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by diet_jerome 360 days ago
I feel you there with only luxury housing being the only kind of housing being built in many areas. Honestly, a lot of it is damn ugly too. Allowing developers to construct non-luxury housing would help much more than only allowing them to build luxury housing.
3 comments
donatj 360 days ago
I'm not even sure it's entirely a matter of being blocked from doing so as much as the incentives merely not being there. What is the incentive for a developer to build affordable housing? The margins are surely much lower.

The city could set rent restrictions on new development and all that, but that removes the incentive for developers to actually build in that area at all, especially when they can just find an unrestricted space to develop a couple miles away in the next town.

It's a tough problem.

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hydrogen7800 360 days ago
>What is the incentive for a developer to build affordable housing? The margins are surely much lower.

This makes sense to me, and I hear it all the time, but when was it ever in a builder's interest to make affordable housing? Why does this perverse incentive seem like a recent thing?

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donatj 360 days ago
My wild guess would be urban renewal grants and drastically lower land costs made it easier to recoup investments. I'm sure that's only part of the equation though. Part of it is probably also just the realization they could be making more money.
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kjkjadksj 360 days ago
A house used to be simpler, materials cheaper, permitting nearly nonexistent, and a crew much less skilled and compensated.
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anthonypasq 360 days ago
where i live (Boston) it is impossible to build anything new that is not qualified as "luxury" because its competing with a 150 year old tenement with 20year old appliances.

i dont even know what it would mean to build a new non-luxury apartment. No one has ever explained this to me. New housing is always lampooned as being shit quality yet luxury at the same time just because it has.... cabinets that arent falling off the walls and a floor that isnt slanted so badly that i roll away from my desk?

When the existing current housing stock is so old and bad you just need to build to bring up the average quality of an apartment. Rich people will go to the new stuff and it brings up the floor of housing quality.

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jccalhoun 360 days ago
Same here. I am in a small midwestern USA city of less than 100k people. Someone got a grant to build some housing. Instead of building affordable housing they tried to build a huge "luxury" apartment complex with rent way above average for the city.
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PaulHoule 360 days ago
Ithaca built a lot of housing in the last few years but is still said to be the most expensive small city in the US. Some of these buildings have a high fraction of "affordable" units, but one "luxury development for seniors" is about as late as a nuclear reactor and hasn't found any tenants because... seniors who have money go to Florida and don't stay in upstate NY.
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anthonypasq 360 days ago
where i live (Boston) it is impossible to build anything new that is not qualified as "luxury" because its competing with a 150 year old tenement with 20year old appliances.

i dont even know what it would mean to build a new non-luxury apartment. No one has ever explained this to me. New housing is always lampooned as being shit quality yet luxury at the same time just because it has.... cabinets that arent falling off the walls and a floor that isnt slanted so badly that i roll away from my desk?

When the existing current housing stock is so old and bad you just need to build to bring up the average quality of an apartment. Rich people will go to the new stuff and it brings up the floor of housing quality.

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