Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

construction-physics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 799 posts

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

#541

Post by CivBase »

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…

> Americans often think the shitty experience they have in their country applies universally.

Whether this is true or not, what matters to me - a person living in the US - is that public transit in the US is a relatively poor experience compared with driving. Until that changes, I will keep driving and I will resist efforts that would force me to use public transit. I don't care if it's better elsewhere because I don't live there nor do I want to move there.

I want our public transit to be good, but that simply isn't the case right now. Walkable cities with quality public transit and good community infrastructure sound great, but until they are a reality here I will have no interest in living in a dense urban location.

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

#542

Post by wolverine876 »

akira2501 wrote: post #464
wolverine876 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In major cities filled with the professional class - the wealthiest communities in the US, such NY, LA, and the Bay Area, lots of them live in apartments.

What's the most common building material in those environments?

That's a good question: Obviously the taller buildings much use steel or similar, but there are lots of smaller buildings. What's your point?

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

#543

Post by stouset »

lotsoweiners wrote: post #451
lapetitejort wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You seem to be under the significantly confused impression that working to density cities and improve transit options is somehow an attempt to pry your car and single-family home from your cold, dead fingers.

It isn't.

It's about changing incentive structures over the long-term, so more people choose options which have a better set of societal externalities.

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

#544

Post by mortify »

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…

I used to live in a major city in the US. My commute by public transit was 45 minutes and I lived close to a major hub. I now live outside of that city. I can drive into that same job in 60 minutes. Public transit from here is over 2 hours.

Outside of Boston and NYC (well, maybe not NYC right now), I hear of no one happy with public transit in the US. We need to stop pretending that if we just move into cities, the problems will address themselves. Make public transit attractive and more people will want to live there.

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

#545

Post by scoofy »

nradov wrote: post #515
scoofy wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 polici…

Their thesis is clear and falsifiable, it's just that the timelines are very large. If you are going to criticize the thesis, it would make sense to address the actual arguments of ongoing cost-per-resident of various pieces of infrastructure, rather than just calling the organization 'biased'.

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

#546

Post by dingnuts »

iamacyborg wrote: post #505
lotsoweiners wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having to stand for 20 minutes is not such a bad deal if you’re in decent health. Hell it’s probably good for you if you spend most of your day sat at a desk.

> if you're in decent health

and if you're not? Not all bad health is a character failure, you know. Some people just have diseases like multiple sclerosis

in the public vs private transit discussion, all I know is that I've never been harassed by someone else in my car on the way to work, but the subway was a different story, and I've spent a lot more time commuting by car than train

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

#547

Post by cheriot »

zdragnar wrote: post #463
cheriot wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why doesn't the same logic apply to people who don't like the high prices of housing in some areas? Because the cities in question green lit the office buildings that have the job I need. If a city chooses to grow its economy, it has an obligation to allow enough housing for those new people.

Plenty of people (dare I say a majority?) commute to cities without living in them, and that often has nothing to do with the cost of housing and more personal preference. I, for one, don't want to be forced to move every time I change jobs. I would much rather have the opportunity to take jobs in near by communities as well (assuming I didn't work from home of course).

It's possible this conversation about housing is not [yet] relevant to your area. By city I mean metro area, not the municipal boundaries. There's a predictable path:

1. city keeps adding dense office buildings

2. city and suburbs resist new housing

3. new housing is greenfield development outside the existing suburbs

I'll pause here to point out the resulting trend: average commutes get longer because the people in the new housing are driving more miles each day than existing residents. Traffic is a function of miles driven. So traffic is super linear on growth.

4. housing closest to offices become extremely expensive [rich people will pay to save time] and existing residents have longer commutes because of increased traffic

5. make the roads wider

6. 5 doesn't work because of the super linear relationship https://plazaperspective.com/road-widening/

7. homelessness increases because housing that use to be cheap is now renovated for people that want to live closer to work

Now you're Austin passing the same sit-lie law in 2021 that didn't work in San Francisco in 2010

Austin https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/new-play-gives-a-first...

SF https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/What-happened-to-SF-s...

Commuting into a city is a thing everywhere. But the American "sprawl forever" model has broken down in the places that have grown the most in the last ~30 years. It screws the people with extremely long commutes, the homeless, the people spending the majority of their paycheck on housing, the people want to have kids but can't afford to, etcs

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

#548

Post by TulliusCicero »

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…

> "but people want single family homes"

Right, this kind of talk is completely disingenuous from the "single family homes only" crowd.

Upzoning almost always means you can build more densely, not that you absolutely have to. People can still build single family homes if they want.

Single family home zoning is really mandatory single family home zoning. You aren't allowed to make anything else on that land, no matter how much of a housing crisis there is. But that doesn't mean upzoning somehow bans single family homes.

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

#549

Post by quesera »

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…

> Even in the CA, the most densley populated state

California is far from the most densely populated state! It is the most highly populated, but it's also one of the largest.

The most densely populated states are on the Eastern seaboard: NJ (1263 ppl/mi² or 488 ppl/km²), then RI, MA, CT, MD, DE, FL, NY, PA, and OH. CA is 11th, at 250ppl/mi² or 97 ppl/km², approximately 20% of the NJ density.

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

#550

Post by tpmoney »

hindsightbias wrote: post #324
tpmoney wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue more than that the housing crisis is an “urban crisis” and a “fraying of the social fabric” crisis. By the first I mean the continued destruction of smaller towns and semi-rural areas. Even if single family homes are more expensive to build than multi family apartments, the fact is we have ridiculous amounts of space in this country. But most people for various reasons don’t want to live where the space…

> By the first I mean the continued destruction of smaller towns and semi-rural areas. Self-destruction. They are not victims.

OK. So what? Are we more interested in solutions to a “housing affordability crisis” or are we more interested in making sure some old codgers who are stuck in their ways and oppose the march of progress get their just desserts? And if you’re interested in both, what better way than to encourage a mass of young blood and modern companies to move in and gentrify the area?
Post reply on HN