[jjkeddo199]

In my impossible fantasy dream world, China and America could avert the "2nd cold war" by having dangerously over-leveraged idled Chinese builders (Evergrande, Country Garden, etc.) partner with American construction companies and put their idle/money-burning build capacity to solving America's own real-estate shortages. Each Chinese worker would be required to have an American teammate on the job, bringing a nice profit for everyone involved and building new friendships along the way. One can only dream...

[nordsieck]

> China and America could avert the "2nd cold war" by having dangerously over-leveraged idled Chinese builders (Evergrande, Country Garden, etc.) partner with American construction companies and put their idle/money-burning build capacity to solving America's own real-estate shortages.

I don't think that works.

If the Chinese builders are idle, it isn't because they don't have work to complete - the entire crisis is because people basically prepaid for their homes and the builders have yet to complete a lot of them (I think there's a strong implication of embezzlement here). And the Chinese government is desperately trying to find a solution that will get complete homes to the people who have paid for them.

In any case, I don't think a lack of construction companies and/or workers is the problem. It's that local governments are making it impossible to build. We're not going to get more homes built to attacking something other than the bottleneck.

[smileysteve]

Context

"Even 1.4 billion people can’t fill all of China’s vacant homes, ex-official admits "

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/23/business/china-too-many-homes...

[ClumsyPilot]

So one system has too many homes, the other has not enough? I know which I would prefer.

[acover]

Houses in China are 40x your income. In the USA they are 6x

[linuxlizard]

I have a modest proposal. We (USA) could send our retirees to China which would fill up some of the overabundance of housing there while releasing housing here. An article floated by a while ago saying Boomers are the fastest growing homeless demographic.

[tessierashpool]

we have an overabundance of housing here too, though. LendingTree research pegged it as 16 million empty homes.

[spankalee]

The problem right now isn't construction capacity, it's zoning.

[zjp]

(50% of the city is zoned for single family and the rest has height and density limits) "The market will not solve the housing crisis!"

It's the 'stop hitting yourself' of housing policy.

[supertrope]

When people don't know many facts about an issue but it affects them personally they rely on ideology to form opinions. e.g. They follow what other people on team red or team blue think. Or just apply a pre-conceived notion of regulation being the solution, or de-regulation being the solution. Hence you get counter-productive conclusions like new supply in the form of new luxury apartment construction being the cause of rent inflation.

[zjp]

This is true, mostly. I suspect SF and NYC NIMBYs know full well the legal limits of building in their respective cities.

[Dig1t]

The dumb thing is that the market WOULD solve the problem if it was allowed to. We have a dysfunctional system with too many regulations but instead of the regulations getting blamed, the market gets the blame instead. And the problem never gets solved.

[zjp]

Just one more subsidy bro I promise it'll work this time

[sofixa]

> The dumb thing is that the market WOULD solve the problem if it was allowed to

Not only do you not have a way of knowing that for sure, history would indicate otherwise.

Housing is fundamentally a good with limited elasticity, therefore the market on it's own without a good dose of regulation could easily become disastrous.

For a historical parallel, take a look at what happened in industrialising countries when the market was the one making decisions about housing where it was needed (next to the newly appearing factories/otherwise urbanising areas). The result was people living in horrifically cramped and squalid conditions (alongside other fun ones such as company towns) which was literally one of the main inspirations for socialism and communism.

Regulations on housing are a must, but their impact needs to be carefully managed and offset with appropriate incentives, policies and subsidies to make sure housing is of good quality (nobody should live in asbestos and lead paint filled pods under a highway next to a chemical factory) but abundant.

[zjp]

"You're not allowed to build an apartment complex out of paper" regulations are not the main thing driving costs today. "You're not allowed to build an apartment at all" regulations are. End height and density restrictions.

[sofixa]

> End height and density restrictions.

I'd go with relax over end, because surrounding infrastructure still needs to scale with the amount of people living there, and having very dense skyscrapers next to low height buildings is not great from an urbanist perspective; but there's nothing stopping most American cities from upzoning to 8-10 floors, and upgrading transit and city infrastructure to match the increased density (you're going to need more internet, water, sewer, electricity but nothing fundamentally unfixable).

[Dig1t]

I absolutely DO know that for sure. I personally tried to build more housing, by actually buying land and building housing. I ended up not being able to because of single family zoning.

Just say you personally want to go out and solve the housing problem, what is stopping you? Like you can just go buy some houses, tear them down, and build more densely. You will definitely make money. That was my thinking and I was prepared to put my money down to make it happen. I was stopped at the planning stage by zoning.

I was under contract to buy land and started the planning for building. I had an idea of how many buildings I wanted to construct, where they would be laid out and was starting to get permits. So I went to the city to start getting approved for permits, I was told by the employee at the city planning department that that was not going to be possible and that the maximum number of homes that could be built on this lot was exactly ONE. Even though the lot could have easily held 5 single family homes, it was zoned for one house.. Meaning that the planning department would automatically decline my permit application based only on the fact that that land had been designated for one house instead of five. That's what "single family" means here. It had nothing to do with the quality of the buildings or their layout.

So I thought that was ridiculous and asked how I could get around that, I was told that I would have to go to the city zoning commission and either get the lot rezoned or get a variance (special lingo for an exception). She laughed at me and said that that was very unlikely to happen.

I went to the zoning commission meeting that was held monthly. Can you guess who runs that commission? Homeowners from the area! Guess what they did not want me to do. Build more housing! Those people do not want to see the character of their town change, they don't want to see anything change. The people in charge of determining what gets built in cities are the people with a vested interest in keeping supply low to maintain their investments. And the thing is that when these zoning laws were set up the cities all basically just copy/pasted from one another, so they all have the same system with only small differences.

Needless to say, I backed out of escrow, did not go through with buying the land, and learned a very valuable lesson about how housing works in the US.

This is a separate issue from building codes. The building standards in the US are determined by codes which have nothing to do with zoning and can be as stringent as one likes.

Take a look at the city of Cupertino zoning map: https://www.cupertino.org/our-city/departments/community-dev...

You will be amazed at how much of the city is single family zoned. Meaning that it is required to be super low density and that even if a developer bought all the houses in a neighborhood they would not be allowed to build any more densely than what is already there.

[qp11]

Isnt it also related to utilities? I mean if you have laid water/sewage/power/gas/telco infra for a one family home, and someone builds a structure for 5 families how does upgrading all that infra work?

[FooBarBizBazz]

At this point, I think civil disobedience is the solution.

Uber fixed the taxi industry (and then started taking a cut for itself) by just flouting the law -- until it had a fait accompli that most people liked.

The same thing will have to be done with housing, by people who have the resources to do it.

The problem is, it's difficult for this to be a grassroots civil-disobedience thing. That's called building a favela. Though honestly that could work too.

What the example of the favela (or, before that, the homeless camp) highlights is that property is as much about security (violence/force) as about construction. The camp can always be bulldozed. That's what a lack of property rights actually means, materially. I don't know how one provides security in a civilly-disobedient way.

[harambae]

The closest thing I can think of to what you’re describing is the van life movement and sleeping overnight various places without permission.

Or, taking it up a level, living in an RV somewhere in a gray area of legality or where there’s little enforcement (such as the RV’s on El Camino Real in Palo Alto)

[HeyLaughingBoy]

> I don't know how one provides security in a civilly-disobedient way.

Are you sure about that?

[jjav]

It's both though. People who have managed to maneuver all the bureaucracy and have approved plans in hand are having a hard time finding construction crews with any available time.

[TheCaptain4815]

The issue isn't necessarily a "housing crisis", but more so "prime land" crisis. There's huge enormous swaths of America that lay empty, but no one wants to live/build there.

[mattbrewsbytes]

I think you picked the wrong country. Mexico has a growing population, build a government program where they get a path to citizenship (maybe dual) if they come over and legit work in the housing development industry. Incentivize housing developers to hire them legally for projects that build middle-class affordable housing, not McMansions. Incentivize home buyers (for these houses) with lower interest rates and forbid corporate ownership of these houses. Spend some extra money to watch for, catch and prosecute the fraudsters that will be there.

[spacecadet]

If only.

[legitster]

> put their idle/money-burning build capacity to solving America's own real-estate shortages

I mean, we could quickly end the US real-estate shortages completely domestically if we were willing to upzone and build insane tenement-style high-rises like the Chinese are willing to do.

[forgetfreeman]

stares in roughly 16 million pre-existing vacant homes

[matteotom]

I know this is a common talking point, but what are you suggesting, specifically? Are you accounting for temporarily vacant homes due to finding new tenants? Or homes that are up for sale? Or whether people actually want to live in the places these homes exist? eg are you suggesting struggling tenants in San Francisco should move to Detroit? What about vacation homes, are you suggesting policies to make it harder to own a second home?

[forgetfreeman]

Things I'd suggest: literally any approach that doesn't divert funding to mega-developers who use the "housing crisis" narrative to drive the problems everyone's complaining about in the first place, and an excellent place to start would be dismantling the hyperconcentration of capital around a handful of major metro areas. How best to accomplish that is left as an exercise, but understand there is no housing crisis. The real crisis centers around the lack of opportunity outside of major metro areas. Folks wouldn't clump this tight if other options were available.

[zjp]

"Hey man, sorry you got priced out of New York but we've got a nice shack in the Dakotas removed from your whole social structure ready for you."

[jjav]

You joke but sometimes that is the most practical answer.

In my 20s I lived near Manhattan and my goal was to move into Manhattan. But.. it never happened. Way too expensive. I beat my head against that wall for a couple years but it became clear it was impossible.

So I moved to a (back-then) much cheaper area of California and bought a house.

[zjp]

But should incentivizing your behavior be a _policy goal_. I think not. Cities are mainly engines of wealth creation with concentrated opportunity. We should expand the supply of apartments in city centers so that they can remain so. They should not be nearly as expensive as country club suburbs. Our grandparents' grandparents understood this and made room for their children and their grandkids. We weren't so lucky with our grandparents. We can choose differently for ourselves and our children.

[jjav]

> But should incentivizing your behavior be a _policy goal_.

No. But pragmatically just like in finance "the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", housing policy can also remain against you for decades or way more. As an individual, sometimes it's better to move and have a nice house and lead a good life than to spend a lifetime fighting policy.

[forgetfreeman]

K so what we're actually saying is everyone should be able to afford to live anywhere regardless of regional land/property values? I might actually agree with that but I'm pretty sure nobody's going to get behind building a trailer park in the Hamptons.

[zjp]

No, I wouldn't get behind it either. The median income (individual but I'd be fine with household) in an area should be enough to buy a starter home in that area. Until then, the area is underbuilt. The Bay Area pretending an apocalyptic flood of poor people will descend upon them when professionals making a (extremely sarcastic voice) _mere_ 100k stand a chance of buying is and will always be laughable.

[forgetfreeman]

So get a job delivering pizza in the Hamptons for 5 years, van life it, and retire to Appalachia a multi-millionaire? Sounds good to me.

[legitster]

The states with the most vacant homes are... Alaska, Vermont, Maine, West Virginia, and Alabama.

Not sure what you are implying. That we don't need more housing because we have enough abandoned hovels in places no one wants to live?

[muzz]

No, those are states with the highest percentage of vacant homes, not the most.

The states with the most vacant homes are Florida, California, Texas, and New York.

https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/vacancy-rates-stud...

[harambae]

The prices in Vermont and Maine recently suggest someone does want to live there.

The common thread (for the first 3 of 5) appears to be vacation destinations or 2nd houses that are often cabins.

West Virginia has a decreasing population. Alabama, I don’t know.