Hacker News Reader

Comment by everdev | Hacker News Reader

> If you could just put up housing on land you own and charge however much people will pay for it, this housing crisis would quickly be gone!

It's not that simple. Rapidly increasing the housing supply has all kinds of effects on communities:

* Decreasing the value of nearby homes (supply and demand)

* Increasing traffic and strain on community services like schools

* Environmental impact

* Rapidly changing the demographic and possibly culture of the area

Zoning laws and the permit process exist to help ensure safe buildings but also to help protect the home value of existing residents.

This makes sense in communities with the infrastructure to support it though and we definitely should be looking into ways to safely house everyone.

View on HN

Rapidly increasing the housing supply in a way that has these knock-on effects is only possible if demand already far outstrips supply. So really the problem isn't that these things will happen—it's that laws have been protecting wealthy "communities" for so long already that the whole thing is upside-down and we risk unleashing chaos simply by satisfying the demand for housing.

The solution is to get our heads around the fact that people need affordable places to live, and work toward satisfying that demand as quickly as reasonably possible without completely overloading services or putting too many homeowners on the edge upside-down on their mortgages. Unfortunately, so much damage has already been done that this will not be easy, but it will only get harder as governments continue to shelter the wealthy at the expense of everybody else and local economies in general.

Oh, and hand-wringing about changing demographics and culture is not helping. Change happens. Integration is necessary.

> Oh, and hand-wringing about changing demographics and culture is not helping. Change happens. Integration is necessary.

Culture matters to a lot of people. Why do you like one town versus another? Maybe the weather, maybe the jobs, but probably also because of the people, the shops, the architecture, the parks, etc. The later are all a function of culture.

Some of the most unique cities are ones with a strong identity. If you take an agricultural town with lots of great festivals, open space and farm to table restaurants and basically make it an affordable housing suburb for the nearby big cities, it's not an easy win/win. You'll need to take that open space and popup some fast food restaurants to feed the demand. Something is lost culturally in that process and it's worth examining rather than saying it's inevitable or necessary.

Culture is made of and by people, and when those people are spending four hours in their cars every day getting to and from work or working themselves to the bone with multiple jobs just to afford a place to live, you're going to have a whole lot less of it.

Fetishizing yesterday's culture is a poor substitute.

> Decreasing the value of nearby homes (supply and demand)

Or rephrased: "Making housing affordable".

I mean you're right, but this is the entire point of building more housing!

It makes housing affordable for new homeowners, but if prices drop rapidly existing homeowners can owe more than their home is worth.

That's why it's not as simple as "build more affordable housing", not everyone wins if it's done too fast.

While we need to provide affordable housing there are reasonable economic / environmental / community reasons why some small towns don't want it in their own backyard.

That's how cars economics work. Homes are depreciating assets. They need expensive repairs and renovations throughout their life. Modern homes are designed to last a few decades. Why are capital holders entitled to guranteed capital returns when their neighbors sleep in excrement on the streets?

I see your point, so please don't accuse me of missing it. However comparing an underwater loan to living on the streets is absurd. If the house isn't worth the mortgage file bankruptcy and move on with your life. If you're living on the streets the chances of getting another chance are razor thin. We all should take a hard look at our privilege before we compare the pains of bankruptcy to the immediately life threatening hellscape that is homelessness.

Affordable housing and homeless shelters are two different things.

I doubt homeless shelters produce this effect on existing home prices.

And yes, telling a hard working middle class family with kids to just declare bankruptcy and move on is a big deal and worth examining the impact before you create policies that make that a real possibility.

Sure it's a big deal. They gambled on a house and lost. Homeowners should not be guranteed an roi on a depreciating asset like they are in this economic climate. The housing market is irrational because of speculative investing, predatory renting, rent seeking landowners, nimbys, racist lending, etc. Each of these requires different solutions.

Would I feel bad for someone who bought a sfh and went underwater. You betcha. That's life though. Most car loans are underwater from day 1. Should be artificially restrict the number of cars on the road so car owners can sell their worn and breaking down clunker for a profit too? Should we continue to limit this dynamic to scalable profit generating schemes that disproportionately benefit millionaires and billionaires?

Increased density tends to go together with higher real-estate values, not lower ones. (What it does is lower demand for real-estate elsewhere, as the high-density area becomes more desirable due to its better amenities.) And it makes it easier to provide "community services" like mass transit, that obviate increased traffic.

Other than environmental impact, I don't see why any of those bullet points should be protected by law.

> Decreasing the value of nearby homes

People often overlook this point way too quickly, they don't consider people with mortgages, if you saved up for a house and purchased with a mortgage then when the flood gates are opened and your house value drops, you now owe more than your house is worth, not a good position to be in.

Poor investment decisions should not be insured by your neighbors and local government.

Historically, homes weren't meant to be purchased for life for the vast majority of people. In the past few decades people have got in the mindset "I'm going to live here for at least 2 years, I'll buy a house" and then buy, sell, buy, sell, buy sell "Hey, property values are up 30%, time to sell and buy a bigger house!" or "Oooh such and such city/neighborhood sounds cool I'm bored with this city/neighborhood, time to sell!" type behavior.

If people would go back to purchasing homes with the full intention of staying there for decades, this wouldn't be an issue for most people.

The people are moving there whether you like it or not.

Seattle has had 20 years of almost continuous growth, with little housing expansion, and almost no affordable units (compared to growth. Yet, it has this idea, that if we ignore the problem it'll just go away.

Realistically, every city needs to accept that it is not an ocean liner, and cannot pull up the gangplanks and go "oh, sorry, we're full now, maybe you should try Portland? best of luck to you!"

> Seattle has had 20 years of almost continuous growth, with little housing expansion

False. "Seattle not only has more cranes than any other major city in the country, it’s by a landslide—the city with the next-highest crane count is Chicago, with 40." https://seattle.curbed.com/2018/7/24/17608278/seattle-constr...

> almost no affordable units

Rents have actually declined over the past few years, and housing outside the urban core is affordable. Not everyone needs to live in SLU.

> if we ignore the problem it'll just go away.

If you just stop interfering with the market, the market will fix your problem for you.

Regionally, we've had a couple thousand high end luxury units built, but no great growth, to keep up with growth we need an order of magnitude more housing then that. There has been almost no growth of rental housing outside the downtown core.

My rent more than doubled from 2012, to 2015, and then went up 10% a year thereafter - you are mostly correct, for one year in there my rent didn't go up - then the northward climb began again in earnest. I was living for most of that in what most would call affordable housing.

The market probably would do its job and solve the issue, provided we didn't make it so dang hard to actually build anything in the City of Seattle.

> The market probably would do its job and solve the issue, provided we didn't make it so dang hard to actually build anything in the City of Seattle.

With you there. But compared to the Bay Area, Seattle is practically permissive.

> Regionally, we've had a couple thousand high end luxury units built

People conflate "luxury" and "expensive".

Any housing you build in an acute housing shortage will be expensive. This is because there is so much unmet demand, not because it's "luxury".

So it's impossible to build cheap housing in a housing crisis, and if you demand that only cheap housing be built, you're actually demanding no new housing!

For existing home owners and landlords, that is a profitable strategy to weed out competition for their assets. For anyone else: Don't get fooled!

The high rise units downtown are undisputedly luxury though

> strain on community services like schools

Public schools take forever to build because they need to get a bond approved, procure land, find a builder, staff it, etc. If Washington in general and Seattle in particular were more open to charter schools, there's a better chance of schools keeping up with demand. Additionally, if Washington allowed a voucher system (it's been a while since I checked, but I'm pretty sure it's not allowed), private schools could also pick up the slack.

> rapidly changing the demographic and possibly culture of the area

Is that a bad thing?

I'm okay with zoning laws in general, but for it to work, the city needs to be open to rapid changes in zoning.

>Decreasing the value of nearby homes (supply and demand)

So, instead of flipping your house after 2-5 years for 5x what you paid for it, you'll have to stay in it for 10-50 years and only get 2-3x what you paid for it?

Repeat after me: it is not the governments job to insure every persons individual investments maintain their value.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com