[zbrozek]

This sounds fast for California. It's taken me about two years to get a site development permit to edit my roofline a bit to make it better at shedding water. I don't have a building permit yet. I desperately want to move out of this state, but my wife (who isn't handling any part of the project or our costs of living) likes the weather and so we're stuck here.

I think we could fix the housing shortage turbo-quick if we passed a constitutional amendment that offered property rights to landowners. But owning land right now is almost meaningless. It's the right to ask for permission to do something on that land, and local governments exist seemingly for the sole purpose of preventing any change whatsoever.

It's probably one of only a handful of root causes of American ossification and cost disease.

[ryanSrich]

Completely agree. I bought land in 2019 with the hope of building. Not only is the government painfully slow, no builder will take on the project unless the budget is north of $5m. That’s what I was told. $5m and they’ll sign a contract to start in 2025. Anything less than $5m and they aren’t interested. This is the case for around 6 builders I’ve talked to. I’m probably going to just end up selling the land.

[mensetmanusman]

At those prices it might make sense to fly out workers from the Midwest and house them.

[ryanSrich]

There isn’t anywhere for them to live. Luxury ski towns are feeling this pretty hard throughout Colorado.

Get this. If the average rent is north of $3k/month for a 1bd. And the average house costs $3.7m. Where is a ski lift worker making minimum wage supposed to live? Or the person running the only local gas station? Or the food service workers? They can’t live outside of these towns because the prices are still within 50% of the prices above. It’s just entirely unsustainable.

Now take this and apply it to larger cities, where even teachers making $50-$80k/yr can’t afford to live within an hour commute.

I’m all for a free market, but at some point you need to protect critical workers, and the only way I can think to do that is through rent control and special housing programs. Most places have neither unless you’re borderline homeless poor. Middle class continues to be gutted.

[bubblethink]

>the only way I can think to do that is through rent control and special housing programs.

This is a part of the problem. Rent control is such a half assed solution that makes everything illiquid and worse for anyone not already locked into a good deal. It's similar to the deal that incumbents have in ownership. Look at SF. Rent control or not, you will have to pay 3k+ for a 1 BR in a 100 year old building with no appliances, poor heat, and no parking. Only people who have been living in rent controlled apartments for their whole lives have a good deal. It doesn't facilitate liquidity at all.

[ryanSrich]

Yeah I probably misused rent control there. I didn’t mean anything specific, or to imply the way it currently exists. It could even be as simple as the government subsidizing housing for critical workers. Doesn’t have to rent control for everyone.

[zbrozek]

Anything you subsidize gets more expensive due to supply, demand, and availability of money. We see the same inflation in college tuition (cheap loans), home prices (mortgage subsidies), and health care (myriad things, but e.g. pre-tax HSA accounts).

Rent control breaks the market and subsidies pour fuel on the dumpster fire. There is exactly one good way out and it's making it easier to build.

[deepakhj]

Ski towns should have prioritized apartments and condos in dense villages to make proper transit in town and from the city make sense. Instead they allowed mostly large single family homes.

[zbrozek]

House them where though? CA is short housing, that's one of our worst problems. And local homeless people have already put up tents and parked RVs everywhere.

Could we have avoided this problem by building housing while labor could still afford it? Sure. But we didn't, and now we reap what we sow.