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

#411

Post by scoofy » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 9:05 PM UTC

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #407

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…

While suburbs certainly are financial sinkholes, there are other factors. Housing in cities like NYC is expensive in part because there is a housing crisis in NYC, because nothing is being built. And what is being built is preposterously expensive and beyond the teach of a typical New York family (not to mention cramped; you can barely fit a queen-sized bed into many of these bedrooms). Another issue is that develope…

I'm not arguing that blocking housing doesn't also cause a housing crisis. I'm just saying, given the choice of living in Manhattan in a single family home, or a six-floor walkup, I'm taking the single family home. And if everyone in Manhattan made the same choice, Manhattan would be ridiculously more expensive. The best parallel is probably Beverly Hills, but for the entire island.

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

#412

Post by rangestransform » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 9:07 PM UTC

wolverine876 wrote: post #381

adamisom wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Ever…

What is your reasoning here? Cities are 'bad' from something as minor as that? We all deal with things we dislike, such as stoplights, rain, or bad news on TV. Let's not even start on traffic! Where will you find this idyllic place to call home? FWIW, it might be alien at first but there's nothing to be afraid of from people who want some food, any more than from anyone else. That is based on long experience with zer…

> there's nothing to be afraid of from people who want some food

not OP but FWIW my roommate was followed into an ATM vestibule while depositing his (5 figure) casino winnings, begged at aggressively, and then the destitute person kicked his suitcase, I'd say that's definitely something to be afraid of. now I don't use ATMs with people sleeping in the vestibule.

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

#413

Post by mhuffman » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 9:07 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #391

mhuffman wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's plenty of places in the US that you can still get a house for under 200k. I bought 3 houses all for under $20k each over the past 2 years. I use them all as rental houses. You can get waaay under $200k. The problem when you bring this up to people online is they say, "well I would never want to live there". So they are very happy to tell people that already live somewhere that they can move if they don't wan…

And no matter what you do, there will always be people who would want what they have, but cheaper. It's triply confounded by the huge group of people who simply don't understand the math behind renting (and this includes many landlords, sadly).

Also the building restrictions in a highly-populated area. I remember a person on here breaking down the costs of building multi-family housing. Basically in SF or LA you can only build high-priced multi-family housing to make any profit, otherwise it would be at a high loss and that is assuming something like rent controls, because otherwise the price would be driven up anyway.

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

#414

Post by foxyv » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 9:09 PM UTC

10u152 wrote: post #363

foxyv wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A huge reason these shared spaces are so miserable is because the communities around them cannot support them. Parking minimums and low density means that not only are these commercial properties insanely expensive, but also that not enough people can access them. A huge upside to increasing density is that the theatre goes from having 100 people within 4 miles of it to 10,000. In addition, instead of having a 400 ca…

Cost is a factor but you can have all this and car parking. Plenty of developments in my city are mixed use. 3 or 4 levels of underground parking, then retail, supermarkets on ground floor then bars, gyms, pools, restaurants on the next few and and 20 or 30 levels of apartments on top. And people can walk straight off the street into the building.

It sounds like you live in a very affluent area. There are ways to build cities like you live in that are affordable to everyone. But minimum parking standards make it almost impossible.

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

#415

Post by huytersd » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 9:09 PM UTC

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…

No one wants to live in a condo. Shitty coops where your neighbors are a wall away, no land/backyard, no hobbies, no place for your kids to run around etc. No ones cares about a community center/shitty shared space. If you’re outside a medium sized city in the US, you’re less than 10 mins from restaurants and bars from your multiple acre sized property.

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

#416

Post by xyzelement » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 9:10 PM UTC

VHRanger wrote: post #282

xyzelement wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

New residents don't just include immigrants: it's also all future inhabitants of the place. Your perspective amounts to existing residents extracting all the economic value in a location simply because they bought land there first. That's ridiculously inefficient and toxic at a national scale. Or even at a local scale, over 40-50years. One important paper on the topic calculated 50% GDP losses in the US because of la…

// Your perspective amounts to existing residents extracting all the economic value in a location simply because they bought land there first.

I think people mainly think of it as "their home and their community" rather than "economic extraction"

// calculated 50% GDP losses in the US because of large metro areas being too expensive to move into

Doesn't that strike you as obvious bullshit?

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

#417

Post by littlestymaar » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 9:11 PM UTC

betaby wrote: post #180

littlestymaar wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well but aren’t you giving a great example of how that wealth is illusory? It is mostly, since your purchasing power doesn't increase because all house prices rise. But: people don't live forever, and when your home-owning parents die, you now have two homes instead of one, and you'll get much more than if housing price was half the price. Same when your in-laws die too. Obviously this is entirely unsustainable and…

> and when your home-owning parents die, you now have two homes instead of one While I absolutely believe it's a thing for someone. It's not a thing for anyone I know. Two factors there. People live longer. An then parents die (70+), they kids ( avg. 2) are at the age of 55+. At that point they housing situation is figured out. Also if ( big if in Canada) house was paid off you inherit half of it ( unless you are sin…

> People live longer. An then parents die (70+), they kids ( avg. 2) are at the age of 55+. At that point they housing situation is figured out.

That's exactly what I mean when I say people end up with two homes. In fact, if the home was given to children not owning their home, we would still be in the wealth illusion situation.

> However in Canada what I see is that houses were reverse-mortgaged to supply income on pension and/or live in a retirement home, and thus my friends got trivial inheritances in a tune of tens thousands of CAD dollars after estate liquidation.

This is not something we see a lot in my country (France) because so far we had decent pensions… But obviously situations vary a lot between countries.

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

#418

Post by lo_zamoyski » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 9:12 PM UTC

novok wrote: post #301

majormajor wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You don't sit on the train for an hour. In properly designed large cities the metro beats the car by a huge time margin unless they made cars so expensive by policy that nobody has a car and there is no traffic at that city as a result. Americans often think the shitty experience they have in their country applies universally. Ex: The bus & light rail is bad and slow, so therefore it will always be bad everywhere. Am…

> America doesn't know how bad they have it.

This may be changing. You see a growing awareness of the shabbiness of certain American norms in parts of so-called "populist" circles (left and right).

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

#419

Post by tomcar288 » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 9:12 PM UTC

scoofy wrote: post #273

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 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…

we had no problem building houses for people in the 50s and 60s. Why all the sudden we can't do it in the last 20 years? There's plenty of land out there. Even in the CA, the most densley populated state, there are more acres in CA than people and yet somehow there's a huge land shortage and ridiculous amounts of regulation. Even 100 miles away from the city, you'll see houses squeezed together like some kind of concentration camp, with open land in every direction and a 5 lane highway to service the equally insane commuting distances created by these land use policies: talk about terrible for the environment.

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

#420

Post by alistairSH » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 9:13 PM UTC

tpmoney wrote: post #275

foxyv wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying we should ban 4000 sq.ft. detached homes on large sprawling lots. They just shouldn't be the ONLY type of home being built. Give people options so they can choose. In fact, if you want to have that beautiful home surrounded by nature and not suburban cookie cutter houses, then it's also in your interest to see that cities stay in the cities. Too many orchards and farms have been demolished to build mis…

Where do you live that 4k sqft homes are the only new construction? I live in a major metro area and sure in the outskirts and suburbs there’s plenty of McMansion developments, but there’s also a whole host of new townhomes and apartments. And the entire downtown is practically being rebuilt into massive multi story apartments. And this is hardly the center of YIMBY land.

Reston, VA - for new construction, we see a mix of large SFHs (3000-6000sqft), large THs (2500-4000sqft), and mid-rise and high-rise apartments (vast majority of which are 1-2 bed).

What's missing is smaller apartment blocks (4-8 units), small THs or SFHs (That is beginning to change, largely as a result of rezoning around the Metro corridor. More mixed use, more low-rise condos. But, this is limited to areas that are suitable for complete redevelopment (mostly old low-rise offices within 1/2 mile of a Metro station).

Nuking the SFH zoning to allow market forces to drive development outside the immediate Metro-adjacent plots would help. Allows ADUs and "granny flats". Allow a SFH to be split into a duplex or rebuilt as 3-4 THs. Etc.