61–70 of 799 posts
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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.
There are studies - there are more vacation units than homeless people in the United States - like double.
There's a shortage of detached single family homes in desirable cities and suburbs. If you just want to rent an apartment there's an oversupply from overbuilding during the pandemic.
I don't think there's much, if any, of an over supply of apartments. The people I've seen who try to teach vacancies show that new buildings get to nearly full occupancy within a year or so. That's pretty reasonable if you need to rent a few hundred units at once. If anything, there's a massive under-supply of 3+br apartments large enough for families, due to double-loaded corridor designs that are almost required to…
Every single major population center that has distorted (high) housing costs relative to income, also has very strong protections for the existing home owners (NIMBY). "There are no coincidences..." The solution is terrifyingly simple: don't allow existing residents to block new housing developments. If they don't like it, they can move. This will probably never happen in the U.S., because the government no longer fu…
I think that most jurisdictions already have the legal tools they need to put the public good in front of special interest groups, in the form of eminent domain laws.
It's just that the policial will is just not there.
Obviously someone who is familiar with the field but it's kind of strange that they compare these two technologies since they aren't used for the same construction. You've not going to use glulam and CLT to build your one story house. It's about building taller places.
I bet there are some single story houses with glulams. Certainly plenty of two-story houses do. I have a 30 inch tall glulam that spans 35 feet across my garage holding up a good chunk of the second floor.
Every single major population center that has distorted (high) housing costs relative to income, also has very strong protections for the existing home owners (NIMBY). "There are no coincidences..." The solution is terrifyingly simple: don't allow existing residents to block new housing developments. If they don't like it, they can move. This will probably never happen in the U.S., because the government no longer fu…
If there is one industry that is the most resistant to change, it's the construction industry. There are still people who have been roofing for 50 years and refuse to change a single thing they do and learned 50 years ago. Saying a bunch of glulam will solve the issue is just incorrect. Wood is fantastic material. But using half a forest to build a 2000sqft house is certainly not the direction we should be going, we…
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.
If there is one industry that is the most resistant to change, it's the construction industry. There are still people who have been roofing for 50 years and refuse to change a single thing they do and learned 50 years ago. Saying a bunch of glulam will solve the issue is just incorrect. Wood is fantastic material. But using half a forest to build a 2000sqft house is certainly not the direction we should be going, we…
I think your comment is misguided and lacks reflection. Change for the sake of change is never good because by definition there is no upside. Construction technology is also expected to be reliable and have long service life, and traditional techniques ensure that by the fact that the are tried and true.
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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…
If you do the right "step-up" programs and purchasable housing becomes extremely cheap around the country, it will solve itself. There are a lot of homeless people in Oakland that if found out they can buy a house in Kentucky and afford it with a restaurant dish-cleaning job, they would move. Stop treating the homeless as "shippable containers" they have agency.
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If that happens, just raise prop taxes to 100k per year (for rental units).
For what it's worth - you come across as completely unserious if your suggestion to fix housing shortages is genuinely to levy a $100k tax for property owners who aren't currently renting out their units.