Comment by asdafdssad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asdafdssad | Hacker News Reader

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Because there really isn't a housing crisis so much as a market failure to provide architecturally suitable spaces.

Consider that cities in N. America either have homes with large lots or condos with maximum 2 bedrooms (the price for 3 bedrooms or more scale non-linearly). Therefore it is very difficult to have a family of 4+ in an apartment.

The homes with large lots create areas with too low density which cause our transportation woes (long commutes, highways, infeasibility of public transport).

The 2 bedroom condo building are also often high-rises, which are also terrible (density is too high, making transportation near the building very difficult - just see the jams caused by people getting out of the high rise in the morning).

A more sensible, IMHO, is to have apartment blocks no taller than 8 stories with a good mix of 1, 2, and three bedroom units. These are found in poorer developed countries where the middle class could not necessarily afford a car, never mind two (my family in BsAs, for example in a 100 m^2, three bedroom apt)

In my city it's essentially illegal to build higher density residences than exist currently. Not sure how this is a failure of the market. So of course rents and real estate values are soaring and the current landowners do everything in their power to prevent development of anything that would allow people to live in the city cheaply.

> recently, the Somerville planning office released a report in which they confided that, in a city of nearly 80,000 people, there are exactly 22 residential buildings that meet the city’s zoning code. Every single other home is too dense to be legal: Either it takes up too much of the lot, or it has too many homes, or it’s too tall, or it’s not set far back enough from the street, and so on. (Note that this calculation actually doesn’t include parking requirements, which might very well do away with those last 22 conforming buildings.)

http://cityobservatory.org/the-illegal-city-of-somerville/

Bad government regulation isn't a market failure.

SF isn't the whole world. Yes, there is gov't insanity in housing in the US, but bad housing decisions are made across the US' various states and city governments.

Canada, with a much more sensible gov't [0], has similar woes driven by building idiotic high rises.

[0] Govt spending as a fraction of GDP is similar; the suburbs are much higher density than the US; the line at the DMV takes less then 15 minutes; a new passport takes 2 hours to get from when it was requested (clearly I've lived in very many places).

Yes, I have read that the reason Soviet housing blocks were generally 6-9 stories was that the planners found it to optimize density. The other main benefit of Soviet style housing was that there were large green areas between buildings, which we don’t have in a lot of American cities with similarly sized apartment buildings - here they will more commonly have a very small courtyard, bigger parking area, and otherwise go right up to the road.

There was a lot of thought put into those housing blocks. Unfortunately, they invested the hard thought once and then copy/pasted it for the next 1 million units. Then they used bad materials.

On the other hand, the Germans gave them a proper housing crisis to solve :S

They also made cities sprawl a lot more than they did in the past, and built good public transport links so you can easily travel to your job without a car (which only a couple of people in your building would have).

They are called housing projects in the USA.

Kinda. They weren't nearly as well thought out as the Soviet apt. were, and the underlying city planning was incompatible with the design.

After all, if you're transforming your cities into a sea of asphalt and destroying the public transportation systems, how convenient is a housing project with thousands of units and no parking?

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