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

construction-physics.com

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

#451

Post by lotsoweiners »

lapetitejort wrote: post #437
rayiner wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

I would rather sit in a train for 69 minutes than sit in a car for 45 minutes. In a car if my attention slips for a second I can kill myself and others. In a train if I fall asleep I may have to take another train.

Cool! You do you. I’d personally rather spend an hour in the car comfortably vs 20 minutes on public transportation where I’ve got a stranger sitting next to me, no privacy, and potentially no seat during rush hour commute times.

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

#452

Post by nonameiguess »

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…

All I can say is thanks, but yes, every thread of this variety gets a bit tiresome hearing the same things over and over that tend to be some variation of "my peeve local issue with the US is the reason the US experiences a problem experienced by hundreds of other countries with wildly different policies."

Not to say, in a vacuum, multi-family housing won't provide more housing units per unit of land area than single-family. Clearly, it will. But unless you build every city from scratch to house 20 million people, whether you started with single-family or multi-family, the most desirable cities will end up in a future state whereby more people want to live there than housing exists for, and even if regulations and zoning allow you to build higher and denser than is currently done, to do it where people want to live, you'll have to tear down existing buildings, including existing housing, and many of the owners and occupants of that housing won't want that. You'll also need to run more utility lines, build new pipes, run them under existing roads, which means shutting down those roads, and even if they're perfect utopian European roads that have zero cars on them and only have pedestrians and bicycles, the user of those roads are still going to get annoyed and inconvenienced, and it's going to cost more to do this than building new housing where nobody currently lives, pretty much no matter what.

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

#453

Post by lolinder »

mlsu wrote: post #308
baggy_trough wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to live next to a huge building, so I selected a town where that was not allowed. So don't tell me changing this is a win win for me. It isn't.

It's not a win for you then. It is a win for the 100 people who can move into that apartment building. Are you really that important?

What about the 100 people who also owned homes within a few blocks of that apartment building and are also opposed to the change that it brings to the neighborhood? Zoning laws don't exist because of one loudmouth, they exist because solid majorities of the people who live in a given area like having them.

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

#454

Post by foxyv »

nradov wrote: post #350
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…

Denser housing sounds good in theory; I support it myself and vote accordingly. The problem is that it comes with other people . The more immediate neighbors you have, the greater the risk that one of them will be an antisocial asshole who makes life hell for everyone else. You're going to occasionally get drug dealers (or other habitual criminals), aggressive dog owners, serious mental illness cases, couples that ha…

American apartments are horrible. However, that isn't a problem with dense housing itself so much as how our cities are built.

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

#455

Post by NewJazz »

rayiner wrote: post #434
NewJazz wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You end up sitting in traffic for an hour instead of standing on a bus or train for an hour for your commute Why are you acting like driving a vehicle and being a passenger in a vehicle are the same experience? One is clearly more demanding and inhibiting than the other. On a train you can work, read, listen to a podcast, sometimes eat... Lots of things you can't do while in a car. Unless your job is driving. Which,…

You can do those things if you get a seat, which you generally cannot during commuting hours in any city where public transit is good enough to be popular. I commuted for awhile between Baltimore and DC on Amtrak and apart from being hellaciously unreliable it was great for working. But my commute from the upper west side to east midtown when I lived in NYC was completely different—being crammed into the 1/2/3 and th…

You can listen to music or a podcast while standing.

I just plugged in upper west side and midtown Manhattan into google maps... It said 18 minutes via transit. Maybe your commute had more complications, last mile and so on.

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

#456

Post by lotsoweiners »

NewJazz wrote: post #378
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 end up sitting in traffic for an hour instead of standing on a bus or train for an hour for your commute Why are you acting like driving a vehicle and being a passenger in a vehicle are the same experience? One is clearly more demanding and inhibiting than the other. On a train you can work, read, listen to a podcast, sometimes eat... Lots of things you can't do while in a car. Unless your job is driving. Which,…

> On a train you can work, read, listen to a podcast, sometimes eat

I do all of those things in my car while driving too. Maybe not read but I’ve listened to audiobooks. I also sit in Teams meetings, read and respond to emails and IMs on my phone as well when I’m at a stop light. Maybe some people can’t do these things while driving but plenty of us do.

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

#457

Post by bombcar »

acover wrote: post #135
geodel wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL. So people who have been living in an area should have no say but people from planning to move must have a say. > This will probably never happen in the U.S Thank god for that. Maybe checkout in other countries like Canada, UK, France, Germany or even eastern europe, further in Asia on how they are doing on housing front. For sure they couldn't be having housing policies as bad as US.

How can you fix the incentives so locals actually want densification? I always liked the idea of more local taxes rather than federal. Then the larger tax base would improve services or do a direct transfer.

The "old way" that nobody talks about is that part of the city would become a slum/shithole, drop in value, be gobbled up by redevelopers, and made into nicer/denser city.

But the other thing is that density is only the solution if you insist people live in certain areas - the US has experienced tremendous growth in many time in history, and not all of them were handled by densification.

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

#458

Post by tptacek »

singleshot_ wrote: post #422
tptacek wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a historical fact. I'm not saying you're a racist. Those zoning ordinances though definitely are.

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

#459

Post by foxyv »

huytersd wrote: post #415
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.

A LOT of people want to live in such places. However, most of the problems you mention are a result of car dependency and not dense housing itself. Kids have nowhere to play because cars make it unsafe for them to roam. You have no hobbies because you have no places to go to do them. You have no backyard because the roads prevent you from going to the park.

Instead we have to build our houses into huge compounds to do things that we would normally do at community centers, pubs and other public buildings.

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

#460

Post by tptacek »

lolinder wrote: post #453
mlsu wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a win for you then. It is a win for the 100 people who can move into that apartment building. Are you really that important?

What about the 100 people who also owned homes within a few blocks of that apartment building and are also opposed to the change that it brings to the neighborhood? Zoning laws don't exist because of one loudmouth, they exist because solid majorities of the people who live in a given area like having them .

In your example, your side is outnumbered by the residents of a single apartment building.

This whole thread is kind of silly, in that high-density apartments aren't what's going to get built on SFZ blocks in cities and inner-ring suburbs; 3-flats are.

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