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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

There is a fundemental problem that cannot really be solved with housing:

People want a single family homes with a nice property in nice area. They want a short commute and all the convenience of modern life.

There is in fact a hard limit on how many single family homes you can have in a an area. You can build them somewhere else, but then you get long commutes or short commutes to low paying work.

HN, let me remind you, most people do not work in tech banging on a keyboard all day with mild collaboration. Most people still need to commute to their jobs at least once a week. The majority still need to go in everyday.

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Families tend to want single family homes. But singles/couples are happy buying townhomes or condos, which we could build a lot more of on the existing land. And we should encourage older couples to downsize (eg CA makes this undesirable because of prop 13)

More families would be open to townhomes and condos if they had 3-4 bedrooms.

Yeah.

If I ever raised a family [0], I would very, very strongly prefer them to live in a reasonably-sized condo or apartment in a big city, rather than in the suburbs or in the sticks. There's more to do, better and more diverse food, a far more diverse set of people (and ideologies) to meet, and the environmental impact of one's consumption is much, much smaller per-capita than living outside of the city. [1]

It's to city managers' great discredit that they don't prioritize making it reasonably possible for families to have a decent quality of living within the cities that they manage. (If they did this, one would expect the quality of living for every ordinary person in the city to inevitably become substantially better.)

[0] And I will not, because I would be an absolutely terrible parent.

[1] Or, that was the case prior to the collapse of shopping in many big cities. Now, I guess many folks get stuff shipped direct to them, just as if they were living in the middle of nowhere.

Same same. We bought a two-bedroom house in an inner-ring suburb when the kiddo arrived. We'd be happier (even renting) in a two-bedroom place in the City. Not possible. I vote the local YIMBY coalition's ticket - even though it's notionally (now) "against my economic interests" (I don't actually think it is) - and wish there was more I could do.

Add to that a systemic lack of investment in public transportation infrastructure and it makes said commutes completely reliant on private resources.

People are willing to live in condos just fine. But everything is unaffordable now. Every new condo building has crazy HOA fees with prices that are totally out of reach.

We're not building out or building up. So yeah. It's bad.

> Every new condo building has crazy HOA fees with prices that are totally out of reach.

At least here in San Francisco, even old condos have HOA fees that are within shouting distance of "market rate" rents... on top of the absolutely absurd purchase price. It's madness.

An SFH in a big city is a luxury, as you say, something has to give. You can't have cheap SFH in a nice neighborhood next to your job for everyone, there is reason why buildings exist

Factor in good schools and other wants well.

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