sat, Apr 20, 2024, 9:22 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #115

OJFord wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know, it just seems like preference is much stronger against them / there are fewer of them in NA. Maybe because if you build your houses with a timber frame you need an air gap not to heat the neighbours? Also I suppose the cost saving of constructing like that is a lot less than with brick or even breeze blocks.

I would say 25% of the townhomes here in Ballard are row homes that share walls, the rest are townhomes with footpath sized spacing between them. It isn’t a matter of heat here in Seattle, heat pumps are efficient and insulation between homes is pretty good. Besides cost savings, you can fit more in if you don’t have those foot paths between, but the market isn’t into it.

Sorry, 'heat' was a typo for 'hear' - air gap not to hear the neighbours, I wasn't worrying about cheap neighbours sapping up your heat, ha. (Although anecdotally, that can be huge for mid-storey flat/apartments, not completely stupid.)

Re: Household size and the housing stock

#133

Post by tmnvix » Sat, Apr 20, 2024, 9:29 PM UTC

airlocksoftware wrote: post #127

tmnvix wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your links don't measure underutilised and vacant property (e.g. AirBnBs and second homes, or land banked properties). From the links: The homeowner vacancy rate is the proportion of the homeowner inventory that is vacant for sale. The rental vacancy rate is the proportion of the rental inventory that is vacant for rent. So essentially this is a measure of how many properties are vacant and available for rent or purc…

I'm not sure why you'd want to include AirBnBs and second houses in your measurement vacancy measurement — they aren't available for rent.

Because usually when people talk of an accommodation crisis they are referring to a shortage of homes available to be used as a primary residence. It makes sense to consider holiday homes and such as contributing to this problem. Just ask anyone in Majorca for example.

Sometimes people refer to underutilised properties rather than vacant properties for this reason.

I am very interested to know what happens to the proportion of underutilised properties during an accommodation crisis. The most recent linked chart in this thread is very interesting - what caused the steep increase leading up to the GFC (i.e. during a boom - often associated with a 'shortage')?

Re: Household size and the housing stock

#134

Post by vkou » Sat, Apr 20, 2024, 9:49 PM UTC

fire_lake wrote: post #130

davidw wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grassy front yards are a complete waste of space and water. Kids don't play on them. The person who uses a front yard to grow food is pretty rare. At the end of the day, too, we have a housing crisis, not a front-yard crisis.

Lawns are bad but greenery is good. We can recognize the need to not recreate Kowloon in the context of a housing shortage.

It's more likely that a man will jump to the moon than a North American municipality is to recreate a Kowloon.

Re: Household size and the housing stock

#135

Post by seanmcdirmid » Sat, Apr 20, 2024, 9:56 PM UTC

OJFord wrote: post #132

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say 25% of the townhomes here in Ballard are row homes that share walls, the rest are townhomes with footpath sized spacing between them. It isn’t a matter of heat here in Seattle, heat pumps are efficient and insulation between homes is pretty good. Besides cost savings, you can fit more in if you don’t have those foot paths between, but the market isn’t into it.

Sorry, 'heat' was a typo for 'hear' - air gap not to hear the neighbours, I wasn't worrying about cheap neighbours sapping up your heat, ha. (Although anecdotally, that can be huge for mid-storey flat/apartments, not completely stupid.)

In Southern China, flats built as early as just 10 years ago lack indoor heating and reasonable insulation. So even if you want to heat your apartment with a space heater, you aren’t going to get very far. The coldest 5C I ever experienced.

Noise is an issue. In particular the one I really wanted to buy overlooking the Ballard locks, we suspected that the unit next to us was a party airBnB.

Re: Household size and the housing stock

#136

Post by hackerlight » Sat, Apr 20, 2024, 10:08 PM UTC

arrosenberg wrote: post #129

hackerlight wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or you could provide data. I don't live in Ireland, did they have a surplus before? Net migration has tracked higher than new dwellings for a number of years in all of these countries. See Canada for example where this has been a trend since 2016. Net migration (excludes 2023 which was almost 500k): https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.NETM?locations=C... New housing: https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/hous…

I chose an example of landlords playing games in Ireland. The only generalizable fact across the western world is low interest rates from 2007-2022 and the landlord class continuing to jack up rents every time they got more access to cheap money. That's the problem.

I think you misunderstand elementary economics here. The rental market is not a monopoly or oligopoly. Landlords can not exercise market power. It is a competitive market given the number of independent landlords and given their inability to coordinate in order to effect collusion.

> the landlord class continuing to jack up rents every time they got more access to cheap money

That's not true. As a case study, in Australia during the negative net migration during Covid, rents actually decreased. Rents only increased when net migration levels surged post-2022 to 2.5x the level of annual housing starts. Credit in Australia is actually more expensive now than back when rents were low in the 2010s. https://tradingeconomics.com/australia/rent-inflation

Also, cheap credit does have one deflationary impact on rents, which is that it leads to more housing starts which addresses the shortage issue. If credit was expensive you'd have less housing, exacerbating the main cause of rent increases.

Re: Household size and the housing stock

#137

Post by jltsiren » Sat, Apr 20, 2024, 10:12 PM UTC

giantg2 wrote: post #88

jltsiren wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of homes in every country that are essentially worthless. You can live in them, and they may even be in good condition. But if you try to sell them, you probably can't find anyone willing to pay real money for them. Because very few people have a reason to live in that area. And good luck if you need to borrow money to renovate the home. Then there are areas where many people have a reason to live in.…

And why aren't we doing anything to address that distribution? If the employers are having to lay exorbitant salaries so people can afford housing, shouldn't they be looking at opting offices in other cities to reduce their cost? If not, the system is broken and the leaders are poor. In my opinion the leaders should be looking where they are creating jobs as part of their societal duties, maybe even put it under DEI…

Everyone is already doing that, which is exactly the problem. When every leader is trying to make their city/company more competitive, the ones that are already competitive will win. They can do more, because they have more money.

If you want to fight the market, you need centralization. You tax everyone and use the collected money to subsidize a limited number of cities with unrealized potential. Selecting the winners is essential. The more evenly you spread the money, the less effect it will have.

Re: Household size and the housing stock

#138

Post by giantg2 » Sat, Apr 20, 2024, 10:49 PM UTC

jltsiren wrote: post #137

giantg2 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why aren't we doing anything to address that distribution? If the employers are having to lay exorbitant salaries so people can afford housing, shouldn't they be looking at opting offices in other cities to reduce their cost? If not, the system is broken and the leaders are poor. In my opinion the leaders should be looking where they are creating jobs as part of their societal duties, maybe even put it under DEI…

Everyone is already doing that, which is exactly the problem. When every leader is trying to make their city/company more competitive, the ones that are already competitive will win. They can do more, because they have more money. If you want to fight the market, you need centralization. You tax everyone and use the collected money to subsidize a limited number of cities with unrealized potential. Selecting the winne…

"Everyone is already doing that, which is exactly the problem."

I'm not seeing that. I'm seeing concentration and not social equity focused distribution.

"You tax everyone and use the collected money to subsidize a limited number of cities with unrealized potential."

There are already cities with untapped opportunities. In my opinion the reason rhey remain untapped is because leaders don't care. They'd rather follow group-think.

Re: Household size and the housing stock

#139

Post by scotty79 » Sat, Apr 20, 2024, 11:18 PM UTC

hackerlight wrote: post #121

scotty79 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher rents inflate asset prices, but higher asset prices also inflate rents because buying becomes too expensive and rents can safely grow because people who can't buy must rent. Direction of causality goes both ways. It's positive feedback loop that's barely contrained by any reality. That's why it seems to run away towards infinity despite only small changes in supply and demand. There's no good solution to your…

This economic reasoning doesn't make sense to me. If a buyer can't buy because an investor priced them out, they'll become a renter (+1 demand), and that property will become a rental property (+1 supply). These things cancel out. You still haven't explained the imbalance (lack of rental properties versus number of renters) that causes rents to go up. However, the other poster brought up vacancies, which is a good po…

There's inefficiency when property becomes a rental. As you noticed vacancy is one factor. There's also the rent itself that's aimed at extracting value from the person that needs a limited resource more than the investor.

Vacancy tax would be great but it's way harder to track vacancy than ownership. And it wouldn't help with the rent. Money would still flow through this channel from people who get their income mainly from work to those who get their income mainly from capital. And there are so many channels through which this process happens that if we could limit this one a bit it would be something.

Hoarding limited resorce that everybody needs is one of the societally worst things somebody can do with money. We'd be better off if that money was redirected to literally almost anything else.

Re: Household size and the housing stock

#140

Post by giantg2 » Sat, Apr 20, 2024, 11:28 PM UTC

RangerScience wrote: post #109

giantg2 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One consideration is that, from a legal rights and social inclusion perspective, places aren’t fungible." You do understand that works both ways? If you reverse the areas you're thinking of, there are people who prefer the rights or social environment in the opposite direction. Shouldn't we be trying to bring similar opportunities to all social groups? If we want to look at how this turns out, take a look at Native…

Edit 3: Originally I'd replied about population demographics and migration; @giantg2 has a good reply to that, which you can see below. In reviewing the conversation, I got mentally stuck on the comparisions to reservations, because I think it's a severely fucked up comparison. But saying that alone isn't a helpful or effective conversation, so - > Shouldn't we be trying to bring similar opportunities to all social g…

The main comparison points for the rural areas and the Native Americans are:

- Both groups had pressures, albeit to very different degrees and methods, to remove rights and land. We see that rural populations are losing farm land due to the way the market treats commodity crops and the way the government subsidizes - get big or get out. Many people in rural communities feel ignored and even mistreated by their governments on a variety of issues, including things like eminent domain, property rights, due process, and constitutional rights, especially the 10th and 2nd amendments. As urbanization increases the rural areas just have things pushed down their throats. While reservations have a lot of autonomy, they miss out out on a lot of programs and incentives due to having almost no representation at various levels of government.

- The general attitude towards each is that they are dumb, superstitious/religious, and they should stay in their backwater areas if they don't want to get in line with progressive agendas. That it's their own fault they're choosing to be poor by not moving to the cities, or they don't deserve the same sort of opportunities in their area.

- There has been animosity towards both groups. We've had presidents make fun of both groups. While the Native Americans were targeted with more active methods of elimination, there are passive methods of eliminating people - most of it unintentional. If you eliminate enough opportunities the people have to move, as we've seen with the increasing urbanization. It can be hard to believe that things like free trade (elimination of many factories) and elimination of fossil fuel industries without any geographic replacements aren't politically strategic.