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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

#731

Post by slothtrop »

giantg2 wrote: post #339
slothtrop wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> owners holding vacant units Check the vacancy rate in major cities. > people wanting/needing to live in specific locations Where the jobs are, yes. > individual preferences for bigger, fancier, better school, sfh, etc attributes Mixed density and smaller builds are almost nowhere to be found, and small developers have incredible difficulty securing loans from banks to build them. The large developers focus on expen…

"Where the jobs are, yes." "Check the vacancy rate in major cities." What are the vacancy rates in the smaller cities and rural areas? What are we doing to utilize the vacant units by bringing jobs to those areas? Is it really more effiecnt to build new housing rather than take advantage of the existing housing? Should we just concentrate everything in a few major cities and leave everyone else behind? Sure, reducing…

> What are the vacancy rates in the smaller cities and rural areas?

Also not amazing. Many have fled the cities to purchase properties in rural areas, which drives up the prices there too. This is particularly pronounced in Canada.

> What are we doing to utilize the vacant units by bringing jobs to those areas?

Bringing what jobs? You're going to move a company HQ to the middle of nowhere? You're going to move manufacturing there? Be serious.

> Should we just concentrate everything in a few major cities and leave everyone else behind?

"We"? These are municipalities with their own policies, and people go where they want. If they want to make a life in the middle of nowhere with few prospects, they are welcome to, but you cannot force people and their businesses there to satisfy some notion that it would make their lives "affordable".

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

#732

Post by shortsunblack »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #667
ducttapecrown wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Concrete sequesters carbon from air. In its lifetime, it is expected to sequester all the carbon associated with its emissions. And of course, concrete lasts much longer than any timber structure even in idealized conditions for timber.

And concrete industry is innovative. R&D is being done how to reduce emissions associated with kilns.

Concrete will long be zero carbon before forestry becomes sustainable. We have massive deforestation everywhere to prove that.

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

#733

Post by slothtrop »

shagie wrote: post #531
slothtrop wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Homelessness in San Francisco doesn't kill you from the elements in January or July. This would be equally true of other large cities in the southern half (including July for many), and none of them have anywhere near the same rate. Notwithstanding, northern cities have indoor shelters and if the cold mattered that much, the rates would be quite small, but they're not. In expensive cities like NY, homelessness rate…

https://www.axios.com/local/phoenix/2024/01/22/arizona-heat-... > Between the lines: The county is also trying to address other health factors that put people at increased risk for heat illness or death, including drug use and unsheltered homelessness, by embedding social workers at cooling centers to help with finding housing and harm-reduction strategies, Sunenshine says. > More than half of last year's heat deaths…

I'm well aware of Texas. It isn't the only other city around.

> Boston has 657.

This supports what I said. You also forgot NY.

And check the rankings by State. CA is second behind DC, and after that there is VT, OR, HI, NY, WA, ME.. and so on. Not exactly pristine weather year-round. The common factor is affordability.

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

#734

Post by tacocataco »

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…

Can't afford to go to Yellowstone. All my money goes to living expenses.

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

#735

Post by _heimdall »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #709
_heimdall wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that this is caused by two factors, both which would be really simple to fix if we cared enough. Easy access to large amounts of debt allow people to become heavily dependent to the value of their home, and we have been sold a story that your home is an investment that should play a large factor in your future net worth. Go back in history and two things are true, debt wasn't much less common in general and…

It's not the home itself that's the investment. It's the plot of land on which you are allowed to build a certain type of home and in an area where you are banned from doing other things that would reduce the home's value, like building high density housing. That's what you are investing in and voting to protect. But yes, that is the core of the issue. You need an off ramp for the people who bought into this Ponzi sc…

If you're getting at revoking building codes or zoning laws, I'm all for that!

Unfortunately I don't know what an off ramp would be other than a housing crisis similar to or larger than 2007-2008. A ton of "wealth" is locked up in real estate, and more importantly in mortgage debt. That can't be gently removed or wound down, the loans would have to be allowed to fail before we can move on from this idea that taking on huge amounts of debt is an investment in our future.

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

#736

Post by lelanthran »

m_fayer wrote: post #718
lelanthran wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the consolidation to make things cheaper isn't working out so well at making things cheaper, is it? You can't have both "everyone should want to live in the same place" and then also want "everyone should be able to afford to all stay in the same place". Highly contented areas aren't going to get cheaper even if you double the accommodation. The expensive areas are expensive because people either want to live th…

Our priors are different. We need to not cover all decently accessible land on the planet with either sprawl or agriculture. That's bad for the environment. People need to have affordable access to medium-to-high density housing for reasons of physical and mental and cultural health. Concentrating people in medium-to-high density housing makes it easier to achieve our decarbonization goals. We need to work backwards…

> People need to have affordable access to medium-to-high density housing for reasons of physical and mental and cultural health.

Physical and mental health is better out of the city than in it.

And cultural health is purely subjective: what on earth makes you think that what you consider good for culture is the same as what everyone else considers good culture.

This is what I meant by attempting to enforce your moral mores on everyone else.

> Concentrating people in medium-to-high density housing makes it easier to achieve our decarbonization goals

Well that's not the problem being discussed here, is it?

We're talking about how to make certain centers more affordable wrt housing.

Removing need is a good first step, as that lets people who want to live elsewhere, live elsewhere.

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

#739

Post by jghn »

bombcar wrote: post #487
ejb999 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, if I had to choose between buying a house built 50 years ago, or one today - I personally would take the older one. Nothing scares me more (relative to owning a house) than buying a brand new one. If it has been around for fifty years, it has been tested - may have some things wrong with them, but you usually know what you are dealing with and usually the skill was better and materials better. Heck, my pare…

I'll trade you my 40s house for a todayhouse any day of the week. Sure, there are bad builders and if you're having something custom built you need to educate yourself (or hire someone trustworthy to monitor), but there are so many things much better than a 50 year old house, at least if you're in a climate that has lots of degree days. Maybe in San Diego it doesn't matter as much. Of course, the shittiest 50 year ol…

It's a tradeoff, as you allude to at the end. Our house is a mid-1800s build. Thus it's safe to say that there's some survival bias at work and it was solid enough to persevere. There are things our friends with newer houses go through that we never experience. On other hand, we have our own issues. retrofitting modern benefits is difficult, at best.

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

#740

Post by foxyv »

BariumBlue wrote: post #661
Sophistifunk wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We definitely need to have both types of housing. We just want the freedom to choose.
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