I'm beginning to look at the housing market in the UK, a bit like the diamond market. Where the market is effectively controlled by 1-2 companies that ensure the release of a controlled quantity into the market at any one time.
Developers have a huge land bank upon which they could develop high density cheap accommodation using modern commercial property techniques however this would destroy their market. It's better to release 200k of 'stock' per year in the market to maintain high house prices.
It helps that the government has pretty much stripped the ability of councils to build houses, and more importantly, the sale of council houses (right to buy). Bring in the fact none of these houses have a 'no second home' clause means they are bought up as buy to let facilitated by a change in banking regulation in 1996 that allowed buy to let mortgages.
So yeah, we have a housing stock problem. Start thinking about it like the diamond business and the similarities are quite scary.
There's an easy solution to the developer land-banking problem: levy a tax on the unimproved value of land.
Most taxes have some sort of efficiency cost (e.g. income tax means people work less hours than they otherwise would have). Recent modelling by the Australian Treasury suggests that a LVT (set at a sensible rate) actually has a negative efficiency cost: that is, it increases economic efficiency, resulting in higher levels of economic output.
If you're looking for a new house in the UK, then you're going to get ripped off. Poor quality construction, too many tiny rooms, no outside space, design deficiencies which mean the house is unlikely to last 30 years without major reconstruction, an insurance policy that's not worth the paper its written on, an emerging scandal in leasehold contracts.
Buy an old house, preferably a Victorian terraced house or a solidly constructed 1930s-1960s council house.
Also similar to American houses, they now are all built around wooden frames. That's cheap and easy (the frames are made in a factory and just screwed together on site), but in a wet and windy island it's a very bad idea. Any significant roofing leak which isn't fixed immediately will destroy the house, and helpfully these wooden framed houses are dressed in fake brick and plastic cladding which cover up evidence of leaks.
Having lived in American houses for about 30 years now, leaking isn't an issue if you have a good roof that is maintained. I live in the north, an even worse than rain we get lots of snow that leads to "ice dams" forming on roofs. Even with that we don't have problems with leaking.
Knowing family in N.E. where it rains, and snows quite a bit and remains damp for most of the year (ponds) the construction type doesn't seem to be deficient in that sense. They are however, not the same construction as older house from 1800s, early 1900s --but those too have their issues with very irregular construction. Things which would not be allowed today (narrow staircases, irregular architecture and of course, no accommodation for modern plumbing or electricity).
I've pondered where you even start today if you want to build an 1800's style "built to last" home that ignores cost, and focuses both on longevity and ease of maintenance.
With some modern design concepts (e.g. leaving plenty of plenum for unanticipated future cabling/plumbing needs) I think you could come up with a very pleasant place to live, just at probably quadruple the price.
Is anyone building stuff like this today? Or would this have to be some extremely custom stuff you need to research and act as a contractor managing a bunch of subcontractors?
Absolutely, if you have a good roof which is maintained, not the cheapest possible roof which goes unmaintained because naive buyers think that because it's a new house with an "insurance" policy they will never need to maintain anything.
The problem is use of softwood timber frames (because: cheap) in a very wet country, adding the cheapest possible roof, then cladding the whole lot so you cannot see any leaks or other damage happening. Then selling the resulting tiny flat to a first time buyer who doesn't know any better for an average of £232K (2016 figure). IoW a systematic failure at all stages.
> Also similar to American houses, they now are all built around wooden frames. That's cheap and easy (the frames are made in a factory and just screwed together on site), but in a wet and windy island it's a very bad idea. Any significant roofing leak which isn't fixed immediately will destroy the house, and helpfully these wooden framed houses are dressed in fake brick and plastic cladding which cover up evidence of leaks.
Nearly every one of these criticisms is a desirable feature of traditional Japanese architecture. Houses are assembled from standardized materials produced off-site and fitted together without nails (wood joinery). Many interior walls and some exterior walls are literally made of paper, in sliding wooden frames (exterior shoji almost always have sliding wooden covers that are deployed at night). Special attention is paid to the thatched or tiled roof.
Japan is a very wet place. In summer there are typhoons at least every week and it's miserably hot and humid. Traditional houses are perfectly adapted for this: when you need to you can slide open most of the walls and take advantage of every breeze. I believe that most of the wood is cedar, which is resistant to rot, and most of the structure is left visible (i.e. no plaster) so any problems are readily apparent.
Houses seem less adapted to winter, but people adapt by using deep baths, kotatsu, and quilted clothing to heat their bodies rather than the entire inside of the house.
Earthquakes are pretty common in Japan, one of the reason lighter materials are used. Traditional buildings are typically built on stone foundations. Structural posts are fitted with stone "feet" that are free to slide around on the foundation during earthquakes.
Japanese don't value permanence in architecture the way Europeans do -- even the Ise Jungu (shrine), a national monument, is rebuilt every N years -- yet in the area I lived (Nara prefecture) there were many traditional houses over a hundred years old. There is at least one wooden building at Horyuji (temple) that is ~1200 years old.
[Thanks to Dr. Lloyd Fulton for that class in traditional Japanese architecture at Waseda U. Miss you, sensei.]
I didn't know traditional houses over a hundred years old existed in this country. The sole exception that have witnessed are western style building in Hakodate, however they are anything but traditional.
More importantly, when you speak about these throwable houses, are you sure that is a "desirable feature"?
>Japanese don't value permanence in architecture the way Europeans do...
That may be a big part of the explanation. It's fairly common for Japanese people to have the existing house torn down and rebuilt when they buy a property.
Houses have been timber framed in the UK since the sixties. There is nothing wrong with timber frame houses, Bergen gets much more rain than most places in the UK and is still mostly timber houses. I've lived in a timber framed house clad in horizontal planks for the last thirties years in Norway (the house was built in 1952) and it's fine. Modern Norwegian houses are often made of kits of parts but that generally makes them better not worse.
It might be that the UK has more than its fair share of cowboy builders. It is not the building technique that is at fault but the execution of it.
The 1920s ex-council house I live in is built from two layers of brick separated by a cavity (with metal ties between the layers, which are themselves a problem because they rust). Unbelievably even the internal walls are also all two layers of brick. All I know is that labour must have been very cheap in 1920.
The outer cavity is designed to stop water from crossing from the outside to the interior.
There is a fashion for filling the cavity with insulating materials, but that leads to problems because it can draw water between the layers.
Bricks have very low r-value meaning that you pay a lot of money to heat/cool them. Bricks is a bad choice for construction anywhere where indoor climate control is an issue.
American construction is strong enough to last for a few hundred years if you maintain it. While it isn't passive house efficient it is efficient (and it isn't clear that a passive house is even possible in our climate - many of them make other compromises which means they rot out in a few years).
How can you know about r-values but not that every modern house built has cavity walls that can be/are insulated?[1]
Even hundred-year old houses can be insulated by DIY drylining. You'll lose about 10cm of floor space though. Sometimes there's even some government grants available for this[2]
I'm biased to US construction methods of course. Note that while bricks are themselves of a worse r-value than wood, but wood isn't actually a great r-value either.
Note that bricks are not a strong as wood under tension. They do well under compression, but that is not all the loads to account for. Bricks are used in cities and commercial construction primarily because they do not burn and so you can use them as a safety barrier.
Not usually concrete in a domestic house, but solid red brick or stone blocks for the internal walls yes. Hollow walls like a kind of wood and plaster tent seems just as ridiculous to me. Solid walls keep the house cool or warm and stop noise.
New construction (at least in the north central US) is minimum 2"x6" studs in the exterior walls filled with fiberglass insulation and pretty significant blown fiberglass insulation in the roof. Most of the noise going between interior rooms is a result of the use of cheap, hollow doors; usage of solid oak doors minimizes sound travel between rooms. Additional noise-damping insulation can be installed between rooms if desired that effectively eliminate all sound travel between rooms.
I'd speculate that a well-build modern wood-and-sheetrock house is probably more energy efficient and quieter than an early 20th-century double- or triple-brick house.
Also, wood-and-sheetrock is a lot easier/cheaper to replace than brick when a tornado comes along and knocks the house down, which is possible in 75% of the US.
There are significant areas of the US where I suspect it's actually illegal to build an all-brick house (as opposed to just quite expensive).
The UK is basically tectonically stable, which means those brick houses aren't likely to collapse into a multi-ton pile of bricks when the mortar crumbles or cracks in an earthquake. The same cannot be said of many areas in the USA, and it only takes one earthquake every few decades to drive that point home.
No, please no concrete for the walls. I have lived in an an apartment that had concrete walls in Bangalore and it's just terrible. Concrete amplifies both hot and cold weathers. So you are spending a ton of money on air-conditioning and heating as well. Admitted, in Bangalore you don't need heating but I can't imagine a concrete house in the northern hemisphere.
Like others have stated, solid bricks, stones or even clay bricks are a better alternative. You still need to use cement but that's alright.
The thermal mass in construction is like adding inductors and capacitors to a circuit. It has to be tuned to the local climate. The best you can do with thermal mass alone is an interior that is always the local mean temperature (like in a cave).
So in a thermal wall, you should match the rate at which heat conducts through the wall to the thickness of the wall, such that it takes about (12 + 24n) hours for heat applied to the exterior of the wall to radiate from the interior of the wall, and vice versa. You're trying to eliminate the daily temperature variation, so that the heating or cooling load will be more stable.
Adding phase-change materials to the concrete mix would help, but for the most part, the traditional building method in the region has been tuned by trial and error. If you build an adobe house in New Mexico, you make the walls from local materials, with the same thickness as the traditional homes. Or you get an engineer to do the thermal calculations.
Most houses built in the US just stick to the building code, which is generally good enough to accommodate local weather conditions without breaking out the calculators.
Right. Writing code to estimate the optimum thickness was one of our homework problems in modeling and simulation class, back in the day. I expect running that sim on a PC would be trivial today, but back then it took a significant amount of time on a fast SPARCstation.
(the basic idea was to model the wall as extremely thin slices so the heat transfer between slices can be approximated easily. How thin? You kept making them thinner until the model stabilized).
The wall thickness we derived was very close to the wall thickness traditionally used by the indigenous people of the area. What are the odds? :-)
No, literally all the internal walls in my house are built from two solid layers of red bricks. There's no wood or metal involved. This is normal in most of the west outside America.
Oh, ya not sure if I've ever even seen that. I live in an old (by American standards) 1950's apartment building with plaster walls, but pretty sure still hollow underneath.
Seems like that would make it harder to frame a new subdivision in under a week.
Yes you can't slice-and-dice it like I'm sure you can wood. But they last forever. Houses here are routinely hundreds of years old where in the US the approach seems to be to knock down the wooden houses and build them again before they get that old.
At least until the next earthquake, which is a real possibility in much of the US. Light frame houses survive earthquakes pretty well. The brick chimneys on them don't.
> Houses here are routinely hundreds of years old where in the US the approach seems to be to knock down the wooden houses and build them again before they get that old.
Well, yes and no. The US isn't that old. There weren't a lot of homes here hundreds of years ago so obviously there aren't a lot of 200-year old homes now. But yes, there's also a fair bit of demolishing of 50-year old homes.
I live in a four-story condo building that's about 100 years old and entirely wood-framed, all the way down to massive wood beams in the basement that anchor the entire place to the foundation. There's been some moderate renovations of exterior walls because of water damage before, but it's worth the hassles of that kind of thing to know that if an earthquake comes along the building will ride it out without any serious damage.
> There's been some moderate renovations of exterior walls because of water damage before
Yeah, I don't understand the comments in this thread that talk about water damage. Do people in Europe just not bother maintaining their roofs? You can get hidden water damage from a leak into a hollow wall, but it's really not that common. Typically there's visible water staining and severe damage only comes from willfully ignoring that signs.
I know plenty of people with houses over 100 years old in the US, so it's not like the houses aren't lasting that long. Naturally, it's not as large of a portion of the houses as in the UK because the US's population has more than 200% in the past 100 years while the UK's only went up by 50%, so the US needed to do a lot more construction since then.
It's going to be an ugly, ugly thing if another major quake hits there. The last time the region was sparsely populated. Now there are cities all over the place and and the seismic codes are far more lax than they are in California (if said codes even exist).
New houses in the UK are almost universally a joke(and I've been looking at some recently) - 4-5 bedroom homes with bedrooms so laughably small that they don't even fit a double size bed. So effectively, you take one room for the bedroom, one for a wardrobe, and one for a desk. Idiotic. And like others have mentioned - paper thin walls.
What do people such as yourself have against buy-to-let? It doesn't change the supply level (unless for some reason you need to buy and can't rent). I always thought buy-to-let seemed rather nice and progressive - a good way for ordinary people with a little spare money to invest and build up money for their retirement while their asset still benefits society by being maintained and housing someone. That seems like a great example of sensible British middle-class aspiration.
And why is this a problem? The landlord takes on administrative hassle, and -- more importantly -- risk, for example
- Can't rent out the property.
- Property needs to undergo repair.
- Tenants don't pay rent, destroy the property.
- Liquidity risk: property is not as easy to sell as many other goods, in case of emergency.
All of the above happen with a certain probability and that needs to be priced in. The last one is rarely a problem but the others are major considerations. And I have not even mentioned transaction costs for buying/selling a property, not to mention taxation. For these reasons, property typically doesn't have a good ROI, vis-a-vis e.g. investing in shares. A lot of property investors are naive, and would be better off investing in a passive index fund. So in many cases tenants get a good deal. In my experience buy-to-let is lucrative primarily when
- Landlord has multiple properties, Economies of scale kicks in.
- Landlord has relevant skills (plumber, electrician, or ... tax expert, lawyer) so he can get some jobs that need to be done substantially below market price.
- Is physically close to the property, so can visit/check easily.
- Has unusually low cost of capital (lower than bank-based mortgages).
Ideally more than one of those.
only thing separating
The landlord has already proven financial stability, while the tenant typically hasn't. Many tenants tend to be young, e.g. students who are by-and-large not yet ready to take on the major responsibility of buying and maintaining a house. My heuristic for when you are ready to buy a property: > 10 years in a stable job, enough savings to put up 1/3 of the price up-front. After-tax income high enough so the mortgage can easily be paid. Good timing for a mortgage when you pay it off a bit before you stop earning (i.e. before retirement). Given a 25 year payment schedule and retirement at 65, age 35-40 would be a great time to get a mortage.
Plenty of countries do quite well with mostly-rent based system. German Chancellor Merkel rents, for example.
Because it can lead to a market where the price of the goods is much higher, meaning a greater portion of their wealth has to go to housing than would otherwise (on top of receiving no ownership stake)
To illustrate, let's say there are no buy-to-let landlords. Let's also assume the majority have a strong preference to purchase a property over renting (a potentially "better") one (which they do in the UK).
Currently (esp. with the presence of cheap credit), individuals are constrained not by their monthly outgoings (as they would be with rent) but with the amount of leverage the bank will permit them (i.e. their existing capital).
This means the market stabilises at a lower monthly ongoing than it would do if there were no capital constraints.
Thus, once buy-to-let landlords with significantly more capital participate, individuals can be "priced" out of the purchase market they would otherwise participate in.
They are instead forced to participate in a rental market that has no capital requirements. Thus, the prices are no longer constrained and can rise.
This can quite reasonably be seen as an unpleasant situation for everyone currently with limited capital - as they are further prevented from obtaining more capital, by both having less disposable income and not receiving the capital they would have from ownership of their property.
What you are arguing for is zero deposit mortgages.
They are a terrible idea, because they encourage irresponsible risk taking in two ways:
- People who are not stable enough to be able to carry a mortgage until it's paid off suddenly can buy dwellings.
- It fuels speculation: just get a dwelling in a desirable area, wait for a year and flip it.
Indeed this was what caused the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Do you want to go back to this?
Asking for ~ 1/3 of the dwelling's price as deposit is a good (and time-tested) heuristic for filtering out those who have a substantially high probability of being financially irresponsible.
prevented from obtaining more capital
Typically owners of buy-to-let do not acquire more capital while paying off the property. They only do so after the 2nd mortgage is paid off, which is typially when they retire.
In the Netherlands zero deposit mortgages for your primary home are the default.
While there have been shenanigans in the past, up to so called 'career mortgages', where the mortgage amount was based on your career potential, nowadays the lending norms are pretty strict.
I guess it helps there is a 2% tax on the total sum when buying a house, so flipping becomes even less attractive. At least I've never heard anyone about flipping, that is a foreign concept to us.
According to a graph[0] I found housing prices dropped 15-25% between 2008 and 2013. But I feel this was caused by the financial crisis, not the other way around. Yes, a lot of mortgages went under water, but there is simple fix for that: don't move.
Requiring 1/3 down payment seems like it wouldn't allow anyone to buy a home. That would basically require you to 'pay' the mortgage twice, once as rent and once as savings, for about 10 years. Using the average income of €35K, which leads to a max mortgage of €154K, you suggest not living in a home worth over €77K?? I'm not even sure those exist.
Which market? To a pretty good approximation, most people live in exactly one property. If they own more, they rent out the surplus. (Please don't What-About-XYZ me with exceptional cases like billionaires who own multiple properties and let them stand empty. Yes, that happens, but is marginal.) So the owner/renter fraction doesn't as such directly change the amount of available property.
push up prices
Rental prices are largely determined by two three things: (1) salary levels of the tenants, (2) what fraction of their salary tenants are willing to spend on their dwelling, and (3) supply/demand of housing. I doubt (1, 2) have changed all that much. The main problem in London is (3) because a lot more people moved to London that new housing was built.
Neither have all that much to do with buying vs renting.
>> So the owner/renter fraction doesn't as such directly change the amount of available property.
It changes the prices of properties. When existing owners have much easier access to cheap credit than potential owner-occupiers, they compete with these folks and push prices up. There is more demand to purchase. Not more demand for properties to live in, but more demand to purchase. First time and young buyers get priced out.
>> Rental prices
I wasn't talking about rental prices, I was talking about purchase prices.
The result is that instead of younger people paying a mortgage and gaining an asset over time, they are doing that for someone else.
It's good that younger people can't easily buy property. They have a substantially higher risk of financial irresponsibility. As dwellings are pretty much the biggest financial investment we make in our lifetimes, care is warrented. Dwellings should be purchased only by those who are very likely to be able to afford this -- even in the event of unplanned and costly life events like illness, children, the dwelling needing costly and unexpected repair etc. That's why stable job with good career prospects, married with children, being able to afford substantial deposit, being older, are good heuristics for who should by property.
Giving a mortgage to everyone encourages financial rectlessness, which lead to the financial crisis of 2007–2008.
>> It's good that younger people can't easily buy property.
No, it's not, and it's not even to the owner-occupier's benefit that the market inflates so much.
>> Dwellings should be purchased only by those who are very likely to be able to afford this
Young people can afford this, who the hell do you think is paying the buy-to-let mortgage crowd's mortgage? The fecking fairies?
>> That's why stable job with good career prospects, married with children, being able to afford substantial deposit, being older, are good heuristics for who should by property.
They're good heuristics for who should already have property, and already have a substantial sum paid down. Something unachievable if people cannot get started in their 20s.
>> Giving a mortgage to everyone encourages financial rectlessness, which lead to the financial crisis of 2007–2008.
I'm not advocating giving a mortgage to everyone, I'm advocating giving out fewer mortgages to those who wish to buy more homes - they're effectively leveraging cheap mortgages to get someone else to buy them a huge asset, and at the same time making that asset further out of reach for the person who is really paying for it.
Typically a collection of ever changing tenants, few of whom are in the position to manage, or even interested in managing a long-term investment like a dwelling.
should already have property
Why? What's wrong with renting? As I said in a previous post, Chancellor Merkel in Germany rents.
I'm advocating giving out fewer mortgages
I'm advocating building enough dwellings, not doctoring with symptoms like restriction on mortgages, rent control, draconian building codes, zoning laws and the like. I find it supremely baffling that the obvious solution seems to be deeply unpopular.
>> Typically a collection of ever changing tenants, few of whom are in the position to manage, or even interested in managing a long-term investment like a dwelling
This is less frequently the case in the UK, as the inflated market keeps people renting for longer.
>> Why? What's wrong with renting?
A lot, if that's not where you want to be, and have seen the market mutate in the space of a few years from somewhere that was inclusive for most people earning a decent wage, to something reserved for few, or those who already have property.
>> I'm advocating building enough dwellings,
Good luck with that. Restriction of mortgage is not "doctoring the symptoms" when easing up on certain mortgage categories has been a major cause.
I haven't mentioned those other methods, I have no opinion on them.
This has nothing to do with renting vs owning, or even with second mortgages, but is primarily because supply of dwellings did not keep up with demand. The UK, especially the greater London area, has seen a lot of immigration, and on top of that there is the ongoing reduction in family size. So more and more dwellings are needed, but supply has not kept up.
Restriction of mortgage is not
"doctoring the symptoms"
Yes it is, because it neither reduces demand for, nor increases supply of dwellings.
So what? People who don't want to move a lot find they must keep paying someone else's mortgage as they can't get their own.
>> Yes it is, because it neither reduces demand for, nor increases supply of dwellings.
If buying up housing is made, by whatever means, financially less attractive to those who already own homes then of course this tackles demand for purchases and allows more people who are forced into renting the ability to buy their own home.
As I said, it's important that not everybody who might be able to afford monthly rates gets a mortgage, for otherwise you'd get too many defaults, leading to financial instability. And very few tenants rent for the whole duration (typically 25-30 years) of a mortgage.
Finally nobody needs to own their dwelling -- renting is fine. I rented most of my life, and so did German chancellor Merkel.
someone else's mortgage
As I've pointed in previous posts, that's fine, for they provide a valuable service, that can be summarised as a "risk transfer". That needs compensation.
Finally you seem to think that there is a difference between a first and second mortgage: the first being given by magic first-mortgage-fairies out of the goodness of the lender's heart and the second out of sheer greed to oppress people like you. Well, I recommend a quick calculation how much you overpay on the property if you get a first mortgage, vis-a-vis a cash purchase.
forced into renting the ability
For some bizarre reason you (like many others I have discussed this subject with) are unwilling to admit that the price of dwellings whether paid by rent or mortgage repayment, is primarily (indeed almost exclusively) determined by supply/demand; the solution to high prices is to build more. It's almost like there is some deep-seated investment in the status-quo that is needed to stabilise your world-view. I recommend to let go of your deep seated resentment and instead learn about the social function of credit.
> Dwellings should be purchased only by those who are very likely to be able to afford this -- even in the event of unplanned and costly life events like illness, children, the dwelling needing costly and unexpected repair etc.
Highly leveraged buy-to-let empires are, on the other hand, the paragon of financial sensibility?
Much as private landlords are famed for keeping their properties in good repair?
> - Liquidity risk: property is not as easy to sell as many other goods, in case of emergency.
I think only the last one is a real problem. If you buy your own house, then you are your own tenant and your interests align with yourself. You won't destroy the property or leave it empty.
Liquidity is going to be a real risk in the coming negative equity / house price crash however. People forget that not only do house prices go down, but houses become difficult to sell at any acceptable price.
The one huge issue is that the (richer) buyer costs are normally subsidized by the (poorer) renter by government transfers and regulations that force prices up.
Remove the government mangling the sector, and I fully agree, there's no problem at all.
If you look at the issue of 'buy to let' you will see a significant upshift in housing values that started in 1996. http://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/ The change that happened there was enabling buy to let mortgages. We're now in situation where upwards of 40% of council houses are buy-to-let owned.
In fact you now have a situation where people hitting retirement, buy houses to let to ensure good income.
We are now in a situation where generation X will almost not be buying a home for until their late 30s.
It's go so bad that St Ives introduced a 'no second homes' clause to all new builds.
I actually think there is nothing wrong with buy to let however you need strong rights for tenants as well as rent contol. Something Germany has successfully done and people are quite happy not owning houses and renting for their life knowing they have strong rights to stay with safe rent levels.
generation X will almost not be
buying a home for until their late 30s.
Why is that a problem? Assuming the usual repayment schedule of 25-30 years, that means the houses are paid off before retirement, i.e. before they stop having an income. That's exactly how it should be. Most people are too unstable (in many senses of the work) in their 20s to take on a major responsibility like a house.
rent contol.
This leads to massive misallocation of resources such as illegally subletting at market price.
It's quite simple in fact: supply and demand of dwellings needs to be in synch. If you have immigration and/or reduction in family size, you need to build more. For various reasons the obvious solution is typically rejected ...
Germany
I'd argue that the reason is different, namely that big organisations such as trade unions and (the german version of) pension funds have traditionally provided rental homes at large scale, which kept supply and demand in check. Cf sozialer Wohnungsbau [1].
> I actually think there is nothing wrong with buy to let however you need strong rights for tenants as well as rent contol. Something Germany has successfully done and people are quite happy not owning houses and renting for their life knowing they have strong rights to stay with safe rent levels.
Germany only has "soft" rent controls. Their purpose is not to actually keep rents low, but to slow their increase so the market has time to react by building new homes. The rent index that municipalities maintain for that purpose also helps with keeping rents transparent, but that's more of a side benefit.
I sometimes wonder why smalltown America prefers "trailer parks" over small-to-midsized apartments. Instead of spreading out over dozens of acres, you could have a couple of complexes with nice communal gardens/parks/playgrounds and have people live vertically densely enough to encourage shops.
Instead they either have single family homes (that's okay) or they have trailer parks --if it's a college town then they have squat apartment buildings with little in the way of design other than cheap and utilitarian with very little noise dampening, for the most part.
If you travel thru rural California (HWYs 49, 120, 99, etc) there is so much sprawl consisting of cheap housing --instead of gobbling up farmland with crappy buildings they could build alright apartment buildings resulting in better quality of life for the residents (better concentrated service, more walkable for the poor folks, etc.) on the other hand, fewer taxes for the municipality, given the property tax system.
I sometimes wonder why smalltown America prefers "trailer parks" over small-to-midsized apartments.
It's a lot harder to make a snap judgement regarding a person's socio-economic status if they live in an unremarkable apartment. If someone lives in a trailer park or a terrifying drug-infested cinder-block shithole, though, you can make some guesses about them right away.
I snark, but I'm also serious. An awful lot of lower-middle-class suburbanites see large, inexpensive housing complexes (be they trailer parks or low-rise apartment buildings) as systems for isolating lower-class people from the surrounding neighborhood.
I would expect a really small apartment building project, well-integrated with my neighborhood, to face grassroots opposition. Some of the suburban governments I've lived under actually planned to demolish well-kept, inexpensive, functioning apartments and replace them with expensive single-family houses. There is more than a hint of racism bound up in this, and this seems so obvious to me that I'm surprised the article didn't even broach the possibility.
There's nothing racist about demolishing apartments. It's stupid because it segregates the rich from the poor, but it has more to do with socioeconomic status than race.
Because of its brevity, my story is stripped of context here. In context: 1) this was just one of many such moves on the part of the city government 2) it was very much in line with the prejudices loudly and unashamedly expressed by many in the once-very-white suburb 3) these moves got underway only after non-whites began moving to the city in significant numbers and therefore clearly were not about economic status at all. (That is, the city didn't want to knock down the affordable housing when it was full of low-income white people.)
When I was 20 years younger, I might well have made the argument you're making. But I would have been wrong.
Because there's no downtown to speak of, and everything in the town is built with single family homes and strip malls in mind, from the roads to commercial districts. There's a lot of space to sprawl and the sprawlers are the first to move in.
I'd love a smaller (in land use) community to move to that is walkable and dense enough, but it just doesn't exist, or the downtown core is too expensive for the area (apartments the same as a largish house just outside).
Put enough people in proximity and you'll create that downtown.
Having lived in high(ish)- and low-density developments, the biggest difference is that in higher density, you walk ... a few blocks and there is at least some level of commercial activity. In low density ... you travel at least a mile, often several. And even the old town centers are evicerated -- commerce is on boulevard strips (and now is fading fast even there).
Small rural towns have a WalMart, Love's, Sonic, and a boarded-up downtown.
Even Silicon Valley, with its staggering home values, barely has the density to support a marginal commercial district -- Castro, California Ave., University Ave., and Santa Cruz Ave. in Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Menlo Park, respectively, come to mind. Yes, there's some retail and activity there, but it's only modestly functional.
In older and more compact places which haven't entirely died, you'll find that density, and it works. It's almost always some sort of tourist destination these days, in the United States, though.
>Put enough people in proximity and you'll create that downtown.
I will be a fossil before this ever happens in Mountain View.
I used to live in a garden-style apartment within walking distance of downtown Mountain View. It was an old building, and my rent was $1900. That was considered affordable for Mountain View, but no amount of savings could ever persuade me to move back to there. Like someone stated above, there were no amenities - no in-unit washer/dryer, no updated appliances, etc. The walls were horribly thin, and none of the cabinets or drawers closed properly.
So, I'm now living in a newly-built, sterile mid-rise 12 miles away in downtown SJ. I would have loved to stay in Mountain View and keep my short commute, but there is still not enough density to bring prices down for the nicer buildings. The newer construction on El Camino are going for $3k for a 1-bedroom (and this, when the market is supposed to be cooling off). There was talk of another building going up on Shoreline, but of course the NIMBY crowd shot it down fast.
There is usually a "business district" in those 3-20k-resident towns, usually a couple of blocks with shops on either side or an intersection with strip malls and shops, but one or two blocks out, it's all flat and squat architecture. In some places like Alaska you do occasionally get a few apts buildings, I guess the cold kind of forces that option a bit.
The small-town ideal, IMO, would be an apartments-over-shops Main Street that runs for a few blocks, maybe similar construction for a few blocks on the cross streets. Then duplexes and small lot single-family homes farther out, then larger lots and farms.
Small towns in the US used to be like this, but the main streets are all dead now for various reasons. (The big reason that I can think of is that franchises prefer to build their own buildings on the fringe of town rather than move into main street buildings, plus the rise of Wal-Mart, but there surely must be others.)
There have been some good answers but it is also an issue of cost. Building a 3 story apartment building requires a much larger capital outlay. For a trailer park, all you have to do is run utilities over open ground. You can make a lot of money here vs the investment level with almost no recurring costs. If you have apartments, a lot of your profits for a unit each year have to be reinvested in new carpeting, paint, repairs, etc.
You also need to hire people to manage and show the apartment to renters again increasing your costs and reducing profits. The other thing to consider is that land is cheap as you get more rural. An apartment building likely needs to be closer to the city center and that land may be more expensive even though it is 20% of the size.
I wonder how much that outlay spread shrinks once you count for the fact that you need many times more roads, pipes, electric lines et al. when you spread out?
Imagine a small town as a square of 16 100 story towers. You wouldnt need much roads, public transit, cabling, pipes etc. You'd only need 1 police/fire hall (albeit a big one).
I imagine that my spouse's guitar playing would be a nuisance, as would my neighbor's dogs. Smells of stinky food would fill the hallways, and we are gonna hope that drunk people don't piss or puke in the halls while they are trying to get out.
I imagine that the 3 uncleanly neighbors will cause all 100 stories to be infested with roaches, and a place like that is too big to put up for a few days to exterminate.
I imagine you'll need a much better evacuation plan and a parking garage. You'll need stairs and a elevators and escape ladders and such things.
Some of them do have solutions, but most of them aren't normal things to put in place. Of course, I dislike living in large places and would rather live miles from the nearest neighbor, so I'm sure I'm biased. :)
You know, I considered not adding in the parking spaces because of that.
But to be honest, I don't need a car. I walk nearly everywhere - the the grocery and all that even. But I (we, I don't drive in Norway yet) do have a car and tend to use it about 1 or 2 times a month, plus vacations and short trips. It means we can visit his grandmother an hour away without being stuck overnight and relying on rides from folks and bus schedules. Just because folks aren't driving daily doesn't mean they don't need the parking space.
I can probably help you to understand this, at least in Indiana.
A good portion of trailers in parks are owned by the resident. They simply pay lot rent, which is usually around 1/3 of the price of rent. The folks that rent usually find the place is often larger, cleaner, and/or more private (in the form of physical space between neighbors) for a similar price. Additionally, it is easier to find in a rural location.
The sorts of places you speak of are often unaffordable to a lot of folks as they tend to be newer and in cities. Most do have green space, but few shops and few parks.
My understanding is that the squat buildings are cheaper to build partially because it is simpler to follow the building codes: Higher buildings have more codes due to fire safety and such things. This is the main reason most apartment buildings in Indiana are only 2-3 stories. They also fit in a medium sized college town of 50-100k people.
It's not just a matter of code, it's a straight-up matter of physics. Every additional story adds a significantly greater burden on the floors below it than the previous one. You can get away with sticks and sheetrock for a story or two, but the building itself becomes expensive, fast, once you exceed about four stories.
Have you ever actually been inside of a modern mobile home?
They may not be luxury dwellings, but for what you can get in a prefab vs. what you get renting an apartment, it's not even close- the trailer is going to be more comfortable by a mile, and cheaper to live in to boot.
Add to that lack of apartments, and you can see why my 3 bedroom 2 bath (with juccuzi) on 11acres was 300/mo was a no brainer when I lived in rural USA. I had to pay a neighbor to run me a well line, and no garbage pickup was available. Not as uncommon as you would think.
I used to live on a 40-acre horse ranch, renting a mobile home right next to another few hundred acres of open space preserve. It was glorious, and the cost was far, far better than even a shoebox apartment in the city. I did have to take my trash about a kilometer to the shared dumpster, but I towed a utility cart with my motorcycle. No complaints at all, I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
I can't say I prefer or even like trailer parks, but the single family home (with a yard/surrounding property that keeps your neighbors at a good distance, what's the point when you can reach out your window and touch your neighbor's window?) is way better to me than some apartment complex. And I can see the trailer park as a way for poorer people (or people looking to save a bundle) to capture some of that too, while also not strictly tying themselves down in their mind at least like a house would. Vertical living is a good solution for densely packed population, and I think that will continue being where the most stuff happens, but I don't want to live in such a way long term.
"Instead of spreading out over dozens of acres, you could have a couple of complexes with nice communal gardens/parks/playgrounds and have people live vertically densely enough to encourage shops." This sentence fills me with an irrational, existential dread. Likely influenced by my upbringing living in a developing neighborhood on the foothills of a smaller Wasatch Front city in Utah, but spreading out, having actual nature (not constructed nature parks) to enjoy, and not seeing an abundance of humans everywhere you go simply feels better, while high rises (like I see in Bellevue/Seattle) and the associated mini-parks/artisanal shops/population density are unsightly and less comfortable.
America seems to have a glut of poorly made "luxury" apartments. Luxury in this sense is they slapped up a standard wood frame multifamily until built to the absolute minimum building codes possible and threw in a concrete counter-top. Most seem to use the IBC which has incredibly lax sound transmission standards. Apparently they don't have to test for anything low frequency -- just standard human talking frequencies. The best part is that STC is measured in a lab, not in the actual unit during code inspection. (I believe if you measure it after a build it can be dramatically lower). I've always been able to hear neighbors talking in wooden units I've lived in. Always guessed STC isn't even part of the code inspection but no idea.
I'm with you 100%. Let's focus on building high quality units that will actually last longer than 10 years. Sure, it'll drive up the rental prices, but hopefully people would move out of the cheap garbage everyone is used into nicer units with privacy. That would open up a lot of space in now less desirable units.
Health code would be a good start. Hell, create a new sound transmission standard & test that actually requires the range of frequencies you'll hear in an apartment (including subwoofers and doors slamming), and make landlords have to supply that information if requested. At least I could actually shop around for something better instead of rolling the dice on neighbors.
Noise dampening isn't cheap though. How do you meet all the required regulations without massively cutting corners AND still have affordable apartments? If you're going to go through all the trouble of putting up a new building you might as well shoot for the golden goose.
Doubling drywall, making walls 2x6 instead of 2x4, and using insulation isn't prohibitively expensive.
Of course the cheapest thing of all is making a building out of concrete or masonry that can last for over a century and has inherently great noise dampening.
For S and I: use 'normal' wood, or if using metal mandate expanding spray-foam insulation (to dampen vibrations). I MUST be insulated (should be fire code, as well as noise and common sense code).
The brackets are 'dry wall' but mandate the higher quality stuff that won't support mold growth.
Yes, there's an inner gap between the outer walls, and the floor/ceiling have a bit of extra padding of some structured engineering product that dampens vibrations.
The outer walls have studding to allow for cords and in-wall plumbing.
Do NOT run plumbing or put any shelving/fixtures on walls adjacent to another unit.
I haven't seen, or figured out my self, how to make the vertical noise isolation equally effective. I suspect a dedicated between floor crawlspace would be effective (but raise costs notably).
The core-wall approach CAN lower costs since it allows for a structural core with studs as dense as desired and no cut-outs.
You'll need some kind of artificial "cork". Real cork is in short supply and very expensive. Most wine bottles these days have dumped real corks and switched to fake ones, or have just gone to screw caps (which is really better anyway; corks are an anachronism and inferior in every way to a screw cap).
As someone that's lived both in a concrete 10 story "high rise" apartment building as well as a 3 story wood-framed apartment building, concrete is far superior for noise dampening as wood.
In the concrete building, we could never hear neighbors above of below us, in the wood framed building, we could hear foot steps and even voices. Our upstairs neighbor had a squeaky bed and we could clearly hear the bed every time they were intimate.
I think the difference is that in wood frame you can sometimes hear things through the walls. Whereas with concrete, any sort of impact (chairs moving, doors slamming, people walking in heels, the guy putting a nail in the wall to hang a picture on) gets transmitted to the entire building.
Plaster walls need to be the double-thickness type, AND have sound-proofing material between each wall. I've suffered a few piss-weak plaster walls in my time, thin enough to punch a hole through with my fist and strangle neighbour on the other side (never actioned).
Once I lived on the bottom apartment in a two storey apartment block. The floor boards were a nightmare and eventually we had to move. Upstairs footsteps across the floor were loud enough to wake us up, and I don't just mean squeaky boards, but just the thumping knocking sound resonation. Sometimes I could make out the words being said in their conversations. Never again.
Definitely depends on the construction type. I will say that floor-to-floor noise transmission in a 19thC brownstone is a tiny fraction of what it is in a mid-20th-C apartment block. In the latter, you can hear people moving furniture or turning on the shower multiple floors away on the far side of the building.
eh, a modern apartment built with modern noise-dampening standofs on the drywall (something like "resilient channel" - there are several technologies, but the idea is to make the attachment between the drywall and the stud absorb vibration) is better at preventing noise from one apartment to another than older mobile homes are.
Not an expert in noise dampening as a whole, but often building better has negative cost in the long run. Good windows with good insulation always pay off in the heating/AC bills, for example.
If you have not lived in the US, particularly in small towns or suburbs, you literally cannot imagine the mindset of the typical person living in them.
On the one side of the brain, you have this stubborn independent streak, where you have to own what you own. Then on the other side of the brain, you have this rabid fascist streak, where other people have to be told what to do with their property. And twixt the two, you have homeowners' associations, restrictive covenants, condominium associations, zoning laws, and local code ordinances.
On the one side of the brain, we have a burning desire to own the places where we sleep. On the other, we mortgage ourselves up to the eyeballs and beyond, NIMBY each other relentlessly, and generally spoil any effort to make housing more affordable, even for ourselves, because poverty is simultaneously a grave character flaw and a contagious disease. The cure is to make living in poverty cost more money (per quality-of-life-unit) than living middle-class, so that only the most diligent and disciplined can escape it.
You cannot understand it. It is indistinguishable from insanity to the rest of the world. Without looking too closely, it suffices to say that sensible community housing would severely impair our ability to mercilessly extract rents from each other. You can't really build a residence unless you can continue to make money from it long after you transfer title to a new owner. You have to let people think that they own something, even while you still control their use of it.
(This form of insanity often persists after an American travels abroad, even when the travel is explicitly for the purpose of building affordable housing in the destination country.)
As such, much sprawl is caused by the following pattern. Person finds local restrictions on property use too stifling, and too expensive, and builds just beyond the jurisdictional border. That person almost immediately votes to institute new restrictions on property use in their new jurisdiction.
It's pretty obvious. It's always preferable to not a share a wall with someone.
In the US you need a car anyway, so it's a better deal to buy or rent a trailer than to live in some shitshow apartment complex. Lot rents are cheap and getting a new or used trailer is also a better value.
Also, thanks to ADA, midsize building are out. You need to provide elevators on multi-story buildings in most cases. No playgrounds either for the same reason.
Here in the UK in most cities the amount of empty commercial property is astonishing. You can get space on really good terms eg first 6 months free, next 18 months heavily discounted, and a 5 year lease. A decade ago that would have been nothing free or discounted and a 10 year lease. The reason being that high street shopping is dying. Shopping centres have occupancy rates as low as 80% and are gradually being converted in to complexes of restaurants and bars instead.
Store fronts are an anachronism. Building new commercial property in places where you can't put a service business like a bar is pointless. And very few people want to live above a bar.
Ground level storefront shopping has died a quick death, but I have often seen them converted to offices for small business/freelance/remoting and the outcome is nearly as good. They do not increase walkability much (that should be taken care of by a corner supermarket, a parcel receiving machine and public transport), but it works surprisingly well to keep the "abandoned city" vibe away that haunts purely residential areas during working hours.
In my area, there is an ongoing resurgence of ground-level storefronts with residential over.[1][2]
In both cases, at least one of the rows of homes is actually large condo units on top of ground level retail space. The homes in both developments are selling quickly and in the first, the retail spaces are also condo (owner operated, or whatever you'd call it). It appears to be a mix of light food (coffee shop), retail, a fitness studio, and some small professional offices.
the other significant benefit of mixed zoning is that the city doesn't concentrate office space into pockets and breaks up peak hour travel across multiple directions and locations.
A lovely new apartment complex in the centre of Cheltenham has 10-15 shop fronts available, every single one is empty. Quite astonishing as the apartments seem very popular.
Where I am you can get rent assistance from the council for up to 3 months. We this have lots of businesses that close after 3 months. A moderate newsagent type store on the high street is ~£5k per month (plus business rates, c.120m^2/1400sq.ft) - investors elsewhere don't need occupancy, they've already made back 100% of their purchase price in 10 years. They don't care if the space is occupied. Result, death to the city centre; it's all charity shops and pound shops.
... And like you say more shopping is moving off the high street too. But I'm not seeing the favorable high-street shop rentals you're suggesting.
Here in Seattle, it's been said that developers can afford to keep ground floor space empty in apartment developments as the apartment rents adequately cover the financing. You see lots of ground floor window covers (pictures of happy people walking dogs) that hides the vacant space. I've always thought it would be ironic to open a business that sells cling wrap advertising in one of those spaces.
It's fairly uncommon, yeah. Often it'll be allowed in a smallish 'downtown' area and nowhere else, so most of the city isn't very walkable in terms of doing errands.
There's a lot we can do even in cities. I own a house now and it's pretty ridiculous how restricted the city makes your home. For example, I must set the house back 25 feet from the front curb, and 15 feet from the back. Basically you can't legally extend just about any house and make room for a growing family. You must always move.
There were anti-gentrification laws passed like in the city I'm and some of the first ring suburbs about 10 years. There was fear-mongering about people "destroying the charm of quaint 1960's neighborhoods of small single family houses" by knocking down to build larger, 3 story houses in their place.
Not allowing houses to grow helps to ensure the are smaller houses. Something you relied on to get your house, others will this rely on that when you move out. I see the sense in it.
Except you often can't since most single story homes weren't designed to support the weight of extra floors. You'll end up needing to replace the foundation and load bearing walls which means either demoing the whole house and starting over or raising the existing structure on hydraulic jacks then building a new foundation and first floor underneath it. Neither of these options are in the same ballpark of convenience or expense as adding a wing.
I kind of wish apartment buildings in the country, just outside of town were a thing. I don't love living in an apartment, but to live in one surrounded by a couple acres of lawn/trees/whatever and maybe some actual fields seems like it would be a lot nicer.
(My current apartment happens to overlook a field in the middle of a city. It's great when they plant clover in the spring and the whole thing is bright red for a couple of weeks.)
That's an idea that dominated construction in Europe after the war, and it just didn't work very well. See [1] for one of the better examples. There are others, like the french banlieus, with 20-story apartment towers that basically turned to slums.
What works much better, as far as I can tell, is a high-density neighbourhood with park nearby. See [2] for an example from the same city.
It works well many places. Maybe not quite 20-story appartment blocks, but Norway has plenty of examples of mid-density 5-6 story apartment complexes in groups pretty much in the middle of nowhere that are popular and function well.
I think a key distinction is that to work well these developments needs to be demand driven, and social housing needs to be integrated without being allowed to dominate.
Norway has its share of bigger apartment blocks built rapidly right after the war to cover a lot of social housing too, and they tend to have been a bigger problem. But most of the house building in Norway after the war was part funded by government through cheap loans etc., but were managed by private house-building associations that built based on which locations and types of housing was attractive to people. And that's what has driven a lot of the building of areas like the ones mentioned above.
So there were fewer large scale attempts at building these huge social housing estates that have served to basically concentrate social problems in some countries.
E.g. near where I live now in London we have a couple of major council estates that used to be big problems because they were basically a way of building cheap housing out in the middle of nowhere with no services, and dumping thousands of underprivileged people together there. It was thought of as massively progressive at the time - you built pretty much villages (these estates have their own shopping parades) out in the middle of nowhere. But while many of the people given flats there were regular families, many were also people with additional problems ranging from mental problems through drug/alcohol problems and other issues that contributed to making the estates themselves hotspots of social problems that affected everyone. One of these estates had a life expectancy five years below the UK average for a long time, and it took decades to normalise things there.
Currently, partly as a result of financial constraints, partly as a result of harsh lessons like that, most new social housing in London at least comes in form of concessions by developers as part of the planning process that involves much lower concentration of subsidised or council run properties in any development, rather than building these large estates.
So I don't think the problem with the more suburban apartment complexes had much to do with the concept, and much more to do with an execution where it was often driven by ideology and totally unproved theories about city planning that were allowed to run amok in the post war period in an urgent need for volume that favoured large projects even when how they affected the integrity of the cities was unproven.
To extend on your post, all the failed blocks seem to have one thing in common: too much density. Anything higher than maybe four story high packed or slightly higher sparsely packed tends to enter a downward spiral except when "risk groups" are consequently priced out (and even that is only possible in exceptional locations like New York City where low density would be completely unaffordable even for buyers of luxury apartments). In lower density environments (the medium density the article is advocating), the exact same mix of people seems to create much less of that downward spiral.
My hypothesis is that it is not the relative fraction of potentially troubled individuals (for lack of better words) that makes or breaks a neighborhood, but their absolute density. No matter how many affluent, stable, nice people you add to the mix, they are pretty much invisible when it comes to creating a positive or negative impression. If "misery per acre" reaches a certain threshold, sad individual fates start influencing each other negatively, multiply and eventually dominate the whole place. Up to a certain, moderate density, stable individuals pull up the troubled, upwards of some undefined density threshold, the troubled start pulling their environment down.
You're right: the outcomes of this sort of developments vary widely. In many cases (including, as far as I can tell, my example), they are now inhabited by older people who are quite happy with them.
i just believe the evidence points at high-density mixed commercial/residential housing to be the dominant option. My second example, for example, is from Berlin's historically poor neighbourhood, with unemployment today still at 13% (3 times national average). Yet it's the place where everyone wants to life.
Your example, of London requiring social housing as part of new developments, is the kind of policy that's made with an eye towards such observations. It's not just aimed at creating affordable housing, but something that will benefit everyone living there.
Could you elaborate on why it doesn't work? That first example looks like a lovely place to live, at least compared to most urban landscapes... As long as it isn't far away from more lively areas.
These are common in north Europe, and many places in northern Europe are nice, but it's in spite of this building style rather than because of it. The problems are:
* As a resident the grass is useless. You cannot use it like a garden because it's not yours. You cannot put garden furniture there or plant things. Sitting there feels weird because all the neighbors can watch you from above.
* It doesn't work as a park either. People will not feel comfortable walking around or picnicking on these bits of grass, because they are too small and clearly belong to an apartment building.
* They turn into parking lots, because people want parking more than useless bits of grass.
The traditional closed city block structure is better and very popular. Building around the perimeter right against the street and a shared space in the middle.
These are abundant in Germany, but the green that grows between them isn't exactly a pleasant sight. They are not so much used for the greenery but as a compromise between natural seepage and vehicle compatibility.
That seepage is important because any sealed off surface area increases flooding risk downstream. Of course nobody really cares for that, but the sealed surface also determines your utility bill for wastewater treatment, and people quite certainly do care for that.
"It doesn't work" is possibly too harsh, see my other answer. But in the best cases, these developments turned into extremely boring places with almost no contact between neighbours. Today, it's exclusively elderly people living there.
There are a few factors I've heard for this trend:
- There are ample green spaces between houses, but they're too small for some of the purposes parks serve, like sports, or to have barbecue without someone calling the police.
- At the same time, they don't replace gardens because you wouldn't be allowed to grow anything.
- They are, however, large enough to lower the density of the neighbourhood, to a point where retail locations are no longer comfortably reachable on foot. It's not quite obvious from looking at it, but my second example has probably 4x the people per area than the first.
- Depending on the social structures, these developments can further crime because they offer many small, unobservable spaces and getaway routes.
Some of it may also be the result of the location where these developments were build, or that they were initially occupied by a very homogenous population (young families in the 60ies -> old people now). But the trend has moved decidedly towards higher-density mixed environments.
>Today, it's exclusively elderly people living there.//
That may be a measure of success. If people have chosen to stay in the same neighbourhood (or haven't chosen to leave) then it at least suggests the local community is functional?
There are plenty of Rust Belt or coal country towns that are decaying where all have left except the elderly.
My wife's grandmother lived in such a town, and when we visited it was clear the town had seen better days. Most things were closed, hardly any people our age, and those that remained were looking to leave. Almost everyone we saw was old.
Real estate is cyclic. When I was a kid, whole stretches of blocks in the Bronx or Brooklyn looked like recent war zones. Now they are good working class neighborhoods.
Likewise, quaint country villages near where I live now are decaying rural slums.
Only partially, I've seen places like you describe: there will be one or two 'trailblazing' projects but over the next 5-10 years all the surrounding area will develop with malls, more appartments and such.
I define suburbs roughly as a place where people commute from because it is cheaper than living in the city proper.
Sure malls and other small time commerce will develop. Malls also exist to serve traditional American style suburbs. But these places will never be urban centers in their own right.
From what I've seen there's a ton of this type of development in China. Admittedly what I've seen of China's country side is mostly out a train window so obviously I'm only seeing places meant to be serviced by trains.
Better in what sense? Miniature houses are fine but are simply different in a lot of ways compared to apartments. They offer more privacy and space at the expense of, well, expense: apartments are unit-for-unit cheaper to build and cheaper to provide infrastructure for.
I'd take more maintanence for simple lines of ownership any day. A line in the ground with everything on one side being mine. As far as I can tell, appartment body corps can be a political nightmare and contractors charge a lot for work.
Is this because New Zealand hasn't got a long history of apartments or is it difficult everywhere?
A lot of suburban apartment complexes are being built near commuter rails now and they generally have grounds that sound a little like what you're talking about.
You're just describing long-distance commuter wage-slave conditions. Last resort if apartments in the city + SFH's in the burbs are both too expensive.
A thought that's occurred to me regards housing is a dynamic which seems to affect asset classes generally, and real estate has very much become an investment asset class:
Owners of assets prefer to have those assets appreciate over time.
This applies whether you're holding cash, gold, stock, bonds, loans ... or real estate. Or capital goods, educational degrees, guild memberships, computer language skills, etc.
The basic principle is simple: if the value of whatever it is you're holding goes up, you have more financial wealth.
One consequence is that whoever it is that holds some asset will tend to talk it up or otherwise see that what you own, or have, or control, appreciates in value.
Among the key ways to do this is to control the supply of a thing -- this is what cartels (De Beers, OPEC, Standard Oil), guilds and professional societies (medical and lawyers credentialing organisation), taxi medallion holders, and homeowners do.
If the good is simply an investment asset, and has no productive or consumptive value of itself, say, stocks or bonds, this isn't much of a concern. You may still have problems of asset inflation bubbles, but nobody will be deprived of life nececessities because stock prices are doubling every 10 years.
For housing, both the price and the supply impacts have tremendous effects. Households are forced either to spend an inordinate amount of income on housing, to live far from work, or to crowd (often illegally) into small spaces shared with others.
Among the differences is that the investment asset is what I'd consider a Maslovian good: one that is essential to livelihood. Food, water, shelter, clothing, security.
There are some goods which have borderline properties -- they're both necessary and carry a strong Vebelen status-signalling component, such as college education (depending on the institution).
But generally, this case of treating things people need in order to live as investment vehicles ... seems problematic.
How to not do that becomes an interesting question. A Georgian land tax seems as if it might actually be one of the better options.
I've recently begun to think about the availability of housing and how that impacts the middle/lower stratum of the US, and it seems to me that there have been several short-sighted policies put in place that have put us in a much worse position for the future for short term gain (the article explains how subsidies for single-family homes are a reason for the shift away from small apartment buildings). Has this always been happening, or has it appeared to become more pronounced with the recent focus on gentrification? What can be done to improve affordable housing? I'm not all too familiar with this field, so anything helps!
A lot of it seems to exacerbated by limited access to quality public transport. As jobs become more consolidated in city centers, the middle and lower class are more likely to get priced out of living near their work places. High insurance and other private vehicle costs (tickets, maintenance, traffic) make car ownership impossible for mid/lower class citizens.
So you end up with a bunch of people, living in poor housing conditions, with poor access to quality transportation, which means the amount of time they are spending in transit, or the jobs that they can reasonably have access to, is constrained.
America should have spent more time trying to shift demand away from private car ownership and more towards effective public transportation. Doing so would make areas outside of major metropolitan areas available for middle/lower class people and allow smaller/mid sized cities benefit from the tax revenue.
Redlining[0] was going on through the 80s. Much of many Americans' net worth is tied up in their houses, and house prices have risen somewhat faster than inflation in American cities. Consider the magnitude to which black Americans as a population were disenfranchised by this practice until quite recently.
It seems to me city planning can be quite easily supported through simulations. Like a Sim City on steroids. You want to optimize "quality of life" -"as manifested by a bunch of factors - walkability, low pollution, short commute times etc. Partially these targets can be formulated in some differentiable manner. Partly one might need to do some more black box optimization. Then overhaul zoning rules...
The biggest problem in the US is the wide-spread application of "Euclidian" zoning which strictly segregates use (often down to single versus multi-family dwellings), which leads to dead suburbias with houses everywhere but not a grocer or convenience store in place, which makes for absolutely dreary and dreadful environment.
You don't even need to run sims to get something better, you can just look at "organic" countries and cities and how they implemented their zoning.
When I was a kid and played Sim City for the first time it was also the first time I was confronted with zoning. The whole concept of having a square grid and strictly separate residential/commercial/industrial zones seemed foreign to me. I understood slowly that there was plenty of cultural bias in the game. For me the most natural form of a city was that of a circle surrounding some central area. That would be the european bias I guess... We do have zoning as well of course, but in fact new laws are coming in place that aim for more of a mixture of spaces within a city. I think this is a great development.
Those aren't really quality of life metrics though. They are things you think might lead to quality of life, but the isn't the same thing. Walkability might not be the important thing, but ease of commute might be and separate cars might win out on that (convince a majority of LA natives to give up theirs cars in exchange for the subway and see how far you get).
Your most likely scenario is going to be a simulation that optimizes the preferences of the person seeing it up.
This is a problem and we haven't even come to the part about knowing how goals and actions interact with each other.
This would literally win you a Nobel prize and change the world.
You put it like finding out people's needs is complete voodoo... but in fact there are well established disciplines in the social sciences that do nothing but that, and quality of life can be put into indices and even ranked. And, yes, at this point European cities with good public transport, like Copenhagen, Zürich, Vienna or Munich come out on top in many cases in these surveys.
Except, you could build out said algorithm, in theory, put it into use, and an election cycle later the community is polarized in some new direction and everything changes. Urban planning is as much prediction as it is response to changing circumstance.
I feel like the US needs a new way to structure corporate America. Office space needs to be about as sparse as residential. i.e. Instead of having massive business centers have large numbers of small offices interlinked via tech. I'm aware this is pie in the sky. You can't have it both ways, though.
That just increases reliance on cars and cuts the employee pool for the business. There is an area on the outskirts of my city that they decided make into a large office park. It's great for the people that live around there, but they are always desperate for employees because most don't want to travel that far for work, and the area isn't exactly where people live if they have a choice.
It could actually decrease reliance on cars. If employers are widely dispersed, then housing within walking distance of any given employer is not in egregiously high demand, and could be affordable to its employees.
There are always going to be more desks than beds in central business districts.
I think we should live more like the way we work. Instead of having separate houses or apartments, we should have giant, open rooms where 10-20 families live together, without any walls. There can be a few kitchens, which can be shared and used on a first-come-first-serve basis, and maybe 3 bathrooms (again shared), and everyone's beds and couches will be part of this one large room. This will vastly improve a feeling of being part of a team among these families. These families will experience excellent collaboration due to this living environment.
I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't want to live this way.
Looking at this discussion, I have to say that everyone seems to want what he can't get easily. Looking at the extensive single house areas in the suburbs of the big US cities, I have a voice in my head saying "I want exactly that". Living like this costs only a fraction of housing in a similar size like here in the Frankfurt area of Germany where most ground now is small and freaking expensive. Even better earning people here essentially can now only affort living in apartments.
Land is expensive in the US as well depending on where you live. However, building construction techniques are different in the US, which brings down costs tremendously. In the US, newer residential homes are mostly wooden, "stick built" (even apartments!) buildings which go up in the matter of a few months. Bricks are even used as siding facades instead of structural support. In Germany, buildings are constructed with a limestone/sand/brick masonry mixture, take much longer to construct and of course are higher in costs. But homes in the US aren't as resilient and are often torn down and rebuilt, whereas in Germany, homes are built for the long-term and passed down between generations.
Yes, sure, construction is in general a bit more solid over here. But with pre-constructed houses, you can also get wood-based buildings starting around 150k (price to build).
So here you get the quality, but the financial burden to buy one of these highly engineered houses makes it more difficult to own one when you are young.
Sure in the US, there are areas where housing is extremely expensive. But when I look at metropolitan Dallas for example, where the economy is quite good, I can get deals for great looking homes for about 250k including large enough ground. A similar home in a similar economic area here, just comparing ground and building size (not quality) would cost me 500-800k in Germany. So maybe many US homes are not for life, but you can start one in them.
Remember when we were promised better things every year? In 1950 we were told by now we'd hardly have to work, have lots of leisure time etc., but at least we all got a 3 bed house near a nuclear power plant. Now we get fewer crumbs off the top table than ever.
We could just build more, better buildings; enough to make the price go down. There is no incentive for property developers to do this of course.
Look at how people in the 1950s lived: do you really want that. They had ONE black and white 13 inch TV - 19 inch color TVs existed but only the rich could afford them. They lived in smaller houses than we live in today, and the furnishing where more utilitarian. They had one car (odds are the women wasn't allowed to drive though this part of culture was changing), it didn't have AC, you might or might not be able to afford the optional heater and radio (it broke down often despite doing tuneups all the time). They had one phone - it was a party line so they could share some of the costs with their neighbors...
Today we have a much higher standard of living. We have decided that the toys, space, and luxury is worth more than the time we have to work to pay for it. Is this the right choice? That is an interesting discussion: I can take either side of it.
I know of a few people who have chosen to work less. They live a sparser life - generally working at WalMart or some such because the better paying jobs won't even give you the option of working less hours - this is a choice they made and they are happy with their life.
It is well known that there is a spike in deaths just after people retire: most people don't actually know what to do with more leisure time, and their work hours also double as part of their social hours. As such for many people working for luxuries is the correct choice.
Technology has provided benefits but the rich take an ever increasing slice of those improvements and that's deliberate to keep the proles working. Housing was arguably better built in the 50s (and earlier) than it is today and it was certainly bigger.
Maybe we need to figure out a way to use technology to help the problem of high quality affordable homes.
Wealth is NOT a zero sum game. Yes the rich are getting richer, but so is everybody else. The Middle class is richer too.
Most people have multiple TVs with none smaller than 25 inches. Poor people today have 40+inch 1080 color TVs. Poor people often with a video game system. The Poor have cell phones and computers with internet service. No amount of money could get any of that in the 1950s, now it is considered normal for the poor to have them - legally.
If you think houses were better quality then you know nothing about construction. They might LOOK better, but in today's houses engineers have actually calculated wind load to ensure it will stand, r-values to ensure you can afford to heat it, and other safety standards so it doesn't kill the occupants. Of course most of that is invisible, you see something that seems like is is not flimsy and don't realize it is strong enough, while may things that seem strong are brittle.
You can say "cheap Chinese labour has lead to cheaper goods". We aren't any richer adjusting for inflation, and are considerably poorer if you include land values in the inflation calculation.
In mid April I will move to a 200sq ft apartment. Very small. I am a bit anxious if my plans work out. Up until now I had about 3.5x that space for me alone. The apartment ist directly at the central station of the city which allows me to get to work super fast and the central station is not too far away from the inner city... walking distance. Let's see how this goes.
Heads up, the difference between 200ft and 300ft is huge. I'm all for small living in the middle of cities, but I think 200 would be too small for me. Wish you the best of luck of course, but I think going for 300ft would be good for next time :)
I lived in a space of around 300 square feet for years quite comfortably. The only persistent annoyance was doing laundry. Though, the key part of it was to never let any clutter build up, and I am one of those people who can get by without much "stuff".
The author may be assuming a conclusion: does America need small apartments because they are cheaper, or are they not built because people don't want them, and low demand keeps down the price?
His economy of scale argument cuts both ways. Putting a few more units in a city does not appreciably increase the strain on infrastructure and density, but it does much more so in the suburbs where he seems to want them.
"Failures" in urban planning are not necessarily shortsighted blunders that arose out of nothing waiting to be found by journalists.
One issue is that smaller apartment buildings just aren't going to have the amenities that make living in an apartment attractive. I live in a large apartment building which has a reception that receives packages while I'm at work, a well furnished gym, and a swimming pool. A tiny building with only a dozen apartments wouldn't have the economies of scale required for that.
There are a lot of these crappy 6-20 unit apartment complexes around me. They have all the downsides and none of the upsides of renting. They are usually the price of larger apartments but with none of the amenities. I'd far prefer a larger complex with a pool, gym, and reliable maintenance.
Luxury apartments will always exist, no need to worry about that. But plenty of people don't really need those things, and certainly don't want to pay for them.
99.9% of apartment buildings in Germany do not remotely resemble anything in Manhattan, and it works extremely well.
>But plenty of people don't really need those things, and certainly don't want to pay for them.
Those things don't cost very much when they're shared by a couple hundred units. That's why non-luxury hotels can afford to have such amenities for rather cheap nightly prices. A gym, in particular, is dirt cheap: ~5 exercise machines at even $1k apiece (a high estimate) is still only $5k, which is roughly a month's pay for many people. Spread that one-time cost over 200 units and that's $25 per unit. You can probably expect those machines to last at least 5 years, so that's $5 per year per unit. Whoopee. Definitely not "luxury", unless you're used to 3rd-world living conditions.
I've lived in all sorts of tiny apartments in Japan and think they are very useful but only for very specific groups of people (students and single people). The great thing about them is you can rent extremely cheap (I paid $450/month in a guest house where it was only the room and shared bathroom/kitchen/laundry etc). For a tiny 2 bedroom apartment I rented for $600/month but far away from the station. These are great for students and single people because you can meet others, it's very safe (generally), and very affordable. I don't know the new apartments going up in SF but if they made them extremely small units I'm sure they could fit a lot of people and be very reasonably priced (relatively).
I thought it was obvious. We're still living in a housing bubble and the people who would otherwise live in buildings such as these are in homes they're struggling to pay for. There's no market for them until the inevitable correction.
Probably if more decent small apartment buildings was available there would be even more of them. Especially in hot tech hubs such asn San Francisco it's ridiculous how many well-paid employees (FB,GOOG) still lie with roommates, because renting alone will eat too much of their paycheck.
For those of you in the US interested in this topic, I suggest listening to podcast called The Kunstlercast. It really opened my eyes and altered my views on housing, land use, transportation, etc.
My first (and I suppose selfish thought) is "where will I ever get to use VR if I keep living in small apartments". My current apartment is about 50sq meters. Unless I removed my sofa and TV or slept in the living room and got rid of my bed there's no place to have room scale VR here.
Similarly I've gotten to play Rockband at people's houses but there's no way I could play Rockband in an apartment. Certainly not above the 1st floor with the drums nor on any floor with the singing.
Did you read the article? It's not about building small (as in low floor area) apartments, but small apartment buildings. Apartment buildings which are 3-4 stories high, and provide the "missing middle" between high density apartments you find in the middle of cities and the single family homes that make up urban sprawl.
> America Needs Small Apartment Buildings. Nobody Builds Them
Nobody builds them, because people don't want to live in them. I lived in a "small" apartment building with like 8 units in New Orleans, and also in Seattle. They tend to be older, quaint, and rife with issues... heaters that don't distribute heat evenly, no amenities like a "full-size" apartment complex would offer (gym, pool, covered parking, in-unit washer / dryer hookups, proper cooking ventilation, someone to sign for package delivery, etc.), and not nearly enough sound insulation. Granted these things could probably be slightly improved with new buildings... but for a housing developer... why go through all the hassle of getting a lot zoned for multi-family if it's "cheaper for renters" (meaning probably less profit margin).
Having lived in small apartments and big apartments, and having my own house now... man, I love having a yard and space and not worrying about a line when I go to do laundry. But if I had to go back to apartment life, I'd want one of the big, resort-style complexes that felt like a college campus.
People do want to live in them. It is the people who control what gets built that don't. Consider a neighborhood with a great school. You don't think families would jump at the chance to live in a new apartment in that town? The town planners, however, will fear apartments will bring in people that might lower the quality of the school, bring town test scores, etc. The only apartments allowed will be retirement communities.
This exactly. Where I live (suburbs large city SE US) the school district created redlined school clusters to group the dispersed apartments towards one HS/MS/ES cluster and high priced single family housing to another. The result? What you expect - the disparity between the 2 HS is shocking. The apartment schools are older, in disrepair, have higher crime/drug rates, etc. The SF HS has a big new stadium, fancy street front LED signage, and lots of tech. Single moms and low income families are just where you expect - many cannot participate in the discussion due to work, inability to understand what is being discussed, and the other foibles of lower class life in America.
You're sort of missing how the school got to be a great school. Low-density neighborhoods, high relative property taxes, parents with time for PTA involvement... without fail, the "good" schools in America tend to be the ones in neighborhoods without apartments.
You can't change up the population density, the property tax each family pays, and expect nothing to change about the school. Once I buy a house, I don't want that school to change... so yes, people do whatever they can to keep the population density of their school district from changing. Can't really blame them, can we?
I'm the opposite. Have lived in high rises, small buildings, medium buildings, rented houses... the 6-9 size is the sweet spot for city living. Intimate enough where things like bringing in packages, giving a neighbor a spare key, etc still happen, but not so much that everyone is up in your business all the time.
It's about economies of scale. If you're in a 6-9 unit building... you can't employ a full-time handyman for maintenance... you're stuck using whatever contractor comes in lowest bid. That won't lead to quality in the long run. But if you have a few hundred units, you can have a maintenance staff that cares about the property (or at least their jobs)... and that keeps everything nice.
My mom own a few 4-12 unit apartments in CA. She bought them in the 90s, and charges what seems like a fortune in rent -- but after taxes, and maintenance, and all the various costs involved... she pretty much just breaks even. Her plan is to sell the buildings when she retires... and that'll be a nice windfall when that day comes.
Until then... as much as I hate to say it about my own mother, she's basically a slum lord. She does only the bare minimum to fix anything when it breaks, and drags her feet for tenants who complain too much in hopes they just move out. She has to manage the properties herself... deal with tenants who are late on rent, deal with all the hassles because if she hires someone it puts her into the red. We've had long discussions about it... the profit isn't there to justify spending more. She'll do the basics... whatever is legally required of her... past that she has no incentive to spend money on the properties.
Anyway I know there can be nice small multifamily structures, but in many places I think the landlords hit the scale issue. They don't make enough off the properties to hire better property management, or keep things as nice as the apartments that have hundreds of units. Maybe a brand new 6-9 unit building would be OK, but one that's 30-50 years old... it's going to have a lot of issues or sky-high rent -- or both.
Does anyone use the pool? Does anyone use the gym with one treadmill and some random circuit machines? Honestly.
If you lived in a city you could go to a gym run by someone who cares instead of something contributed by the original developer that will never be maintained.
As a homeowner in a similar neighborhood as the one described in the article, I wish passionately LESS people would turn their houses into apartment buildings. I hate to use the 'there goes the neighborhood' argument, but renters are ruining my neighborhood. They're loud and disrespectful of others property. The fierce competition in the renting market means steadily declining property maintenance (basically you can charge a small rent uptick for a very nicely maintained property and spend a bunch on maintenance, or spend the bare minimum on maintenance and only lose 5-10% of rental income-which is way more profitable than maintaining the property nicely). I'm currently warily watching some renovations going on at the property next to me-the minute it looks like they're splitting it up into apartments I'm going to have to put my property on the market. I can't live 20ft away from a carousel of characters.
I think part of the problem is that they they're neither fish nor fowl. They don't fit into what people conventionally think of as a "neighborhood" with single family homes (or at least buildings that were originally built as single family homes and later subdivided into one or two units), and they also don't necessarily fit into an area full of large apartment buildings for economic reasons (if it's economical to build a 20 story apartment building with 120 units, why would you put a 20 unit building on the same plot).
We're watching the first part play out. At the end of our street, there's a garage that was built for a heating oil distribution company. Real estate prices are nuts (Boston area), and the heating oil company has either moved or gone under. The building owner is trying to redevelop it into a 4 story apartment (or condos, TBD) with 7 units. I went the the community meeting with my wife because she has domain expertise with the environmental side of such a redevelopment project.
People are having a fit about the building. It's too tall, it'll change the character of the neighborhood. What if the neighbors throw RAGING PARTIES on the terraces? What if they leave their lights on and they shine in the windows of the immediate neighbors? Can you put plants on the edge of the terraces to mitigate that? What if the new neighbors don't trim the plants?! The color the developers are proposing is too ... I don't know, but people don't like it.
The neighbors have been holding the developers feet to the fire over what amounts to 1) bikeshedding, and 2) what if we get bad neighbors? How much is it costing the developer to hold people's hands over these things? The only possible reason for doing this I can imagine is that there simply isn't a lot of unencumbered land waiting to be built upon, so infilling smaller buildings is the only way to go about developing unless you have the resources to develop something truly huge on a large ex-industrial parcel.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sympathetic to the fact that bad neighbors exist, and we like the neighborhood in part because it is quiet. Still, real estate prices are insane, and building more housing is the only way it's going to get better.
In the interests of full disclosure, we rent. Largely because we don't see staying here for more than another couple years (largely because we don't see a realistic way to become home-owners, so we're doing our part to perpetuate the property price problem).
We're largely insulated from any property value concerns that people may have about the new building. Still we like the neighborhood, and we do our part to be neighborly to the many owner-occupants we live near. We're as invested in the neighborhood as anybody who doesn't own is likely to be, but we do think the development is wholly reasonable and a great reuse of what is a hulking, windowless brick building.
Developers have a huge land bank upon which they could develop high density cheap accommodation using modern commercial property techniques however this would destroy their market. It's better to release 200k of 'stock' per year in the market to maintain high house prices.
It helps that the government has pretty much stripped the ability of councils to build houses, and more importantly, the sale of council houses (right to buy). Bring in the fact none of these houses have a 'no second home' clause means they are bought up as buy to let facilitated by a change in banking regulation in 1996 that allowed buy to let mortgages.
So yeah, we have a housing stock problem. Start thinking about it like the diamond business and the similarities are quite scary.