[deleted]
Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage
21–30 of 799 posts
Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage
#22There'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.
Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage
#23It’s not mentioned in the article, but the Brock Commons that was the tallest timber building is at UBC! I was there as it was built and finished. It’s an 18 story dorm building one of several nearly equally sized dorms (!!) on campus. It went up fast - it was started and done between the 2 years I was there.
UBC is huge for specifically timber engineering research, they claimed at one point to be the best in the world.
Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage
#24Of course timber won't fix the housing shortage. The housing shortage is artificial. There are plenty of empty units across the country. It's a distribution issue of: owners holding vacant units, people wanting/needing to live in specific locations, and individual preferences for bigger, fancier, better school, sfh, etc attributes. With an almost stagnate population growth this isn't really a building issue even if i…
Raise prop taxes for non-rented vacation units by 150% Raise prop taxes for rentals by %350. Raise prop taxes for airbnbs by %500. Everyone will own a home, and home prices will plummet as people try to unload extremely expensive property taxes. And if it doesn't work, double my percentages. Or just make it 100k per year. Those people crazy enough to keep holding them, will fund the creation of homeless housing. DV's…
Everybody will be paying more rent
Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Raise prop taxes for non-rented vacation units by 150% Raise prop taxes for rentals by %350. Raise prop taxes for airbnbs by %500. Everyone will own a home, and home prices will plummet as people try to unload extremely expensive property taxes. And if it doesn't work, double my percentages. Or just make it 100k per year. Those people crazy enough to keep holding them, will fund the creation of homeless housing. DV's…
Everybody will be paying more rent
If that happens, just raise prop taxes to 100k per year (for rental units).
Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage
#26Of course mass timber won't solve the housing shortage.
The housing shortage is entirely a self-inflicted problem arising chiefly from insanely restrictive zoning laws that prevent construction of high-density walkable neighborhoods.
It's not only about NIMBYism, though that alone is enough to cause the current crisis. Building an apartment complex in an area fille with single-family units is nearly impossible. Building a high-rise? Forget about it.
It's also the fact that mixed-use buildings are still a taboo in the US (God forbid people could work and shop where they live, just look at the hell that is Brooklyn, the EU, and Japan, and ..!).
And sticking a high-rise in the middle of a suburban sprawl immediately faces the classic opposition of "but what about traffic and parking", because we can't build public transportation networks either (the opposition to those, of course, is "but nobody uses public transport").
That's why the article misses the point: housing shortage is not a problem about houses.
Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage
#27There'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.
Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everybody will be paying more rent
If that happens, just raise prop taxes to 100k per year (for rental units).
Raising property taxes on rentals increases cost to renters. Raising taxes on vacant units is a good idea though (but perhaps hard to enforce).
Remote work is solving the housing shortage already though, through opening up living to much wider geography (and locales that don't impede building, such as TX and FL). It will just take a decade or so to normalize.
In-person work forced people to compete over limited housing in small areas
Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage
#29To 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.
Has someone on onion talks said it before "the idea is there, it just needs implementation".
Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I cannot upvote this enough. We ruined today through decades of car centric planning, we have to give the future something better.
This whole chain is a series of ideas that will never happen.
The issue might get forced if energy prices hit a threshold, debt bomb explodes, etc.