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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

#561

Post by akira2501 »

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?

> voting should just be mandatory tbh

Then you get Brazil. Literal clowns and jokes for candidates.

> i dont understand why people seem to refuse to participate in democracy

Participating in democracy means actually going to meetings, trying to get on the agenda, watching and reporting on the business of the government. Voting is literally the smallest form of participation available.

Further, even if it wasn't, I'm a free person. I didn't ask to be born in your democracy, I don't feel required to participate in it, and even your system of participation explicitly denies me the right to say "no."

> and it's mandatory here

My view is all this does is give politicians a false mandate. They're forcing you to pick from a slate they've likely manipulated and introduce the majority mode of "least worst of."

Is that what my forced participation is to boil down to? Giving full authority to the least worst person that got sent up that year? What about this makes you feel that you have participated in anything?

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

#562

Post by philwelch »

Zach_the_Lizard wrote: post #523
scoofy wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in Texas, people are have been building in literal floodplains because there is no more room to build. https://abc13.com/floodplain-housing-building-houston-flood/... Houston is just second-to-last in line in Texas to face the affordability crisis (followed by San Antonio) because they have the highest capacity automobile infrastructure, but it's already regularly ranked with the worst traffic in the United…

Considering that Houston is significantly bigger than Austin--metro area of 6.6 million vs 2.2 million--one could argue it _is_ handling a significant influx of people better than Austin.

In absolute terms, Houston is building significantly more new homes than Austin, but Austin is growing its housing stock by a larger proportion. https://constructioncoverage.com/research/cities-investing-m...

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

#563

Post by etblg »

qwertyuiop_ wrote: post #270
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 live in a multi housing building and its a NIGHTMARE. A drug dealer moved in next door and he smokes all kinds of synthetic drugs 24/7 the shared walls and gaps are so thin the drugs leak in to my home. The person above me has some sort of mental condition, he wakes up at 12:45 am and starts drumming the floor with his hands, runs around and moves the furniture all night everyday. There isnt a damn thing i can do a…

How do you know they are synthetic drugs? What kind of synthetic drugs are these?

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

#564

Post by LunaSea »

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…

You described hell.

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

#565

Post by Tyrannosaur »

stouset wrote: post #543
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.

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.

I am failing to persuade my brother of this. If someone desperately wants to live in a single-family home an hour away from the city center, they should want the city to be nice and dense and lots of cheap housing with great transit, because that will also make their dream home cheaper!

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

#566

Post by huytersd »

foxyv wrote: post #524
huytersd wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shared spaces and parks are not a replacement for your own land. I’ve done that while I lived in Manhattan and never enjoyed it.

That's great! But we need places for people to live too. Not everyone wants to own acreage. Some people just want a place to lay their head that's close to where they work and a nice school for their kids. It also doesn't have to be Manhattan density either. It can even just be as simple as building houses closer together and allowing for corner markets in residential areas.

I get that but I dislike when this is spoken about like it’s a panacea that applies to everyone. Atleast qualify those comments.

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

#567

Post by sofixa »

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 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 see lots of people watching movies/series or reading books (physical or ebooks) while standing up in various Paris transit during rush hour.

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

#568

Post by nox101 »

Los Angeles has a housing shortage. It also has a car traffic problem a d argubly needs 40 train/subway lines, tons of bike infra, and re-zoning so more small business can open in walking distance to people. building twice ssany homes won't work if we can move around twice as many people

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

#569

Post by cpursley »

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.

NYC city transit is shameful vs. even places like Moscow. Americans have no freaking idea.

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

#570

Post by sanderjd »

tpmoney wrote: post #560
sanderjd wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ap…

Yep! None of what I said was meant as a disagreement with any of this :)

I mean, I might wish that going from "wait a minute, nobody can afford to live here because lots of people have moved here and we haven't been building any housing" to seeing the first improvements in affordability would require less than like 20 years, but in reality, yeah, things take time.

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