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

construction-physics.com

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

#121

Post by TylerE »

throwitaway222 wrote: post #100
TylerE wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such houses do not exist. A minimum wage dish washing job barely pays enough to eat off of. Your gross take home from a minimum wage part time job is $145/week. Before all taxes and deductions. You can’t afford a closet is crack hiuse on that “salary” even in the boonies. Even in my LCOL areas places that were like $400/month 5 or 6 years ago are over $1000/month.

I think you missed the thread - we're making it nearly impossible for someone to own a rental, it would flood the market with purchasable homes - cratering home prices potentially making the medium drop from $400k to $100k (at least for a certain class of homes), create programs for homeless people to get loans - some kind of step-up, combined with a job, and the homeless would suddenly be home owners and become peop…

$100k might as well be $100m to 99% of homeless people. Do you think they’re going to qualify for a loan at a non-usurious rate?

In case, if the market value drops, well, rich people will just buy them.

If you’re currently in a “$300k” home and can buy a “$400k” home for $100k… like how do any of these numbers make any sort of sense?

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

#122

Post by ReptileMan »

Why not bricks - they are eco friendly, we are not running out of clay soon, amazing thermal buffers and isolation, while energy intensive to produce you could fire them with renewables eventually. Change the shape a bit so they are easier to lay fill the cavities and we are in the business.

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

#123

Post by xyzelement »

CrazyStat wrote: post #27
tempsy wrote: post #22

There's a shortage of detached single family homes in desirable cities and suburbs. If you just want to rent an apartment there's an oversupply from overbuilding during the pandemic.

There’s generally not room to build the desired number of detached single family homes (with desirable lot sizes) in desirable cities and suburbs. Which is why you end up with exurbs and hour long commutes. We need to build higher density housing in the desirable areas, which is often disallowed by zoning.

I think you're operating on maybe 5+ year old thinking on this problem. Post-COVID, the "exurbs with hour long commutes" have become significantly more desirable, as people have gone fully or partially remote. The "penalty" of the long commute has gone down while the benefits of space, affordability, and community type have gone up. The world is obviously figuring out the Return to Office thing but overall the commute is a less big deal than it once was.

This dynamic means that folks who own what you correctly categorize as owning "detached single family homes in (or close) to desirable cities" who no longer care about the commute might be overall willing to sell these homes in favor of larger/more affordable homes further out, freeing up these homes to those for whom city proximity still matters.

I think there are really two core demographics at play with a small middle. There are those who are all about the city life - don't want a car, don't want a house, want to walk to work and to the tinder date, be around a large number of diverse people and experiences, etc. Then there are those who primarily orient their life around home/family and want the space/affordability. Distance to city mainly matters as a factor of the commute, which itself is less relevant than it was before.

Then there's the relatively smaller group that both wants a house and needs to be close to the city life. This group will continue to pay the highest costs because they have the highest demand but I think that's reasonable.

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

#124

Post by ejb999 »

throwitaway222 wrote: post #70
its_ethan wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth - you come across as completely unserious if your suggestion to fix housing shortages is genuinely to levy a $100k tax for property owners who aren't currently renting out their units.

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 business alive.

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

#125

Post by Spivak »

pixl97 wrote: post #90
Spivak wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the government no longer functions as intended. On the other hand it seems like it's functioning exactly as intended. The interests of the people who live in and who elect the city council are being represented just as they should be. The argument could equally be if you don't like it, build somewhere else. Do you believe communities have any right to self-determination? I would feel a bit peeved if I and all my ne…

This gets problematic as what is the right of others over your private property. What is the right of an individual property owners self determination versus the communities?

If you've got an answer for how to strike that balance you'd best start writing essays for the Federalist Papers 2nd Edition.

Because obviously you can do whatever you want with your property: well not open a business because it's not zoned for that, and not build too close to the property line, but anything else! Oh and you can't make too much noise after 9pm that's just rude, or fix your own electrical work because if you do a shoddy job it'll catch your neighbor's house on fire, and...

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

#126

Post by Ekaros »

ejb999 wrote: post #96
dubcanada wrote: post #32

If there is one industry that is the most resistant to change, it's the construction industry. There are still people who have been roofing for 50 years and refuse to change a single thing they do and learned 50 years ago. Saying a bunch of glulam will solve the issue is just incorrect. Wood is fantastic material. But using half a forest to build a 2000sqft house is certainly not the direction we should be going, we…

Honestly, if I had to choose between buying a house built 50 years ago, or one today - I personally would take the older one. Nothing scares me more (relative to owning a house) than buying a brand new one. If it has been around for fifty years, it has been tested - may have some things wrong with them, but you usually know what you are dealing with and usually the skill was better and materials better. Heck, my pare…

50 years I think puts here them highly in danger zone... That means 1970s... Which have whole host of very well known issues. Now 100 or even 70 year old houses... If not ruined in 70s-90s by renovation...

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

#127

Post by xyzelement »

cpursley wrote: post #12

To solve the housing crisis you have to build up like the Soviets and Chinese have. They housed a lot of people, quickly. It’s really not difficult; just takes some brave people to change the zoning laws and rethink some of the building codes combined with financing it.

// To solve the housing crisis you have to build up like the Soviets

My family lived in a communal apartment[0] for about 30 years in the USSR waiting for a place of our own. Whatever definition of "housing crisis" you are operating with, is heaven on earth compared to the Soviet housing reality.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment

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

#128

Post by 10000truths »

geodel wrote: post #115
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…

LOL. So people who have been living in an area should have no say but people from planning to move must have a say. > This will probably never happen in the U.S Thank god for that. Maybe checkout in other countries like Canada, UK, France, Germany or even eastern europe, further in Asia on how they are doing on housing front. For sure they couldn't be having housing policies as bad as US.

You are falsely assuming an equivalence between homeownership and residency. Renters and household dependents make up a significant portion of residents in large cities.

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

#129

Post by slothtrop »

shagie wrote: post #113
lanfeust6 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wrong. Homelessness scales with affordability, not mental illness or addiction rates. This is why San Fransisco and LA have the highest rates in the country. Noah Smith writes about this at length, the data is very clear.

Homelessness in San Francisco doesn't kill you from the elements in January or July. A homeless person in Minneapolis or Chicago in January may die from the elements on an excessively cold night. A homeless person in Arizona in July can also die from it being too hot. It's rarely ever too hot or too cold in costal California cities.

> Homelessness in San Francisco doesn't kill you from the elements in January or July.

This would be equally true of other large cities in the southern half (including July for many), and none of them have anywhere near the same rate. Notwithstanding, northern cities have indoor shelters and if the cold mattered that much, the rates would be quite small, but they're not. In expensive cities like NY, homelessness rates are high.

See here https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-...

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

#130

Post by geodel »

ReptileMan wrote: post #101
mrkstu wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, depends on the level of government you're talking about. If it is local, then if local homeowners (who are local voters) don't want the development, it is eminently 'democratic.'

And yet democracy is best described as "Three wolves and sheep deciding what to have for dinner"

Previously there were two wolves, it seems now they have gotten super majority.
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