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Why Britain doesn’t build

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Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#251

Post by tomcar288 »

ggm wrote: post #3

I find the economic reductionism in housing planning really irritating. It's not like other public utility functions, but it is damn close to a fundamental and is included in human rights declarations. What kind of state throws up it's hands and claims "it can't" fix housing when states can do precisely that? Thatcher's revolution in council housing is a cesspit of counterfactual outcomes. It made individual househol…

I'm a homeowner as well and although I've benefited enormously to the tune of 100s of thousand of dollars in equity gains, I'm disgusted by the lack of will to fix this problem. I'm not the most selfless person in the world, far from it but I would never vote against someone else's right to build cost effective shelter (building regulations/requirements) or acquire the land needed (zoning/land use policy) to do so. I don't understand how people don't get that everyone should have a right to be somewhere on this planet: anything less is completely inhumane.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#252

Post by klyrs »

WalterBright wrote: post #217
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Politicians and the bureaucratic class have deep investments in real estate 2. Foreign money keeps flooding into western economies to find a safe haven and lack of capital controls. A bulk of it goes into real estate. 3. Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners. The entire system is rigged against anything that would impact home prices - such as an increase in supply or ch…

> Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners. This doesn't explain the constant increase in property tax levies being passed in Washington State.

If you're going to cherrypick a single example to rebut the existence of an overarching trend in the UK, you could at least pick a state with an income tax. Or, perhaps, not beat the dead horse at all and talk about Britain.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#253

Post by bobthepanda »

majormajor wrote: post #225
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Politicians and the bureaucratic class have deep investments in real estate 2. Foreign money keeps flooding into western economies to find a safe haven and lack of capital controls. A bulk of it goes into real estate. 3. Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners. The entire system is rigged against anything that would impact home prices - such as an increase in supply or ch…

The purpose of real estate development is to make real estate more valuable. So if you have laws restricting that development you need to look further than just "real-estate investors don't want development." Even ones not doing the development benefit financially - landlords love being able to raise the rents cause other people in the area built a bunch of new shit. The better off - and therefore more politically-co…

The thing is that large developers love restricting development because it limits competition.

If there is only a limited supply of land to build further on, it is much easier to corner said market of land and sit on it if the prices are not high enough for your liking. The cheapest development is the kind that larger developers do not bother with (one house to two or three on a single plot of land, rather than large complexes)

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#254

Post by alistairSH »

prottog wrote: post #177
parthdesai wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or at least in North America, younger people don't want to live in soulless suburbs where there's literally nothing to do apart from visiting the same big box stores, chain restaurants and bars in exactly same looking plaza.

Real estate isn't immune to the law of supply and demand, which mandate that you can only pick at most two out of size (or quality) of the housing unit, location (and the quality thereof), and price. Most places in the US are either affordable and boring or the other way around. > soulless suburbs where there's literally nothing This is a bit of a reductionist take on those younger people's part. You can have just as…

… You can have just as much fun at the TGI Friday's at your local strip mall as you can at the hippest restaurant…

Have you actually eaten at a TGIFridays? The food is awful. I suppose if the actual meal is completely secondary to your enjoyment of the experience, you might be right, but for me, eating out is as much for the food as the company.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#255

Post by alistairSH »

clpm4j wrote: post #209
khuey wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many young people want to live in NY and rent a shoebox flat for life. Nobody wants to rent a shoebox apartment in NYC for the rest of their life. But if you're not rich your only choices are to rent the shoebox or to leave NYC, and people choose which one matters more to them.

And if not already rich in NYC then you're probably there because you're trying to become rich.

Do you think all 8+ million residents of NYC are trying to get rich? It’s not all investment bankers and engineers.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#256

Post by ClumsyPilot »

dahwolf wrote: post #184
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Politicians and the bureaucratic class have deep investments in real estate 2. Foreign money keeps flooding into western economies to find a safe haven and lack of capital controls. A bulk of it goes into real estate. 3. Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners. The entire system is rigged against anything that would impact home prices - such as an increase in supply or ch…

"Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners". Sounds like democracy?

> Sounds like democracy?

Here is an example -

16 year olds who have a keen interest in their futute, are not allowed to vote.

A 90 year old, who does not even remember that USSR has already collapsed, votes for a war-Mongering government.

18 year olds are drafted into the army and sent to fight a war, and they never had a chance to vote at all. Maybe their entire experience of democracy is getting sent to faraway land to die.

Their experience is indistinguishable from tyrany

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#257

Post by alistairSH »

lmm wrote: post #192
dahwolf wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners". Sounds like democracy?

> "Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners". > Sounds like democracy? Young people might get their first chance to vote at age 23 - assuming they paid for the right kind of ID, or navigated an impenetrable web of underpaid bureaucrats to get the mythical free ID. And if they manage to get off work on election day. Meanwhile the elderly are reliably on the register (because t…

Does the UK not have any equivalent of the US “motor voter” system? When we update our info at the department of motor vehicles, there’s a checkbox on the form to automatically register to vote. So getting on the register is mostly automatic once you have the paperwork in order to get a driver’s license (which is a necessity to function as an adult in most of the US).

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#258

Post by ClumsyPilot »

dahwolf wrote: post #226
jezzamon wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could imagine a system where similar to how we split votes into geographical regions via things like electoral colleges or having a locally elected representatives, there could be a similar splitting of votes into age ranges to ensure each group is sufficiently represented (Not advocating for this, just an interesting thing to think about)

Indeed, democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for lunch. It's just an unusual and new idea to see young people as a minority as this never was the case to this extend. As it comes to housing though, I remain convinced that the issue is not as political as many make it out to be. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36486626 Meaning, even if the young seize more political power, the…

There is also no law they can pass to reverse climatw change. Once some things are fucked, they are really hard to fix

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#259

Post by danem »

lucideer wrote: post #231
danem wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused... Are you arguing that zoning, red-tape, and generally anti-development politicians and voters aren't the fundamental problem here? How exactly do you envision a government housing program to side-step all of the above issues? Do you think voters who fight relentlessly to block development feel differently about public housing? How do you expect it to get funded even, when a single unit of "affordable h…

> Are you arguing that zoning, red-tape, and generally anti-development politicians and voters aren't the fundamental problem here? Minus the leading language (as I presume these so-called "anti-development" politicians don't self-define as such), yes, this is what I'm arguing. > Do you think voters who fight relentlessly to block development feel differently about public housing? I believe the tales of such voters a…

> I believe the tales of such voters are highly overstated, a really common red-herring used by advocates of private developer subsidy to deflect criticism.

I'm not familiar with Ireland or the UK, but for the US at least, this is absolutely false. I'm most familiar with San Francisco so let's look at that as an example. Why do you think it takes nearly 2 years to get permitting done for housing here? Why do you think you need to pay $100ks in fees just to break ground? Why do you think all of the housing built over the last 20 years has been located in one part of the city (SOMA)? Why do you think our Supervisors are so reluctant to adopt by-right zoning and ministerial review processes? Why was huge swaths of the city down-zoned in the 70s? Hell, why do you think California literally has an amendment to their constitution (article 34) prohibiting the construction of low-income housing without explicit approval from local residents? These aren't the demands of private developers, but the demands of influential neighborhood associations, unions (SEIU, CBTC, etc), and average homeowners who like their neighborhood as it is and don't want it to change.

> Have you ever stopped to think about why it costs $1m to build such a unit in SF in 2023? About what system of incentives lead to the current status quo? I can assure you it wasn't decades of publicly-run projects.

Absolutely. There are of course many factors, but a big one are the various road-blocks politicians put up, and the concessions (rents) they extract from projects for their preferred special interests. These are things that don't just go away once private developers are out of the mix.

Have you ever stopped to think why the market hasn't been able to produce the necessary supply of housing? It's not because they aren't interested in making money.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#260

Post by ClumsyPilot »

dahwolf wrote: post #204
jgon wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We usually have checks and balances in democracy so that a majority can't vote to say, take all the money from some minority group that has less voting power than them. What is happening now is that a "loophole" has been discovered wherein instead of just directly taking all of the money from some minority class the property owning class just instead condemns them to a lifetime of renting whereby just enough rent is…

I get what you're saying and I'm against inter-generational hate. There is no plot against young people. Remember that most old people have children. If today's young people would time travel to some decades back, they'd too make the most of the conditions then. I would not imagine any young person that owns a home to sell it at a discount out of solidarity, they too would self-optimize without any consideration for…

young people are absolutely targeted - education was fre for older generation, and young people get a lofetine of debt.

In boomer time government probided free milk for babies, now baby formula is the most stolen items and is kept under lock and key in super market

Todays politicians talk about growijg up ina. councill home as a market of being through hard times. They dont even get thay councill homes are gone, and if they were growing up today, they would be on the street

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