How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing • Hacker News Board

Re: How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing

#81

Post by darksaints » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 2:32 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #75

darksaints wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody needs, or can even afford for that matter, infrastructure for people that don't exist yet. That's why that process never works. It is nothing more than a giant concern troll: you get to look like the smart one who insists on planning ahead for more development, knowing full well that nobody will seriously propose adding more infrastructure for people that don't exist yet. Luckily, you can build infrastructure…

It's a question of collecting money not building infrastructure. When 100k people move in and you need a new water treatment plant. Those 100k people should pay for the water treatment plant not everyone that lives in the area who also paid for the last water treatment plant. Further, you need to start building infrastructure now, not in 20 years when the new people have paid enough in taxes to pay for it. It's not l…

That's exactly the point, nobody is gonna pay to build infrastructure for people that don't exist yet. Especially if they don't want those people to exist. That's what's so ridiculously obvious about the concern troll. When a developer wants to build housing, it's always "no, we don't have the infrastructure to support it", yet a few days later when new infrastructure gets proposed, it's "we can't afford that!". Well shit, wouldn't it be nice if there were more people in the city that could help share that cost? But you blocked them out.

Requiring infrastructure to be built beforehand is nothing more than a way for incumbents to win in their quest to never let anything new get built.

Re: How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing

#82

Post by Retric » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 2:33 PM UTC

conanbatt wrote: post #80

Retric wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why should housing not be to governed by market forces? The limit is transportation/infrastructure. not buildings. You need NYC's roads, schools, and subway etc before block after block of 40+ floor building are viable. It'a very much a tragedy of the commons situation as a single high rise is fine but 100 of them are not. Unfortunately, most areas are regulated at the local level which while better than a free for…

> I would posit that the best solution is state level control + an infrastructure tax on new development. Charging ~30k per SFH might seem to make things more expensive but by allowing new entry to pay their own way let market forces work while adjusting for externalities. Why should the new pay the burden of the new and the old together?

The old has already paid for a lot of infrastructure or their would be no roads etc. New people need both new and old infrastructure their property taxes offset the use of old infrastructure, but the added cost of new should be paid for by the people who need it.

Re: How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing

#83

Post by Retric » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 2:35 PM UTC

darksaints wrote: post #81

Retric wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a question of collecting money not building infrastructure. When 100k people move in and you need a new water treatment plant. Those 100k people should pay for the water treatment plant not everyone that lives in the area who also paid for the last water treatment plant. Further, you need to start building infrastructure now, not in 20 years when the new people have paid enough in taxes to pay for it. It's not l…

That's exactly the point, nobody is gonna pay to build infrastructure for people that don't exist yet. Especially if they don't want those people to exist. That's what's so ridiculously obvious about the concern troll. When a developer wants to build housing, it's always "no, we don't have the infrastructure to support it", yet a few days later when new infrastructure gets proposed, it's "we can't afford that!". Well…

In my new system local government can't say no. Making that objection meaningless.

They simply collect money from new people to pay for it, because it's very much needed.

Re: How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing

#84

Post by russell_h » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 2:45 PM UTC

FreakyT wrote: post #37

maxerickson wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The planning commission in my small town recently blocked a $10 million apartment building that would have mostly been cheaper housing. Some directly stated that they didn't want the poor people living in the area, which is stupid because they already live there (demographically it's already the poorest zone in the county). A few others said they didn't want to disturb the historical character of the shabby, decades…

> The real reason is that they don't consider reducing housing prices a good outcome. I think this is the key. If you're a property owner, any outcome that reduces the value of your property is naturally a negative outcome. A rational economic actor, in that case, would always oppose anything that would reduce housing costs. It's a tough problem to combat, because what can be done? Barring property owners from partic…

Bar local government from implementing housing policy.

Re: How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing

#85

Post by Consultant32452 » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 2:53 PM UTC

zeth___ wrote: post #47

macspoofing wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Housing is in many places (mostly successful cities) the economic disaster. Fully exposed to financialization, business cycles, inflation prone. Rather than signalling to supply, prices adjust to whatever the median person can afford to pay Why should housing not be to governed by market forces? Housing shortages are due to regulations, from limiting new development outright, to limiting high density buildings, to h…

>Soviet housing never worked. More to the point the wait lists for apartments was measured in years (ripe for corruption). The buildings were shoddy and depressing (hope you like grey). Urban planning was haphazard and may or not may have corresponded to where people actually wanted to live. And yet there was no homelessness in the USSR. If that's a system that doesn't work, sign me up for two.

>And yet there was no homelessness in the USSR.

>If that's a system that doesn't work, sign me up for two.

Okay, step one is to starve millions of Americans to death in order to reduce demand. What's step 2 again?

Re: How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing

#86

Post by dalbasal » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 2:56 PM UTC

conanbatt wrote: post #79

dalbasal wrote: post #2

I think it's worth occasionally thinking of the "economy" in simple terms, especially for the wider middle class. There are relatively few broad categories that make up most of our economic lives. For most people the "economy" mostly consists of (0) their job/income (1) food/consumable (2) stuff/durables (3) transport (4) vital services: health, education, etc. (5) housing. 1 & 2 are well served by free markets, and…

Every market has its own peculiarities, and housing much like anything benefits enormously from behaving like a free one. The two single most important factors that make housing not behave efficiently as a market are zoning and taxation. Zoning because it puts limits on what can be built, which means the process to expand is now bureaucratic. The original article talks about how in tokyo zoning hasnt been a problem f…

>> Every market has its own peculiarities, and housing much like anything benefits enormously from behaving like a free one.

IDK if you can just take that as a premise. I think we've had a body of evidence, hard to refute, suggesting that laissez faire markets improve industrial output.. substantially. Not necessarily pure laissez faire, but the effective systems seems to have effective price systems, and private profits. Post 80s China, West vs east europe in the 70s & 80s.

There are other sectors with good evidence too.

Housing...? I think that we've seen laissez faire markets can build a certain type of city (car-suburb) in certain conditions (green-field). In cities that already exist... IDk. Housing in europe is not that much better now that socialism is gone. The stuff in the house, way better. The house, nope.

Free markets work well when there are nicely sloping supply and demand curves, plenty of competition, and coordination can happen via prices. Price systems can't coordinate the infrastructure & public service requirements of cities. They can't usually affect supply much. All they can do is "allocate" a limited supply, based on wealth. Allocation always happens, whether you use ration cards or markets. At this point, I think half the population might prefer ration cards.

I just don't think that housing is like furniture or smartphone manufacturing. I don't think you can refer to the same lines of reasoning.

Re: How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing

#87

Post by repsilat » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 2:59 PM UTC

FreakyT wrote: post #37

maxerickson wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The planning commission in my small town recently blocked a $10 million apartment building that would have mostly been cheaper housing. Some directly stated that they didn't want the poor people living in the area, which is stupid because they already live there (demographically it's already the poorest zone in the county). A few others said they didn't want to disturb the historical character of the shabby, decades…

> The real reason is that they don't consider reducing housing prices a good outcome. I think this is the key. If you're a property owner, any outcome that reduces the value of your property is naturally a negative outcome. A rational economic actor, in that case, would always oppose anything that would reduce housing costs. It's a tough problem to combat, because what can be done? Barring property owners from partic…

Building a big tower could decrease your property value, but upzoning and by-right construction should increase property values (because now the person who wants to buy your house wants to replace it with more than one house.)

Local government being able to stop individual projects rather than setting policy could be the problem. Maybe.

Re: How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing

#88

Post by saosebastiao » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 3:03 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #83

darksaints wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly the point, nobody is gonna pay to build infrastructure for people that don't exist yet. Especially if they don't want those people to exist. That's what's so ridiculously obvious about the concern troll. When a developer wants to build housing, it's always "no, we don't have the infrastructure to support it", yet a few days later when new infrastructure gets proposed, it's "we can't afford that!". Well…

In my new system local government can't say no. Making that objection meaningless. They simply collect money from new people to pay for it, because it's very much needed.

Maybe theoretically that works. But it's still not fair in the way that you think it is.

100k people move in and several things happen: you need a new sewage treatment plant, new some more transit capacity, new schools, etc. You are proposing that the new people pay for this expansion. But you are neglecting the ways in which you benefit.

By building more schools, each school serves a geographically smaller area, meaning school buses drive a lot less. You can also have higher student-to-administrative ratios (even if student to teacher ratios stay the same). By having more transit riders, your transit system might need additional capacity, but it will be using that transit capacity much more efficiently, because transit system is a step-fixed cost business, and more riders means more profitability (or less subsidy). You aren't getting any benefits to scale on the sewage treatment plant, but you will get benefits on the water provision: smaller and higher density housing uses far less water per person than single family homes with yards, etc.

So yeah, if new people move in, you're gonna need a new sewage treatment plant. If you charge the new residents for the new sewage treatment plant, are you gonna credit them for the improved efficiency of the transit system, school system, and water system? Or are you gonna try to keep those benefits to yourself?

Somehow I think its all just a bit easier to treat every person as the same whether they're new to the area or not.

Re: How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing

#89

Post by Qworg » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 3:03 PM UTC

conanbatt wrote: post #79

dalbasal wrote: post #2

I think it's worth occasionally thinking of the "economy" in simple terms, especially for the wider middle class. There are relatively few broad categories that make up most of our economic lives. For most people the "economy" mostly consists of (0) their job/income (1) food/consumable (2) stuff/durables (3) transport (4) vital services: health, education, etc. (5) housing. 1 & 2 are well served by free markets, and…

Every market has its own peculiarities, and housing much like anything benefits enormously from behaving like a free one. The two single most important factors that make housing not behave efficiently as a market are zoning and taxation. Zoning because it puts limits on what can be built, which means the process to expand is now bureaucratic. The original article talks about how in tokyo zoning hasnt been a problem f…

No zoning is awful - just look at Houston. Factories and power plants build abutting residential neighbourhoods without any communal impact discussions.

How do you properly price these impacts?

Re: How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing

#90

Post by snidane » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 3:03 PM UTC

macspoofing wrote: post #23

dalbasal wrote: post #2

I think it's worth occasionally thinking of the "economy" in simple terms, especially for the wider middle class. There are relatively few broad categories that make up most of our economic lives. For most people the "economy" mostly consists of (0) their job/income (1) food/consumable (2) stuff/durables (3) transport (4) vital services: health, education, etc. (5) housing. 1 & 2 are well served by free markets, and…

>Housing is in many places (mostly successful cities) the economic disaster. Fully exposed to financialization, business cycles, inflation prone. Rather than signalling to supply, prices adjust to whatever the median person can afford to pay Why should housing not be to governed by market forces? Housing shortages are due to regulations, from limiting new development outright, to limiting high density buildings, to h…

> Why should housing not be to governed by market forces?

Housing can and should of course be managed by market forces. Land usage rights distribution is where the problem lies.

For physical reasons there is no supply of new land. We'd have to wait until Mars or Moon colonization, which would pop the ongoing land price inflation.

Until then it's just a market in which the sooner you get in the better off you'll be. Which is why older generations and aristocracy benefit from such arrangement.

Later generations are just told to shut up and accept that you have to slave more and more each decade to be afford living. Until a revolution of some sort.

The funny thing is the misnomer 'to own land'. The only thing you own is a right to use the parcel, which is guaranteed by no one else but the population. And the population is not paid to provide such a service.

Payment for actual usage on ongoing basis is a solution. Such as land tax or government lease.

Worked wonders in countries founded on this principle.

https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/successfull-examples-of-land-...