Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by jimbob45 » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 5:08 PM UTC

throwitaway222 wrote: post #20

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…

Raise prop taxes for non-rented vacation units by 150% Raise prop taxes for rentals by %350. Raise prop taxes for airbnbs by %500. Everyone will own a home, and home prices will plummet as people try to unload extremely expensive property taxes. And if it doesn't work, double my percentages. Or just make it 100k per year. Those people crazy enough to keep holding them, will fund the creation of homeless housing. DV's…

Couldn't agree more. I'm tired of the HN crowd that espouses the benefits of building more supply, yet consider the AirBNB and rental-afflicted homes to be totally untouchable. Even worse are the ones that seem to strongly believe in environmentalism, yet have no problem tearing down forests to build more supply on them...for AirBNBs and rentals.

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

#42

Post by rootusrootus » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 5:09 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #5

Not a very convincing article. The fact that mass timber uses more wood is right there in the name. Everyone knows this. The point is you get a better building. The cavities in a wood-framed building cause all manner of problems with respect to heat, draft, cold, damp, and noise. Filling the cavity with solid wood variously solves such problems. All the stuff about the capital cost of making laminated wood is irrelev…

> Filling the cavity with solid wood variously solves such problems.

Solves some problems, sure, but not heat/cold. Wood has just over a third the R-value of fiberglass batting, IIRC. Better to increase the cavity size and uncouple the inner and outer studs.

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

#43

Post by spankalee » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 5:09 PM UTC

tempsy wrote: post #22

There's a shortage of detached single family homes in desirable cities and suburbs. If you just want to rent an apartment there's an oversupply from overbuilding during the pandemic.

I don't think there's much, if any, of an over supply of apartments. The people I've seen who try to teach vacancies show that new buildings get to nearly full occupancy within a year or so. That's pretty reasonable if you need to rent a few hundred units at once.

If anything, there's a massive under-supply of 3+br apartments large enough for families, due to double-loaded corridor designs that are almost required to meet fire codes. The only good spot for 3brs is in the corners, so you get at most 4 per floor.

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

#44

Post by pitaj » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 5:10 PM UTC

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…

Except we know it's a building issue. Housing starts are lower than they were in 2000 despite adding 50 million in population.

Vacancy is good - higher vacancy is related to lower prices. Vacancy rates are the lowest they've been in decades.

We just need to build.

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

#45

Post by davidw » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 5:10 PM UTC

cpursley wrote: post #12

To solve the housing crisis you have to build up like the Soviets and Chinese have. They housed a lot of people, quickly. It’s really not difficult; just takes some brave people to change the zoning laws and rethink some of the building codes combined with financing it.

You don't even have to do that - a lot of 3/4/5 story style flats (can be owned or rented) that are not concrete soviet blocks would do wonders in most cities. See: western Europe.

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

#46

Post by mjmahone17 » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 5:10 PM UTC

tempsy wrote: post #22

There's a shortage of detached single family homes in desirable cities and suburbs. If you just want to rent an apartment there's an oversupply from overbuilding during the pandemic.

There is absolutely not an oversupply of apartments in my city, nor in Seattle proper. it should be non-controversial to let the market supply as many apartments in the locations people want to be as people are willing to rent. Especially any regulatory changes that enable family sized apartments to be built at relatively lower cost should be encouraged.

Even if there were an “oversupply”, if someone could build new apartment buildings at 50% the cost with larger, safer, more comfortable units than most apartments nearby, it would drive rents down for existing buildings while still allowing the developer to make a profit. We should be enabling these opportunities as much as possible.

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

#47

Post by spankalee » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 5:11 PM UTC

KaiserPro wrote: post #38

I would argue that the mateiral is not the pinchpoint of the housing crisis. Its the lack of land, or permits to build on said land. Edit I should say _affordable_ land. Or land that isn't blocked by nimbys

There's plenty of land if it were legal to build on it, and the permitting process didn't take forever.

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

#48

Post by throwitaway222 » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 5:11 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #37

throwitaway222 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raise prop taxes for non-rented vacation units by 150% Raise prop taxes for rentals by %350. Raise prop taxes for airbnbs by %500. Everyone will own a home, and home prices will plummet as people try to unload extremely expensive property taxes. And if it doesn't work, double my percentages. Or just make it 100k per year. Those people crazy enough to keep holding them, will fund the creation of homeless housing. DV's…

I mean, landlords are going to pass on their costs directly to tenants. If you raise property taxes, then rents simply go up. None of these tax increases are going to magically make a 20% down payment appear in someone's bank account that they could use to purchase something outright. None of these tax increases are going to prevent people who legitimately want to rent from renting. (Some examples: apartments that ar…

There is absolutely nothing wrong with allowing someone to rent a unit for $30k per month - even if there are thousands of them. If we're collecting 100k in property taxes earmarked for certain programs - that would effectively fund building an entire ADU on a property per year for that expensive rental to exist.

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

#49

Post by rootusrootus » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 5:11 PM UTC

renewiltord wrote: post #35

Obviously someone who is familiar with the field but it's kind of strange that they compare these two technologies since they aren't used for the same construction. You've not going to use glulam and CLT to build your one story house. It's about building taller places.

I bet there are some single story houses with glulams. Certainly plenty of two-story houses do. I have a 30 inch tall glulam that spans 35 feet across my garage holding up a good chunk of the second floor.

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

#50

Post by survirtual » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 5:12 PM UTC

throwitaway222 wrote: post #20

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…

Raise prop taxes for non-rented vacation units by 150% Raise prop taxes for rentals by %350. Raise prop taxes for airbnbs by %500. Everyone will own a home, and home prices will plummet as people try to unload extremely expensive property taxes. And if it doesn't work, double my percentages. Or just make it 100k per year. Those people crazy enough to keep holding them, will fund the creation of homeless housing. DV's…

To add,

- Make it illegal for corporations to own residential homes / any property in residentially zone locations

- Generate policies to eliminate real estate parasites (illegal to have percentage profits off of sales, open data, low friction technological avenues to remove those jobs altogether)

- Marginally increasing second / third / fourth property taxes on individuals (first home untaxed, second taxed at 20% market-rate valuation per year, third taxed at 50%, fourth at 100%, etc).

- Create avenues to easily demolish HOAs when they go off the rails

- Multi-unit housing can no longer be owned or managed by a for-profit entity (rent goes exclusively towards building upgrades and paying works for upkeep & administration, all transparently visible

- Limit Big Lumber's ability to export Lumber outside of the US -- trees grown in the US should stay in it to house people.

This would be a start to fixing the issue. The objective being, of course, to utterly collapse the housing market, and make houses homes again.