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It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

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Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

#121

Post by [deleted] »

bluGill wrote: post #105
whartung wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You missed a costly part of grabbing a chunk of land: utilities. There is a 15 acre lot down the street. A good spot for another small housing development. But one issue with it is that it has legacy utility and power poles on the periphery. Anyone wanting to develop that space is obliged to route all of that underground, which easily add several M$ to the project. Eventually, someone will bite, buy the lot, and de…

What is wrong with powar poles? They are reliable and work well.

[deleted]

Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

#122

Post by jjav »

camel_Snake wrote: post #100
nemo44x wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could never understand why some people don't understand that people buy into a community because they like the community in the state when they bought into it. And that making large changes to the community would alter the community and what people liked about it will be diminished. Not to mention the practical aspects like utilities, road capacity, schools, etc. as you've pointed out. For some reason, some people…

I'm probably one of those people you're referring to, and quite honestly it's not that I don't realize or understand - it's that I don't care. The community you love wasn't always that way - it changed to become what you enjoy, likely to the similar anger/detriment of the previous residents who like the "old" community. I imagine racial segregationists and apartheid advocates used disconcertingly similar arguments.

> it's that I don't care

Ok. So hoefully you can see why people who like their homes and their town will rationally do everything possible to oppose a person who is an outsider and comes in saying they don't care about anything the residents enjoy and just wants to change it all (destroy it)?

Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

#123

Post by blargey »

Loudergood wrote: post #110
kaibee wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am pointing out that this is not a given, magic that will just happen. Capitalism is not always efficient nor reliable, based on the evidence. I said 'if there's a market for it'. The simple fact is that these rural communities are just not as economically viable as they used to be. Most rural communities exist around 'base input' types of industries that made money by exporting stuff extracted from the land. Far…

This is why I'm very pro remote work for the broader economy. It's much easier for remote workers who want to live in rural areas to patronize these local bars, stores, etc, when they're not already commuting to places with a much larger collection of services.

The problem with remote workers is that they will only move to a town after there’s a healthy crop of local businesses competing for patronage on quality.

So they can’t become the motive for such businesses to start in a town. It’s a crop of local workers flocking to location-specific, non-remote job opportunities that creates that attractive opportunity for service businesses to follow.

Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

#124

Post by chgs »

aorloff wrote: post #111
chgs wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Barcalona is a terrible place to live due to mass tourism that the intenet has enabled.

Yup I hear nobody goes there anymore because its so popular.

Tourists go. That doesn’t mean it’s a good place to live.

The extreme example is of course Venice.

Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

#125

Post by medvezhenok »

blargey wrote: post #123
Loudergood wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I'm very pro remote work for the broader economy. It's much easier for remote workers who want to live in rural areas to patronize these local bars, stores, etc, when they're not already commuting to places with a much larger collection of services.

The problem with remote workers is that they will only move to a town after there’s a healthy crop of local businesses competing for patronage on quality. So they can’t become the motive for such businesses to start in a town. It’s a crop of local workers flocking to location-specific, non-remote job opportunities that creates that attractive opportunity for service businesses to follow.

To be fair, rich people could theoretically jump start the process by paying people to open businesses in a town. It just takes startup costs. And if the flywheel gets going, you could see a new "popular" town spring up.

But it's a risk.

Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

#126

Post by lapcat »

ghaff wrote: post #117
lapcat wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No shortage of land in the US, but everyone wants to live in the same few places It's not enough to have land, though. The land needs access to water and electricity, not to mention roads, or it's a nonstarter, especially if you want to build a bunch of homes on the land. And the new homeowners will need access to food and supplies, i.e., stores. You need an entire community.

That's a bit of a strawman though. There are plenty of cities and towns that have infrastructure and have stores at some level that have much lower costs. (They may or may not have good local jobs.) It's not a choice between NYC/SF/etc. and the wilds of Wyoming.

I'm not sure what exactly you think is a straw man?

When the OP said "everyone wants to live in the same few places", I didn't interpret that to mean specifically NYC/SF, because that's plainly false. I interpreted it to mean urban vs. rural/undeveloped areas in general.

But the problem is that home builder cartels exist all across the country, and they own a lot of the desirable land around the urban areas. For example, in my own area of Madison, Wisconsin, we have a company Veridian Homes that owns giant tracts of land all around the outskirks of the Madison area. They're the dominant home builder here.

Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

#127

Post by ghaff »

lapcat wrote: post #126
ghaff wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit of a strawman though. There are plenty of cities and towns that have infrastructure and have stores at some level that have much lower costs. (They may or may not have good local jobs.) It's not a choice between NYC/SF/etc. and the wilds of Wyoming.

I'm not sure what exactly you think is a straw man? When the OP said "everyone wants to live in the same few places", I didn't interpret that to mean specifically NYC/SF, because that's plainly false. I interpreted it to mean urban vs. rural/undeveloped areas in general. But the problem is that home builder cartels exist all across the country, and they own a lot of the desirable land around the urban areas. For exam…

It was in reference to: The land needs access to water and electricity, not to mention roads, or it's a nonstarter, especially if you want to build a bunch of homes on the land.

(The comment may indeed be true--sort of by definition to at least some degree--for new construction, although getting that access can be pretty straightforward, to the degree anything involving construction is straightforward. It's more that housing prices are an issue in popular places where a lot of people want to live. And, yes, vibrant college towns fall into that category although not to the same degree as elite cities.)

Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

#128

Post by medvezhenok »

sokoloff wrote: post #113
kaibee wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For some reason, some people outside a community believe they should have a voice on what the actual community wants. As if a community should be expected to want to ruin what makes their space attractive so interlopers can infest it? I don't understand the notion that that community exists in a vacuum where they're entitled to be insulated from the world changing around them.

I don't think that it's entitled to be insulated from the world changing around it, but I do think that the residents of, say, Palo Alto, should have more say about the planning and permitting in Palo Alto than I do (living 3000 miles away from there), no matter how much "some people outside a community believe they should have a voice on what the actual community wants." I don't live there; I shouldn't have any say…

They should have some say, but they should not be able to act as a cartel and prevent permitting altogether. And I say that as a new homeowner.

General zoning policy should be decided at a state level (or federal) - like in Japan. Otherwise, no individual community wants more development (of course), but it's a bitter pill that they have to swallow together if we want to solve the housing problem.

Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

#129

Post by jjav »

delichon wrote: post #47
warkdarrior wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and nobody wants to live there.

Look at a digital U.S. map with a private / public land overlay and zoom in on the satellite images. It quickly becomes clear that people will live wherever they are allowed to. Sometimes the population stays low and sometimes bare desert turns into the Las Vegas metropolitan area.

> It quickly becomes clear that people will live wherever they are allowed to.

Doesn't seem to be true. You can buy land in e.g. Nevada for less than $1000 per acre, but it sits empty because approximately nobody wants to live in the middle of the desert.

Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

#130

Post by sroussey »

chgs wrote: post #89
sroussey wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like the developer wasn’t the problem.

Yes the inability for society to tax the land is the problem

“Society”.

Tax all land so after 6 months it is not profitable to hold. I guess after 6 months all land everywhere will be built.

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