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

While I agree with your general premise, I'm not convinced that remote work is the driver we should rely on. As a peer comment mentioned, infrastructure is a weak point right now, and remote work would add another dynamic that would make the situation more risky instead of less. Up front though, I should clarify I am a huge proponent FOR remote work. The rest of this is focused on why remote work should not be a foundation to build American housing on.

Prior to the normalizing of remote work and cloud computing, the infrastructure risks that a company needed to consider were related to hubs. Cloud computing moved a lot of the processing out of the hub, which is good from a risk perspective. This leaves the need to ensure the infrastructure related to workers accessing the computing is resilient.

If remote work becomes the foundation we building our cities on, we now expose our companies to the additional infrastructure problem related to internet connectivity while not resolving the connectivity issues inherent in the other grids of roads, power, and water. This is fine for companies that are natively born to this, but this is dangerous for the existing large cap companies and governments that are not.

And just as we're pushing for an increase in remote work, we are also in a period of time where our infrastructure is regularly attacked remotely.

Again, this is not to say remote work is bad. There's just a lot of transformation that needs to occur and I personally feel we should not take a darwinian approach to this when state and local governments are involved.

The instability we would introduce through this would likely lead to corporate funded infrastructure being stood up to ensure remote workers maintain access to cloud computing. I believe the company town concept [0] would make a comeback.

My main fear is that we would inadvertently create remote private corporate fiefdoms that would lead to corporate scrip [1] being used for local goods and services and non-transferable to other regions. The flexibility of remote work would, if my fears are realized, lead to a world of less flexibility than we have today. Not more.

I don't know what a better driver is though. How does one generate desire for a traditionally undesireable location?

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/13/biden-infras... ("Biden pledges billions to rebuild cities ‘torn apart’ by highways decades ago")

Playing devil's advocate here. What causes housing shortage - more demand than supply. What causes more demand? - more people.

IMO an ever increasing population isn't a good thing if the economy can't absorb them at an equilibrium of demand and supply.

Canada a population of 40M bringing in 1M population in an year was a terrible move. Great for house prices but it takes it's toll.

It is to be said though that rebar in concrete does not last. It is also to be said concrete industry is highly innovative and there are alternatives in the market and in R&D to steel reinforcement. Fiber-reinforced concrete for example.

All the old structures that still are here used concrete without steel reinforcement. We also have such structures today. Dams are made out of roller compacted concrete that don't use steel. Those structures last hundreds of years. There's also shotcrete which is used to stabilize soil.

Why do housing prices go up? Partially inflation. But mostly because purchasing a house and renting it out is massively profitable, state subsidized, and a safe way to invest a store of wealth. Owners of capital seek out niches with good risk:value ratios. Look at housing prices over the last 5 years: even if your investment home sat empty, it's probably gone up 70% or more in price. Rent is just profit on top of those (also state-subsidized, way more than any other asset class!) asset gains. Mortgages that are all-but-guaranteed by the state allow even the least-qualified investors to massively leverage themselves into multiple million dollar properties.

The housing market is broken because moneymakers would rather maximize profits and render everyone else homeless than participate in a functional society. Consider a world where investors own 80% of housing in the USA: would they rent it all out? Or would the small number of corporations collaborate to keep _most_ units off the market, massively spiking the cost of housing and increasing the value of their portfolios? Our healthcare market suggests that when it comes to necessities, people are willing to pay literally any price. And our society has become more and more unequal in the past couple of decades, with the top 1% controlling as much capital as the bottom 50%. Logic dictates that the small number of that 1%, or perhaps the top 10%, if forced to pay insane rents for housing, will provide more profit than setting rent prices that everyone can afford.

I don't think we should vilify the average homeowner who doesn't want to end up underwater on their mortgage. We should vilify the government that has allowed market forces to increasingly distort the residential real estate market, to the point where we're starting to squeeze essential jobs like teacher, firefighter, waitress, and nurse out of the market entirely. Both for rentals and purchases.

Right now it doesn't matter if we double the US housing supply in the next year: it'll still get bought up by investors with far deeper pockets than the average family, because those investors have a strong incentive to prop up the real estate bubble -- they've got more skin in the game than anyone else. And they're less discerning, waiving inspections and paying 10% over asking in cash because if the house turns out to be a lemon they'll just absorb it into margins. Or write it off as a business expense -- depreciation!

The US housing market needs a massive overhaul to disincentivize residential property ownership for anything other than owner-dwellings, co-ops, and small, local landlords (to provide flexible rental options for those who move around too much to justify one-time buying costs). Much like a monopoly or oligopoly in the any other industry, large market forces in the housing industry have deeper pockets, more lawyers, more lobbyists, and more time than any small-time player. And those large market forces have a tendency to squeeze everyone else out.

Housing should, first and foremost, put a roof over the head of every person in the country before anyone profits at all. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either directly or indirectly profiting from homelessness.