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Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

construction-physics.com

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Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

#291

Post by ryukafalz »

iteria wrote: post #151
ryukafalz wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market is not deciding when municipalities are legally prohibiting denser, lower-cost housing from being built. To use your example, it's as if we were to restrict car production to mostly only Ferraris. And then if someone can't afford a Ferrari, we tell them to buy a Honda - but there aren't many of them to buy.

But there are reasons for municipalities to do that. Namely infrastructure. The city next to mine allowed uncontrolled building of housing and that city is a shitshow right now. The roads are clogged and often gridlocked. They deal with all kinds of failure modes in their utilities due to high usage. No. My town is being more strategic about it. They allowed businesses to come in first and expanded out the robustness…

Sure, municipalities do need to consider infrastructure. I was just responding to someone saying that the market decides who can live in an area, which just isn't the full picture.

In areas where the power grid is struggling to keep up with demand, the municipality will need to plan with that in account. If you expand housing in an area where you've made driving the only transportation option, that will straightforwardly lead to more cars on the road. And so on.

But at least in my area, municipalities largely seem to be trying to keep housing density at or below the level it's at now, which is a problem when we're facing a housing shortage.

Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

#292

Post by ducttapecrown »

ReptileMan wrote: post #122

Why not bricks - they are eco friendly, we are not running out of clay soon, amazing thermal buffers and isolation, while energy intensive to produce you could fire them with renewables eventually. Change the shape a bit so they are easier to lay fill the cavities and we are in the business.

Bricks are a nonstarter on the West coast because of earthquake safety is what I was told as a kid in California.

Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

#293

Post by eikenberry »

akira2501 wrote: post #244
foxyv wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To Start: Zoning laws, land use restrictions, parking minimums, property covenants and restrictions, traffic flow requirements, and minimum offsets.

Do these laws serve no other purpose other than to prevent building? Which of these laws can be discarded to 'solve' the housing problem? Which should we keep?

The obvious one is residential only zoning. How are you supposed to be able to walk to local businesses if there are no local businesses as zoning prohibits them?

Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

#294

Post by adamisom »

tpmoney wrote: post #221
foxyv wrote: post #177

It takes significantly less materials to build a multi-dwelling apartment/condo/townhouse structure than a single family home. In addition, the required square footage per person drops by huge amounts when people can walk to nearby community centers, restaurants, kitchens, theaters, and bars. We are building massive 3-4k sq. ft. homes for families of four because all of their food, entertainment, and social needs are…

I would argue more than that the housing crisis is an “urban crisis” and a “fraying of the social fabric” crisis. By the first I mean the continued destruction of smaller towns and semi-rural areas. Even if single family homes are more expensive to build than multi family apartments, the fact is we have ridiculous amounts of space in this country. But most people for various reasons don’t want to live where the space…

I just went to Panda Express for lunch--yeah yeah, it's not fancy at all, but it's a step above McDonald's--and someone begged me for food.

Cue a bunch of online warriors on their high horses implying I'm a bad person for not prioritizing their need over my negative experience.

I'm still going to second-guess going out to eat a little bit, though. I want to create my own beautiful bubble, and that might be home.

Everyone on Earth should curate their own bubble--should live the life they want. This is not at all contradictory with efficient aid to help the unfortunate.

Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

#295

Post by comte7092 »

stronglikedan wrote: post #207
shortsunblack wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which is fine, if they are willing to pay the full cost of it. suburbia is massively subsidized.

> suburbia is massively subsidized That's a common argument that no one has been able to sufficiently prove.

It’s a fairly intuitive thing to understand, the suburbs require significantly more infrastructure per capita. More roads, power lines, sewer/water lines, etc.

Just look at something as simple as trash pickup. In the burbs you have to travel a significantly greater distance per household.

Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

#296

Post by ducttapecrown »

benced wrote: post #176
dubcanada wrote: post #32

If there is one industry that is the most resistant to change, it's the construction industry. There are still people who have been roofing for 50 years and refuse to change a single thing they do and learned 50 years ago. Saying a bunch of glulam will solve the issue is just incorrect. Wood is fantastic material. But using half a forest to build a 2000sqft house is certainly not the direction we should be going, we…

> Wood is fantastic material. But using half a forest to build a 2000sqft house is certainly not the direction we should be going, we should be finding ways to build with 1/2 the amount of wood we currently use Wood is inherently a carbon sink. I suspect stimulating forest production via added lumber demand (similar to how Christmas tree demand stimulates tree farms) would be a net pollution win, albeit potentially a…

We need to stimulate demand for growing forests!

Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

#297

Post by lanfeust6 »

giantg2 wrote: post #276
slothtrop wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Homelessness in San Francisco doesn't kill you from the elements in January or July. This would be equally true of other large cities in the southern half (including July for many), and none of them have anywhere near the same rate. Notwithstanding, northern cities have indoor shelters and if the cold mattered that much, the rates would be quite small, but they're not. In expensive cities like NY, homelessness rate…

"Or to put it another way, while 33% of the homeless population suffers from mental illness, nearly 100% of the homeless population can’t afford housing. 100% is a much bigger number than 33%. Which is why mental health, while a factor in homelessness, cannot possibly or statistically be a lead factor." The quality of the analysis and arguments are terrible. We can just ignore factors if they don't explain everything…

> We can just ignore factors if they don't explain everything?

No, we just can't rely on them to explain everything! As you purport.

Only 33% of the homeless suffer from mental illness, and it certainly is not a strong predictor as to why rates are high in some cities but not others. That's the data.

> Affordability is a moot point for people in these categories

It matters to everyone, but even if we pretend it doesn't, that's 67% percent of the homeless.

Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

#298

Post by slothtrop »

giantg2 wrote: post #255
lanfeust6 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wrong. Homelessness scales with affordability, not mental illness or addiction rates. This is why San Fransisco and LA have the highest rates in the country. Noah Smith writes about this at length, the data is very clear.

It might be correlated, and it might making a difference at the margins (eg the people who have a job and can afford to live in a car). But the vast majority of the homeless population does not fit in that margin. Most of them do have other problems preventing them from getting any job, like severe mental health, substance abuse, or criminal records. Affordability is a moot point when employment is unattainable.

> Most of them do have other problems preventing them from getting any job, like severe mental health, substance abuse, or criminal records.

I just showed you elsewhere that this is wrong.

Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

#299

Post by ducttapecrown »

marssaxman wrote: post #10

Here in Seattle, an eight-story mass-timber apartment building was recently finished, claimed to be the first of its kind in the US: https://timberlab.com/projects/heartwood This was built close to my house, so I got to watch the frame rise. It was an interesting process, and it makes a certain amount of sense to emphasize timber construction in this heavily-forested region. I have to agree with the headline, though.

There's also a completed mass timber building on UW campus, on a grass field adjacent to the cherry groves that will be in bloom March 20th.

Re: Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

#300

Post by comte7092 »

bitcurious wrote: post #265
foxyv wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The results of multiple studies have validated this claim: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53dd6676e4b0fedfbc26e...

I’ll admit that I merely skimmed the study, but as I read it states that local/municipal property taxes in many cases don’t cover the road infrastructure required to support those homes. To make the argument that they are subsidized you’d also have to factor in municipal and state income taxes.

Subsidies are about relative costs. Tax collection is an interesting thing to look at in addition, but ultimately if we are to determine whether the suburbs are subsidized, it would require analyzing cost to deliver city services per capita.
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