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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

#161

Post by nineplay »

mjmahone17 wrote: post #153
nineplay wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your assertion is that if all the open space near me was mowed down to make room for massive apartment complexes, then I would actually experience less noise and traffic. It's a bold theory but not one I want to try out in practice.

No. In most American suburbs you can get more density by taking 2 single family homes and replacing them with one 6-plex. You’ll also have more open space, because a 6-plex takes up around one single family lot. Especially if the 6-plex can be 4-6 stories tall. Everyone can have more (private) interior and more (shared) exterior space if the neighborhood allows a little bit of density. As a bonus having more neighbor…

You are right, and I will amend my statement. I will get more noise and traffic if the open space near me is mowed down. I will also get more noise and traffic if all the single family homes near me are replaced with 6 plexes.

I assure you that neither of those are a good outcome as far as I'm concerned.

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

#162

Post by nineplay »

wpm wrote: post #157
nineplay wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your assertion is that if all the open space near me was mowed down to make room for massive apartment complexes, then I would actually experience less noise and traffic. It's a bold theory but not one I want to try out in practice.

You’ll see that it’s true once you decouple the idea that one person == one more car on the road. Aside from lawn equipment, the noise pollution I suffer from in my streetcar suburb in a major metro is almost completely from cars and other fossil fuel motorized vehicles. I was out in a fairly high earning suburb recently and the backyard was constantly inundated by the roar of a not so nearby highway. Like, what exac…

Cars make noise. More people == more cars. This will happen whatever ideas I personally may or may not have.

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

#163

Post by nineplay »

mjmahone17 wrote: post #154
jjav wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Presumably double the density you also double the size of the school and double the teachers. It's not that easy. If you doubled the density, maybe there is nowhere left to go for the school to expand, or the land is now so expensive there is no way for the town to afford expanding the school. My town is an example. The middle school had two quite large empty lots on two sides. Those lots have now multi-story apart…

Couldn’t the school just build taller too?

'just' is doing a lot of work there. No one 'just' adds more stories onto existing buildings.

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

#164

Post by pandaman »

durumu wrote: post #146
nineplay wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Property values are a small-to-none factor. I don't want more noise. I don't want more traffic. I don't want more students at my kid's schools, which are already at a 35/1 kid to teacher ratio. That's it for me. I think that's it for a lot of people, whether they live in cities or suburbs or far out in the country. Very few people want more crowding. The people who like living in dense cities already live there. Blam…

> The people who like living in dense cities already live there. One would then think that dense cities would build more housing, but that doesn’t seem to happen. NYC, SF, and Boston are the densest cities in the country and build barely any housing compared to areas like Houston and Austin. I also just think it isn’t true that everyone who wants to live in a dense city does. My experience is that a lot of people wou…

That's because few really like unbound density, people who move to cities want more density than a SFH-on-an-acre and/or perhaps can tolerate more of it but they do not enjoy density per se and don't "upgrade" by moving to even more crowded conditions just for the sake of having more nuisance.

Sure, many people would love to move to NYC, but how many people would chose to move to a tiny apartment over a giant penthouse in there, if given such a choice. Say the employer pays for housing with no cost to the individual and no limit, how many people would go for the smallest place in their preferred location and how many would go for the largest? If the former group is in minority this would explain how the cities, ruled by a democratic process, do not strive to pump density.

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

#165

Post by mulmen »

biomcgary wrote: post #77
mulmen wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1.47 billion 2005 dollars is 2.29 billion 2023 dollars. Profit per house in 2023 dollars: $44,751.04 in 2005 $56,683.19 in 2023

Thanks for doing this calculation! It would be interesting to know if the average square footage of houses built by the company has changed. If they have increased by 25%, the profit per square foot would be roughly unchanged.

Maybe. I’m not a domain expert so I’m not sure that’s a meaningful metric, especially at this scale. But in general I think anyone would be happy if their business improved units sold and per unit profit. Naively I’d expect an inverse relationship.

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

#166

Post by jauntywundrkind »

xnx wrote: post #5

No shortage of land in the US, but everyone wants to live in the same few places (for good reason), and those places have a lot of restrictions on what can be built where. It's satisfying to blame a big bad "them" for this, but the problem is "us". We all want our properties to increase in value so we collectively conspire to suppress supply that would make our properties less valuable.

One thing DC had some well half a century ago was housing coops.

Take a bunch of folks across a block of area & convince them to band together & build big. Create a housing coop that collectively owns the building, is the people who will live there.

Right now every property owner is sort of in it for themselves. Figuring out ways to enable development while retaining ownership, without forcing owners to sell of their stake, while enfranchising future owners, worked really well. But it feels like we aren't trying to replicate this clear success.

Opportunity comes at scale Figuring out how to make that scaling possibly accessible by residents (versus someone else getting to capture the value of redevelopment) requires some legal can do willingness we haven't been seeing.

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

#167

Post by sokoloff »

mint2 wrote: post #145
sokoloff wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who think it's wonderful to live in a place where every block is 4-story apartments should feel free to move to such a place.

That place doesn’t practically exist in most of the US.

It doesn't exist in most of Spain/Catalonia either; it's in a few of the largest cities.

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

#168

Post by adverbly »

nnf wrote: post #12

> tax the land of lot developers so they don’t hold land off the market. This is something I dealt with a few years ago. There were a few acreage lots (5-15 acres) my partner and I were considering buying and building a house on, and all of them had been in the $200k range a year or two before but had been bought by land speculators (in some cases by the same person). Prices went from ~$200k to ~$750k, which we weren…

Your thinking is exactly correct.

Economists have been saying this for over a century.

Look up land value taxes. They are what we need right now.

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

#169

Post by shiroiushi »

nineplay wrote: post #143
mint2 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those are required in cities, and actually suburbs are the main cause of traffic jams. The main noise in most places is traffic, and traffic is usually caused caused by sprawl, low density and car oriented building. What you’re objecting to is fixed by more density

So your assertion is that if all the open space near me was mowed down to make room for massive apartment complexes, then I would actually experience less noise and traffic. It's a bold theory but not one I want to try out in practice.

I see you've never visited Tokyo, and have probably never set foot outside North America.

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

#170

Post by shiroiushi »

sebastos wrote: post #159
fmobus wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cities aren't loud, cars are loud.

An interesting side benefit of switching to electric vehicles is that cities and streets will become quieter.

Not necessarily: it depends on the traffic speed. If all the cars are traveling at 20mph (using American units here), then sure, streets will be quieter. Over about 35mph, they don't: tire noise becomes the main noise factor at higher speeds.
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