
Why Housing Is About to Eat the US Economy - jseliger
http://csen.tumblr.com/post/145455151989/why-housing-is-about-to-eat-the-us-economy
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lindenksv1
This article misses the forest for the trees - the question of why we have a
housing deficit in the first place. And it's not because thousands of coastal
cities forgot to build housing and only the author noticed. It's because
they're mostly run by NIMBYs who've spent decades actively opposing new
housing construction near existing jobs centers. So I don't know how the
author gets from "we have a deficit" to "therefore there will be a
construction boom." As long as the city governments remain controlled by NIMBY
homeowners, there will be no housing boom in coastal cities.

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wrong_variable
This blog post sounds too simplistic.

Firstly there is no shortage of housing, there is a shortage of housing in
_relation_ to where people work.

The housing crisis that this person speaks of can be solved if there was much
more infrastructure that allows business to thrive in other parts of the US.
Sensible Law, access to capital, access to good transport network, access to
good educational institutions . .

You just do not put programmers in a room to generate software - programmers
are there to improve their real life just like everyone else.

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rdlecler1
It seemed that this was implied. People are increasingly more educated and
jobs requiring educated workers are concentrated in a handful of cities as
those cities benefit from network effects.

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pascalxus
From what I've seen, most companies are pretty stubborn about remaining in
those coastal cities. As long as they can keep finding employees there, they
don't have too much incentive to move to better areas with greater supply of
labor. Instead, they'll just lobby congress for more H1Bs.

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johan_larson
So the opportunities here are a) make house construction less labour-
intensive, and b) bring more women into construction work.

Part a) sounds like a call to make building more modular, with larger and
larger things made in factories rather than on-site. For part b), maybe
training programs. Have them women-only so they're less intimidating to women
looking to enter a very male profession, and make them cheap or free up front,
with tution payable only by those who actually find relevant work.

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dsfyu404ed
I'm all for diversity but specifically targeting people who are smaller on
average for employment in a physical labor job seems just plain dumb.

Construction labor isn't "lift a ~50lb 3U chassis by yourself from time to
time" Several times per day you'll lift objects that are 50lb or heavier,
unwieldy and might have to be in an odd/precarious position to do, plywood,
packs of shingles, bags of concrete, bathroom fixtures, etc come to mind. Some
days you won't do anything too strenuous, other days you'll spend 4hr
unloading packs of laminate flooring. Not that individual women can't do that
stuff but at a statistical level they're working harder to do so and it
manifests itself as increased wear on equipment (workers). Sure you can carry
a cord of wood in a Tacoma and it gets the job done but if you have a fleet of
Tacomas and F150s carrying cords of wood day in and day out you'll eventually
crunch the numbers and go with all F150s because for a given amount of work
the bigger truck holds up better, people are no different except that it
doesn't cost more up front to get the bigger truck when they self select for
the job.

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pascalxus
I think another thing this article points out quite noticeably, is the coming
Educational Bubble. There's a whole lot of people running around with fancy
degrees and seemingly not enough blue collar workers. One would hope we could
innovate our way out of that by automating these jobs but I don't think
technology is the limiting factor there.

