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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

#661

Post by BariumBlue »

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…

There was a study investigating people's preferences for living type ... I don't remember whether it was 40/60 or 60/40, but the preference for SFH or for apartments is not universal.

Honestly it's weird that people decide they know how other people want to live, both ways. Obv it stems from folks assuming that their values and wants are universal therefore anything derived from those is obvious, but some folks have some pretty extreme confidence in knowing other people's preferences.

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

#662

Post by prawn »

foxyv wrote: post #408
ejb999 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

zoning laws are usually locally voted on and approved - if the locals in any given area want to allow business, they can - but lots of people don't want to live close to businesses - so they vote accordingly. People that want to live near businesses and don't, should move to places that have it - there are lots of places in the country like that. People that want to live in an entirely residential area, but don't, sh…

Local elections have notoriously low voter turnout and candidates are often supported by developers and real estate brokers. Often local city council members are outright bribed by people who have an interest in only approving their own projects. In addition, sometimes city counselors will prevent zoning changes to increase the value of their own property. City officials are often the biggest bang for your buck when…

Where I live in Australia, small developers would be the biggest opponents of things that limit their opportunities to subdivide and build more densely - parking minimums, setbacks, frontage minimums, shadowing, sight-lines and so on. (I don't know what "offset" is in US real estate lingo.)

The limitations are largely NIMBYism. There's a block of six units in my short one-block street of otherwise detached single-family dwellings, and the elderly neighbours here talk about how they wished they'd objected to its building decades ago because it changed the character of the street.

It's all tension between "what is best for me and the street as it was when I bought into it" and "what is best for us all collectively". Building here is slightly outpacing population, but it is too financially attractive to buy second and third properties as investments, and it is politically risky to tackle that.

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

#663

Post by J_Shelby_J »

giantg2 wrote: post #571
J_Shelby_J wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Yes, we could all sleep in tents and live off the land if we truly wanted to. What a great point.

Tell me where I could move where housing hasn't doubled in price in the last 5 years AND has employment for a family.

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

#664

Post by vivekd »

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 used to believe this. And I still prefer density and think that urban sprawl is bad for mental health, finances and the environment.

However I no longer believe it's the cause of the housing crisis. Perhaps it contributes in Europe but here in North America there is space to build and building materials only make up a small portion of the cost of housing. So I don't believe we can point to single family homes as a cause for the housing crisis or price inflation.

However that said, although it is not behind housing inflation, it does still have negative impacts on quality of life and the environment and I do hope we move towards samer urban planning models incorporating density, public transportation and walkability.

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

#665

Post by decafninja »

hparadiz wrote: post #660
decafninja wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot replicate the Tokyo (or Seoul, or Taipei, or Singapore, or Hong Kong) model in the US without making certain societal choices that are either impossible or unpalatable here. We will never have anything remotely as nice as the Tokyo transit system for that reason. I love taking the Tokyo subways whenever I visit. I make it a point to avoid the NYC subway if at all possible.

People get so mad but this is the 100% truth.

And by “impossible or unpalatable choices”, I’m not referring anything to do with cars.

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

#666

Post by Clubber »

lispisok wrote: post #651

People debating about what kind of housing to build are getting ahead of themselves. The housing crisis is intentional. Homeowners demand the value of their home keep going up and they vote. They way to do that is to keep supply lower than demand. The first step to fixing the housing crisis isnt to figure out what kind of housing to build, it's to convince enough of the voting population there is a housing crisis tha…

Another problem is a vast majority of people want to / have to live in a very few select places. We could alleviate housing costs by changing that as well; back to supply and demand. I hope that StarLink and WFH are big pieces of the puzzle that will move people away from mega-dense population centers. We certainly have the acreage.

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

#667

Post by Tiktaalik »

ducttapecrown wrote: post #250
dogman144 wrote: post #199

I hope large scale timber construction doesn’t occur exclusively because of the impact on our forests. Between the pine beetles, fires, the many many stumps from the last round of serious logging years… our national forests and surrounding un-designated forests could use a break from a possible sharp uptick in demand. If you support ideas like this which help largely sub/urban areas by using out of sight out of mind…

I wonder what the impact of the production of concrete and steel has on the environments where it takes place. I like the part of the article where they point out that mass timber would be better for carbon sequestration. I also think that buildings should mostly be built with a death period in mind because everything in this world requires maintenance and can be upgraded lol. So why not use a building material that…

Concrete is bad for the environment and strongly arguably worse than mass timber, which is a reason why folks are pushing mass timber.

Concrete development for buildings produces a lot of CO2 and from that POV mass timber is better. Logging harms animal habitat, but so does gravel mining.

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

#668

Post by lmm »

dogman144 wrote: post #498
foxyv wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's plenty of space to build new homes of all types. Unfortunately this is not the case in North America. Very little land is zoned to allow such communities. Those areas that are have become so insanely expensive only the extremely wealthy can afford to live in them.

Very little land...in all... of North America. That's a big place for such a tight summary lol. The communities,, space, and zoning are out there, but often many facing the housing issues just aren't willing to move. There's more to it than this obviously, but for every person slamming their lifestyle and expenses against the wall in a trendy area, there are others picking up and moving to Philly, St. Louis, Lexingto…

> Very little land...in all... of North America. That's a big place for such a tight summary lol.

The problem is it's de facto illegal to actually build anything in city centres in North America, because of postwar zoning laws (it only takes 1 NIMBY to block any development, so it's not literally illegal but it might as well be). So even if you start your own new city in the middle of the empty desert, as soon as a hundred people move there you can't build anything anymore. That's why the only cities in NA are the ones that were built pre-1940, and as demand grows while supply stays fixed, they just get more and more expensive.

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

#669

Post by lmm »

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 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.

The problem isn't that people are allowed to live in detached houses with yards, it's that they're not allowed to live anywhere else. Plenty of people evidently want to live in apartment buildings - it wouldn't be necessary to make them illegal otherwise.

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

#670

Post by oceanplexian »

majormajor wrote: post #322
novok wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In China right? You know they are the equivalent of people in LA who live so far away from their job and have 2 hour car commutes right?

Not just in China. China is maybe the most interesting point of comparison with big cities in the US, though, since its cities are both much denser than most AND more sprawling than most. And I don't follow your second question. If the trains OR freeways are full of people who can't afford to live closer to their jobs and have hours-long commutes, isn't that bad? And if it can happen even with extensive public transi…

China isn't even remotely comparable to the USA.

The urban mega cities are a prop that the CCP puts on display for the world. There's a reason that China's GDP-per-capita lands somewhere between Kazakhstan and Cuba.I would know because I've been there. If you go to a random exurban part of China you're going to find people living in makeshift tin structures, a lack of running water, oxcarts used as serious transportation, and a society that is functionally in the 1930s.

The CCP are masters of propaganda though, and flood Youtube and social media with influencers riding around on maglev trains and showing off new airports and architecture. Even on American Social Media, if you look for videos of "The Real China", or "Chinese Poverty" you'll get carefully curated propaganda that does not line up with what I saw first hand.

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