Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage (opens in new tab)

This is sort of true, but confused, because it's land that has value, not housing, and the value of land increases when it's upzoned. [0]

[0] It's of course not increased when government unilaterally constructs low-income housing without reference to market conditions, which is why it's important to assure homeowners that this is not what upzoning entails.

That same logic applies to cryptocurrencies. Nobody actually cares about the "utility" of Bitcoin or Ethereum. An expensive cryptocurrency also means expensive fees which diminishes the net benefit of the cryptocurrency. So in practice homeowners and cryptocurrency speculators are making money off the collapse of their community.

Doesn't matter what you do, some places are more desirable than others to live in, and the end up attracting a premium.

> Homeowners demand the value of their home keep going up and they vote.

Bypassing the will of the voters is ... difficult. It's not impossible to force your moral mores onto voters who don't want it, but it sure ain't easy, and it ain't easy for good reason!

> 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 that needs fixing.

The "convincing" is never going to be persuasive enough to convince the specific voters that they need to take a financial hit of several years of salaries "for the greater good".

The only permanent fix is to make less desirable places more desirable. With remote work a large and significant percent of the population can just buy somewhere cheap and far off from where they work.

By draining the currently highly contended places of workers, those accommodations will cost less, and the migrating workers will pay less anyway because they are, by definition, buying in a cheaper CoL area.

Highly contended centers that everyone migrates to is going to expensive no matter what you do. it doesn't matter if you double the housing in the next year, the demand will grow to fill it at current prices anyway.

The only solution is to reduce the contention for those centers. It's not a full solution, but it's a damn good start: leave the downtown offices all empty of workers and prices will adjust to reflect reality.

Or phrased more succinctly:

What's needed is to Legalize Housing!

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 homes were more often built to last. I honestly don't understand considering most homes built in the US today as an investment. The average home is poorly built using cheap materials that won't last. Most major components of the home will need to be replaced in a couple decades if not sooner, meaning you're left chasing large repairs and remodels when you should be paying off the loan and building equity.

I'd propose that the best way to solve the housing crisis is for us to stop treating it as a get rich quick scheme.

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.

Maybe we should just figure out different incentives to make housing people profitable?

if this is true won't market forces attract more builders? If there is no promise of a healthy profit (and with growing material prices worldwide you can't keep property prices flat) - there won't be a lot of construction? If anything you need to address construction materials shortage/supply issues.

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.

now let's talk about the demand side

s/homeowners/landlords/

There's also a completed mass timber building on UW campus, on a grass field adjacent to the cherry groves that will be in bloom March 20th.

> There are still people who have been roofing for 50 years and refuse to change a single thing they do and learned 50 years ago.

This is at best a huge exaggeration. For one thing, roofing is not a 50-year career. If you know any 70 year old roofers, they've either been retired or moved on to other things decades ago - the toll that roofing takes on a body makes it a 10-15 year career at best.

Secondly, I've been working with roofers a lot lately - I have a very old style of roof that was common 50 years ago, and it's very hard to find people who can work on it, because everyone wants to do things the modern way.

A big part of the point of that Construction Physics Substack is to explore these factors around innovation, productivity, and process change in the construction sector. I don't think it's really quite as simple as you imply: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-its-hard-to-innov..., https://www.construction-physics.com/p/sketch-of-a-theory-of...

Sometimes practices do reflect real constraints, rather than just path-dependence.

Counterpoint: I spent several years in construction, and the assistant superintendent on the project, who was at the end of a ~50 year career, often complained that so much had changed he had no idea what was going on. The tools, machines, materials, techniques, schedules, laws, etc. all changed so dramatically he was really only able to remain expert at the human elements.

Melting down trash that will offgas for the next few decades and putting it in close proximity to people sounds like a great way to boost cancer rates.

> Wood is fantastic material. But using half a forest to build a 2000sqft house is certainly not the direction we should be going, we should be finding ways to build with 1/2 the amount of wood we currently use

Wood is inherently a carbon sink. I suspect stimulating forest production via added lumber demand (similar to how Christmas tree demand stimulates tree farms) would be a net pollution win, albeit potentially at the cost of a nice looking forest somewhere.

Timber is a crop. Wanting to build houses with less wood is like wanting to make clothes with less cotton or wool; there’s no fundamental reason to economize on a renewable resource.

Or look into building with earth, as used to be the practice: https://www.calearth.org/ and https://www.rael-sanfratello.com/made/mud-frontiers

"The house gotta breathe" is something you still hear people uncritically parroting, to the point where it's become a trope in net zero construction.

> it's the construction industry.

Any industry that warranties it's work. They're far less likely to take on new and disruptive technologies if there's no guarantee they're going to be supported for the necessary amount of time.

> we should be finding ways to build with 1/2 the amount of wood we currently use.

Different houses have different requirements. Some roofs see snow, others don't. Some roofs see hurricane winds, others don't.

I’m not sure if this is entirely fair. I know people in the trades that have updated their technique and tools every few years the same way a software engineer would. They may be more resistant to change, but local building codes and such inherently force tradesmen to adapt at a certain point.

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 parents house is now 250 years old, and still as solid as can be.

A brand new one where the builder was trying to save money by using the latest and greatest techie products, and may or may not how to install it properly? No thanks.

To each their own though - I know plenty of folks that wouldn't even consider buying a 'used' house.

Indeed! Because none of this exists!

https://www.equipter.com/equipter-articles/roofing-tools-tha...

> If there is one industry that is the most resistant to change, it's the construction industry. There are still people who have been roofing for 50 years and refuse to change a single thing they do and learned 50 years ago.

I think your comment is misguided and lacks reflection. Change for the sake of change is never good because by definition there is no upside. Construction technology is also expected to be reliable and have long service life, and traditional techniques ensure that by the fact that the are tried and true.

>refuse to change a single thing they do and learned 50 years ago

they weren't using nail guns 50 years ago, and they surely are now.

What rural area enforces building codes strictly?

And what market are you in where a double wide is 300k?

And why are you doing anything with asbestos if it's a new build?

There is a lot in this that doesn't really add up to me.

We didn't have to worry about code, because it's not enforced by the state, but local governments. We did build to code though.

A double wide was 125k fully installed. We chose to build a little smaller stick frame for 100k.

Asbestos. Um. Why?

And spray foam insulation is a terrible choice, unless the wall is already up. Why would you not do the much much cheaper blown in?

If you are building from scratch, why do you need an asbestos survey? What are you surveying?

And does your state really require spray foam insulation and solar? Or does it require an R-value for insulation and spray foam is the easiest way to get there with your design?

Spray foam insulation: $27k

Got to say using spray foam to insulate the wall cavities instead of using external insulation over the structural elements is about the worst idea ever.

Also how much solar can you buy for $27k? Enough to supply 60kwh a day to run a heat pump.

When land is cheap, do what the locals do - out buildings abound!

It can be worth your while to sit down and map out house areas, purposes, and requirements, and change as many of them as you can to avoid mandatory features.

> Tipping fees

What is a tipping fee

Ability for timber to sequester carbon is really complicated. Most studies that arrive at positive conclusions for industry ignore land-use change associated emissions. I.e razing an old-growth forest only to plant plantation trees. Old growth forests sequester carbon in the soil and their roots. They also allow for an ecosystems that itself sequester carbon (various bacteria). Forestry IS not currently sustainable managed. All the IKEA and FSC scandals attest to that. European old growth forests are for some reason disappearing.

It's really irresponsible to gesture at this vague idealist future when the present is anything but. Yes, technically wood sequesters carbon. Yes, when trees rot and decompose they release carbon. Yes, if you turn the tree into timber or furniture that carbon will be then locked for very least couple decades.

No, forestry is not sustainably managed. Nowhere close. Europeans are razing down their old growth forests for heating. And wood pellets have higher carbon emissions than coal per unit of energy produced. See NYTimes coverage: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/07/world/europe/...

Wood does not last longer than concrete. We’ve got concrete around from thousands of years ago and you can make it self-healing.

Owners holding vacant units is not a significant cause of the housing shortage. Overly restrictive zoning and subjective reviews exploited by NIMBYs explains almost all of it.

Except we know it's a building issue. Housing starts are lower than they were in 2000 despite adding 50 million in population.

Vacancy is good - higher vacancy is related to lower prices. Vacancy rates are the lowest they've been in decades.

We just need to build.

> 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 expensive projects that have more overhead and checks, and even there they don't build that much because they are few in number. People would opt for mixed density were it actually available.

Zoning and regs are actually among the factors that make certain projects riskier, so reform helps in this regard. Just see Minneapolis. Zoning reform works. It works so well that there is some push back from NIMBYs in those cities pissed off that their areas are changing fast.

Raise prop taxes for non-rented vacation units by 150%

Raise prop taxes for rentals by %350.

Raise prop taxes for airbnbs by %500.

Everyone will own a home, and home prices will plummet as people try to unload extremely expensive property taxes. And if it doesn't work, double my percentages. Or just make it 100k per year. Those people crazy enough to keep holding them, will fund the creation of homeless housing. DV's are just landlords and other types of bottom feeders.

I would love to see a "landlord tax" that squeezes owners to either live in, rent out, or sell.

Mass timber isn’t meant to replace stick built buildings that are 5 stories or less, it’s meant to replace reinforced concrete for buildings over 5 stories, up to around ~25 stories [0]

[0] https://www.fs.usda.gov/inside-fs/delivering-mission/apply/w...

> Filling the cavity with solid wood variously solves such problems.

Solves some problems, sure, but not heat/cold. Wood has just over a third the R-value of fiberglass batting, IIRC. Better to increase the cavity size and uncouple the inner and outer studs.

>...Canada a population of 40M bringing in 1M population in an year was a terrible move.

Do you have a citation for that number? Most sources say Canada takes in about 1/2 that:

>...Currently, annual immigration in Canada amounts to almost 500,000 new immigrants – one of the highest rates per population of any country in the world. As of 2023, there were more than eight million immigrants with permanent residence living in Canada - roughly 20 percent of the total Canadian population.

https://www.statista.com/topics/2917/immigration-in-canada/#...

> What causes more demand? - more people.

Also, a speculative boom, cheap credit, and a burgeoning short term rental market among other things.

the problem isn't the people, is that most of the country ranges from "fairly uninhabitable" to "dangerously uninhabitable".

foreigners aren't moving to rural Manitoba, they're all going to a handful of areas, most of which are in the furthers south parts of the country (e.g. Vancouver, and Greater Toronto), which also happen to have the mildest weather.

Australia is seeing a similar trend -- influx of people, not much (viable) land.

also keep in mind this demand is simply to keep up with population loss, and demand on the system for pensions, healthcare, and support for the Boomers. the Liberal party is ultimately still pro-capitalism, and they need to balance out these dying old people; "stonks only go up", so we need more consumption.

There’s plenty of land, it’s just typically zoned and used poorly, designed to accommodate cars instead of people.

49% of San Bernidino’s central city area is dedicated to parking.

There's plenty of land if it were legal to build on it, and the permitting process didn't take forever.

There's plenty of land, it's just not where people want to be.

Around here houses are going up, land is being subdivided, everything is moving.

> It was fine finished and lovely from the top; the bottom was moreso to my eye: you could see how woven together it was and how far from perfect the individual boards were.

This seems like a fitting description of society in general.

I had an addition done where they had to bolt LVL and steel plate together for a rather large span with cantilever. That bit of support isn't ever moving.

You don't even have to do that - a lot of 3/4/5 story style flats (can be owned or rented) that are not concrete soviet blocks would do wonders in most cities. See: western Europe.

The Chinese/Soviet style of a tower in a park builds tall, but it doesn't actually tend to give more density than more US style dense areas with 3-5 stories mostly filling a block. With the Chinese approach you get better views, but with the US approach you get more walkable neighborhoods and I'll take the later.

Has someone on onion talks said it before "the idea is there, it just needs implementation".

https://youtu.be/DkGMY63FF3Q

But not like the UK and US social housing / projects. They need to be in master planned, well thought out and connected communities.

// To solve the housing crisis you have to build up like the Soviets

My family lived in a communal apartment[0] for about 30 years in the USSR waiting for a place of our own. Whatever definition of "housing crisis" you are operating with, is heaven on earth compared to the Soviet housing reality.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment

Bricks are a nonstarter on the West coast because of earthquake safety is what I was told as a kid in California.

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 literally grows itself? I agree with your point that destroying all the forests to build housing would be a bad idea, but we can and do sustainably log---all you have to do is plant some trees and wait!

Mass timber construction will reduce the amount of lumber needed for housing. A large timber 100 unit multi-family dwelling will use WAY less material than a hundred single family homes.

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

Homelessness > shanty towns

apparently

The article points out a range of tradeoffs for mass timber (and I'm not arguing that mass timber should by itself solve the construction cost issue - it's more interesting as one more very different direction). More directions will be helpful for finding more cost effective solutions for different buildings.

For one thing mass timber allows far more floors than current "5 over 1" construction - because of better fire behavior. In current cities that is certainly a useful feature. At least in cities that do grant construction permits...

That should be helpful even in cities that grant ENOUGH construction permits for that to influence unit affordability.

Not sure the article ("original post") makes that claim either. It just asserts that mass timber is (probably) not in fact cheaper, and has not been/is not going to accelerate building of more housing. A solution, i.e. what "we desperately need", is not covered in the article.

It's a false equivalence, light-wood framing is typically used in single-family homes or shorter (<5 stories) multi-family homes.

Steel and concrete is typically used for 10-20 story multifamily housing.

Mass timber is being pushed by the timber manufacturers as an alternative to steel and concrete, no one's seriously proposing you build your 2-story 2500 sqft home out of laminated beams instead of studs, trusses, and joists.

You can do things with it that you can't do otherwise. For instance, you can create extremely large spans that weren't otherwise possible in wood framed construction. This creates really cool opportunities when designing the interior of a home.

Framing can be done with LVL as well and the benefit is that it's very stiff. This means a better frame when you have high ceilings and the ability to go 24" off center so you can have more insulation. Can do this with 2x6 as well.

3d printed houses exist. Why not crank out a ton of em in the middle of nowhere and build dedicated passenger rail into a metro location?

The common argument against this is that these buildings were not built for residential units (plumbing, electrical, building codes) and bringing them up to residential code is prohibitively expensive. This is not untrue, but I think this is a cop-out.

What we need to do is create the systems that allow us to develop office spaces into residential spaces instead of complaining they don't exist. Create building technologies that safely convert these spaces into residential. Create the building codes that allow these conversions to be done safely but also economically. The demand is there, the supply is there, and our downtowns need this.

We’ve heard from people in construction that this is often a tear down situation. The needs of office space and apartments are very different. Somehow they see this as different from the old warehouse-loft conversion process.

This can work but many buildings are unsuitable. Office buildings tend to have too much interior space where it’s difficult to give all residential units access to natural light. There are also differences in building code for safety issues.

Wood framing can be just as fireproof as steel and concrete. This is why drywall is so popular for interior finishing.

Actually CLT is wonderful for one story house. The foundation becomes much cheaper because of walls being low weight. This can massively reduce home cost (as concrete is expensive). The bad thing is that CLT itself is more expensive. The costs need to go down. Edit: I realize I made a mistake here. Americans use stick framing, which already is low weight. This was in reference to bricks and concrete (cast on site or pre-cast) construction. CLT allows to use its members much like concrete (slabs get mounted exactly same way as concrete slabs, etc). In such sense CLT is much better than stick framing.

I bet there are some single story houses with glulams. Certainly plenty of two-story houses do. I have a 30 inch tall glulam that spans 35 feet across my garage holding up a good chunk of the second floor.

I don't think there's much, if any, of an over supply of apartments. The people I've seen who try to teach vacancies show that new buildings get to nearly full occupancy within a year or so. That's pretty reasonable if you need to rent a few hundred units at once.

If anything, there's a massive under-supply of 3+br apartments large enough for families, due to double-loaded corridor designs that are almost required to meet fire codes. The only good spot for 3brs is in the corners, so you get at most 4 per floor.

> There's a shortage of detached single family homes in desirable cities and suburbs.

You have this backwards, it's essentially physically impossible for this to not be the case. Past a certain point you just cannot squeeze more detached single family homes into a reasonable distance from a city. Single family homes, suburbs, and the required car-centric transit they require are massively space and transit inefficient. If you want there to be affordable detached single family homes within a reasonable distance to a desirable city your best bet is to push for increased density within and around the core of the city, with walkable streets and excellent public transportation. The increase in livability and affordability in the center encourages more people who might otherwise be pushed out to stay and leaves more single family homes for those who really want them.

There is absolutely not an oversupply of apartments in my city, nor in Seattle proper. it should be non-controversial to let the market supply as many apartments in the locations people want to be as people are willing to rent. Especially any regulatory changes that enable family sized apartments to be built at relatively lower cost should be encouraged.

Even if there were an “oversupply”, if someone could build new apartment buildings at 50% the cost with larger, safer, more comfortable units than most apartments nearby, it would drive rents down for existing buildings while still allowing the developer to make a profit. We should be enabling these opportunities as much as possible.

There’s generally not room to build the desired number of detached single family homes (with desirable lot sizes) in desirable cities and suburbs. Which is why you end up with exurbs and hour long commutes.

We need to build higher density housing in the desirable areas, which is often disallowed by zoning.

There will always be a shortage of detached single family homes in desirable cities and suburbs, because that style of housing takes up a great deal of land. The only way out is up.

The incredible thicket of state, county, and municipal rules all layer and combine to make housing incredibly difficult to build. It's the technical debt of the material world.

Seriously, look up your local zoning rules. It's not "you can't build a chemical plant next to a preschool" like it's so often portrayed. It's minimum size for the lot, max square footage of the house based on lot size, max/min frontage, height allowances, max garage sizes, minimum number of trees, number of windows.... etc.

It really just goes on like that, and then to top it off, you can be totally compliant with code and still not be approved. Either because of local incompetence (building permits stuck "in review" for years) or because of local opposition.

> because the government no longer functions as intended

This seems contrary to what you're stating - local government exists to represent the interests of local residents. Protecting those residents from external forces is completely in-line with their mandate.

> If they don't like it, they can move.

A person who owns land somewhere should have more sway over local politics than a megacorp developer from another state or country. How about that developer moves their project somewhere else if they don't like it?

> If they don't like it, they can move.

Why doesn't the same logic apply to people who don't like the high prices of housing in some areas? There's plenty of affordable housing in the country, but it doesn't all exist in the places people want to live.

A major issue with housing is that it is a primary driver of wealth for many Americans. Obviously, this comes at the expense of our fellow Americans who do not own a home. I was able to buy shortly out of college (1% down loan) so rising home prices don’t impact me as much since my home has also gone up in value. I was able to sell the first house and roll that equity into the next house.

As long as it’s the main store of wealth for your average citizen, there will be very little incentive to change that.

You seem to be coming from the perspective that people who don't live in a place should have more say over the nature of that place than those who do live there.

To put it in your terms, why does it make more sense to tell existing residents "your place has to change and you can move if you don't like it" vs channel the new residents to other places where more housing is available and is available cheaper.

Well, depends on the level of government you're talking about. If it is local, then if local homeowners (who are local voters) don't want the development, it is eminently 'democratic.'

>If they don't like it, they can move.

Can't you say the same for people trying to move in? There's plenty of places in the US that you can still get a house for under 200k.

> the government no longer functions as intended.

On the other hand it seems like it's functioning exactly as intended. The interests of the people who live in <area> and who elect the city council are being represented just as they should be.

The argument could equally be if you don't like it, build somewhere else.

Do you believe communities have any right to self-determination? I would feel a bit peeved if I and all my neighbors built this nice neighborhood and then am told too bad people really like your neighborhood so we're letting Alliance Residential buy up a bunch of property for a huge apartment complex. The neighborhood I grew up in is going through this. They were a bunch of lower-middle class people who bought houses in a "rough" area because it's what they could afford, made it nice and then developers saw dollar signs. They don't have the kind of pull to keep them out so it's about to get steamrolled with gentrification.

  If they don't like it, they can move.

It is funny how people criticize the US "colonialism" yet feel entitled that they should be able to move into any neighborhood and drive out current inhabitants.

Strong homeowner protection is almost universal throughout the developed world, including regions where the cost of housing is low relative to wage levels, so whilst it may be true to say that expensive parts of the US and Europe are homeowner friendly and have restrictive planning laws it doesn't indicate any actual correlation. New York isn't super expensive because other places take advantage of greater ability to build to a higher density.

In most lower middle income countries with relatively limited property rights, urban housing that can actually be bought is actually much more expensive relative to local median incomes, though these do have more options in the form of dorms and slums...

> The solution is terrifyingly simple: don't allow existing residents to block new housing developments. If they don't like it, they can move.

The problem with new housing development is that only large corporate investors are allowed to develop. I am very NIMBY as it relates to building apartments next-door, because I am prohibited from building apartments on my lot.

I'm all for reducing land use restrictions, but it should be done in a neutral fashion that doesn't advantage those with the capital to hire real-estate lawyers.

I'd argue the solution is even simpler and has been known for decades.

Land value tax.

LOL. So people who have been living in an area should have no say but people from planning to move must have a say.

> This will probably never happen in the U.S

Thank god for that.

Maybe checkout in other countries like Canada, UK, France, Germany or even eastern europe, further in Asia on how they are doing on housing front. For sure they couldn't be having housing policies as bad as US.

a) What major population center does not have distorted (high) housing costs relative to income?

b) Does the answer to a) have slums?

> The solution is terrifyingly simple: don't allow existing residents to block new housing developments. If they don't like it, they can move.

I think that most jurisdictions already have the legal tools they need to put the public good in front of special interest groups, in the form of eminent domain laws.

It's just that the policial will is just not there.

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 also the cost of infrastructure, and the cost of transport. The reason we have a housing crisis is because as much as we all love single family homes, they aren't universalizable. If everyone were to live in a single family home, then after the transportation infrastructure reaches capacity, there is a cascade of issues that leads a region becoming totally unaffordable and ultimately unsustainable.

I would recommend the Strong Towns organization for anyone more interested in the interaction between long-term affordability issues and surburban infrastructure problems: https://www.strongtowns.org

I know it's hard to believe that many people are simply happier living in their own single family home and have little desire for the urban lifestyle.

I would argue more than that the housing crisis is an “urban crisis” and a “fraying of the social fabric” crisis.

By the first I mean the continued destruction of smaller towns and semi-rural areas. Even if single family homes are more expensive to build than multi family apartments, the fact is we have ridiculous amounts of space in this country. But most people for various reasons don’t want to live where the space and “affordable” housing is or can be built. The more our population drifts to major metro areas for economic reasons and the more jobs go to where the people are, the worse housing affordability will be, even if we build huge sky rises and cram everyone into Tokyo size apartments.

By the second I mean that people want their own bars, theaters and restaurants at home because in a lot of cases going out to the shared versions of these sucks, sometimes a lot. There’s an overall lack of respect for being in public that just seems to permeates the American culture right now.

In my own experience just this past week someone was completely oblivious to the fact that I was leaving a parking space and their doors were open and they were flitting about making leaving unsafe. It only broke through to them when a gust of wind caught their door and slammed it into my car, to which they hurriedly apologized and swore it would “buff out” and then ran away.

Or the taxi driver who parked in the middle of the lot lane waiting for their fare blocking the whole exit.

There was the restaurant patron loudly having an argument on their cell phone. The cashier who was so stoned or distracted they needed 3 tries to get the order right. Or the waiter who got into a literal shouting match with their co-worker to which management did nothing but watch.

The theater floor is stickier than a fly trap and the seats aren’t much better. The food is awful, and over priced. The cost of just a few games of pool at the bar is crazy, even before factoring in your drink will cost you 4-6x what you could get it for at home and be lukewarm.

Why would people want to go to these shared places or live where they can’t have the space for their own version when this is more and more the norm.

>> Everyone has their own bar, restaurant, theatre, and community center.

As opposed to all the "urban lifestyle" people who readily offload their basic needs onto others. Some people are happy cooking their own basic foods. Others want them to be prepared, and their dished cleaned, by a team. Some people are happy with a beer fridge. Others want to go to a bar and pay a young person to smile and flirt while concocting a fancy drink in a silly glass. To each their own. But having a basic kitchen in an apartment is not a luxury any more than having a cupboard for cleaning supplies, a service that can also be outsourced by those too lazy to clean up after themselves. A desire for a modicum of self-sufficiency is not a vice.

It was facinating to see a pub ran by a landlord at the bottom floor of an 11 floor student dwelling with 16 rooms, 4 toilets, 4 shower a shared area with giant kitchen per floor. Each had something like 3 bar shifts usually taken up by someone else, the thing was "open" all night and beer on the tap was much cheaper than the store. It paid no rent, needed no licenses and didn't have any tax obligations. As no one knew what to do with the pinball profit it was frequently not allowed to pay for beer.

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 for us. The rest are much harder to fake out. It's possible to have those things in the city, but only if you are extremely wealthy. For everybody else, it's a life of being tolerated by the people who own and control your world, so long as you keep paying out most of what you earn, don't make any noise or waves, and aren't interested in doing anything that doesn't already have the required space or vendor already within your designated, walkable, or public transport-safe area.

Denser housing sounds good in theory; I support it myself and vote accordingly. The problem is that it comes with other people. The more immediate neighbors you have, the greater the risk that one of them will be an antisocial asshole who makes life hell for everyone else. You're going to occasionally get drug dealers (or other habitual criminals), aggressive dog owners, serious mental illness cases, couples that have screaming arguments every night, motorcyclists who rev their engines at 5:00 AM, etc. And the police/code enforcement/apartment manager usually won't do anything to fix the problem. It only takes one bad neighbor experience to send a family fleeing to a single-family house in the exurbs regardless of costs or environmental impacts. So far I haven't seen the YIMBYs propose serious solutions to the antisocial behavior problem, or even acknowledge that it's an obstacle to their goals.

Not everyone likes to share a wall. I'm glad there are options, since I'm one of them. I can walk from my single family home to nearby community centers, restaurants, kitchens, theaters, and bars in 15 minutes. Not everyone likes to be that close to that stuff, and that's okay. I'm glad we have options, since I'm not one of them. There's plenty of space to build new homes of all types. It's an entitlement crisis.

I don’t think sfh have been foisted on us by stupid or conniving urban planners.

It’s more interesting to ask why people don’t want to live in multi family dwellings. For example, if hearing your neighbors is a big part of the problem, would building code requiring sound baffling in every multi family start tipping the scales? Or if crazy neighbors was the issue, what about legal structures that let residents approve of new owners? (Yes, risky territory, but humor me for a second)

Multi family is generally seen as less appealing. So if you want people to live in multi family, how do we make it appealing?

You can see small attempts at dealing with the problems in e.g. the elimination of shared metering, which invited freeloader problems that simply don’t exist with individual metering.

Those amenities are rarely used in North America. The problem is zoning, fire, and building codes make it impractical to build a bunch of 2.2k square foot units instead of the current mix of 500, 700 and 900 square foot units. Double stairway requirements are a big onerous regulation, especially when we already mandate sprinklers. What we need for families are more developments like the interwar upper west side in NYC, 4 bedrooms, natural light, bigger than 1.5k square feet, single stairway.

The crisis is not related to the cost of building housing. It's due to regulatory hurdles preventing houses from being built.

Outside of literal college dorms, where can you find apartments without kitchens?

Partially, yes, but you have to mix in the whole idea of treating your house or houses as your retirement plan, which is a screwy, self-perpetuating economic system. It takes a lot of capital to construct an apartment building, and greed seems the only way capital is directed towards housing in the US.

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.

> We are building massive 3-4k sq. ft. homes for families of four [...] Everyone has their own bar, restaurant, theatre, and community center. [...] the required square footage per person drops by huge amounts when people can walk to nearby community centers, restaurants, kitchens, theaters, and bars.

Most families don't live in 3-4k sq homes. The average newly built house today is a little over 2k sqft, and most houses are not newly built. Unless you are seriously stretching their definitions, most do not have their own "bar", "restaurant", "theater", and "community center".

A house or apartment should follow a kind of "fractal" pattern that mirrors private and public spaces that encircle it or that it contains. A town should have a town center. This is the public square. For towns large enough, you'll have neighborhoods with squares or parks that are the public meeting place for the neighborhood, but more "private" in relation to the town. Each neighborhood is divided into housing units. An apartment building should have a public space for the apartment buildings, like a courtyard, that is proper to the building, but private in relation to the neighborhood. Within each apartment building, there should be a living room + dining area that function as the public space of the apartment, but which is private in relation to the apartment building (the same principle holds if we replace "apartment building + apartment unit" with "individual house"). The ultimate private space is the bedroom.

Of course, this is idealized, but this is a principle we see in traditional architecture and one that makes sense and respects human nature and supports human flourishing instead of trying to impose some weird, inhuman, Procrustean invention on people to check off some boxes. The things you mention, like bars, restaurants, theaters, and community centers, would appear chiefly in town and neighborhood centers. But they don't replace the living room, the kitchen, and the dining room.

EDIT: Ah, and I would define "neighborhood" in terms of walkability. I should be able to get to the town square by walking in a reasonable about of time.

Stop trying to imply we should be in these 600 sqft shoeboxes where the only escape is to go outside in a dirty urban city and walk around.

I want a large home I can decorate, with lots of light to keep me happy, and space to invite friends and host a variety of activities, a garden I can tend to and see animals, or just be at peace enjoying the quiet tranquility of not being attached to a neighbor.

If I had no choice but to live stuck in a tiny apartment all my life – I’d just kill myself.

I live in a multi housing building and its a NIGHTMARE. A drug dealer moved in next door and he smokes all kinds of synthetic drugs 24/7 the shared walls and gaps are so thin the drugs leak in to my home. The person above me has some sort of mental condition, he wakes up at 12:45 am and starts drumming the floor with his hands, runs around and moves the furniture all night everyday. There isnt a damn thing i can do about this other than pack and move. the hoa is an exercise in futility. I am now literally nauseously averse to “muti-unit” housing.

There is no crisis. Its all artifical to keep ppl poor.

Infrastructure is centralized, if it was more spread out everyone could afford a nice house with own big garden and vegetables field.

Stop making it sound like its the ppl issue they want to live near nature and have own land.

Too high density of ppl per square meter has huge disadventages in well being of those ppl and their overall health.

There is so much unused land in the world - trying to say we dont have it is silly.

Our leaders just FORCE us to flock to cities cpz its cheaper on infrastructure.

No one wants to live in a condo. Shitty coops where your neighbors are a wall away, no land/backyard, no hobbies, no place for your kids to run around etc. No ones cares about a community center/shitty shared space. If you’re outside a medium sized city in the US, you’re less than 10 mins from restaurants and bars from your multiple acre sized property.

> We are building massive 3-4k sq. ft. homes for families of four because all of their food, entertainment, and social needs are not met by their community.

You assume it's a necessity thing instead of a desire+wealth thing. Yet the history of the wealthy and powerful "escaping" to large estates goes back centuries (millenia!).

Additionally, the housing affordability crisis is also happening in European cities with 4+ story buildings everywhere and shops and restaurants on every corner.

If you misunderstand what exactly the problem is and what exactly is being desired and what is being purchased then any sort of "build it and they come" attempts to provide alternatives will be limited by the misconceptions, and any sort of enforce-through-policy change will by stymied by lack of popular support.

> because all of their food, entertainment, and social needs are not met by their community

An existing trend that was accelerated by years of lockdown.

The housing crisis remains about human greed. That's all it is.

What a dystopic vision, living in 50sqm pods and having our basic needs attended to by market participants, eschewing all self-reliance.

Vacancy rates are misleading and includes things like being unoccupied briefly between owners or houses that are unlivable in areas with no buyers. The number of homes where people want them is quite low, there is simply a shortage.

Houses as an asset is a major contributor for sure. It's long been a rival to stocks or exceeded it as an investment and makes a powerful political base. But it also includes a lot of people who view their primary residence as one and aren't landlording other properties.

It's hard to find solutions to this that are politically and socially viable. To create more homes requires capital and doing so will lower the value of existing assets. I think people reach for easy solutions because they don't want to face some deep contradictions in our way of life.

I hope we can be better about addressing issues like this. Taxing empty houses, like most negative incentives, fails to address the existing incentives that cause the problem in the first place which will lead to different market imbalances.

The biggest challenge we face is that the best way to protect wealth is to own assets and properties are assets we can live in. If wealth didn't naturally sublimate this would be less of an issue. Likewise if it were easier to protect wealth by doing something productive, it would happen.

Where to even start with this? Homes occupied by renters are not being "hoarded." At most this is a concern about homeownership rate, which is not nothing, but a distant second to whether people have places to live or not. Because rents are tethered to incomes, the rental market is a relief valve for speculative excesses in the ownership market. That's why it costs less than half as much to rent as to buy the same property in San Francisco right now. Landlords are not getting a return from collecting rent, they're getting a return from appreciation due to scarcity. And the more concerned voters get about capitalism and inequality, the surer a bet that scarcity becomes.