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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

#201

Post by xnx »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #195
xnx wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true. There are many areas in the US (Detroit for example) that have lost population over the past 50 years that wouldn't have to start from scratch with new development.

The homes from detroits population high did not sit vacant and maintained over the decades. They rotted apart and many were razed. Much of inner city detroit really would be like starting from scratch considering the amount of vacant greenfield land available.

The neighborhoods definitely aren't turnkey, but roads, pipes, and power lines give you a good head start.

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

#202

Post by oerdier »

Jensson wrote: post #187
oerdier wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't solve the worse than 35/1 student/reacher ratio problem of ancestor post if those extra classrooms won't have teachers in them. Seems like increasing teacher shortage is a problem in the US as well as here in the EU.

Teacher shortage mostly happens in sparse communities not dense ones since it is easy to find teachers where lots of people live.

Here in the Netherlands, already a generally densely populated country, there's a teacher shortage everywhere, including cities.

People rather have higher paying jobs, or quit because the job disappoints. I belong to the latter group. I quit teaching at secondary school (ages 15-18). After three different schools in three different areas, and having spoken with many colleagues and their experiences, I sadly had to conclude that broadly the work culture in secondary education (in this country, at least) is dramatically lacking professionalism. To a point where I think if my goal is to teach the next generation well enough, my time and energy is better spent elsewhere.

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

#203

Post by quantified »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #198
quantified wrote: post #134

Having a stable, rather than growing, population would go along way to reducing the price of housing. Competition would be much reduced.

Population growth has slowed substantially in high demand cities. Honestly when looking at historical charts, prices were better when cities grew hand over fist. There was enough development to meet growth and also prevent much price growth beyond what wages could afford. Today there is little growth, and prices have surged as a result of that limited supply being bid up.

If we froze the population level and all the people try to move to the same place, it'll bid up the prices. But growing the total supply of humans only causes additional pressure.

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

#204

Post by HDThoreaun »

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #148
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…

Traffic? Build rail and deploy bussing like you fucking want it. Make it so good Japanese and European civil engineers ask you for help. Noise? That’s an engineering problem. Teacher ratios? Your property taxes too low for the services your community needs. Notice how I said need - it’s necessary. 20-1 is high, 30+ plus and your local governance is criminally incompetent. You’re distracted by change and upset that yo…

Its easy to say "just build trains." It is much harder to actually do it. New rail costs on the order of a billion dollars a mile in American cities. It is not financially practical to expand rail service because of this. What usually ends up happening when suburban areas densify is just that traffic gets worse. It makes sense that people are worried about that when theyve seen it happen many times.

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

#205

Post by HDThoreaun »

fmobus wrote: post #178
nineplay wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> More people == more cars Counter example: Europe, Japan. It's perfectly possible for a city to grow denser of people without growing denser of cars. My inner city neighborhood is quite calm and quiet, because the city has decent public transit with three different modes within 3 minutes walk (besides decent biking infra).

America isnt the Europe or Japan. Unfortunately things that work there do not work here. I would like that problem to be solved, but just saying "well they solved it" isnt the same as actually solving it.

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

#206

Post by xnx »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #166
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…

Interesting. I'm reading about co-ops, and I don't see much functional difference from condo associations.

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

#207

Post by achierius »

kaibee wrote: post #92
toomuchtodo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said: > The neat thing about capitalism is that stores will be built to serve the community if there's a market for it. 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. > before going back mostly shopping at a Walmart 30 miles away. My guess is that those people were going to that Walmart anyway for this or that in man…

> 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…

"if there's a market for it" is a big weasel phrase. It lets you ascribe fault not to the system, but to the people who 'chose' to live in such a non-marketable way.

Even if we accept that: what would you have those farmers do, then? Capitalism has hollowed out the towns that supported them, and now you say that the free market will handle the rest: to me that sounds like a recipe for headlines ten years out saying stuff like "The farmer shortage is quickly becoming an issue of national security."

And it's not just a rural issue either. AFAIK the term originated, or at least first became popular with reference to urban areas: e.g. map of these in New York https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=a20cc15bc7cf49939c8... These people did the "right" thing and moved to a city, even if they had to take up residence in cheaper homes to do so. Yet the market still doesn't want to serve them.

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

#208

Post by spwa4 »

fmobus wrote: post #178
nineplay wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> More people == more cars Counter example: Europe, Japan. It's perfectly possible for a city to grow denser of people without growing denser of cars. My inner city neighborhood is quite calm and quiet, because the city has decent public transit with three different modes within 3 minutes walk (besides decent biking infra).

I live in Europe, Belgium to be precise. There's a total overload of cars here. Could you elaborate which this city is that has less cars?

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

#209

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #204
Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traffic? Build rail and deploy bussing like you fucking want it. Make it so good Japanese and European civil engineers ask you for help. Noise? That’s an engineering problem. Teacher ratios? Your property taxes too low for the services your community needs. Notice how I said need - it’s necessary. 20-1 is high, 30+ plus and your local governance is criminally incompetent. You’re distracted by change and upset that yo…

Its easy to say "just build trains." It is much harder to actually do it. New rail costs on the order of a billion dollars a mile in American cities. It is not financially practical to expand rail service because of this. What usually ends up happening when suburban areas densify is just that traffic gets worse. It makes sense that people are worried about that when theyve seen it happen many times.

Deploy the army Corp of engineers, tie to a massive jobs program with expedited eminent domain. Fund it by closing loopholes on wealthy tax cheats, tax unrealized gains for billionaires, tax loans against stocks, tax private jet travel 100%. And on and on.

These are all solvable problems but no one has the will because the people empowered are too fucking comfortable watching the planet get destroyed while people die deaths of exposure and despair by the millions.

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

#210

Post by HDThoreaun »

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #209
HDThoreaun wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its easy to say "just build trains." It is much harder to actually do it. New rail costs on the order of a billion dollars a mile in American cities. It is not financially practical to expand rail service because of this. What usually ends up happening when suburban areas densify is just that traffic gets worse. It makes sense that people are worried about that when theyve seen it happen many times.

Deploy the army Corp of engineers, tie to a massive jobs program with expedited eminent domain. Fund it by closing loopholes on wealthy tax cheats, tax unrealized gains for billionaires, tax loans against stocks, tax private jet travel 100%. And on and on. These are all solvable problems but no one has the will because the people empowered are too fucking comfortable watching the planet get destroyed while people die…

When you say "just bring in the army corps of engineers" everyone hears "we're not going to solve the problem" because the odds of that happening are extremely low compared to the odds of everyone just putting up with things being a little bit worse. We need to rebuild faith in our government in order to undertake projects that cause change.
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