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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

#571

Post by giantg2 »

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #512
giantg2 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

"Markets with a housing shortage have record low inventories and record low uninhabited units."

So you admit there are markets that do not? That's my point - distribution of housing across the country.

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

#572

Post by kleinsch »

nightski wrote: post #344
mdorazio wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mortgage interest tax deduction by itself is enough to refute you.

I'd imagine practically no one actually takes that because the standard deduction is more lucrative. Unless you live in a far above average priced home with a jumbo loan.

Mortgage interest deduction is capped at $750K of debt, conforming loan limits are $760K+, so doesn't apply to jumbo loans.

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

#573

Post by cameldrv »

bobthepanda wrote: post #556
cameldrv wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, you don't want empty AVs roaming around the streets. There probably needs to be some sort of government intervention to discourage this behavior. Here's what's possible though:

1. Shared ride AVs can deliver multiple people per trip to their jobs, and they can also make multiple trips in the morning, and multiple trips in the evening. Private cars generally take one person, have to sit in a parking spot all day, and then go home.

2. AVs can park relatively far from their destination. After they drop off their passenger, they can go somewhere else to park.

3. AVs, if they can coordinate or be remotely controlled by a parking lot, can park way more densely than normal cars. In a normal parking lot, maybe half of the space is aisles for cars to drive to and from the parking space. If cars could dynamically get out of the way, you would only need a small portion of the space empty. A very simple strategy would be for there to be only room for one aisle for a big parking lot, and all of the cars would just move forward or back to make the single aisle appear wherever it was needed.

In all, this probably reduces the need for parking by maybe 6x relative to human driven cars.

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

#574

Post by nine_k »

zamfi wrote: post #558
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…

> 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 sin…

In the 1970s, beside the prevalence of cars, there were two more factors hollowing out cities: "white flight" and the fear of a nuclear war. A nuke hitting Manhattan would certainly affect more people that a nuke hitting some suburbia, and why would a nuke be targeted there in the first place?

The fear was real :(

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

#575

Post by giantg2 »

8note wrote: post #230
spankalee wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those studies are so often flawed will pieces. Houses begging sold or between tenants are counted as vacant. Vacancies in rural Pennsylvania and Kentucky don't matter much for the homeless in Oakland. What do you even do with that information? Ship the homeless around the country? Other studies should that the higher the vacancy rate the lower the homeless rate and the cheaper housing is. So we can just allow people…

Between tenants should be considered vacant, when you consider that landlords have been colluding to restrict supply and drive up rents

There should be reasonable lag time of a month or so. That way the landlord has time to perform maintenance between tenants.

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

#576

Post by jpgleeson »

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…

Even giving people the single family housing they want, there’s ways to increase the density massively that aren’t being utilised right now. Bringing back terraced houses in the US would be a great first step, and is only an improvement over the insanity that is the Bay Area’s houses in every back and side garden while still enforcing setbacks.

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

#577

Post by tpmoney »

Analemma_ wrote: post #307
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.

It's getting better now, but the OP could live in Seattle: [0]. Anywhere white on that map it was illegal through 2019 to build anything but a single-family home. Just an appalling waste of land. [0]: https://i0.wp.com/publicola.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/S...

I feel like this is part of the problem every time these housing affordability conversations come up. The problems are hyper-local, but the proposed solutions are advanced as if they need to be state or even country wide. A lot of "we" statements that don't actually apply to the audience. And to people in areas like where I am, or in semi-rural areas that are dying and the housing prices are falling, it just seems ridiculous and hyperbolic. And that isn't to say we don't have problems here. I have plenty of younger co-workers who are facing down where and how to afford living in this area as housing costs have grown immensely over the years. But "stop only building 4k sqft homes" isn't even remotely the right solution here, because that isn't the problem here.

Imagine if we suddenly got a bunch of articles on HN about the "website affordability crisis" and it was a bunch of FAANG engineers and ex FAANG employees and want-to-be FAANG employees talking about how you can't build a reliable website for less than a few million in cloud services and monitoring and logging from Datadog and the like. Sure from their perspective of trying to build a FAANG scale service that might be true, but it would also seem insane to the rest of us who are wondering what's wrong with throwing up a few boxes in a colo center or even a few basic EC2 instances and a cloudflare proxy if you just want some affordable website hosting.

Not every IT problem or company needs Google scale solutions, and not every community (or even community suffering from a housing affordability problem) needs Seattle scale solutions either.

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

#579

Post by giantg2 »

lanfeust6 wrote: post #297
giantg2 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Or to put it another way, while 33% of the homeless population suffers from mental illness, nearly 100% of the homeless population can’t afford housing. 100% is a much bigger number than 33%. Which is why mental health, while a factor in homelessness, cannot possibly or statistically be a lead factor." The quality of the analysis and arguments are terrible. We can just ignore factors if they don't explain everything…

> We can just ignore factors if they don't explain everything? No, we just can't rely on them to explain everything! As you purport. Only 33% of the homeless suffer from mental illness, and it certainly is not a strong predictor as to why rates are high in some cities but not others. That's the data. > Affordability is a moot point for people in these categories It matters to everyone, but even if we pretend it doesn…

"that's 67% percent of the homeless."

The data does not support that. You cannot simply subtract 33 from 100 and claim affordability is the primary factor. Mental illness is not the only factor affecting employability. You have substance abuse, criminal records, etc that all prevent people from finding employment.

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

#580

Post by fnordpiglet »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #226
jghn wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tipping fees What is a tipping fee

You need to tip the builder 20% of constructions costs in the US (Just kidding, it's the fee for taking the waste to the tip)

Really the issue is the PoS terminal the builders use default to a 20% and all the options presented are higher. You feel like a real creep tapping other and typing in 0 in front of them.
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