Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

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This would be no-problem if cities built more houses (especially large apartment blocks) ... well, and outlaw airbnb.

I live in a former socialist country that somehow managed to build A LOT of housing in the 70s and 80s, with shitty equipment, but somehow cannot build anything in the last few decades. And not just the government building stuff... normal people could buy a plot of land, get their friends to help, dig a hole and start building... a small loan for bricks and cement, and the basement + a concrete slab was built... then a month or two went buy, and what was left from the paychecks went for a pallet of bricks plus a few bags of cement, and half a floor was made. Repeat for a few years and a house was there... no insulation or a facade, but people could live inside and deal with that later. Papers and permits? As long as you built within some basic rules (far away from the property line and not a too unusual shape), you could basically ignore them, and deal with the "legalization" later. Now you're not allowed to build basically anywhere, papers cost more than the whole material+work did back then, and you're not allowed to do anything by yourself and your friends are not allowed to help anymore. So yeah... good luck.

>This would be no-problem if cities built more houses

"Just build more houses" is not something that scales infinitely. Long commute distances and geography tends to get in the way with stuff like hills, mountains, rivers, lakes, oceans, etc. while demand from foreigners and tourists will stay virtually infinite.

At which point do you stop building and say your city can't house more people without ruining the character that makes it a desirable city in the first place?

Should we level Lisbon's 2-4 story housing and turn it into a dystopian city with hundred story megablock towers like in Judge Dredd, just so that everyone in the world who wants to move to Lisbon has a place to live there? But then people won't want to live there anymore if Lisbon is just megablocks.

But in this case we are talking about replacing single-story buildings cities with multi-story apartments.

Just about every city has plenty of room to build lots of housing via upzoning.

> single-story buildings cities with multi-story apartments

How many single story buildings does Lisbon have? I don't remember seeing that many. And how many of those single stary buildings are not under UNESCO historical heritage protection laws and you are allowed to buldoze?

Lisbon is a large city, not everything is the historic "old" city center. You don't even need to demolish anything, since there is space around, and even if you do, there are a lot of not-historic areas there.

You don't need infinitely much, you just need a more than you have now.

We have vast areas here (Ljubljana, slovenia) where you're only allowed to build two-story two apartment buildings and nothing more.. and right next to those buildings are large socialist-time apartment buildings with many apartments. But nope, you're not allowed to build higher there. Even in rural areas, we have a lot of empty land, right next to the road, and nope, not allowed to build there, because people who built their houses now complain and don't want new houses there. They also complain if anyone wants to create any kind of business there, and then they complain that there are no jobs there, and that people have to drive to the capital.

Look at eg. sillicon valley for example... just building 3, 4, 5 story apartment buildings in areas where there are single-family houses would multiply the usable area for apartments by 5 times, making the buildings larger (combining multiple plots) even a lot more, and since the number of apartments goes up, there is much more potential for investors to offer above-market rates for those plots of land where they could build bigger and higher.

>You don't need infinitely much, you just need a more than you have now.

How long do you think "a little bit more than you have now" will last until housing stops being sufficient again and you're back to square one?

Cities like Lisbon have virtually infinite demand due to how attractive they are and how many people would like to live thre, so yeah, you would technically need infinite housing to satisfy the never ending demand, unless you take some legislative policies the makes Lisbon less attractive for certain foreigners and tourists wanting to come there.

Tourists belong in hotels not in residential area apartments. Foreigners should not be able to own apartments at all, since it's a limited resource. Otherwise, build until the prices drop to some managable level for normal people.

> Cities like Lisbon have virtually infinite demand due to how attractive they are and how many people would like to live thre, so yeah, you would technically need infinite housing

Well obviously "infinite" is not true since there are limited people on earth with mobility to visit Lisbon, and not everyone would want to visit, and not everyone can do it at once...

But in good-faith arguments, there is a lot of difference between "build on an empty lot" and "turn Lisbon into Manhattan". As others have pointed out, there are a lot of crumbing buildings in Lisbon. You don't need "more" forever, you need "more" until demand is satisfied or supply of buildable area is exhausted (which it is not).

Also, there are areas on the edge of lisbon, that could become a new manhattan there.

Look at Belgrade for example... after the war, when the city was "full", the communists decided to build more, took an empty swampy area across the sava river, and started building... A LOT:

before: https://www.4zida.rs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/novi-be...

After (a tiny part): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/05/Be...

I live in slovenia, and similar projects were built here, and A LOT of them... somehow all the building stopped after we gained independence.

If your argument implies a slippery slope into a fictional dystopia, you just may be exaggerating just a weee bit.

Wasn’t this called “wild building” for more reasons than just lack of permits?

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