[slibhb]

Downward mobility is almost entirely caused by housing costs, which are a self-inflicted problem. We don't, as a matter of intentional policy, build enough housing.

I live in an expensive area and I'm always shocked by how many of my friends who cannot afford to buy a home (or even a condo) are NIMBYs. These are people in their 20s through 40s who have been earning since college, can't afford to buy, yet get annoyed whenever there's new construction that "alters the character of the neighborhood". Talk about false consciousness. I can at least understand people who own a home feeling this way.

[antinomicus]

I may or may not meet your definition as a nimby 28 year old. I am all for housing, just not the type being built in my area. Dozens of “luxury” units built cheaply, selling for 4,000$ for a 1 bedroom. They get subsidized by the local government for including maybe 5 units that are “low income” and probably still cost 2k - and those low income units go away as soon as the building gets sold to another corporation.

I want lots of high quality, dignified housing for myself and my community, not wealth extraction pods. I want real public housing. Housing should be a human right. As it stands now the land is being squatted by mega corporations seeking to extract as much profit from the community as possible.

[ProfessorLayton]

Almost everything you said is a typical NIMBY talking point:

> Dozens of “luxury” units built cheaply, selling for 4,000$ for a 1 bedroom

A nebulous definition of "luxury", and totally ignores the fact that people with money can get what they want anyway, pushing those with less out. So yes, more "luxury" builds help.

> They get subsidized by the local government for including maybe 5 units that are “low income” and probably still cost 2k

Many purportedly want more low income housing, often at absurd rates like "100% affordable" knowing that projects like that will never pencil out. It's a way of saying "No" without actually saying it.

> I want lots of high quality, dignified housing for myself and my community, not wealth extraction pods.

Okay, so build some? If you can't build what you want then why stop others from building what they can with the budget they have?

>As it stands now the land is being squatted by mega corporations seeking to extract as much profit from the community as possible.

It's literally illegal in most places to build more densely due to height, parking requirements, discretionary reviews, etc. impacting everyone interested in building more units (Like for a multigenerational household as seen in elsewhere in the world). This is not just impacting corporations seeking to extract profit.

[rurp]

It's all talking points on both sides. "Build more housing" being the one true solution has become a religious tenant in a lot of wonkish circles. I see it repeated uncritically every single time this topic comes up on HN and similar spaces.

The reality is that demand is always going to far outstrip supply in certain areas. You can only cram so many houses into a place like San Franciso, even if you raze the city to the ground and replace it with some yimby paradise that houses 25% more people. The extra supply might lower costs to some degree in the short term but the induced demand will ensure they stay above what someone on an average salary can afford. Everyone seems to understand this when the topic is freeway expansion, but not with housing.

The actual solution for housing costs is a lot more complicated and multi-pronged, but that doesn't fit neatly on a bumper sticker. There actually is a ton of affordable housing in the US, but it's mostly in areas that people in influential industries like tech and media tend to sneer at, so it gets dismissed; and suggesting someone move there is practically treated as a human rights abuse.

Dramatically increasing housing density does have adverse affects for existing residents. It's fine to say the tradeoffs are worth it, I'm not saying it's never the answer, but even acknowledging that it's a tradeoff usually gets met with dismissive insults from the yimby crowd.

[inigyou]

Isn't SF infamously a SFH zone that makes no sense? If you razed the whole city and rebuilt it like Manhattan, you wouldn't have 25% more inhabitants, you'd have 25000% more. And if you improve public transit (I heard BART is some that's pretty good by American standards but not by European standards?) you can drastically widen the area that feels like the core city (just take a look at Berlin which I'm familiar with) giving maybe another 1000% multiplicative increase.

Every time I'm in Berlin I love the public transit system there. I think that's because they have a relatively dense network of lines through the city center, and the trains run every 4-5 minutes which means you don't have to check the timetable before going to the station, you can just show up. I haven't visited London or NYC though. I know some cities with more modern train signaling have trains every 1-2 minutes so there is basically always a train at every metro station.

[rsynnott]

> And if you improve public transit (I heard BART is some that's pretty good by American standards but not by European standards?)

BART is ~fine; there's just not very much of it. Only two lines go through San Francisco (both of which are essentially one line while _in_ San Francisco), plus there's one line worth of Caltrain (which is kinda low frequency; 3-4 an hour per direction peak time), and _that's about it_.

[cal_dent]

every single city you mentioned there also has significant housing issues. So as per the original comment, the actual solution is more complicated than the debate typically tends to acknowledged.

Densifying homes will help, don't get me wrong, but its far from the silver bullet HNs lads like to claim. Now, not densifying jobs and employment centres as much as modern society as done on the other hand....well, now we may be on to something with legs

[inigyou]

Oh. "A 2 million percent increase might not be enough, so we should do zero percent"

[pibaker]

> You can only cram so many houses into a place like San Franciso

Well, yeah, a human can only run so fast, but San Francisco is not even trying to run — it's barely crawling. Go to the sunset district, or Bayview, or any neighborhood in the western or southern half of the city and you will see nothing but rows after rows of single family homes — and yes, the car is a part of the family. Replace it with something like new york's west village and you will more than double its density.

> There actually is a ton of affordable housing in the US, but it's mostly in areas that people in influential industries like tech and media tend to sneer at

Yeah, just tell everyone to move to somewhere in the rust belt where the only job opening is in public sector health care that may or may not get cut by the current administration, that will help.

[ieatcandlewax]

I don't understand how people can see San Francisco and think "I wish this entire skyline was all 20 story apartment buildings so that rootless cosmopolitans can have marginally cheaper rent". If you want to live like that, new york is a great place and there is no need to sacrifice a beautiful and historic (by american standards) city for it.

This is all on the backdrop that the only reason people are complaining about this is because they want to pay Midwest prices for rent to go work at Amazon and make 250k.

These companies didn't build the city themselves, and they'll be gone as soon as you turn it into seoul with a higher corporate tax.

[slibhb]

It doesn't have to be 20 story apartment buildings. Start with duplexes, fourplexes, or townhomes -- none of which have to be ugly. It simply makes no sense to zone these densely populated urban areas for detached, single-family houses.

[scoofy]

What the hell are you talking about? I live in SF. Like half the city is literally single family homes. You could trivially double or triple the population of the city by just legalizing the cute, three-story Victorians they have in the Haight city wide.

People live here and would like to build a life for themselves instead of living with roommates into their 40s and 50s.

[rsynnott]

> rootless cosmopolitans

???

I hadn't realised _Stalin_ had a HN account.

[rainsford]

It might be unsatisfyingly simplistic, but if prices are high in an area because a lot of people want to live there, building more housing seems like a fundamentally better approach than demanding everyone who wants to live in San Francisco instead accept living in Mississippi. Even if prices stabilize back to where they were before, it would still be a net win that more people than before get to live in a desirable place for the same cost. I'm genuinely not "sneering" at Mississippi here. But if you want to live in San Francisco, Mississippi is probably not going to be a reasonable substitute and maybe making it easier for you to live in San Francisco is a reasonable policy goal.

But history and lots of examples suggests prices are unlikely to remain the same if you build more supply, which makes sense from an economics perspective. There aren't an unlimited number of people wanting to live in a particular area at a given price point, otherwise they would likely have driven the price higher in the first place. Induced demand is a problem for highways because the cost of driving that particular route at a particular time is essentially zero, which his not really true of moving to a different area.

[lovich]

Do you think if you built a million houses for every person that the price would go down?

I’m using hyperbole here specifically because I’ve met nimbys who confidently state that the price would not go down in that situation.

Assuming your answer would be yes, then part of the yimby/abundance crowds argument is that this needs to be done everywhere or at least at a state level. Yea if only a single city does it they may never be able to out produce their demand, but that’s more of a prisoners dilemma issue between cities than a problem with building more housing leading to lower prices.

[maxerickson]

Do you think yimby's hate transit and encouraging revitalisation?

They are going to support both for the same reason that they are yimby's...

[gwerbin]

In my town they are building a lot of apartments downtown, and that's fine with me, but the unfortunate reality of my area is that if you don't have a car then you are pretty well stuck in town and can only get around to surrounding towns using buses that only run a few times a day. You can get to Boston faster than you can get to the shopping center 2 towns over (unless you take an Uber). And that's still pretty good by American standards. Let's assume that they are buliding 500 new units downtown but only 350 new parking spaces. So what's going to happen is that these $4500/month apartments and $900k condos will fill up with high-income singles and couples from Boston/Cambridge/Somerville with no kids who don't really care about not having a car, because they'll just commute to Boston for work, walk downtown for errands, and take an Uber for their occasional trips elsewhere.

That's fine on its own, but meanwhile the sub-wealthy families will continue fighting tooth and nail for the diminishing handful of old unrenovated houses that go on the market each year, and the wealthy families will keep happily buying and selling the nice pretty mansions on the quiet suburban streets at the edges of town. That is, it's not actually relieving supply pressure on the people who are hurting from it the most. Instead it's relieving supply pressure on the city that the suburb serves, which is still a good thing for the region overall but not optimal for the town.

The real NIMBY mansion-dwellers are quiet winners here. They get to comply with state-mandated development minimums without actually changing anything in their neighborhoods.

What actually should be happening IMO is that zoning restrictions need to be eased uniformly across town, for the same number of added units but at a lower overall density. We need more mansions converted to 2/3/4-unit condos (and yes I mean condos specifically, not just rentals) in addition to the luxury apartment development happening downtown. We need safer bike infrastructure so people who do want to really go car-free in a downtown apartment can do that without worrying about death by pickup truck, maybe even get their kids around on an e-bike or whatever. We need local circulating buses to take people around town, without relying on the sprawling MBTA bus network. We also honestly need a program where the city commissions development of smaller and cheaper homes, and sells them at cost in a lottery system or something like that, because all the new development in the fancier neighborhoods is $1m+ 2000sqft stuff that's way too expensive, bigger than most 1/2-kid families need, and also looks like shit (and is probably built like shit too).

Or none of that is right and I'm wrong about all of this. But the point is that no serious long-term holistic planning is being done, at least not in any venue that the public can see and comment on, and anyone who calls that out is shouted down as a NIMBY. I literally want more apartments in my neighborhood and fewer single family home (yes I live in an apartment but I wish it was a condo not a rental), more bike lanes, and narrower streets with bioswales and raised crosswalks and stuff. And yet I'm a NIMBY by some people's standards because I'm a little skeptical of just letting developers do whatever they want, in an area that isn't even that close to my backyard.

[ironman1478]

That is all that is allowed due to local and state zoning codes. Loosening restrictions on what can be built will bring down costs and all for more types of buildings. The bland housing is all that pencils out for builders at the moment.

[inigyou]

They did this in New Zealand under Jacinda Ardern's government and house prices have started to fall, but only slightly so far. IIRC the rules were something like, lots in a certain radius of a train station or town center are mandatory mixed-use zoning, overriding any city rules to the contrary. It was very controversial for the national government to override city governments like that.

[bell-cot]

> In several opinion polls, Ardern's domestic popularity had reached all-time lows by 19 January 2023...[when] Ardern announced she would resign as Labour leader and prime minister by 7 February. -Wikipedia

Other political leaders might hesitate to follow such footsteps.

[inigyou]

It was during the coronavirus pandemic. New Zealand successfully avoided the virus completely for a few years, but conspiracy theorists thought she was just being a Nazi.

[lovich]

Is getting the prices to fall at all not a massive success when they are rising everywhere else? Wouldn’t even just arresting the price increases at 0 while other countries/regions deal with rapidly increasing prices be a win?

[8note]

i think making it more restrictive would be better?

"affordable housing" is the same thing as "luxury housing" asides from the rent

sure, you could allow less restrictive builds so that you only get a room with no bathroom or kitchen for $4k but thats not actually better

[bryanlarsen]

If rich people can't buy luxury housing, they buy non-luxury housing, driving up its price. If you don't want rich people driving up the price of affordable housing, make sure there is lots of luxury housing available so they don't drive up the price of the cheap stuff.

[ironman1478]

That's not how it works. More competition will bring the price of those down.

[slibhb]

I realize I'm not going to convince you but I just want to say...it's good that companies/individuals make a profit from building housing. Building housing is a pro-social activity that should be rewarded, like farming and healthcare.

[toomuchtodo]

Please consider running for local office to be an advocate for non market social housing in a position of leverage.

[Animats]

> We don't, as a matter of intentional policy, build enough housing.

If actual number of houses was the problem, house prices would not be increasing in areas of population decline. It's existing houses being repriced upward by speculation that makes them unaffordable.

[vslira]

It's not number of houses, it's number of houses where people want to live.

"house prices would not be increasing in areas of population decline" -> the causation could be running backwards: a family of 2 (maybe 2 retired people with accumulated wealth) can outcompete with a young family of 4 for the same unit, that drives prices up and population down. I'm not saying this is the case, but decreasing population not being associated with decreasing housing prices does not mean that increasing housing prices is not caused by housing scarcity

[brailsafe]

This seems to be, or have been, a very common scenario in Canada, which is why I completely discount when most politicians start going on about a "housing crisis" when in another breath they'll say they don't want houses to get cheaper. If it was a "crisis", one might think houses would be treated with special care instead of basically just another commodity. If a person with wealth can just buy up as many of a finite resource within, especially within the same city as they can tolerate the possession of, then nobody should have a surprised Pikachu face when they do that. If all of the food could and was bought up by a few rich people and figuratively removed from access by anyone who can't bid arbitrary amounts for it, there would and should be riots. That's how houses and condos are priced, and more supply without finite policy restrictions just mints more money for people who already have it. If it's a crisis, why is anyone allowed to own more than 1? Level it out.

[bryanlarsen]

In Canada, second houses and vacant houses are taxed higher than primary residences.

[brailsafe]

As far as I know, they're taxed higher in the sense that they're not exempt from capital gains, like primary residences are, but in my view it seems like that would at-most be a marginal disincentive if renters don't have much in the way of other options or protections (which vary across the country). Likewise, I'm fairly sure a mom+pop residential landlord can save on tax for any expenses related to secondary suites or secondary properties if it's considered business income. If there is very little suitable supply, it still makes sense to acquire the asset and profit off of rent, although this dynamic may be changing with increased cost of borrowing and less demand depending on market, AirBnB short-term rental restrictions, etc..

When money was free and restrictions were few, non-institutional investors seem to have capitalized aggressively on this, because the price of the property increased dramatically and also it was a near-certainty that there would be a constant stream of inflated rent a landlord could charge.

I'm happy about those tax disincentives, but they do strike me as playing around the margins; in normal economic circumstances, they should play around the margins, but that particular aspect of the economy is so embarrassingly tilted that it's really not funny anymore.

[magicalhippo]

Here in Norway non-primary residences were taxed higher but not very much. They've changed that in recent years, so now you get taxed about 100%. However here it's not (just) capital gains, it's wealth, so you pay a percentage of what the estimated street price is for the place each year.

The result is that in the last couple of years landlords have gotten rid of many rental units. This primarily affected smaller apartments, and surprise surprise, those prices have remained flat while the rest has increased.

On the other hand, sucks if you for some reason need to rent, because now there's just a few rental units out there and they're now expensive.

[anon7000]

Why not both?

[Noumenon72]

After thirty years of house prices rising astronomically, you can't appeal to "speculation" any more. People are speculating because the underlying scarcity makes prices sure to rise.

I think if you look closely at "population down, house prices up" you will find normal supply-and-demand stories like "population down, houses down even more" or "population down (downtown), prices up (suburbs)".

[JKCalhoun]

Agree.

So often I see people complaining "people treat their home as an investment…". Because in fact it turns out it is?

Are we supposed to pass laws that fix the price of a home based on the square footage?

(I wonder if jewelers complain that the reason silver is so expensive is that people treat it as an investment.)

[ironman1478]

Nobody advocates for fixing the price. People want more supply which will bring the cost of housing as a whole down or at least provide more price diversity.

Is it even beneficial to have a house worth a lot of money? Think about places where property is expensive, it is also expensive to live there in general because housing costs so much. The cost of housing means employers have to pay their employees a lot to keep them there. This in turn means you are paying more for goods and services. If you're a homeowner, but NOT a high income person, this is very bad. It means you can't make payments towards maintenance of your house, going out becomes harder, etc. Your quality of life decreases.

People who inherit homes that are worth a lot, but aren't flush with cash end up having to sell frequently because there is no way for them to maintain it. It's also the plot of white lotus season 2 with the villas lol.

[inigyou]

Expensive housing means expensive commercial rent too, which means high prices and less quirky niche shops. In Berlin I've watched them disappear and get replaced by a McDonalds or a cryptocurrency startup firm.

[ironman1478]

You can't look at the cost of a house out of context. If you look at Flint, Michigan it's actually one of the most expensive places in the country if you account for average income in that area. Absolute cost needs to be normalized by income in the area. The housing is actually very expensive if you do this type of calculation. We saw an example of under supply during COVID. Housing prices in "underpriced" areas increased during COVID because regions with no real economy saw people moving there with the high out of state salaries. Those areas didn't have enough supply. Now that remote work is less prevalent, those places are having their costs go down but the Bay Area is seeing skyrocketing costs. We are able to measure the effects of supply and demand pretty clearly due to COVID.

Speculation is known to have an effect, but not nearly as much as an effect as under supply. Blackrock THEMSELVES published a paper that the reason their investments are working is due to the low development of housing. Their whole strategy is reliant on NIMBYism and people's lack of understanding of the housing market.

[bryanlarsen]

Weren't there a bunch of houses available for $500 in Detroit 20 years ago?

[thegrim33]

Anyone with 60 seconds of free time can trivially see that your claims hold no water.

Simply Google for cities/areas with declining population, choose one, look up average housing prices there over the last 10 years or so, see how they've changed, correct the figures for inflation, and you'll see that in almost all cases inflation-adjusted prices are lower today in those places than they were 10 years ago.

[lostlogin]

I searched, the first hit was New York (seems odd?). I looked up average price over time, inflation adjusted. They are increasing.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYSTHPI

Edit: DuckDuckGo seems to have served me a terrible example, further digging shows some examples which don't even need looking up, its clear that pricing has plummeted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinking_city

[scoofy]

He’s talking about places with long run population decline.

NYC has grown by about 1.5 million people over the last 30 years.

[ffsm8]

And anyone with a braincell would've remembered that wages didn't keep up with inflation, hence the point you're making isn't actually being made.

You're just being rude for no reason, which is also why I'm now rude to you. You could almost call it rudeflation, tomorrow we'll probably cause a rudeness singularity

[medvezhenok]

Not necessarily.

House occupancy laws also have a role here - some of the living arrangements that ended up in higher density in the past are illegal today, forcing population decline in a given area (which is not necessarily equivalent to _demand_ decline)

[slibhb]

There's no question that underbuilding is the largest factor here. You can look at construction vs. population over time (it's well below historical standards). Or available home vacancy rates. Or notice that the number of households is increasing faster than the number of homes. Or look at the various models, which show a 2 million-4 million shortfall in homes.

That aside, housing prices are reasonable in much of the country. Where population is stagnant or declining, they are generally reasonable.

[jayGlow]

are these areas with declining populations and rising housing prices increasing the number of houses? it could be that the population declines because no one can afford to live there however it's still a desirable area so prices remain high. cities like Austin are seeing reduction in housing prices despite population increase due to construction of new housing.

[alphawhisky]

That only covers a portion of the population. Don't forget the middle of nowhere towns that refuse to tax their citizens (but eat grant money like pigs) and refuse to allow new housing. All of this is essentially being done to maximize property value and keep new people out. This is why people are moving to cities in the US. Not a desire, but a need in order to make ends meet and get on the property ladder.

[inigyou]

People move to cities because of lifestyle and jobs. Cheap housing has never been an attraction of cities...

[alphawhisky]

Yes, they aim to improve their income to expense ratio with a high paying job, I.E. they have more spending power.

[s1artibartfast]

How do you separate speculation from legitimate price increases? If the houses are overpriced due to speculation, why isn't someone building Alternatives and undercutting them? This implies that there is either a real increase in value, a manufactur bottleneck, or both

[alphawhisky]

Civil Engineer/City Planner here. The bottleneck is legislative. NIMBY's are all over in US politics right now, local and larger. These folks put together legislation that makes it extremely hard to build without City/County/Township permission, unless the project benefits them in some way. So, most places will disincentivize new construction unless they get a grant for it, because they feel obligated to help their citizens by keeping taxes low and house values high. New construction does the opposite of these things.

[mothballed]

This is exactly it. I built a house for 60k a few years ago in a HCOL area by finding a legal loophole to permitting/planning that bypassed civil engineers, code inspections, and almost all planning. The house next to me, quite similar and 50 years old, is selling for 5x that.

In the old days it was common to build your own house. And it usually allows a house for half or less the market price. But this is effectively illegal/impractical in most the US. Some simple changes to legislation would halve the average cost of a house overnight!

[bell-cot]

I'm thinking that very few folks, these days, have the mindset & skill set & finances & timeframe to build their own houses.

And it wouldn't be just the currently-active NIMBY's who fought tooth and nail against any "simple changes" that might halve the average cost of a house overnight.

[mothballed]

I was working 60 hours a week, plus raising small children, plus had zero construction experience, plus buying literal pieces of lumber and block paycheck to paycheck as money allowed. If you start at 18 and finish in 20 years, you are still ahead of age of median new home buyer by 2 years.

Some people have valid excuses, but most do not.

[inigyou]

A house doesn't have to be fancy. Live in a tent on a grassy lot? Why not?

But you can't, because the lot is unaffordable

[inigyou]

What was the loophole?

[mothballed]

Do everything yourself and it never touches commercial regulations on licensing, inspection, and and building plans. I recorded a sworn affidavit with the county I was building it myself on my own property for purely personal residential use and then they issued me a permit explicitly stating I did not need to submit building plans or inspections.

Since the house was built without any compensation and not used for any commercial purpose, it bypasses "commerce" which was the auspice under which housing was regulated. When I was done I literally just sent the county a picture of a house and they closed the permit and that was that.

[TitaRusell]

If they were unaffordable they would not be selling. Don't underestimate just how much money people can conjure up. Most parents don't want to be buried with their money Egyptian pharaoh style.

[mancerayder]

California problem. There's no constrained supply in Houston or Austin or a few other cities in the US that are now crashing from over supply.

Another one is Manhattan. There's no space to build so things get retrofitted (office conversions) and new zoning (Hudson Yards) but it's expensive - high hourly rates to pay people on buildings with more 99 units, many many permits required, land is expensive, etc

So it's luxury only in NYC

None of this is NIMBYism.

Part of it is return to office. Why move there if it's too expensive - the answer is you're unemployed otherwise

Part of it is demand. NYC is the closest thing to Europe, where you don't drive around in an SUV to do simple things. The GDP is enormous, so you find jobs. Young people. Etc

Housing costs are a lot more complicated than NIMBYism. There's a strong California bias for obvious reasons, here on HN.

[slibhb]

While it's definitely true that NIMBYism isn't the problem everywhere, I live in Virginia.

[mancerayder]

The only point I was trying to make is, "it's more complicated than <the parent comment I was replying to>." The household affordability problem is extremely complicated. In some cases it's indeed NIMBYism - some law that limits to single-family housing, or complicated HOA rules, etc. Local board approvals required.

Sometimes it's just plain-old high-demand. Who doesn't want to live in a big fancy metropolis as a 25 yr-old with money? More people move in than it's physically possible to build (we're not China).

Sometimes it's regulations - you need to pay construction workers a min wage of $50/hr if you build a unit more than 99, or no tax breaks for you. Sometimes land is expensive. But so is the architect, the materials, the permits. Then you have environmental regulations, sometimes that make sense, some that are too difficult. Then you have regulations to protect the consumer so the place doesn't burn up or fall on our heads, sometimes that make sense, some that are too difficult.

You have interest rates that are high.

We have the private equity investors buying up bulk new construction.

We have wage growth that didn't match the growth of housing costs.

Hopefully I've made my case that housing affordability has many factors.

I'll need to save this message so I can cut and paste it elsewhere because about once a month on HN someone posts that the problem with housing affordability is not enough building and NIMBYism, which is only one of the factors here.

[inigyou]

Housing is flexible. Lots of poor people in some places live in RVs or trailers. It can't be that nice but they have to save a lot of money (or not, because RVs are expensive too). You have tent cities in non-totalitarian cities but their biggest downside is being illegal and therefore everyone who lives there gets periodically ransacked by police and sent to prison. People used to live 10 to an apartment, which also sucks, and were extorted by landlords but if we remove that part it's better than being homeless, but that's illegal too. It's starting to sound like the root of the problem isn't even a shortage of housing, but the fact that cheap housing is illegal.

[paytonjjones]

A big political problem with YIMBYism is that almost by definition it will take years to see the effects.

If you champion it as a politician, there's a very large chance you get all the flack for new developments, but the next guy gets all the credit for affordable housing.

Texas seems to be the only place that actually does it, and I honestly have no explanation for why.

[slibhb]

Yes, this is a real problem. Also, in high-demand areas, building more will lower prices compared to the counterfactual but that doesn't mean prices will actually go down. This makes it a harder sell.

[8note]

and in the near term, you reduce supply by kicking the people out of their homes and they need to find somewhere else

[jjav]

> self-inflicted problem

Self-inflicted would mean the person (or people) suffering from the problem is the same person causing the problem.

But the gazillionaire corrupt politicians aren't really suffering from any affordability problem personally.

[nonameiguess]

Are they actually NIMBYs or just annoyed? I live in a major metro downtown full of construction and fully support it 100%, but that doesn't mean it doesn't irritate me. Roads and sidewalks are constantly randomly closing. Every bridge across the local highway is currently closed for the next five years. My wife had every tire on a brand new go flat within three months because of nails on the roads. Our houses are all covered in yellow dust because the gas company dug up bedrock 9 years ago, left an enormous pile on a street corner, which then washed away in rain and still covers half the sidewalks nearly a decade later. Most of the housing ends up becoming short-term rentals, which in turn mostly become party houses, so the streets are strewn with broken liquor bottles all the time, cops are getting called in the middle of the night to break up fights with strippers. My car's hatch got destroyed by a city dump truck a few years back and I've been hit while parked two other times by work trucks. All of my power tools were stolen out of my garage by a work crew because the original builders put me on the same radio channel as the guy two doors down, so my garage randomly opened without me knowing about it.

I still support it. We need all the housing we can get. But I do get endlessly irritated by the attitude on Hacker News that no person could ever oppose rebuilding a neighborhood while people still live in it for a good reason and they must all by miserly hoarders trying to pull the ladder up from beneath them.

[simonw]

Agreed, this feels so obviously a housing cost problem to me.

[taeric]

I highly challenge this. For a region, industry booms drive upward movement. And regions that are only held by one industry when it busts build rust belts.

Ideally, you have industry for a region treated like a well balanced investment portfolio. But you have to internalize that balancing investment portfolios is is a protection against downside risks. And it specifically loses against the lucky portfolio that was heavy on something during a boom.

So, the question heavily looms on if the regions we are looking at are diverse enough that they can sustain some downturns.

[sva_]

In Germany we even import people by the millions to keep rents high, among other things, and more than half of them get their housing paid for by taxpayers money.

[sefrost]

About half of social housing in London is headed by people born outside of the country. Social housing is quite rare in the UK now after 1980s mass privatization started. It is provided at a steep rental discount and if you qualify for it you can keep it for life. Or purchase it at a steep discount.

Quite bizarre, but difficult to talk about, because it plays in to the wrong side of ongoing culture wars for some people.

https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/fact-check-foreign-born-p...

[joe_mamba]

Same in Austria and other old wealthy EU countries that have since economically stagnated or even declined.

All that seems to matters today, is that the GDP number keeps going up at any and all cost, regardless of long term externalities and second order effect to society. Kina like Saturn devouring his children.

Like sure, now you need to wait 4 months to see a public healthcare specialist compared to only 2 weeks 8 years ago, but the GDP number is higher now than back then, so obviously we must be better off today than in the past, right? RIGHT?!

That's why EU politicians are rushing to implement free speech crackdowns, invasive privacy laws using dictatorial techniques, like last week's Chat Control 1.0. They know they're on borrowed time before the majority of the population wises up and turns against them for the effects of the unpopular policies they pushed that lead to their decline in quality of life and purchasing power.

[TitaRusell]

If GDP rises the country is not economically stagnating though.

[kilotaras]

Rent (and imputed rent) going up does increase GDP without any change in underlying physical activity.

[joe_mamba]

If people are practically poorer and less well off than before, does it matter to them that the country is on paper NOT economically stagnating?

Shoving a graph in their face with a made up number won't change their economic situation.

Sure, let's say GDP went up 5%, but then everything that matters like housing and healthcare went up 10-20%. Average workers aren't the winners of this mythical economic growth we're told we need to keep prioritizing.

What use is GDP growth if most of it just gets concentrated in the top 10% of asset holders and everyone else in the trenches keeping society going, ends up worse off in a decaying society.

That's how we are now massively outputting homeless junkies who gave up on society and Luigis who want to shoot the elites responsible for this, because the system does not work for them.

Now, the elites can avoid the homeless junkies their economic policies create, by living in gated communities in the suburbs and chauffeuring their kids to private schools, but the Luigis are more tricky to dodge because they're smart and motivated, that's why the like of the EU, UK, AU, etc are expediting privacy invasive laws under the guise of "protecting kids" to make sure any future Luigis will be preemptively dealt with the moment they speak ill of the king and the nobility.

[gtrplyrjimi]

It's not just about building more in existing areas. It's about making the construction of affordable housing PROFITABLE for developers; which in this world is nearly impossible. Every tax break you give for building anything just results in luxury developments and the builders keeping the breaks as profit.

Also, you can't just build more in these already built up areas. Many of these areas already have strains on public services and just building up without adjusting for electricity consumption, water, schools, roads, transportation, parking, etc is just creating an even larger more expensive headache.

You have to make building towns / hoas in undeveloped areas easier; and the includes high speed transportation to get to the nearest city hub.

We also have to be alot more flexible on what's allowed to be called housing. We should have more places for people to be able to live in their RV's, cars, etc safely.

All of this comes down to the economic reality of what it takes to actually build and maintain a home and piece of property in America. It's not a right to own a home because of that economic reality. The main ingredients are cheap land in an area that has access to electricity, water, streets, infrastructure and access to income. If you can maintain a job for long enough you can pay off the land and cost to build. That is the only viable way to own. Expecting those kind of prices in LA or NY near the beach or downtown is delusional.

We have to also, philosophically, be honest about the way time passes and an intelligent species propagates itself. An frankly we can just look in the wild and see the same dynamics. If a species is successful, then there will be lots of individuals. Those individuals will be drawn to the BEST places to live. There are only so many BEST places to live. Do we really want to turn every place we live into giant high rises? This is an honest question and I think people aren't being entirely honest about their motives / vision for the planet.

[8note]

if developers cant build housing for people to live in profitably, the government should build it instead

afordable housing is a bedrock to ecobomic prosperity, the same as education and healthcare

[LastTrain]

I really hate this “we don’t build enough housing” narrative these days, because it implies this is a simple supply and demand problem, which it is not. I see so many progressives repeating this line, apparently not understanding that they are suggesting unfettered capitalism (up zoning…) is the solution.

The fundamental problem is we simultaneously want our housing to be affordable and good investment. It can’t be both.

[rainsford]

Those aren't really two different arguments. Wanting housing to be a good investment is one of the reasons we have a supply problem because it incentivizes people to vote against allowing more housing to be built. But at the end of the day the high cost of housing really is a simple supply problem, it's the reason for that lack of supply that's more complex.

[LastTrain]

Maybe you can point me to a recent example in the US where more housing was built resulting in a noticeable decrease in housing costs. And a good investment is one where the value increases faster than inflation, the math doesn’t work.

[fragmede]

Austin. They built a ton of apartment buildings so rent is down.

[heroiccocoa]

I can't think of a good reason as to why people would want housing to be a good investment except if their own wealth depends on it or they want to preserve the wealthy character of their own neighborhood. It takes away investment from local enterprise, local government, which would spur innovation, salary growth, better infrastructure, municipal services, etc.

[patmorgan23]

For the average American homeowner 25-50% of their wealth is in their home.

[antinomicus]

Public housing is the answer to this.

[richwater]

The NYCHA is the largest slumlord in the city. The country has proven over decades that it cannot operate public housing with any measure of success.

[LastTrain]

I agree that is a necessary component.

[JKCalhoun]

"…get annoyed whenever there's new construction…"

People "getting annoyed" doesn't prevent construction of affordable housing. I often see NIMBY comments but never see anything to back up the notion.

Greedy developers that want the largest profit on a given plot of land is probably where you should be looking instead. Why build two inexpensive starter homes when you can build one luxury home and make a larger profit? (Never mind that the county gets larger property tax returns on the more expensive homes.)

And yet. They build high end homes and they sell them anyway. So there seem in fact to be buyers out there?

[stronglikedan]

> We don't, as a matter of intentional policy, build enough housing.

Or maybe we do, but just couldn't keep up with the enormous influx of immigrants for a few years a that ended a couple of years ago. The housing costs have risen due to unforeseen demand, not supply.

[solumunus]

This was a problem long before that, the trajectory has been clear. Is immigration a factor? Sure. The suggestion that it’s the key issue is complete nonsense. This is happening all over the world, even places with low immigration. There’s really no economists claiming that immigration is the main driver. This is reactionary right wing rhetoric and not much more.

[8note]

as an anecdatum, canadian, especially toronto proces are crashing after an easing of immigration

nothing else has particularly changed

[solumunus]

Could it be that middle/high incomes are getting squeezed badly year after year, following sharp housing inflation 2020-2022? Everyone is poorer and interest rates are higher my guy.