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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

That’s not the reason we have a housing crisis. If you look at cities like Houston, where housing is relatively affordable, the vast majority of people still have single family homes. The reason we have a housing crisis is because regulations make it too hard to build housing.

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Despite their reputation for car centric design in the suburbs, Houston is actually building a LOT of multi-family dwellings. This is helping with affordability.

https://catalyst.independent.org/2019/12/18/how-houston-is-b...

I'm also really happy with how they have handled their homeless.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...

These things are not in conflict. It's very easy to build 100% car-dependent high-density residential. Just cut a subdivision off an arterial and chuck a 5-over-1 or some townhouses in there. That's the vast majority of multifamily development by volume.

Multifamily housing is valuable against car-dependence in the context of a city street grid with mixed use zones or at least somewhat proximate neighborhood commercial zones. Then the people living there actually have destinations they can walk to, and routes they can bike or take transit on that aren't "snake around to the subdivison's one interface to the 6-lane arterial, and try not to die on it."

I grew up in Texas, people are have been building in literal floodplains because there is no more room to build.

https://abc13.com/floodplain-housing-building-houston-flood/...

Houston is just second-to-last in line in Texas to face the affordability crisis (followed by San Antonio) because they have the highest capacity automobile infrastructure, but it's already regularly ranked with the worst traffic in the United States.

While I agree that Houston does a lot of things right, especially just literally allowing density, I do not think they would survive an influx of folks while maintaining affordability any better than Austin has.

Austin is still doing a hell of a lot better than the West Coast is!

Right... agreed, but what? Are you not following the argument? Austin is on the exact same trajectory as the West Coast. It's just about 10-15 years behind.

No, it isn’t, because Austin allows building to keep up with demand. The policy failures of West Coast states aren’t a law of nature; they’re policy failures.

>No, it isn’t, because Austin allows building to keep up with demand. The policy failures of West Coast states aren’t a law of nature; they’re policy failures.

The policy of building out is a law of nature, simply because it is impractical and unaffordable to upgrade the transportation infrastructure. The only real development you're getting in Austin is vertical construction downtown (which is net good for affordability), and then you're filling in the remaining wilderness east of Austin (Manor, Webberville, and the area out to Bastrop).

That's the last remaining unconsumed land that is viable for commuting, as the highways are already overcapacity out to Leander, Georgetown, Buda, and nearly Dripping Springs along the Mopac and 35 corridors.

If Austin starts building multi-family homes in existing SFH neighborhoods, then more power to them.

Considering that Houston is significantly bigger than Austin--metro area of 6.6 million vs 2.2 million--one could argue it _is_ handling a significant influx of people better than Austin.

In absolute terms, Houston is building significantly more new homes than Austin, but Austin is growing its housing stock by a larger proportion. https://constructioncoverage.com/research/cities-investing-m...

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