[greenie_beans]

i would love to hear a YIMBY consider the market forces/how capitalism works and not just reduce it to regulation. aka when it costs over $500k to build a single apartment unit and most of those costs are construction with very little of the regulation burden driving up that cost.

[pc86]

If we're talking about home prices why are you talking about apartments? There are a lot of costs associated with apartment buildings that simply don't exist for SFH and MFH builds.

Apartments are a different beast.

[epistasis]

Indeed, there's an entirely separate, far more strict building code for apartments than for single-family detached housing.

This was an explicit goal of the designers of the early building code split: make single family homes as cheap as possible, and apartments as expensive as possible.

[epistasis]

Sorry, you think that YIMBYs don't consider this? Perhaps you should follow some YIMBYs!

What does it take to get a more efficient building market? Lots of building, lots of competition in building. Low barriers to new contractors becoming builders, etc.

It's truly only the YIMBYs who ever talk about any of this stuff in my experience.

[greenie_beans]

i never hear YIMBYs talk about this: https://yonahfreemark.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Freemar...

[epistasis]

Again, talk to YIMBYs, and you'll get an earful about that paper, about a low-demand market with already affordable housing, that has been generalized to apply to situations that are quite different.

Yonah Freemark has some OK work, and that's a fine piece in isolation, but it's an outlier in the literature but gets trotted out because NIMBYs want to use it to block housing, not because it's a significant piece that applies across the nation.

[greenie_beans]

YIMBYs will point to a chart of new multifamily builds and conveniently not look at the building starts before the regulations were moved and then certainly not think about what was happening in the economy during that time.

a market with regulations: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST

crazy that there were more houses being built pre-GFC when all those burdensome regulations were so suffocating and it never rebounded

[forshaper]

Permitting admin is part of regulation, which in turn is required for construction.

[greenie_beans]

yeah for sure and i didn't say that isn't a cost. i said it's a small part of the cost, almost negligible compared to the cost to actually build

[antisthenes]

> i said it's a small part of the cost, almost negligible compared to the cost to actually build

Actually building is the same as building to regulations. Regulations make it more expensive. You can't just hand-wave separate them.

[epistasis]

Is 10% negligible? 20%? How have you quantified this?

[danaris]

Ah, yes, that mythical "cost to actually build."

As in, the cost to build things in ways that completely ignore regulations. Regulations about building materials that won't collapse, and won't catch fire, and won't give everyone living there cancer. Regulations about safe electrification; safe, clean, adequate water; wastewater systems that won't drown the lower floors in raw sewage.

Do you know about the Grenfell Tower disaster?

70 people died, 70 more were injured, and hundreds were left without places to live, because the builders didn't think it was important to follow regulations. So they could make an extra buck.

So tell us about what the "cost to actually build" is. Please. Just remember that cost isn't only denominated in dollars and pounds.

[greenie_beans]

idk you definitely need a lot of money to build a building, i didn't realize that was up for debate. also we are not talking about code regulations, we're talking about local regulations

[vovavili]

>most of those costs are construction with very little of the regulation

You would be surprised.

[cucumber3732842]

>it costs over $500k to build a single apartment unit and most of those costs are construction with very little of the regulation burden driving up that cost.

What? What?

I dare anyone here who's simping for regulation to try to develop from scratch something that does not benefit from the myriad of exemptions that apply to 1-few family residential development (because there'd be no political will for the racket if the average homeowner was subject to it).

Those $500k costs include $100k of which is engineering for a SWPPP that any sane site planner who doesn't want shit to erode in no time flat would have gotten 95% of the same effect of anyway.

And the dirt work guy's bill includes god knows how many extra hours it takes to get it all spot on to meet the plans. He could've shot from the hip and done the job but there were plans and had to hit them.

And of course the lawyer has to go rounds with the town over what level of maintenance detail needs to be specified in the SWPP.

And of course the rent has to cover the landscaper who comes once a month to mow the ditch grass and stuff because that contract is how they cover their own ass.

The reason every goddamn modern property looks the same with the same shitty corporate bland sidewalks and same planters and same parking lot and entry way with the same five styles of door and the same light level and same everything is because every party involved if formulaically trying to meet the regulations related to their trade as cheaply as possible. And everyone knows this stupid. Every single party in the chain of developing a building from the initial survey to specing the lightbulbs knows they could, without even getting close to underperforming solutions, deliver infinitely more value if they could just exercise their goddamn professional discretion.

The guy delivering a rented trench box to a construction site that's chiseled out of bedrock knows what he's doing is wasteful and stupid just as much as the guy signing the check and the guys wasting their dime dropping it into the trench but hey, the rules are the rules and they're all billing the next guy down the line for it so it all goes on.

[psadauskas]

I'm not sure what you're asking for here.

Used to be, the contractor would rent a trenchbox at his discretion. But that means "almost never", because the contractor that doesn't has lower prices than one that does, and just has to pay the occasional OSHA fine. But workers keep dying in trenches, so the government has to step in and make a rule "thou must always use a trenchbox".

We can't go back to "contractor's discretion", because then people die in easily preventable ways. The other alternative is MORE regulation, and the contractor has to do a soil study to know if they're required to use a trenchbox for this particular trench.

[greenie_beans]

it most certainly is not going to cost me $100k in engineering to design a SFH in arguably one of the most regulatory burdened states in the US: vermont

[cucumber3732842]

>it most certainly is not going to cost me $100k in engineering to design a SFH in arguably one of the most regulatory burdened states in the US: Vermont

I can do that easily. Give me a ~10ac property where what isn't steep is stream or bog. I want to clear ~1ac total for 5-houses on 2ac each and the road to reach them needs to cross a stream and traverse some bog (read: offsets). The houses will have to be on piles because as expensive as that is that's cheaper than cutting flat land and doing walls or offsets.

surveys and delineation $20,000 bridge $25,000 road and driveway $75,000 stormwater $40,000 Wetlands offsetting $25,000 250 Permitting $140,000 the houses themselves (remember, they're on fancypants piles) $100,000 septics (mounds) and wells $75,000

total: $500k, 100k per house.

You could cut some out by DIYing the actual permitting submissions but even if you don't make costly mistakes in wording and/or detail level there's a lot of value in having your shit cross the government's desks on the letterhead of an engineering firm who's stuff they've approved a million times before.

The developer needs to then build the houses rich af on the inside and generally check every box to sell for enough to cover the costs. This kind of stuff is why so much of the development in Vermont is rich assholes from NYC in brand new million dollar homes on the world's shittiest gravel road with the world's shittiest driveways. Granite countertops and picture windows the size of rail cars are damn near free compared to the cost of putting a shovel in the ground.

[greenie_beans]

i said "a SFH" not a neighborhood development with nice and fake numbers, and a scenario totally disconnected from reality. if costs that much to build in an area that shouldn't have a structure then that's on you.

thankfully we have regulations that disincentive those projects. there are plenty of other spots to build especially in the denser areas