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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

#641

Post by bluGill »

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #399
someguydave wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not an expert on municipal expenses, but I'd wager that it takes a pretty unusual cost situation to render it cheaper to pave/trench/replace more miles of road/pipe/wire and maintain more service entries to serve fewer people.

This is compex. Rural gravel roads are likely cheaper per capite than paved roads, but they don't scale to the triffic of a suburb. A city street needs to be more expensive yet.

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

#642

Post by lizknope »

decafninja wrote: post #630
lizknope wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course, that is why there needs to be some incentive to get them to change their minds.

Biden Calls for Federal Workers to Return to the Office

August 2023

https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/employee-relations/bi...

The government wants people in the office because it helps boost the economy.

I suggest the exact opposite.

Are we serious about climate change? Which is a more effective strategy? Encourage people to switch to electric cars or just have them drive their existing gas car less? My monthly gasoline bills dropped from $250 to $70 during the pandemic.

How much are we spending on health care? How many people don't have the time to exercise? I had an extra 60 minutes a day to take a walk instead of commuting.

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

#643

Post by handojin »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #618
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…

You forgot Chicago.

It's easy to do that.

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

#644

Post by gottorf »

lizknope wrote: post #640
gottorf wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our stock price shot way up. This would imply that a company's stock price is directly influenced by its productive output; in reality, it's only very tangentially so. Especially for low-profit, high-growth tech companies, I'd wager the federal funds rate's effect on the stock price is way higher.

My company's profits were up in 2020-21 and then we went back to the office in 2022 and our profits and stock price dropped. We had 500 openings in 2020-21 and then we laid off 8% of the employees in 2023. I joke in meetings that we just need to go back home and we will make more money. I work for a fabless semiconductor company that makes chips for data centers and other applications, not a software company.

No argument against your company's WFH productivity! But:

> 2020-21 and then we went back to the office in 2022 and our profits and stock price dropped

The broad stock index rallied like crazy 2020-21 with ZIRP, then all of 2022 was a bear market that followed rate hikes. The S&P 500 rose almost 50% from January 2020 to December 2021, then lost about 20% in 2022. So it's not unreasonable that your company's stock price followed that trajectory.

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

#645

Post by jltsiren »

majormajor wrote: post #341
yitianjian wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The traffic in a medium sized NA city like Atlanta or Dallas can be a lot better than it is now, and it's definitely not comparable to Shanghai, London or Tokyo.

Do you have any examples in mind of 6-10M cities with stress-free comfortable commuting and affordable housing for all? Off the top of my head, but without a lot of first- or second-hand experience, Rome seems like the commute is probably a lot better than the larger cities, but my perception is that the affordability is pretty poor? Otherwise most of my experience is in larger or much smaller places. Something that…

The big question is what counts as a city. American urban / metro areas around a central city are often large, because there are no other major cities nearby. A similar area in Europe may contain several independent cities. For example, if you take Atlanta with wide enough borders to get the population to 5+ million and drop it in the Netherlands, it will probably cover Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht.

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

#646

Post by huytersd »

krapp wrote: post #597
huytersd wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is honestly the wrong angle to take. I’m a raging environmentalist and your decrementalist comment is making my blood boil. Advocating for a reduction in standard of living is not the way to go about environmentalism. Using science and technology to make Manhattan project tier changes to energy generation and transportation are. There is a way to reduce your impact almost completely while still maintaining the e…

The existing standard of living requires exponential growth and unbounded resource consumption. It isn't possible to maintain that while reducing energy consumption "almost completely." This isn't Star Trek where you can just outsmart the laws of thermodynamics and run everything on free energy and vibes. A "raging environmentalist" should understand that, particularly given that climate change and the collapse of th…

Hard disagree. China and India are adding massive amounts of renewable energy in the form of solar, wind and nuclear energy every year. Electric cars are basically selling like crazy in Europe and Asia and to a reasonable extent in the US. Our challenge in the US is simple. Destroy the oil lobby. This should be followed by large scale renewable energy installations and nuclear power plants. Use natural gas as a transitional energy source or in peaker plants to back up the renewables. You having one less room contributes almost nothing to the solution. A cruise ship is going to offset a 100 of your “hardship” gains in about 10 minutes of emissions.

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

#647

Post by screye »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #620
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…

This idea that the problem with western society is that we allow people to live in detached houses with yards instead of inner-city apartment buildings is bollocks. People need privacy, something to work on, freedom to move about, and agency over their environment to thrive psychologically. That's why prison is the opposite of this. "Something to work on" is partially being met by video games, and it's not going well…

This would be a compelling complaint if the rest of the world didn't exist.

Every complaint about apartments stems from American inner city dilapidation. My first culture shock when arriving in the US was the sorry state of American apartments.

We know how to build apartments that are insulated to sound. Common building courtyards give kids safe play-areas within walking distance while supervised. Balconies can be built large and large common areas give people all the space they need.

Back in India, urban army cantonments used to be one of the best places to live. Funnily enough, they were simply gated colonies with large apartment complexes, and the recovered space was used for community activities and sports. That's all we're talking about.

Take the same surface area. You can choose to build in 2d (SFH) or in 3d (buildings). No where does this imply stuffing people like sardines. All they're saying is that if you optimize for your priorities in 3d it is unlikely that the 2d edge case will be most effective outcome.

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

#648

Post by numtel »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #620
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…

This idea that the problem with western society is that we allow people to live in detached houses with yards instead of inner-city apartment buildings is bollocks. People need privacy, something to work on, freedom to move about, and agency over their environment to thrive psychologically. That's why prison is the opposite of this. "Something to work on" is partially being met by video games, and it's not going well…

I don't believe that is as fixed as we think it is.

The desire for privacy is a reflection of a society failing to provide.

I wrote this about if the situation was reversed: https://gist.github.com/numtel/28ffb7181ad1a296a077db76c474b...

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

#649

Post by screye »

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…

The hilarious bit is how confident they all are about people wanting SFH development, yet refuse to legalize everything else.

Imagine banning every android device from the US, while also proclaiming that no one would've purchased android anyway, because Apple is so popular. Apple is good because they compete and then win.

If SFH demand is so high, surely legalizing vertical development would be no big deal, just like android still struggles to gain adoption in the US.

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

#650

Post by oceanplexian »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #620
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…

This idea that the problem with western society is that we allow people to live in detached houses with yards instead of inner-city apartment buildings is bollocks. People need privacy, something to work on, freedom to move about, and agency over their environment to thrive psychologically. That's why prison is the opposite of this. "Something to work on" is partially being met by video games, and it's not going well…

I agree with this. The vast majority of the world is not "choosing" to live in small apartments, outside of a small minority of young urban professionals under the age of 35. There is simply not enough wealth, land, or resources to support detached housing in most of the world. No one wants to live in a tenement with their 12 closest relatives. It's not romantic, or some kind of culturally enlightened way of living. It sucks, and 99% of the world doesn't get the option to live in a house.
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