341–350 of 452 posts
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That, and reduce the immigration ffs. Importing a city-sized population (500k+) every year? - Sorry mate, you just won't be able to build a new city every year.
I mean. Had it escaped your attention those immigrants are he ones building the cities?
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Tell that to China, who has been building so many new cities that their housing crisis is too many homes.
China and the UK are not comparable in scale. Also China isn't importing permanent immigrant populations
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A lot of the issue in the UK is getting permission to build anything. My dad had a 160 acre farm near london, you can get nordic type cabins for ~£50k ( https://www.quick-garden.co.uk/log-cabins/homes/ ) and you could stick loads there for little money but can you get permission? On no. I can understand not wanting to give windfall profits to folks like my dad who did nothing but the government could buy land and dev…
The cost goes beyond the mere material cost of the house itself but if you have a sizable new development how does it fit within the infrastructure where it would be built. Everything from providing services to having adequate road infrastructure. No doubt there is some wonky things in planning but it's also not a case of YOLO'ing up a bunch of cabins. Not to mention that small single homes aren't a very efficient us…
$60k for a house, near jobs, USA. Anybody with half a brain and a little brawn can do what I did, if they can come up with what would be a down-payment on a house in a coastal area. Although I admit, it would be much easier for most just to whine on the internet while watching others do what they say is impossible .
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I'm not even sure it's entirely a matter of being blocked from doing so as much as the incentives merely not being there. What is the incentive for a developer to build affordable housing? The margins are surely much lower. The city could set rent restrictions on new development and all that, but that removes the incentive for developers to actually build in that area at all, especially when they can just find an unr…
>What is the incentive for a developer to build affordable housing? The margins are surely much lower. This makes sense to me, and I hear it all the time, but when was it ever in a builder's interest to make affordable housing? Why does this perverse incentive seem like a recent thing?
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I find it fascinating that Europeans will look down on Americans for their race problems, but mention the Roma/travelers and they respond in a way that would make Archie Bunker say calm down.
> I find it fascinating that Europeans will look down on Americans for their race problems I don't know why Americans keep saying we look down on you for your "race problems," but we do not. Generally speaking, we look down on you for manufacturing race problems for politics as a team sport. We have our own race problems.
Which we don’t do.
What you need to understand is that race problems in the US are very complex because of our history and diversity. We have people from all over the world here, truly. And it’s not small percentages.
In comparison, most European nations are much more homogeneous. And, no offense, but y’all are not handling it as well as you should be given your position. The amount of extreme racism I hear from Europeans especially in regards to immigration is repugnant. Immigration which is comparatively quite low.
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Building new, isolated, towns is hard for that reason. But if you build a town on a train or bus line that connects to places people work you don't need to bootstrap self sufficiency. Building near a highway works too.
Is that a new town? Or sprawl of an existing city? There's only so far out you can reasonably go before the commute stops making sense. Many cities have already hit that limit. For example, there really isn't any space outside Toronto for a new community to have a tolerable commute with the current infrastructure.
Reasonable commute has a different definition for different people. Some people don't commute for work, so two hours to city center is fine if they only go a few times a year. Some only commute for work a couple times a week and an hour and a half sucks, but is doable if the housing is better enough on whatever dimension. Some will be able to move their job to the new location.
If the new town has appropriate zoning and desires, a handful of companies in the city center may setup offices there to reduce office costs and attract workers that are in the periphery, instead of making everyone go into the city center.
This definitely happens around Toronto, just from looking at the density of roads on Google Maps. There's plenty of pockets of density in lines out from Toronto, and there's also several named places where there's no clear boundary between the names (there probably is at other levels of detail).
I live just outside Minneapolis. There's an absolute glut right now of largely unoccupied apartments that have sprung up in the last couple years anywhere there was an open lot and many places there wasn't - tearing down a number of historic buildings in the name of cheaply built wooden framed apartments. Well over 100 new buildings in the last five years within a 10 mile radius. Most of them cost more per month to l…
It's very understandable once you get into the nitty gritty economics of it, where there is no tax on unoccupied housing. F there were a substantial tax on homes that were empty, that would incentivize landlords to rent out housing instead of having it sit empty.
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The cost goes beyond the mere material cost of the house itself but if you have a sizable new development how does it fit within the infrastructure where it would be built. Everything from providing services to having adequate road infrastructure. No doubt there is some wonky things in planning but it's also not a case of YOLO'ing up a bunch of cabins. Not to mention that small single homes aren't a very efficient us…
I built my house for materials cost. You can absolutely most definitely do it for nothing but material cost. My community is also all private roads with easements, so no public development costs of roads. I built mine with an axe and a shovel. As always the solution is to remove the government from the situation -- with private roads, private water, private septic, and private power there is no one to screech their d…
> $60k for a house
Where did you build the house? Presuming it's on land you own, how did you come to own the land? If you purchased it, the purchase amount should be included in the cost. If you did not purchase it, consider how lucky you are.
Edit to reply to the dead reply:
I do see the context of this being on already-owned land so my point is moot. Apologies for that. (For what it's worth, I'm not really convinced by the fact that you can get free land where nobody wants to live but that's another matter.)
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>if the price falls too much it becomes unprofitable to build and you don’t get new supply This is saying "building is expensive because building is expensive". Why is it expensive and how do we address it to make it cheaper?
There’s not a lot of confusion about how to build cheaper. Build less and worse per unit. Share foundations, roofs, walls, and common areas. Build less square footage per unit. Build less fancy per square foot (cheaper kitchens and baths). Use all standard materials and finishes. Install low-end appliances and HVAC. Everything cookie-cutter; no per-unit changes. Use less land per unit (and maybe less expensive land o…
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I built my house for materials cost. You can absolutely most definitely do it for nothing but material cost. My community is also all private roads with easements, so no public development costs of roads. I built mine with an axe and a shovel. As always the solution is to remove the government from the situation -- with private roads, private water, private septic, and private power there is no one to screech their d…
> You can absolutely most definitely do it for nothing but material cost. > $60k for a house Where did you build the house? Presuming it's on land you own, how did you come to own the land? If you purchased it, the purchase amount should be included in the cost. If you did not purchase it, consider how lucky you are. Edit to reply to the dead reply: I do see the context of this being on already-owned land so my point…