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Comment by Manuel_D | Hacker News Reader

California has plenty of land. San Francisco is hardly a dense city. Seattle manages to build lots of housing, despite sharing many of the same challenges: costal city with limited land, earthquakes,etc. But development and housing policy is very different.

California, especially the bay Area, is notorious for being anti-development. The landed class will furiously fight any attempt to build dense housing, to keep property prices high. Rent control exacerbates this as most residents have no incentive to solve the housing shortage since they aren't affected by price increases.

Washington, by contrast, prohibits rent control statewide. It's no coincidence I'm seeing far more construction in Seattle and it's suburbs than I did SF.

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I don’t know much about California.

I’m just balking at the audacity of comparing Massachusetts to Texas and implying their comparable on the basis of their politics more so than their geography.

Land isn't really a big driver of housing costs. The issue is housing where people want to live. Nobody is balking at the apartment rents out in the countryside, it's rents in desirable metros that people are talking about. The question is, how do you get more housing units in a fixed amount of land? The answer is higher density, and policy that allows the conversion of low density housing to high density housing.

> Land isn't really a big driver of housing costs

That is completely and totally wrong.

The land cost is BY FAR the biggest driver of housing cost in the California coastal cities.

The proof of this is that buying a house, completely demolishing it, and building a completely new house is not uncommon in California.

That demonstrates that everything except the land has a negative value.

The point is that it's not a shortage of land. It's not that California as a whole isn't big enough to accommodate it's population. It's that specific desirable places to live are getting more expensive. You concede that this is true when you narrow your statement with "in the California coastal cities."

The problem is that people want to live in the desirable costal cities. The only way that's going to happen is if the city gets more dense. Cities that allow for easy construction are better able to convert low density housing in desirable areas to high density housing to accommodate the growing demand.

People demolishing poor condition or small houses and building high end homes on the land does not in any way demonstrate that buildings have negative value. You're taking an edge case and applying as a generalization. In many of those cases the homeowners are losing money on destroying the old house but prefer that location.

If labor defined the cost, buyers would renovate. If materials defined the cost, buyers would renovate.

The fact that buyers demolish shows that the cost of labor and materials is significantly less than the value of the land. "losing money on destroying the old house but prefer that location" === value of the land is higher than the cost of the rebuild.

That doesn't show that improvements to land have negative value. You're also assuming that landowners always make the most rational value decisions with their properties and that's frankly just not the case. People aren't tearing down high value homes to build new ones, you're only looking at low value ones and applying incorrectly as a generalization to both.

In most real estate transactions where the home is clearly a tear down, it's priced in.

It seems like might have never viewed a property tax bill.

Here's my neighbor's house built in 2022 appraised values:

land: $465,000 improvements: $620,000

While it is true that nobody is complaining about rural countryside rents, it’s kind of dumb to imply that land isn’t a critical issue. Dallas is like 5-6x bigger than Boston in terms of area, because it can spread out, because it has lots of land. Boston can’t really spread. It’s hilly and forester and has tougher weather. Texas is flat plains.

I'm not comparing TX to MA, I'm comparing TX to MA + NY + CA + IL.

On the basis of political differences. But MA is radically different on other more important things. It’s just not a good comparison.

MA housing isn’t even particularly bad. I never paid more than $900 in rent.

> MA housing isn’t even particularly bad. I never paid more than $900 in rent.

When did you live in MA? You'd have to go over an hour west for that at this point.

Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, the burbs

With roommates but never sharing a bedroom

Recent

Boston is second most expensive city for rent. Recently overtook San Francisco.

This doesn’t match my experience although all reports seem to focus on one bedrooms. In my experience most housing, or at least most people, just get room mates and end up finding places much cheaper to live. I also wonder what areas don’t count as Boston despite being on local public transit to the city.

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