How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing • Hacker News Board

Re: How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing

#101

Post by Retric » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 4:53 PM UTC

conanbatt wrote: post #100

Retric wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This tax is not going to increase the cost of a new home 1:1 as markets still exist. It's going to reduce the profit of a new home construction and thus the value of existing land. As the tax is very much levied on the person building the house not the person buying the house the person selling land is also going to take a hair cut. Really I am saying local governments lose the ability to limit growth. The ideal amou…

> This tax is not going to increase the cost of a new home 1:1 as markets still exist. It's going to reduce the profit of a new home construction and thus the value of existing land. Reducing the profit of new construction increases the value of land, as it reduces the supply of housing. Study case, san francisco. It has a 0.1 supply elasticity: if rental prices went up 100%, construction units move by 10%. Any tax t…

I think you are confused about actual housing prices and infrastructure costs in the US. In SF for example a ~30k tax per new home would be meaningless until the price of a new home crashed enough for it to become meaningful.

In small towns on the other hand the infrastructure cost would be much lower.

Re: How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing

#102

Post by ajmurmann » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 4:54 PM UTC

FreakyT wrote: post #37

maxerickson wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The planning commission in my small town recently blocked a $10 million apartment building that would have mostly been cheaper housing. Some directly stated that they didn't want the poor people living in the area, which is stupid because they already live there (demographically it's already the poorest zone in the county). A few others said they didn't want to disturb the historical character of the shabby, decades…

> The real reason is that they don't consider reducing housing prices a good outcome. I think this is the key. If you're a property owner, any outcome that reduces the value of your property is naturally a negative outcome. A rational economic actor, in that case, would always oppose anything that would reduce housing costs. It's a tough problem to combat, because what can be done? Barring property owners from partic…

I think this might be a case where we are seeing something as a zero-sum game that isn't. Property in Manhattan would be pretty worthless if we had kept Manhattan to a few hundred single family homes. Lower prices might attract more people to move the and everyday someone might want to build a skyscraper where my single family home is now.

Re: How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing

#103

Post by dang » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 5:59 PM UTC

Consultant32452 wrote: post #85

zeth___ wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Soviet housing never worked. More to the point the wait lists for apartments was measured in years (ripe for corruption). The buildings were shoddy and depressing (hope you like grey). Urban planning was haphazard and may or not may have corresponded to where people actually wanted to live. And yet there was no homelessness in the USSR. If that's a system that doesn't work, sign me up for two.

>And yet there was no homelessness in the USSR. >If that's a system that doesn't work, sign me up for two. Okay, step one is to starve millions of Americans to death in order to reduce demand. What's step 2 again?

Please don't take HN threads even further into ideological flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing

#104

Post by dang » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 5:59 PM UTC

zeth___ wrote: post #47

macspoofing wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Housing is in many places (mostly successful cities) the economic disaster. Fully exposed to financialization, business cycles, inflation prone. Rather than signalling to supply, prices adjust to whatever the median person can afford to pay Why should housing not be to governed by market forces? Housing shortages are due to regulations, from limiting new development outright, to limiting high density buildings, to h…

>Soviet housing never worked. More to the point the wait lists for apartments was measured in years (ripe for corruption). The buildings were shoddy and depressing (hope you like grey). Urban planning was haphazard and may or not may have corresponded to where people actually wanted to live. And yet there was no homelessness in the USSR. If that's a system that doesn't work, sign me up for two.

Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing

#105

Post by petra » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 6:01 PM UTC

dalbasal wrote: post #2

I think it's worth occasionally thinking of the "economy" in simple terms, especially for the wider middle class. There are relatively few broad categories that make up most of our economic lives. For most people the "economy" mostly consists of (0) their job/income (1) food/consumable (2) stuff/durables (3) transport (4) vital services: health, education, etc. (5) housing. 1 & 2 are well served by free markets, and…

Germany seemed to have solved that problem - their real-estate costs are very stable - rising on average only 0.05% per year in 1970-2003.

The how is somewhat complex , google 'Evans hartwich better homes greener cities' pg 13. On mobile so it's complicated to link to a PDF search result.

Re: How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing

#106

Post by saosebastiao » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 6:05 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #97

saosebastiao wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe theoretically that works. But it's still not fair in the way that you think it is. 100k people move in and several things happen: you need a new sewage treatment plant, new some more transit capacity, new schools, etc. You are proposing that the new people pay for this expansion. But you are neglecting the ways in which you benefit. By building more schools, each school serves a geographically smaller area, mea…

That's an agreement around what the tax should be not that it should not exist.

Complexity with undefined or difficult to determine benefits is definitely a case against itself.

If you want to charge a newcomer more because the city had to build a sewer treatment plant to accommodate him, you should at least credit him back the ways in which he also made the city more efficient, such as by taking public transit or reducing school costs. And if you are willing to take on the burden of an extensive economic analysis of the marginal cost and benefit of every new housing unit, by all means go ahead. For most of us, a single property tax rate works fine.

Re: How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing

#107

Post by conanbatt » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 6:43 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #101

conanbatt wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This tax is not going to increase the cost of a new home 1:1 as markets still exist. It's going to reduce the profit of a new home construction and thus the value of existing land. Reducing the profit of new construction increases the value of land, as it reduces the supply of housing. Study case, san francisco. It has a 0.1 supply elasticity: if rental prices went up 100%, construction units move by 10%. Any tax t…

I think you are confused about actual housing prices and infrastructure costs in the US. In SF for example a ~30k tax per new home would be meaningless until the price of a new home crashed enough for it to become meaningful. In small towns on the other hand the infrastructure cost would be much lower.

Its even more meaningless to increase property taxes on everyone than to focus the pain into the new construction. a 30k tax on any new unit might be like 10 dollar tax on all units.

The effect of concentrating a tax on something is to make it happen less, and less construction means higher home prices and higher rentals. San Francisco needs to build 1000 units to bring rental prices down 50 bucks. What you need is not to punish, but to make people responsible for the infrastructure they use, and everyone is responsible for the usage, and new construction even less so: until the building is used, the increased infrastructure usage is less. And once its built, all the dwellers pay sales tax and income taxes as well. They will be brining more than their fair share.

Perhaps you believe that the new construction represent a minority that can be exploited, after all, they found a way to profit from the city. But the ones that exploit it the most are the state and the current residents. SF has one of the highest budgets in the world, per city per inhabitant. It doesnt need more money, it needs more discipline.

But there you have the actual issue of SF and california, things like prop 13 that make it impossible to raise taxes on property owners but it makes it easy to apply sales taxes which are known and accepted to be regressive.

Re: How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing

#108

Post by kingofhdds » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 8:03 PM UTC

renw0rp wrote: post #92

kingofhdds wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth mentioning these pretty renovations happened well after the system which brought them stopped its existence.

that's for sure, mostly 10-15 years after. Doesn't change the fact that this never happened in the UK; old council houses are still ugly, energy inefficient and often mouldy inside... not to mention some awful&impractical design choices

Well, after I stayed in a typical British house for some time, with its coldness even in a relatively warm weather, and two separate taps system in bathroom, I started to believe that impractical designs in building could be an inseparable part of British culture :-)

Re: How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing

#109

Post by Retric » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 2:08 PM UTC

conanbatt wrote: post #107

Retric wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are confused about actual housing prices and infrastructure costs in the US. In SF for example a ~30k tax per new home would be meaningless until the price of a new home crashed enough for it to become meaningful. In small towns on the other hand the infrastructure cost would be much lower.

Its even more meaningless to increase property taxes on everyone than to focus the pain into the new construction. a 30k tax on any new unit might be like 10 dollar tax on all units. The effect of concentrating a tax on something is to make it happen less, and less construction means higher home prices and higher rentals. San Francisco needs to build 1000 units to bring rental prices down 50 bucks. What you need is n…

SF is not adding units because people are not allowed to add units. I am specifically saying you need to change that to build units. I am also saying that a portion of windfall from changing zoning should be used to offset the cost of new infrastructure. As long as building units stays profitable and people are allowed to build units then people are going to build units. Giving people building units even more profit is going to have minimal effect.

As it stands now anyone that can convince a zoning commission to change zoning get's a huge windfall from doing so as suddenly with zero other changes the land is more valuable. That's ripe for corruption on many levels and creates terrible incentives.

As to building infrastructure after people show up that's really does not work because building takes time. The lag between getting permission to build and someone moving in is not long enough to finish infrastructure but it is useful.

Re: How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing

#110

Post by Retric » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 2:13 PM UTC

saosebastiao wrote: post #106

Retric wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an agreement around what the tax should be not that it should not exist.

Complexity with undefined or difficult to determine benefits is definitely a case against itself. If you want to charge a newcomer more because the city had to build a sewer treatment plant to accommodate him, you should at least credit him back the ways in which he also made the city more efficient, such as by taking public transit or reducing school costs. And if you are willing to take on the burden of an extensiv…

And if you are willing to take on the burden of an extensive economic analysis of the marginal cost and benefit of every new housing unit, by all means go ahead.

Long term benefits are meaningless as they would impact long term property taxes. It's only a question of new construction which is a fairly simplistic annalists.

PS: Really it's hard let's play checkers is not an argument.