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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

#421

Post by lo_zamoyski »

wolverine876 wrote: post #368
majormajor wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You should meet some of my old coworkers in large cities in Asia... (you don't SIT on the train at all in rush hour!) In a smaller city it can work great! But in a small NA city, ev…

> In a smaller city it can work great! The best transit is generally thought to be in NYC.

In the US? Very likely. And given the status of NYC and the US in the world, even that is embarrassing.

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

#422

Post by singleshot_ »

tptacek wrote: post #241
baggy_trough wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The neighbors collectively agreed to the previous zoning. Now some outside body is forcing that to change.

Once upon a time, neighbors also collectively agreed to zone by race and ethnicity, until Buchanan v. Warley in 1917 put an end to that practice and created the minimum-lot-size SFZ proxy system we have today. You can argue persuasively for respecting SFZ, but you probably can't do it from a moral high horse (which is just to say: you can't rest your argument on a moral right).

I’m not sure the implication that those of us who don’t enjoy sharing walls are immoral racists is particularly justified.

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

#423

Post by KaiserPro »

cpursley wrote: post #279
KaiserPro wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But not like the UK The UK's social housing scheme was/is a stonking success, right up until about 1980. it completely reset the minimum standard of housing from slums to actually decent. It wasn't all a success, skelmersdale and thamesmede sucked balls. The problem with the uk's social housing came as follows: 1) the change from needing a job to have a council house to being a dumping ground for troubled families…

I don't know the UK situation in much depth but one of the things I read was how they were disconnected from the rest of the community (socially, services, transport, etc).

indeed, some of it was/is. However in london it was (mostly) slammed in on bombsites/ex industrial places: https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/news/council-releases-map-of...

southwark has the most council estates. the further out boroughs did try and put their estates far out. Places like thamesmede (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thamesmead) failed because there was literally nothing else around (thats improved significantly, 50 years later)

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

#424

Post by rayiner »

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…

> 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.

What’s a properly designed city? Even in Tokyo a car usually beats the train unless it’s an inter-regional trip. Im a huge Japan nerd and love their train system. But I just got back from carting three kids around Tokyo and daily life is just far easier in my American exurb.

Do Americans have it bad? The median Parisian spends 69 minutes per day commuting: https://www.mynewsdesk.com/eurofound/news/budapest-paris-and.... The median commute time in Dallas is under an hour round trip: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B080ACS048113 (28 minutes one way). And the folks in Dallas live in huge houses compared to those in Paris.

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

#425

Post by foxyv »

pojzon wrote: post #379
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…

There is no crisis. Its all artifical to keep ppl poor. Infrastructure is centralized, if it was more spread out everyone could afford a nice house with own big garden and vegetables field. Stop making it sound like its the ppl issue they want to live near nature and have own land. Too high density of ppl per square meter has huge disadventages in well being of those ppl and their overall health. There is so much unu…

Anyone who has lived in a rural area that hasn't been subsidized can tell you why spreading out kinda sucks. The power company charges you $100k to run a line to your house. The phone company charges you $20k to run a copper line to give you 100kb DSL. Water has to be pumped from a well which costs $30-50k to drill.

We don't really need to cram people in elbow to elbow like New York City though. We just need walkable downtowns where you can pop on down the street from your apartments to the market to get ingredients for dinner. Even just building our houses closer together and putting in dedicated pedestrian paths is enough honestly.

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

#426

Post by willcipriano »

Aloisius wrote: post #203
willcipriano wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From just last week: > The Center for Immigration Studies found last year from January 2023 to December 2023, at least 320,000 illegal immigrants were allowed to fly into the U.S. from their home country through a controversial program of the Biden administration using the Customs and Border Patrol app, the CBP One app that was created to let migrants apply for parole into the US. > The Parole program allows for two-…

Sigh. The humanitarian parole program was created to allow 30,000 Cuban/Haitian/Nicaraguan/Venezuelan nationals in per month on a two year work visa as long as they have a US sponsor that will financially support them and pass background checks. In return, Mexico is allowing the US to expel 30,000 illegal migrants per month from those countries to Mexico rather than their home countries.

When is the humanitarian relief for dishwashers in Kentucky expected to arrive?

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

#427

Post by lolinder »

comte7092 wrote: post #256
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.

Affordable isn’t only about price, but price relative to income. Not everyone can have a location independent job. Many places that seem “affordable” lack decent paying jobs. And the areas with the highest paying jobs are filled with people who scream that people should go live somewhere else. These are people who started the race a mile ahead and think they are superior runners. They’ve done very little to earn what…

> Affordable isn’t only about price, but price relative to income.

> Not everyone can have a location independent job. Many places that seem “affordable” lack decent paying jobs.

We don't have to hand wave about areas that "seem 'affordable'": we actually have the data for both income and home prices. The math isn't complicated: housing is affordable to the average person in much of the US [0].

The conflict here isn't driven by people who couldn't afford to move elsewhere, the conflict is driven by the sheer number of people who choose to live on the west coast. One group of those people already owns homes along the west coast and wants their neighborhood to stay the same. Another group would really like for there to be affordable housing along the west coast.

But at the end of the day, there isn't anything stopping either group of people from getting a job in one of the green or yellow areas in the map below and living there with a very decent ratio of income to expenses.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fg...

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

#428

Post by jncfhnb »

tomcar288 wrote: post #419
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…

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 conc…

I’m struggling to imagine how less densely packed housing could be better for the environment

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

#429

Post by evandale »

trgn wrote: post #326
BytesAndGears wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a weird straw-man. I live in a 600sq ft 2-bedroom apartment with my wife, and we cook nearly every meal at home, we rarely go out to bars, or spend much money in the city. But we have 6-7 cute cafes within a 5 minute walk, so we stop in for a coffee now and then. We have a big park that we can picnic in, three blocks away. There are a ton of fun things to do for cheap or free nearby. We don’t need a ton of space…

It's impossible to explain this qualitative difference in life to somebody who hasn't experienced it. When the outside environment is attractive, apartment living is glorious. When the outside is gnarly (e.g. no amenities, bad neighbors, ...), apartment living is hell. There's a weird tipping point, where all the negatives of living in an apartment evaporate. But it's hard to put it into numbers. You just "know", exp…

It's also hard to explain this difference in life to somebody who doesn't want to live that life.

When I tell people I hate driving so much that I'd rather sit on public transit (or even walk!) for 1 hour if the alternative was a 20 minute drive they are flabbergasted.

I go to the grocery store 3-5 times a week and that amazes people because the default assumption is a grocery trip involves getting in your car and buying a cart full of groceries for a week. People find it so hard to believe that I actually enjoy my 30 minute outings to the grocery store and carrying my groceries home. I got a granny cart for Christmas one year because my family thought "oh hey we can save him time if he can bring a bigger load of groceries home" but it doesn't occur to them that I don't even want that.

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

#430

Post by badpun »

akira2501 wrote: post #224
stronglikedan wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone likes to share a wall. I'm glad there are options, since I'm one of them. I can walk from my single family home to nearby community centers, restaurants, kitchens, theaters, and bars in 15 minutes. Not everyone likes to be that close to that stuff, and that's okay. I'm glad we have options, since I'm not one of them. There's plenty of space to build new homes of all types. It's an entitlement crisis.

Every time I see a giant timber framed apartment building being constructed I'm exceptionally glad that I don't have to consider living inside of it. It's fine for your early 30s, but if you hope to be part of the "professional class" then that form of living takes it's toll exceptionally quickly.

> It's fine for your early 30s, but if you hope to be part of the "professional class" then that form of living takes it's toll exceptionally quickly.

Why it doesn't take a toll on members of other classes?

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