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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

#621

Post by closeparen »

tpmoney wrote: post #221
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 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…

Small towns and semi-rural areas squander their land with the exact same ass-ugly car-centric public realms you'll find in the suburbs of major metro areas. They just get less attention for it since the land in question is abundant.

There are examples of small towns with good urbanism - a lot of college towns fit this bill - but they are so rare that they just replicate big-city level prices, without the high-productivity jobs to pay them.

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

#622

Post by shortsunblack »

someguydave wrote: post #334
shortsunblack wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which is fine, if they are willing to pay the full cost of it. suburbia is massively subsidized.

that's a strong statement to make across hundreds of thousands of different tax/cost situations in localities spread over all 50 states.

It's not a 'strong statement'. It's a statement supported both by rationality (more inputs spread out across less users) and empiricism -- there's countless case studies arriving at same conclusions. Here's some from Strong Towns: i) https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/8/3/cobb-county-add... ii) https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/9/27/a-texas-sized-...

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

#623

Post by hibikir »

cameldrv wrote: post #573
bobthepanda wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Traffic is just cars times miles. If all your cars are parked far away from their final destination, all you are doing is adding total miles traveled. Those don't just have basic operation costs, but create yet another kind of traffic: Just like how an elementary school creates more traffic than a high school, because pickups and drop offs require more miles than just having the car parked in the right spots.

So instead of, say, having rush hour start at 4pm, with people leaving work, you have a new, free, bonus rush hour at 2, of empty cars driving near the places where they'll need to be picked up. Same thing near any other rush hour: Every added mile kills. It's not even just cars that have this problem: You'll find that in American cities with transit, which often are built with very few key destinations, there are large depots for trains downtown! Bart has no need to use most of their trains most of their day, so you'll find trains that just go downtown and stay there, parked.

What drives efficiency, always, is fewer miles traveled, and having the need for transport be as even as possible. Something like car-centric stadium is terrible: You need major infra to support a game, with many lanes, and many parking places, just to support game days. But then there might be as few as 10 game days a year, so all that extra infrastructure is wasted the other 355 days.

Self driving, rented cars probably make the first worse, and don't really make huge differences in the second. I think that they have advantages: fewer people dying from drunk driving, or someone doing 80mph in a city street running people over, like we had last week in St Louis. Younger people and older people retaining some independence in areas where now they are wholly dependent of others to go anywhere. But the efficiency gains story is a pipe dream. We will see more miles driven, and therefore more total congestion.

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

#624

Post by tzs »

walthamstow wrote: post #286
stronglikedan wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> suburbia is massively subsidized That's a common argument that no one has been able to sufficiently prove.

US suburbia's externalities are not properly priced in. Gasoline tax is 18c a gallon and hasn't changed since 1993.

That's federal gasoline tax. In most states there is also state gasoline tax on top of that which is usually quite a bit higher.

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

#625

Post by fuzztester »

majormajor wrote: post #306
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…

> 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…

>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!)

Tokyo (I heard)

Mumbai

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

#626

Post by hibikir »

scoofy wrote: post #616
Animats wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason we have a housing crisis is because as much as we all love single family homes, they aren't universalizable. In the US, which has lots of land area, single family homes are the norm: The majority of the housing stock in the United States is single-family detached houses. Of the total 128.5 million housing units in 2021, about 81.7 million were detached homes and 8.2 million were attached single-family ho…

>The US only has a single family home space crisis in over-urbanized areas. FTFY, but fully agree. In urbanized areas (where most people live), we have hit the capacity of the automobile transportation infrastructure. This causes a cascade of real estate prices in urban cores, making the vast majority of these areas unaffordable for normal folks. This is leading to myriad crises, like a massive teacher shortage in Ca…

Ah, if it was just jobs. Imagine you have a very smart kid that goes faster than grade level. In a rural area, your option is home schooling. In a small metro, there might be enough kids to have some sort of gifted program that works. In a really large metro, there will be many specialized schools, where people that are used to not just random gifted children, but those that share very similar strengths and weaknesses. You'll also have more medical specialists, a far wider variety of quality entertainment options, and more people sharing whatever weird hobbies you have.

The advantages of having more people living in your metro are are massive even if one is a remote worker. The advantages might not be needed for one's special case, and you might prefer to, say, live near a beach with great surfing opportunities in Portugal, but you'll still be accepting significant tradeoffs for not living near more people.

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

#627

Post by zrn900 »

marcusverus wrote: post #333
foxyv wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The results of multiple studies have validated this claim: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53dd6676e4b0fedfbc26e...

So the suburbs are net recipients of infrastructure taxes, which is a bad thing. Got it. Shall we also apply this to other government services? It would be kind of shameless to complain about suburbanites being the net-beneficiaries of one service, while expecting them to be net-contributors to literally every other government service in existence, right?

Wasting housing and space makes being the net recipient of infrastructure taxes a net negative to entire society, an extravaganza.

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

#628

Post by lizknope »

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…

People are attacking single family homes and commuter culture. Okay, but my solution is different.

The pandemic showed that millions of us can work from home. My office was closed for about 2 years. Our stock price shot way up.

There were lots of stories about the environmental benefits. Air pollution in big cities decreased dramatically. Wildlife started returning in places.

We keep building commercial real estate and most people I know have little desire to commute to the office and sit in a cubicle disturbed by other people constantly.

I would severely limit commercial real estate building permits, encourage companies to have employees work at home via tax breaks or whatever. This will help with the housing issues, greenhouse gas emissions, decrease the need for new roads because of less traffic.

Everyone wins except dumb control freak managers and restaurants that do lunch in the business areas.

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

#629

Post by tpmoney »

foxyv wrote: post #266
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…

A huge reason these shared spaces are so miserable is because the communities around them cannot support them. Parking minimums and low density means that not only are these commercial properties insanely expensive, but also that not enough people can access them. A huge upside to increasing density is that the theatre goes from having 100 people within 4 miles of it to 10,000. In addition, instead of having a 400 ca…

>A huge reason these shared spaces are so miserable is because the communities around them cannot support them. Parking minimums and low density means that not only are these commercial properties insanely expensive, but also that not enough people can access them.

That might be a small part of it, but some of the places I'm talking about have been there for 30+ years. And they were better before, when the population was even less dense than it is now. Culture plays a HUGE part in this stuff, and I think much bigger than any parking minimums or housing densities. Compare NYC at the various decades over the year to see an obvious example. There are decades where NYC would be a nice place to live if you're a urbanite, and others where it would have been absolutely miserable no matter how much you like high rise tenements.

And my personal feeling is right now the US as a whole is going through a down turn with respect to public behavior and pride, and as a result people want their own versions of these things. I think one place where density does have a factor is in being able to support multiple versions of something. You don't want your local theater servicing 10,000 people. You want the scales to be tilted more towards 100 theaters servicing 100 people each. Both for variety but also because each can serve the specific desires of a specific clientele. Part of the problem with shared spaces is you can only be so much to so many people before either you're not what they want when they want it, or you're so diluted that you're not what anyone wants.

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

#630

Post by decafninja »

lizknope wrote: post #628
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…

People are attacking single family homes and commuter culture. Okay, but my solution is different. The pandemic showed that millions of us can work from home. My office was closed for about 2 years. Our stock price shot way up. There were lots of stories about the environmental benefits. Air pollution in big cities decreased dramatically. Wildlife started returning in places. We keep building commercial real estate a…

The dumb control freak managers are often the same people holding the levers of power to make these decisions.
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