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"Make it easy to build new houses" seems to be a mix between
... and I'm not sure which one this is.
Yep, developers are already building unlivable shit boxes as it is, you don't want to lower standards even more.
Some regulations could be looked at (like parking minimums), but you have to be real careful that you're not just enabling developers to build substandard housing. I saw a YouTube video recently where some guy was advocating removing stairwells from buildings that are mandated by fire codes, and that strikes me as a dangerous idea.
As an architectural professional, this misses the point. It's as easy as it's ever been to buy a plot of farmland for relative pennies vaguely near a major metro and throw up a cookie-cutter exurban subdivision full of builder-grade single-family homes. The cost has gone up due to inflation, but if anything bureaucratic and administrative expenses have dropped as a percentage of the overall cost. Builders are constantly fighting new code provisions that would increase costs, but on average most new code revisions add something on the order of a couple thousand dollars of cost to the average new home -- basically nothing against the current average sales price. Most of the cost in a new home is materials and (espescially) contractor labor and profit -- if builders want to offer cheaper standard homes, they ultimately will have to reduce their own cut.
What people are actually talking about when this comes up, is building denser housing closer in. Local zoning regulations often explicitly prohibit multi-family housing in large swathes of cities, especially the kinds most desired by families (townhomes and multiplexes, rather than large apartment complexes). It's easier to build less expensive housing closer to where people want to live, if it can be made legal to build new, middle-density homes where more density is in demand, and even to convert large single-family properties into livable duplexes (such as can be found in cities like Boston and Seattle).
There are other initiatives that I'm more ambivalent about -- for example, the push to change the building code to permit single-stair apartment buildings, that @[email protected] mentions below. This would put American building practice more in alignment with European practice, but I am personally of the opinion that the requirement in US codes for multiple means of egress is one of the most significant safety improvements we've made, and single-stair towers, in combination with the related design philosophy for residents to shelter in place during a fire, was one of the largest contributors to tragedies like Grenfell. But the advocates do have a point that egress requirements do dramatically reduce the efficiency of the typical apartment tower floorplate in the US, and there is probably a way to balance out the risk with other fire protection features.
the best version of this is removing zoning restrictions on multi-units. But if we don't ~~redacted~~ the landlords, they'll still take advantage of us.
...keep building legal and easy housing. Megacorps and oligarchs get crushed when the bubble pops underneath them.
Well, it'll ding them. But the ones hurt worst will be those invested in the ponzi scheme that is the american retirement system.
Like at my last job my tiny nothing of a 401k was invested in mortgage holdings. Had the bubble burst then all my money would be gone.
"Marginal Utility" - $10,000 is a lot to me. Its not worth stooping over to pick up for a Blackrock Exec.
Don't worry we'll bail them out like we always do
Whenever someone says they aim to make it "easier to build houses", I feel they just mean they'll remove certain standards. Not the "must have this many parking spaces" standards which we can do without, the "do we really need a fire ladder?" standards. And then the house is sold at the same price(+inflation) than before because the cost cut all goes to the builder, not the buyer.
If you assume the building company is exploiting every change in regulation (they do like money after all), small changes do nothing and you readily adopt more extreme views (and if you're racists you blame the people with neither money nor power, but that's expected of them).
It depends where you are, in the UK we have american HOA level regulations on house building, your permission can be denied because of the shade of your roof tiles or because the sheds are using the wrong shape of corrugated roofing sheets. Of course the problem is more that these things are very ill defined and the local planning office gets incredibly petty with the power they're given.
So you'll be interested in California's solution. If the project contains enough low income housing and the city won't approve it the developer can just build it anyways. All the safety standards are still required, they just can't be stopped from building it. And if they build it within a certain distance of a light rail stop they don't have to include parking.
I love this
I've never met a person actually making that argument, though. I'm certainly not advocating removing building safety codes, only the NIMBY bullshit like exclusionary zoning that was literally designed to keep people of color far away from white people. Even the opening paragraphs of Wikipedia page for the YIMBY movement say it's primarily in favor of removing things like exclusionary zoning and parking minimums:
The YIMBY movement (short for "yes in my back yard") is a pro-housing movement[1] that focuses on encouraging new housing, opposing density limits (such as single-family zoning), and supporting public transportation. It stands in opposition to NIMBY ("not in my back yard") tendencies, which generally oppose most forms of urban development in order to maintain the status quo.[2][3][4]
As a popular organized movement in the United States, the YIMBY movement began in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 2010s amid a housing affordability crisis and has subsequently become a potent political force in local, state, and national[5][6] politics in the United States.[7][8]
The YIMBY position supports increasing the supply of housing within cities where housing costs have escalated to unaffordable levels.[9] They have also supported infrastructure development projects like improving housing development[10] (especially for affordable housing[11] or trailer parks[12]), high-speed rail lines,[13][4] homeless shelters,[14] day cares,[15] schools, universities and colleges,[16][17] bike lanes, and pedestrian safety infrastructure.[3] YIMBYs often seek rezoning that would allow denser housing to be produced or the repurposing of obsolete buildings, such as shopping malls, into housing.[18][19][20] Cities that have adopted YIMBY policies have seen substantial increase in housing supply and reductions in rent.[21]
The YIMBY movement has supporters across the political spectrum, including left-leaning adherents who believe housing production is a social justice issue, free-market libertarian proponents who think the supply of housing should not be regulated by the government, and environmentalists who believe land use reform will slow down exurban development into natural areas.[22] Some YIMBYs also support efforts to shape growth in the public interest such as transit-oriented development,[23][24] green construction,[25] or expanding the role of public housing. YIMBYs argue cities can be made increasingly affordable and accessible by building more infill housing,[26][27][28]: 1 and that greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced by denser cities.[29]
This is becoming a global problem. It's not just that you can't easily build houses anywhere, there's also the fact that housing is mostly built for profit so if prices go too low, new housing stops being built. I think you can see where this is going.
Literally everyone agrees that more housing should be built and it shouldn't be too hard to do so (just don't sacrifice safety standards). However, simply building more housing isn't enough. A lot of the housing built nowadays are built for the rich while there aren't many small starter-homes being built. We need to do so much more than just building more homes, or else we risk the rich just buying them all up again.
EVERY BUILDING project in my city is upscale rich housing.
This is myopic thinking. We all live in one big housing market. If you don't have enough houses built, it doesn't provide housing for the working class. You just end up with multi-millionaires living in tiny homes.
When you restrict the ability of builders to build new homes, they focus on maximizing the profit of the few homes they can make. We had cheap housing in the US in eras where we made it possible for builders to build vast numbers of housing on a colossal scale. That way you can really harness economies of scale and drive down the price tremendously.
There are two ways to make money by making something. You can either make high-margin luxury goods, or you can make vast numbers of low-margin affordable goods. Our current restrictions on home buildings encourage developer to take the former path, when we want to encourage them to take the latter.
Who tf is saying "execute landlords" maoist style but also "deport immigrants"
My U.S.S.R. refugee/immigrant next door neighbor that owns a few houses she rents out. She’s not the brightest bulb.
She's the problem
Welcome to Lemmy, a contortionist's wet dream
Do whatever's needed to increase affordability except anything that will reduce the value of my house.
That's basically the two sides.
The problem is that people say the latter as if it's a solution on its own without also doing the former.
To my knowledge absolutely no one saying "Ban landlords" is also saying "Don't build any more housing." But there are plenty of people who think that you can build housing, in an environment where rich landowners have the ability to buy up and hoard everything you build, and don't comprehend that this in no way solves the problem.
I don't think you live where I live. Because where I live there is just no room to build many more houses without demolishing other houses first. There is a lot of discussion about moving away from single-family houses and increasing the density of living space. I don't see how this would be solved by making it easier to build.
ETA: Just to be clear, I absolutely am not advocating for deporting immigrants.
Do some reading about "the missing middle." In many cases the sort of medium-density housing like row houses or duplex/triplex/quadruplex designs that offer more comfort and privacy than a massive apartment complex but are more affordable than single family houses on large lots are explicitly regulated against in American cities, and local codes need to change in order to allow the sort of humane-but-cost-effective housing that will make a dent in the affordability crisis. Problem is, though, that existing homeowners see denser housing as a threat, both to the value of their own properties, and to the comfortable social homogeneity of their neighborhoods. At some level you need to have the power to force these developments through over the objections of the neighbors, undemocratic as that is, or else the problem never gets solved.
The ones who find social homogeneity "comfortable" are the boomer bigots in power. That is one of the main obstacles to progress in this despicable & irrational inequality: removing the churchy racist fucks from office.
In truth, NIMBYism is a gigantic problem even (especially!) in places where people profess to hold liberal and/or progressive values. It's a massive contributor to the housing crisis in California, for instance... and the attitude is not limited to Boomers, who are reaching the age now where they're as likely to be entering assisted living homes as they are to be stubbornly holding on to a house in the 'burbs that's appreciated 1000% since they bought it. GenX and even those us Millennials who are fortunate enough to own can be and often are just as guilty of NIMBYism as the old folks.
Thank you for the clarification in your "ETA".
Evolving the (sub)urban planning directive beyond "single-family houses" while also "increasing the density of living space” is "making it easier to build", TBH. 😅
Hot take. Stop making so many new people so we don't have to live crowded like ants and destroying all our environment to provide housing.
Just stop having so many children.
That's already happened. US birthrates have been below replacement rates for over a decade, and most of Europe before that.
population control is just advocating for eugenics
They aren't advocating for population control, they are advocating for individuals to make their own decisions wisely.
Edit: Nevermind. https://lemmy.world/comment/13130336
No it's not.
Society can handle many many more people, they just choose not to so they can have their SUVs and newest iphones.
This has that twitter style 'make up a dude to get mad at' vibe to it.
RE: Immigrants
Trump & Co are not making this argument in good faith. They don't actually believe that immigrants are taking the jobs and houses, and their insane proposed solution is not actually intended to make anything better. Trump is a fascist trying to win power through demagoguery, and their focus is to find pain points of negative feelings they can amplify to turn people angry and create division.
A big part of this is "othering," finding someone they can turn into the bad guys so they have someone to beat up and blame for all our problems. The Jews, the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese, the blacks, the Muslims the Mexicans. It doesn't matter who, as long as they can find a way to tap into hate and bigotry, and funnel that into a shared anger towards anyone. Any group that is "foreign" and new can and has been the "other" we hate.
In the real world, a solution to housing shortage is as simple as it would be without immigrants. Populations have been growing for centuries, and we simply build more and upwards to provide housing for everyone. Since people are working, their productivity allows them to pay for their housing. This is not particularly complicated. When population growth happens fast, we simply need to manage this process more intently.
We are currently in a weird situation because of population shifts, increase in costs of housing (like variability in lumber costs and high interest rates), and the weird period of excess wealth that we were left in due to the pandemic economic chaos.
The real solution is by no means simply finding an "other" group to blame, hate, and throw into the ocean. The real solution is to put more effort to advance our housing development slightly faster than it would do so normally under regular population growth.
What Harris is doing makes simple sense. She proposes to give incentives to house builders to build more, and to give incentives to families to be able to buy more easily than corporations. There's more than can be done, but this approach is economics-sound and will definitely work well enough while other optimizations are pursued.
Trump's idea of removing 10 million immigrants is not only deeply imbecilic, it's also designed as a catastrophe on the economy, and it's suicidal. You can't shift large segments of the population without an economic impact. Immigrants of all walks of life are part of the economy, contribute to productivity and pay taxes. In various sectors they are a key source of labor supply where we would otherwise not have enough people to perform jobs. It is estimated that there are about 5 million undocumented immigrants GROWING OUR FOOD in the US. If your plan is to kill Americans by famine, kicking out the people that grow and make the food will work a treat.
I also have thoughts on how to slow down corporate ownership of housing, but there's no need to get into that since this post is already long. Harris already has the right direction by putting strong economic incentives on the things that we want to see more of. And that's a starting path towards even more improvements in the near future. But it requires having people with functioning brains and good ideas in gov.
Who is getting mad at the second part but not the first?
People who realize that not all places that need more affordable housing have space to build more housing, and that prices are inflated because of landlords and companies buying up the limited property. Like in cities.
Different situations, different priorities.
Are these being discussed as one or the other things? Why can't we have both, where applicable?
Edit: Er... I only just now noticed the "deport immigrants" part of the top panel. 😨 I want everything but that one.
NIMBYs whose main complaint about short-term rentals is the (admittedly significant) nuisance factor of having a "party house" next door... but also don't want a duplex or other multifamily housing arrangement across the street, where it might bring The Poors into the neighborhood and drive down their property values.
Fact is, though, that most Americans are in debt up to their eyeballs, and their financial situation only works out if they think of their house as an eternally-appreciating asset that they can continually leverage to pay off other debts. If the line ever stops going up, they're fucked. I hate NIMBYism, but we've made our society into such a hypercapitalist hellscape that on some level it's hard to blame people for it.
Even taking you at your word, just building more houses wouldn't solve the problem unless the other existing issues are solved first. There are already more than enough houses, several times more unoccupied houses than there are homeless people in fact. If you just make it easier to build more, those new houses will just end up in the same situation as the existing lot: bought up by corporate groups as investments, held ransom by landlords, and generally NOT made available to consumers who want to buy a home.
So yeah. You're gonna see some pushback if you're only making that second argument, all that will do is make the investor class richer without solving any problems.
It would be funny if someone was against increasing the supply of housing in general terms