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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

#551

Post by ambichook »

akira2501 wrote: post #485
foxyv wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Local elections have notoriously low voter turnout and candidates are often supported by developers and real estate brokers. Often local city council members are outright bribed by people who have an interest in only approving their own projects. In addition, sometimes city counselors will prevent zoning changes to increase the value of their own property. City officials are often the biggest bang for your buck when…

> Local elections have notoriously low voter turnout The flaw in democracy, manifest. You simply can't say "We literally do not need anyone. Things are fine. If there's an emergency we can convene something, but outside of that, I don't actually want a body convened with the responsibility of changing things randomly. I'm busy and I don't have the time to keep an eye on these goofs." It should be that if voter turnou…

voting should just be mandatory tbh, i dont understand why people seem to refuse to participate in democracy

maybe it's a cultural thing? i'm australian and it's mandatory here so that may be affecting my views?

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

#552

Post by nradov »

mlsu wrote: post #521
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…

We only have 2 cities in the United States that even approach a "medium sized" Asian metro in population. Los Angeles and NYC. Only NYC has a usable public transit system. This is actually an argument for transit systems. Los Angeles, San Francisco/San Jose, Dallas, Phoenix -- could be (and should be) a global metropolises, with a populations and cultural relevance rivaling Tokyo or Hong Kong. They would be, if not f…

Most people who currently live in San Francisco/San Jose don't particularly want to turn it into a global metropolis and don't give a damn about abstract concepts like "cultural relevance". Cultural elitists should have some humility and not presume that they know best.

Another option would be to set policies that encourage greater economic development and job growth in Stockton so that residents aren't forced to commute long distances. There's nothing special about the SF Bay Area: it's just another place.

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

#553

Post by bobthepanda »

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…

The solution to dispersal, and density, is to simply allow that type of building everywhere, and then they just kind of randomly pop up whenever/wherever works out.

Unless forced to due to scarcity, dense development does not really clump up together all at once for good reason, since clumping up will drive up costs in a hyper local area. Tokyo for example, has a lot of detached housing, even in the central wards. The density there is more pockmarked and random, and notably never really concentrates all that highly; there is not a single Japanese building in the top 100 skyscrapers, because skyscraper concentration is an artifact of how we force dense developments only in certain places.

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

#554

Post by ska »

robocat wrote: post #439
ska wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and mostly our governments remain responsible if people haven't saved. That's the point of it being "forced saving". Look, I'm not saying the government steered everything or even that they thought it through very far. I'm saying that they constructed a bunch of programs (in US, Fannie/Freddy, mortgage tax break, etc. similar other countries) to subsidize and incentivize house ownership in ways that economists hate…

> That's the point of it being "forced saving". It isn't really savings: it is a giant Ponzi scheme that depends upon the population cohorts aging and working and getting mortgages. I'm in New Zealand and immigration is a primary driver for our house prices. Overseas owners will also drive house prices when we allow that again (our economy is strong but I suspect we will need to sell the family silver eventually). If…

Ok if you dislike technically "savings", call it "incentivized regular investment" - the point remains. As a policy issue countries are stuck a bit because they are reliant on the asset value of these houses to help support non-working people later in life (that is, they have "saved", in some sense). Does that make it a ponzi scheme? No, of course not. Is there risk in the investment? Absolutely, and more than most people like to think about.

I don't think we are really disagreeing here, which is why I described it as a "trap". Governments will go to great lengths to keep this market stable, probably more than they should, because they are in a bind. People will respond to the incentives and keep buying when they can - probably more than they should. So long as there is net growth in economy and population on the whole they can keep the plates in the air, if either or both of those fail to be true, harder. And of course this is only on average, individual areas are not all protected.

Detroit has houses for sale for $0 (or near enough) for the same reason as some places in Japan and Italy (and others). Namely, fewer people want to live there than housing and infrastructure exists for. Same deal with unfinished subdivisions in Florida, essentially worthless.

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

#555

Post by bobthepanda »

nradov wrote: post #552
mlsu wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We only have 2 cities in the United States that even approach a "medium sized" Asian metro in population. Los Angeles and NYC. Only NYC has a usable public transit system. This is actually an argument for transit systems. Los Angeles, San Francisco/San Jose, Dallas, Phoenix -- could be (and should be) a global metropolises, with a populations and cultural relevance rivaling Tokyo or Hong Kong. They would be, if not f…

Most people who currently live in San Francisco/San Jose don't particularly want to turn it into a global metropolis and don't give a damn about abstract concepts like "cultural relevance". Cultural elitists should have some humility and not presume that they know best. Another option would be to set policies that encourage greater economic development and job growth in Stockton so that residents aren't forced to com…

The Los Angeles example pretty much proves that spinning out employment into multiple areas does not mean people will just move to the closest area to their job; it just adds another destination to the list of "places people drive an hour to."

It is not really that people living in Stockton already are commuting into the Bay, but Bay Area workers are being displaced into Stockton. The Bay Area has added more jobs than housing for a while now.

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

#556

Post by bobthepanda »

cameldrv wrote: post #539
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…

Metros are pretty slow. 20mph/30kph is about par, less if the stops are spaced closely, more if they're further apart. If you factor in time to walk to and from the metro, and time waiting for your train, you can almost always beat them with a bike. Here's a chart of a few systems [1]. Where the larger European cities do better is the density -- what you mostly care about in a city is how many people you can reach in…

I don't know that "less need for parking" has ever actually panned out. If the car is not parked somewhere, it is milling around waiting for a ride, which might actually be worse in terms of congestion.

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

#557

Post by quesera »

ambichook wrote: post #551
akira2501 wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Local elections have notoriously low voter turnout The flaw in democracy, manifest. You simply can't say "We literally do not need anyone. Things are fine. If there's an emergency we can convene something, but outside of that, I don't actually want a body convened with the responsibility of changing things randomly. I'm busy and I don't have the time to keep an eye on these goofs." It should be that if voter turnou…

voting should just be mandatory tbh, i dont understand why people seem to refuse to participate in democracy maybe it's a cultural thing? i'm australian and it's mandatory here so that may be affecting my views?

The notion that compulsory voting results in an engaged electorate is not plausible to me. Human nature does not work that way.

It does not seem wise to solicit (much less demand) opinions from those who would choose to withhold them. These would be the least-informed opinions available.

We have enough trouble with the people who insist on sharing when their opinion is unwelcome. (These are often a close second on the least-informed scale!) :)

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

#558

Post by zamfi »

mlsu wrote: post #521
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…

We only have 2 cities in the United States that even approach a "medium sized" Asian metro in population. Los Angeles and NYC. Only NYC has a usable public transit system. This is actually an argument for transit systems. Los Angeles, San Francisco/San Jose, Dallas, Phoenix -- could be (and should be) a global metropolises, with a populations and cultural relevance rivaling Tokyo or Hong Kong. They would be, if not f…

> Los Angeles, San Francisco/San Jose, Dallas, Phoenix -- could be (and should be) a global metropolises

Yes!

> with a populations and cultural relevance rivaling Tokyo or Hong Kong.

YES!

> They would be, if not for the car.

...what?

They are not because their local governments prohibit construction and actively oppose growth, which is only vaguely related to the car. Approximately zero "global metropolises" have single-family zoning in 95% of their inner core land area. Not "have single family homes", sure maybe Tokyo has that. But zoning that prohibits denser development in such a way that most (yes, most) current housing in those areas is too dense to be built today under current rules. (This last part is true even of NYC.)

The US went hardcore anti-density in the 70s. And sure, that has something to do with the car.

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

#559

Post by shortsunblack »

bluGill wrote: post #520
bitcurious wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Old streetcar suburbs are much denser than typical American suburb today due to increased setbacks, lot coverage rates and other factors. But yes, even streetcar suburbs get subsidized back then. The subsidy is just more productive in it opening economic mobility with cheap, carbon neutral transport, depending on your views on rail transport.

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

#560

Post by tpmoney »

sanderjd wrote: post #309
tpmoney wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm seeing this in my area too. But I wasn't seeing it ten or fifteen years ago when these debates first came onto my radar. What it looks like to me is a success story of identifying a problem and working toward improvement, but simultaneously far more slowly than the proponents of the solutions want and far more quickly than opponents want. A decade ago, YIMBY-leaning people and groups were mad but mostly obscure a…

I feel like this is what you'd expect to happen though right? Just from a base intuition on major societal shifts, you'd expect housing prices and availability to outstrip the local ability to afford them. You'd then expect mounting pressure to see more housing built to reduce the rate of price increase and raise the amount of supply. You'd then expect to see developers start making plans and getting the necessary approvals and permits. Finally after all of that happens you'd expect to see stuff start going up. And you'd expect this whole process to probably take something close to a decade to play out wouldn't you? My company just built a brand new HQ, in the middle of a big field. It was a 3+ year process from the moment it was announced, and I have to figure it was another year before that in the planning. I wouldn't really expect that building huge tracts of housing, whether in the middle of downtown, or out in the suburbs would be a much shorter timeline. You have all the permitting and planning to go through, land acquisition, infrastructure improvements / agreements to improve as part of the construction depending on your local setup, public hearings if any zoning changes are required, and then the inevitable delays that come with massive projects like that. And you'd expect all of this to happen in a slow ramp, starting with one project by one developer and expanding as demand continues to climb.
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