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

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

#331

Post by samstave »

xyzelement wrote: post #98
rybosworld wrote: post #57

Every single major population center that has distorted (high) housing costs relative to income, also has very strong protections for the existing home owners (NIMBY). "There are no coincidences..." The solution is terrifyingly simple: don't allow existing residents to block new housing developments. If they don't like it, they can move. This will probably never happen in the U.S., because the government no longer fu…

You seem to be coming from the perspective that people who don't live in a place should have more say over the nature of that place than those who do live there. To put it in your terms, why does it make more sense to tell existing residents "your place has to change and you can move if you don't like it" vs channel the new residents to other places where more housing is available and is available cheaper.

While I agree with you, places that used to be 'burbs - are now under an obsolete civil engineering design... you think SF is going to be able remain SF over the next 50 years?

So all the outlying neighrborhoods/cities/areas -- MANY of which were built out in 40s to support the war effort as we were building liberty ships in the bay at an alarming rate - and all those women workers needed housing (rosie the riveter)...

So all these tiny packed neighborhoods needed for the 1940s workforce resulted.

Now we have a 2040 workforce need in the exact same way for building Liberty LLMS! (Expect of poisoning the dirt with war chemicals - we will find another similar metaphor digitally)

(most of saily city, alameda, treasure island, hunters point, candle stick, dog patch, etc - were all heavy industry for these ships and the naval base - and they were massive amounts of toxics buried in the dirt.

This is why hunters point was always ghetto - because they knew it was a Super Site - and so many people have gotten sick from it. Which is also why it was a very slow process to build stuff out new because new laws require environmental impacts which include soil sampling which reveals Super Site chemicals...

The very tip of Alameda Naval base was also a dumping pit now Super Site -- they decided that its cheaper to pound giant metal posts as a barrier to prevent the chemicals leeching into the bay - rather than spend 10 times as much to clean up the site properly.

and this just happened in the last 20ish years.. its been leaking into the bay since WWII

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

#332

Post by trgn »

qwertyuiop_ wrote: post #270
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 live in a multi housing building and its a NIGHTMARE. A drug dealer moved in next door and he smokes all kinds of synthetic drugs 24/7 the shared walls and gaps are so thin the drugs leak in to my home. The person above me has some sort of mental condition, he wakes up at 12:45 am and starts drumming the floor with his hands, runs around and moves the furniture all night everyday. There isnt a damn thing i can do a…

Nothing kills the vibe of apartment living like trash neighbors. Same with houses, but it's just so much more pronounced in a multi-unit house.

Construction plays a large part. Apartment buildings in the US are flimsy (usually). In other cities, they're often built like vaults.

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

#333

Post by marcusverus »

foxyv wrote: post #217
stronglikedan wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

So the suburbs are net recipients of infrastructure taxes, which is a bad thing. Got it. Shall we also apply this to other government services? It would be kind of shameless to complain about suburbanites being the net-beneficiaries of one service, while expecting them to be net-contributors to literally every other government service in existence, right?

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

#334

Post by someguydave »

shortsunblack wrote: post #197
nightski wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's hard to believe that many people are simply happier living in their own single family home and have little desire for the urban lifestyle.

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

that's a strong statement to make across hundreds of thousands of different tax/cost situations in localities spread over all 50 states.

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

#335

Post by throwway120385 »

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.

They don't cover them to the tune of many tens of percentage points where I live. It's to the degree that the state basically has to redistribute wealth from the cities to the counties where the roads are built.

If the communities served by a road had to pay the full price of the road you'd see a lot of little 8-10 house hamlets with 10 million dollar bridges pack up and leave.

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

#336

Post by nico_h »

majormajor wrote: post #281
scoofy wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it amusing that many folks here are ready to clap back at this comment about how "but people want single family homes" as if that weren't why we are in a housing crisis. Yes... people want single family homes, it's just not feasible to put 3M people into single family homes in a metro area without absorbing an unsustainable amount of costs. Here we are talking literally the cost of construction, but there is a…

You can easily get housing affordability crises even without single family homes, as is plainly evident right now in non-North-American cities. It's a bit of a red herring. You end up sitting in traffic for an hour instead of standing on a bus or train for an hour for your commute, and other knock-on differences like that, which can be debated for various other reasons like ecological impact, but you still end up run…

Uninhabited land is empty of people for a reason: - it’s protected - it’s undesirable (too hot/ dry/wet/far/steep/close to a pollution source) - it’s agricultural land

If it’s not any of these it’s owned and thus controlled by someone.

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

#337

Post by someguydave »

foxyv wrote: post #217
stronglikedan wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

assuming his numbers are correct, that shows that in one town in one state, the local taxes don't seem to cover the cost of infrastructure. But what about state taxes? Do they reimburse the locality? Federal funds?

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

#338

Post by bitcurious »

vondur wrote: post #189
zdragnar wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they don't like it, they can move. Why doesn't the same logic apply to people who don't like the high prices of housing in some areas? There's plenty of affordable housing in the country, but it doesn't all exist in the places people want to live.

Exactly this. We should be giving people incentives to move the Midwest where there is affordable housing. Not everyone can live on the coasts. Here in California, the infrastructure has not kept up with the population increases. As a result, houses are being built in areas that were previously wilderness and now we have fires burning through entire towns.

During/post covid there has been a massive migration out of urban centers into rural places. Thus far the effect has been that affordable places are less affordable, while expensive places stayed expensive.

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

#339

Post by giantg2 »

slothtrop wrote: post #84
giantg2 wrote: post #16

Of 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…

> owners holding vacant units Check the vacancy rate in major cities. > people wanting/needing to live in specific locations Where the jobs are, yes. > individual preferences for bigger, fancier, better school, sfh, etc attributes Mixed density and smaller builds are almost nowhere to be found, and small developers have incredible difficulty securing loans from banks to build them. The large developers focus on expen…

"Where the jobs are, yes." "Check the vacancy rate in major cities."

What are the vacancy rates in the smaller cities and rural areas? What are we doing to utilize the vacant units by bringing jobs to those areas? Is it really more effiecnt to build new housing rather than take advantage of the existing housing? Should we just concentrate everything in a few major cities and leave everyone else behind?

Sure, reducing zoning will mean less rules and people can do more things, like build. The interesting thing is that building mfh was only a small part of the change - a change that CA also made state-wide but isnt seeing much benefit from. The change that made the real difference was increasing density for apartments and reducing parking requirements. The rents for apartments dropped, but sfh values have continued to climb as population declines. Bringing me back to the preferences and distribution part of my original comment -affordability is mostly driven by preferences and distribution.

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

#340

Post by gadflyinyoureye »

KerrAvon wrote: post #254
gadflyinyoureye wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? Those same people work and pay taxes. If they couldn’t live in a city due to cost that city would have less revenue as a result of fewer employed people buying goods and services.

Are you seriously suggesting that everyone in the USA should be forced to live in apartment blocks, or am I misreading you?

You’re misreading me. I replied to the idea that suburbs are subsidized. The view was that people should be taxed to off set their supposed subsidies. I don’t think the suburbs are really subsidized.
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