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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

#511

Post by drekk »

bluGill wrote: post #507
novok wrote: post #301

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. 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…

Metro systems even in the best examples don't give easy anywhere to anywhere access. There are places you cannot access because there is no direct route and unlike a car there are no 'shortcuts' around going where the train goes.

So you walk the last mile? Not accessible to everyone. Neither is accelerating a two ton slab of metal to move one person around from exactly point A to exactly point B (and now you need parking at both points, which adds to the sprawl issue)

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

#512

Post by J_Shelby_J »

giantg2 wrote: post #212
spankalee wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Owners holding vacant units is not a significant cause of the housing shortage. Overly restrictive zoning and subjective reviews exploited by NIMBYs explains almost all of it.

"Overly restrictive zoning and subjective reviews exploited by NIMBYs explains almost all of it." You seem to be ignoring the main part of my statement - distribution and preferences matter. "NIMBYs" can't be a retort to that when NIMBY is by definition local - there are many other areas to build in across the country. "Owners holding vacant units is not a significant cause of the housing shortage." It may not be the…

No, it's not. Markets with a housing shortage have record low inventories and record low uninhabited units.

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

#513

Post by Aloisius »

willcipriano wrote: post #426
Aloisius wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not relief. Parole.

The parole process has reduced the number of aliens from those countries entering the US and government spending and lets us do background checks, capture biometrics and cap how long they're allowed to be here.

There's a reason why the court tossed Texas' lawsuits against it this week. They couldn't find injury.

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

#514

Post by marcinzm »

foxyv wrote: post #310
majormajor wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are building massive 3-4k sq. ft. homes for families of four because all of their food, entertainment, and social needs are not met by their community. You assume it's a necessity thing instead of a desire+wealth thing. Yet the history of the wealthy and powerful "escaping" to large estates goes back centuries (millenia!). Additionally, the housing affordability crisis is also happening in European cities with 4…

If I can walk less than a mile to a theatre and pay $10 to watch a movie on a giant screen, I won't want to pay $10k to create a home theatre. If I can get food from around the world by walking 10 minutes to 20+ restaurants, I won't want to pay $20k to have an 800 sq.ft. kitchen. If I can entertain my guests at a community center or beer garden, I won't need to have a $15k patio and outdoor bar area. People pay absur…

Now have fun doing all that with 2 young kids in tow and the cost of paying for them.

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

#515

Post by nradov »

scoofy wrote: post #385
nradov wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strong Towns is not a reliable or neutral source. They aren't necessarily wrong , but they do cherry pick data to suit the urbanist narrative that they're trying to promote. It can be a useful source for understanding the issue but don't take anything you read there at face value.

What on earth do you mean "neutral" as if there are two sides to caring about long term infrastructure sustainability. If by "cherry-pick" you mean, explain a falsifiable hypothesis and then point to example of the hypothesis playing out exactly as predicted (Detroit, Jackson, etc.). If you really think their hypothesis is totally wrong, we're currently living in a real time experiment of the thesis in the Phoenix me…

That is exactly the cherry picking that I mean. You can point out a few examples that appear to fit the Strong Towns hypothesis (although causality isn't clear) but there are many other suburban cities which are quietly doing fine and have sustainable budgets.

The Detroit metro area would be a mess even if it had higher density housing and better public transit. The problems there are more due to federal trade policies, toxic labor relations, and failed progressive social policies. It isn't valid evidence to either support or refute the Strong Towns hypothesis: too many confounding variables.

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

#516

Post by Retric »

majormajor wrote: post #341
yitianjian wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The traffic in a medium sized NA city like Atlanta or Dallas can be a lot better than it is now, and it's definitely not comparable to Shanghai, London or Tokyo.

Do you have any examples in mind of 6-10M cities with stress-free comfortable commuting and affordable housing for all? Off the top of my head, but without a lot of first- or second-hand experience, Rome seems like the commute is probably a lot better than the larger cities, but my perception is that the affordability is pretty poor? Otherwise most of my experience is in larger or much smaller places. Something that…

Internationally the statistics depend quite a bit on how the data is collected and aggregated, so do it's hard to international comparisons accurately.

I will say using US definitions, commute times are very sticky around the 30 minute time period. Longer commutes and people have a large incentive to move closer, short ones and they don't generally bother.

So in the US Tulusa Oklahoma population 400,000 (1M metro) has a 20 minute commute and NYC population 8,800,000 (20M metro) is 50% worse at 32 minutes average and ~100 cities between those extremes. https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/planes-trains-and-...

Edit: This suggests allowing people to move easily move around the metro area would meaningfully lower the need for transportation infrastructure. I suspect NYC has issues with people living in rent controlled apartments having long commutes but being unwilling to leave their cheap apartment, but don't have data backing it up.

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

#517

Post by matsemann »

lotsoweiners wrote: post #456
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,…

> 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.

> Maybe some people can’t do these things while driving but plenty of us do.

It's not that those people are unable. It's that they're not idiots that risks other's lives.

You write as if you believe you're a better driver than most, but that's wrong. People doing the things you mention are bad and dangerous drivers.

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

#518

Post by cpursley »

xyzelement wrote: post #127
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.

// To solve the housing crisis you have to build up like the Soviets My family lived in a communal apartment[0] for about 30 years in the USSR waiting for a place of our own. Whatever definition of "housing crisis" you are operating with, is heaven on earth compared to the Soviet housing reality. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment

Please be honest, the vast majority Russians and other Soviets didn't live in communal apartments for the past 60 years. Not only did they have access to new construction commie blocks (small and ugly, but warm and well connected), well over 50% of them had summer homes (datchas) and many still do today.

Anyways, you're missing my point. Which was to solve the post-war housing crisis by building up with prefabs. And it worked - rapidly.

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

#519

Post by dnissley »

sonicanatidae wrote: post #375
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…

The housing crisis remains about human greed. That's all it is.

It's actually not. I'm as yimby as they get but you need to understand that the value of people's property has almost nothing to do with nimbyism. They want things to stay the same, they want their "neighborhood character". Listen to them when they say this, it's not a sleight of hand. If more dense housing was built in their area the value of their house would go up even further than without it, but the point is they don't want to live near more people!

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

#520

Post by bluGill »

bitcurious wrote: post #265
foxyv wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The results of multiple studies have validated this claim: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53dd6676e4b0fedfbc26e...

I’ll admit that I merely skimmed the study, but as I read it states that local/municipal property taxes in many cases don’t cover the road infrastructure required to support those homes. To make the argument that they are subsidized you’d also have to factor in municipal and state income taxes.

I keep reading that claim. Then I look at old streetcar suburbs which have successfully a repaired thier roads over decades (including removing the old tracks). They have also added water, sewer, electric, phone, catv since being built.

which is to say it doesn't pass the smell test. I don't know where the studies go wrong but something isn'c adding up.

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